René Girard has observed, "Deviated transcendency is a caricature of vertical transcendency. There is not one element of this distorted mysticism which does not have its luminous counterpart in Christian truth." This does not mean that modern persons have an automatic and immediate access to "vertical transcendency." Indeed, moderns may not only not thematize the yearning for it, they may fiercely deny such a hunger. So not only does our age have the dilemma of not being able to find the Object of our deepest longing, we may "go looking for Love in all the wrong places."
As Saint Augustine noted in the opening of his Confessions,
"Great art thou, O Lord, and greatly to be praised; great is thy power, and infinite is thy wisdom." And man desires to praise thee, for he is a part of thy creation; he bears his mortality about with him and carries the evidence of his sin and the proof that thou dost resist the proud. Still he desires to praise thee, this man who is only a small part of thy creation. Thou hast prompted him, that he should delight to praise thee, for thou hast made us for thyself and restless is our heart until it comes to rest in thee.
I will not say much more except that Girard has nestled in his magnum opus the truth of the Christain faith; namely, that at the heart of every conventional culture there is an altar, and behind its concretization of ritual and myth a founding murder, replicated since time immemorial. Sometimes this culture founding, culture maintaining violence reduction mechanism lifts up unconscious ad hoc "priests" who point an accusatory finger at a new victim. This is especially true in cultures where the Gospel has not created an empathy for victims.
For at the heart of the Christian faith is a kernel of True Change from this pagan proclivity for human sacrifice; a True Change initiated among human beings by a God Who revealed Himself in Christ Jesus, who showed once and for all that it was - and is - a bloodthirsty, fallen humanity which demands murderous sacrifices, not Him.
The Catholic Church observes this greatest satisfaction and deliverance of humanity by gathering not around the corpse of the sacrificial mechanism of the primitive Sacred, but around the "Lamb slain since the foundation of the world," who was raised to vindicate God's true and covenantal love (hesed, charity, agape). The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is the greatest Gift of a self-donating, self-sacrificing God who says, "Come, follow Me."
If we refuse and turn our backs on this Gift, heap scorn on this Mystery, and even deny our true human longing, it is only 2 or 3 generations before we see the primitive Sacred cropping up again. Like this. Or like this. Or this. Or this.
Parents and grandparents who neglect to bring up their offspring in the observance of the Christian Mysteries, the Sacraments, may be flabbergasted to see what children and grandchildren begin to pick up. If we cannot find "vertical transcendency," we humans have a tragic way of settling for "deviant transcendency." Pity the poor, neo-pagan West.
So I leave you, gentle reader, with the injunction to observance and against the sin of sloth from Piers Plowman:
Have ye be slowe to lerne your be leve and the commandmentes and the lawe of God and to teche it to them that beth under your governaunce ... to come to chirche to here dyvine service and prechinge, of the word of god and to worship your lorde god of heven"?
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