Back at the beginnings of this blog I wrote a rather heart-felt post derived from what author Walker Percy termed "the re-entry problem":
What is not generally recognized is that the successful launch of self into the orbit of transcendence is necessarily attended by the problems of reentry. What goes up must come down. The best film of the year ends at nine o’clock. What do you do at ten? What did Faulkner do after writing the last sentence of Light in August? Get drunk for a week. What did Dostoevsky do after finishing The Idiot? Spend three days and nights at the roulette table.
This re-entry problem applies to Christianity.
For instance, a new convert will typically experience a great sense of exaltation and possibility on considering the profundities of his new faith.
But what then? A crash-down into the mundane realities of joining and attending a church, and being expected to conform to a lifestyle so very dull and niggling - when compared with the great cosmic ultimates by which the Christian may have come to faith.
This is not just emotionally disappointing, but the everyday experiences of (what he is told) means "being a Christian" is typically experientially utterly un-related to the original conversion.
This problem is not unique to conversion, of course; we get a deflationary come-down after any exceptionally positive experience.
But it hits hardest in relation to religion - because of our expectation of a qualitatively "more spiritual" life post-conversion.
Most churches will argue that this expectation is false, and that real-life is what it is, and our job as Christians is to understand and value it accordingly...
But I do not fully agree; because I think this is usually just an excuse for the fact that church religion is almost-wholly assimilated to the mundane world, its values and priorities - and indeed even explicitly aspires to this "relevance".
The worldly aspects of church are propagandized and strongly insisted upon; while in contrast the spiritual aspects are vague aspirations, "just words" - and there is no pressure or encouragement towards pursuing them, nor do they affect church conduct - especially not if spiritual considerations interfere in any significant way with everyday church functioning.
Well... it's facile to be critical about this world, and the many ways it falls short of our aspirations - and as of 2025 it is misguided to look for higher spirituality from any social institution (except in its unofficial and minor counter-currents to the Zeitgeist).
Furthermore; it has proved impossible for most people, most of the time, to become spiritually better overall - which was probably why Jesus in the IV Gospel emphasized aspirations and repentance - rather than reform of behaviour - as necessary and sufficient for salvation.
Yet the re-entry problem will not go away, and is a major difficulty for many people - such that recommending negative stoicism is probably counter-productive: the fact is we must each be motivated in Life, and that means the pursuit of some positive enhancement in our everyday spiritual aspirations and sense of spiritual achievement.
Instead of giving-up on a spiritual life (and assimilating to the mundane), or aiming for the spiritually impossible (and despairing at the lack of progress); I think we should address the re-entry re-examining what the spiritual quest ought to be in accordance with our Christian goals.
This may lead to re-framing our personal spiritual quest into something where genuinely valuable progress is realistically attainable, on a frequent, everyday basis.
For me this implies that, because spiritual progress is not evident in this world; spiritual progress therefore instead "must be" logged and accumulated with reference to our future resurrected eternal life in Heaven.
So that - whatever brief specific things we achieve in the here and now - in terms of love, understanding reality including evil, thinking from our real selves, participation in divine creation, repentance, aspirations and commitments, good-motivated actions, the attainment of an eternal and "cosmic" perspective to frame this mortal life etc...
I strive to recognize that every and all such brief, partial and specific spiritual attainments shall be retained and stored; and will be added to the resources of our post-mortal resurrected selves.
The conclusion: There are always such things we might be doing at any time or place; and they are always worth doing.
Rather than such palliatives as getting drunk (Faulkner) or immersing ourselves in trivia (Dostoevsky); that is how we might positively respond to the re-entry problem - whenever it rears its ugly head.
3 comments:
great post. back when i was trying to be a church christian, that feeling of dullness and lifelessness was something i could never overcome. i remembered the initial magic and could see how it was dwindling. and it didn't make sense to me. at the time i thought that it was like being in love and falling out of love, except at that point i had been with my wife for ten years, and we never fell out of love, we only fell into deeper ones. so why was it not happening with God, which then i thought meant church necessarily.
i still think there is something specifically wrong about me in this regard, but also that this is not the whole story, as i can see at least some are 'faking it till they make it', trying to conjure that magic and motivation from sheer sense of duty, and its not working. or its working against God's purposes.
@Laeth - "i still think there is something specifically wrong about me in this regard, but also that this is not the whole story"
Good point - the one does not preclude the other - for me too!
I only came across one person in the churches that I would regard as more "holy" than average - and he was an African, which I think was significant and meant that the example was not generalizable to me.
Pretty much everybody heavily involved in all the types of church I encountered, seemed to me to regard churches as organizations to "do good", and what they personally got from church was a community of people who had a similar idea of what this "good" ought to be.
Put differently; this-worldly ethics was always the core (but the nature of imperative ethics varied pretty widely, including opposites), and the social side of the church was 99% of what it was "about".
Sometimes there was also an interest in aesthetics (music, architecture) but this did not seem to be a means to a spiritual end -I was surprised and disappointed that extremely few people seemed even to think-about the way in which church architecture, music, language, ritual, prayer etc might serve a spiritual purpose.
I think the main idea was that church teaching, activities, and society were intended to encourage and perhaps enforce good ethical behaviour.
(Although there was a certain amount of lip-service to a spiritual ideal, albeit mainly in written form (books, articles) rather than verbally communicated IRL; but such words did not in practice seem to have an effect on anything - or, at least, other priorities were much higher.)
Julius Evola writing his final remarks regarding Hermeticism and spiritual development stated virtually the same thing, that whatever we have done so far will follow us to our next life. Those aspirations for learning and wanting to know God will find us again whether we think we made little progress or not. Therefore keep trying and see yourself as more than what you see in the mirror.
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