FUTILITY OF POSTMODERN CHURCH

Erle Frayne Argonza


As I browsed over the various websites lately, I encountered some sites that featured the clarion call for a 'post-modern church'. Whether a post-modern church is viable is highly contentious.

Fact is, the term 'post-modern church' is an oxymoron. Postmodernity celebrates the micro-narratives, or those totality of terrains comprised by the domains of the individuated souls. Churches comprise the social institution of religion, and are largely progenitors of meta-narratives.

In postmodernity, meta-narratives make no further sense. To continue to peddle the sensibility or relevance of meta-narratives in today's context would only exacerbate the loose grounds from which such institutional templates are founded, for sooner or later such grounds will shatter and the meta-narratives or Discourse (with the capital D) will fragment and self-destruct.

Post-modernity is just but the beginning phase of a longer, more strategic phase in the evolution of mankind: the strategic era of the 'noosphere'. Post-modernity will come to pass, and with its passing will come forth a future world more grand than ever. And more grand is it precisely because the meta-narratives of the past are over, destroyed and shattered, taken over largely by the life fluxes of the individuated.

In the era of the noosphere, spirituality will largely be a knowledge-based pursuit, highly individualized and counter-institutional. There may be semblances of organizations to mediate the formation of Seekers, Mystics and Masters in the evolving contexts, but such organizations will be more of loose social networks of individuals rather than tightly-fit structures of fanatical devotees of Stone Age churches.

This is not to deny that there are today large numbers yet of Devotees, who in fact comprise the larger portion of humanity. These devotees are largely attuned to the mass mind, the mind that is now effacing and giving way to the individuated mind. The Devotees or Believers are largely non-authentic selves of herds, who unconsciously regard organizations such as churches as maternal structures that nurture the ever-infantile devotional types. And so these devotees, even if they leave their own churches today, are indeed prone to searching for some other churches to continue with their devotional works. And if such churches are not available for the moment, then it is but appropriate a response to create another church, and so on ad nauseaum.

And in the coming years or decades, we will still witness the morphing of new churches, even if in the long run such a phenomenon will seem like infantile acts of a population that is becoming extinct. For in due time the Devotee types will be replaced by the Freethinker, the Seeker types of souls, most of whom will come from planets and star systems far more evolved than ours. And the devotee populations will decline precisely because, unable to adapt well to the vibratory frequency of a planet that is now rapidly moving up the frequency ladder, the better will the same devotees survive and grow if they be transported en masse to planets less evolved than the Earth and of a lower vibratory frequency.

To those devotees who long for a 'post-modern church', the challenge confronts them head on to constitute such a church itself, complete with a hierarchy of priests and priestesses and rituals that are mere reconstructions of ceremonies for the ancient herds. They have the right to do so, if we were all to follow the logic of such action from the universal declaration of human rights concurred by the founders of the United Nations.

As a sociologist, I'll be glad to observe such a church as another behavioral species worth my observation. In the long run, it will prove utterly futile to maintain churches on earth, and before long such efforts to comprise new ones will crash back on the ground, unable to procure loyalties from a population of souls of seekers and freethinkers who would always regard churches with suspicion and ambivalence.

[Manila, 13 November 2007]

[See: IKONOKLAST: http://erleargonza.blogspot.com,
UNLADTAU: http://unladtau.wordpress.com,
COSMICBUHAY: http://cosmicbuhay.blogspot.com,
BRIGHTWORLD: http://erlefraynebrightworld.wordpress.com, ARTBLOG: http://erleargonza.wordpress.com,
ARGONZAPOEM: http://argonzapoem.blogspot.com]