Our culture will continue to replace traditional religion with other services that attempt to provide the same thing.
meditation
When I cling to anxieties or resentments, my whole body is like a clenched fist. Contemplative prayer requires unclenching it.
What is it about Western culture that makes it so difficult to taste God? Why would we rather prove propositions than experience the holy?
Sister Carol Bernice told me once that when she milks the cows she whispers "Yah-weh" as she alternates hands milking the teats.
“There is the danger of protecting ourselves from God by striving to be passive. The ‘I’ is very active in its attempt to surrender.”
Are we condemned to be always anxious in our belief? Insofar as our efforts are directed inward, at appeasing or pacifying our own anxieties, the answer is yes. But when we allow our anxieties to become actions, when we perform concrete things in the name of faith, then we gradually begin to find ourselves inching forward on a rope ladder of action strung high over the abyss of unbelief, and our gaze becomes focused on what is ahead of us rather than forever staring paralyzed down.