Anxiety hovers over our lands. The weight of modern life stresses the earth. Our appetites, our consumptions, the numbing images of our media machines leave us empty. Where, in all this commotion, is there room for reverence?
Max Weber never visited the American Southwest, but few theories explain the mass tourism of the region better than his iron cage of disenchantment.
The German sociologist saw the modern world as a lifeless system of technology and bureaucracy that gave up on its spiritual roots. Calculation and efficiency drove the spirits to the hills. "Not summer's bloom lies ahead of us," he wrote more than 100 years ago, "but rather a polar night of icy darkness."
So it makes sense that amid this mechanization the environment has become the last frontier of enchantment -- our playground and our church.
The beautiful and the sacred -- two things the iron cage cannot replicate -- meet together in these junctures of poetic erosion. On weekends and summers, the highways are clogged with campers and SUVs. People from around the world come to touch the rocky wonders they've seen so many times in pictures. Throbbing with otherworldly magic are the pink and orange hoodoos of Bryce Canyon, the towering thrones of Zion, the gravitational improbabilities of Arches, and the swirl of stone needles in Canyonlands.
Read the rest of Nathan's essay published August 8, 2016 in Real Clear Religion:http://www.realclearreligion.org/articles/2015/08/08/our_escape_to_sacred_space.html
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