How might Romantic Christians 'go it alone' - without spirituality degenerating into mere self-therapy

With the Christian churches having 'converged' actively to embrace one or all of the priorities of secular leftism (in 2020 these are the birdemic, antiracism and climate change - long-term it also includes the developing subversions/ inversions of the sexual revolution); and now that these Christian churches have de facto closed and/or all-but ceased their core activities --- we are in a situation where serious Christians Must go-it-alone... that, or else give-up being Christian. 

But as a Romantic Christian, I would assert that this is what Christians ought to be doing anyway, as their primary mode of faith. I mean that we ought to be taking primary responsibility for our religion by personal revelation and discernment - by intuition of our real and divine Selves.

This, rather than - as in earlier eras - accepting our Christianity from external sources such as institution, tradition, scripture or theology. 

Now, obedience will not suffice as the first duty of a Christian; because that which was obeyed is corrupt and/or absent. 

 

In sum - we are compelled to do what we ought to choose to do. 

But conscious personal choice to take responsibility is essential; or else it will certainly not be done properly. 

As always, motivation is of most importance. 

Nowever, to go-it-alone as a Christian is A Big Ask. 

Our spiritual practice needs to do many things; things which at one time were assisted by all kinds of institutional, ritual, symbolic and communal factors. 

The biggest danger is that 'spirituality' degenerates to being merely 'therapeutic'. In other words, spirituality becomes reduced to the psychological, and the psychological becomes hedonic - becomes a self-therapy matter of trying to 'engineer one's own feelings' to be as happy as possible, and to diminish any suffering, miserly or negative emotions. 

This degeneration to therapy, by my understanding, is exactly what happened to New Age spirituality. It became almost purely a matter of self-help, directed towards feeling good - and thereby (sooner-or-later) becoming assimilated to mainstream society - and thus onto the side of evil (Team Satan). 

So, we need to consider the primary things of life. And (at a proximate level) that means a spiritual life of self-monitoring for aspects other-than (or, as-well-as) pleasure-pain, gratification-suffering...

 

My understanding of the basic 'function' of this mortal life is that (for Christians) it is mostly about learning. We have experiences, and are intended to learn from them - that learning being directed-towards resurrected life in Heaven.  

But how do we know we are learning, have learned?

I think that we know (or sense) we have-learned something (probably) when we feel a sense of increased meaning and purpose in life; leading to a higher level of motivation. 

 

Because of the nature of mortal life, which is intrinsically evanescent, these feelings are themselves temporary. Mortal life is not cumulative (all its worldly manifestations, including brain-memories, are wiped-out by death. All detectable and measurable personal experience is vulnerable to loss by forgetting, disease, degeneration etc. - so we should not expect that our feelings be cumulative 

Meaning, purpose and motivation are of course, also positive emotions - like increased pleasure or reduced pain; but they are not reducible to the hedonic axis. They are not just types of gratification. 

And we need to be conscious of meaning/ purpose/ motivation. It is not enough that these happen unconsciously. They need, therefore, to be feelings - which are conscious-emotions. If they just stay as un-conscious emotions, as body-state manifestations, then we are at the level of automatic and instinctive behaviours. With un-conscious emotions we have abandoned the distinctively-human and reduced life to the animal level.

 

Whereas The Task of this era is precisely to become conscious of that which - in earlier phases of human life - were un-conscious not just emotions. 

We need to become conscious in order to choose; we need to choose in order to become free agents, to take responsibility. 

Therefore, it seems that an important task of Romantic Christians will be to become more acutely aware of our feelings of increased meaning, purpose and motivation; with the aim of learning from experiences; and directing our lives in accordance with this learning.