THE “NEW AGE” AND EASIER LIFE

 (THE ELIMINATION OF “SACRIFICE”)

            The enamored Bride of the Song of Songs pleaded with her Bridegroom in these terms:

                        Come, my beloved, let us go forth into the field;

                         Let us abide in the villages.

                        Let us go up early to the vineyards,

                        Let us see if the vineyard flourishes,

                        If the flowers be ready to bring forth fruits,

                        If the pomegranates flourish...[1]

            The bride wanted to flee the City of Men; she was moved by her longings to take refuge in solitude, and also by her ardent desire to live the deep intimacy of Love with her Bridegroom.

            She felt the urgency of leaving behind that City in which Darkness and Confusion had settled. Even more, Life and Truth and Beauty had been expelled from it for good, so that their places could be taken by their horrifying parodies: Death, whose Banner was hoisted and sung as the triumph of Progress; Lies, widely endorsed and acknowledged as the most efficient instrument to subjugate people’s minds; Ugliness, acclaimed as the means through which horrific things express themselves, and which will be the permanent companion of the only feelings that the hearts of the people will be allowed to have.

            As for Love, the City of Men had already condemned it to Oblivion to live immersed in Nothingness. The ultimate purpose of all this was clear: the Flesh should freely replace the Spirit; Animal Pleasure should, once and for all, expel that Perfect Joy which used to flow spontaneously from a clean heart; the Abyss of Selfishness and the bottomless pit of the only for me should take the place of the Perfect Bliss which sprang forth like pure and fresh water from the I-am-yours Spring, always ready for self-giving.

            Therefore, the bride longs to flee, side by side with the Bridegroom, far away from the City of Men, until together they could find the peace and sacred silence of the fields:

                        Let us join our hands as one,

                        As we travel the pathways through green meadows,

                        Apple orchards in the sun,

                        Pomegranate trees in groves,

                        And silver poplars on river banks in rows.

            Or perhaps they may find the fresh and pure breeze of the hilltops. There, leaving Men far behind and forgotten, they will breath the cool and limpid morning air, or the soft and warm afternoon zephyr.

                        My Beloved, let us fly

                        To misty hillsides of craggy mountains high

                        Where hidden dens of foxes may be close by

                        And mountain tops with their silver caps are nigh

                        Where sweet forgotten nights in grand silence sigh…

                        We will stay there, high above,

                        And sing together the blissful songs of love.

            In the meantime, the City of Men doubled its efforts to eliminate the very memory of God from both the minds and the hearts of Men. Therefore, once Beauty and Truth –the eternal and inseparable companions of Love—had been eradicated, the next necessary step was to weaken the idea of Sacrifice. To weaken something, at least as the initial step before attempting its definitive Elimination, is the process which the astute Liar has always used. All of the following contributed to making life in the City more bearable and comfortable:  the definitive establishment of the City of Men as the only possible one; the rejection of any futile thinking anchored in the hope of another City which will never come; the acceptance of the Absence-of-Effort as the sole and legitimate ambition of the World; the condemnation of the Narrow Path; the purging of ideas like self-giving and self-surrender from the heart of its inhabitants, along with the enthroning, at long last, of the Paths of Comfort and Ease as the only ones to be trodden. By then, Love for neighbor had been gobbled up by the ghost of Universal Community: Humanity, which, like a huge Organism in the fashion of One Body, does not need to recognize any Neighbor.

            It was not easy, though, for everybody knows that men live firmly rooted in their beliefs. It became necessary therefore, for this initial phase –called the New Age—to be implemented in the City of Men, to blur the idea of Sacrifice with others more feasible and within the reach of its inhabitants. When Religion becomes less willing to acknowledge itself as a transcendental reality, the idea of Sacrifice as self-denial and self-surrender of one’s own person out of Love tends to fade away. As a consequence, it became necessary to make Sacrifice compatible with the criteria of a World with Man at its center – and Man understood as a being whose existence, when all is said and done, should be defined as a search for his own well-being and his own Self-satisfaction.

            Unfortunately, it seems that no one had thought of the possibility that Joy would no longer be possible for human beings in a World from which the idea of Sacrifice had been banished.

            This predicament reached unimagined dimensions when Religion decided to face this problem in a crucial and decisive juncture for the History of Humanity. Religion was based on a Worship whose nadir is the Reality of a Sacrifice –and a Divine Sacrifice, according to some. Therefore, the new circumstances of the World logically seemed to demand a revision; which was accomplished with two ends in mind:

            First, in order to secure their proper efficacy, a greater participation and cooperation by the faithful in the functions of the Sacrificial Worship was needed.

            Secondly, a deeper and more detailed study of the Sacrificial Worship was required, so that they to whom it was destined had a better understanding and comprehension of it.

            After that, the only thing left to be done was to experiment with the facts and check the results. Both facts and results then reached such transcendental proportions that they changed the course of History in the City of Men.