Postcards from Babylon: The Church In American Exile

by Brian Zahnd

During our rest day in Frómista, I visited the thousand-year-old Church of San Martin three times. I was usually the only person there. I prayed through my morning liturgy of prayer. I sat with Jesus. I contemplated the crucifix. I tried to imagine the worshipers who gathered in this church a thousand years ago. Why did they come? They didn’t come to hear a motivational talk or a “practical” sermon; they didn’t come to hear a praise band. They came because it was a sacred place where the sacraments were present. These medieval worshippers inhabited a world that was imbued with the sacred. Sadly, we no longer live in that world but a secular world where the sacred has been almost entirely banished. Sitting in the thousand-year-old church I wrote these words in my journal: “Once the sacred has been lost to the wrecking ball of secularism, can it be recovered? If yes, how? If no, what now?” Of course I’m enough of a modern man to acknowledge that much of the pre-modern sense of the sacred was mixed with superstition—superstition that was often used as a means of manipulating the credulous masses. I don’t have an overly romantic attachment to the pre-modern period. Still I can’t help but view the loss of the sacred in modernity as a forlorn tragedy.