I am tempted to join them. Perhaps fourteenth-century peasants struggling in their squalid hovels to make it through until tomorrow needed the ornate extravagance and sheer immensity of a medieval cathedral to have an experience of God. In my world, where extravagance and immensity remind me of the Eaton Centre, an experience of slow, quiet, spacious attentiveness is as rare and precious as the Rose Window. For others it's JoJo Savard and her psychics who remind them, at three in the morning when they're sadly and insomaniacally watching TV, that there's another world here too. Pilgrims to Midland Shrine bring their crystals to be blessed by the priests.
People flock to retreat houses to analyse their dreams and discover their enneagram numbers.
Religion, physics and philosophy have found new currency. Whether it's the frenetic nature of modern life, the proximity of exotic spiritualities in our cosmopolitan midst, our cynicism towards institutions, our consumer fatigue or the looming millennium, people in North America are hungering for things of the spirit. Others may be drawing cynical or bored Catholics away from those traditions, but they are also drawing the nonreligious into the world of the spirit for the first time. This issue of Compass seeks the source of the burgeoning interest in new spiritualities. To be safe, the secular media may ignore spiritual things, new or old, or judge them as baloney.