One of the most vivid images I have from my travels is driving through the farm land of France, just south of Paris. It looks little different from the rolling fields of Iowa. Suddenly, in the distance, a huge edifice is spotted looming over the pastoral countryside and growing ever larger on the horizon.

It is the cathedral at Chartres and it is surely one of the glories of Europe with its magnificent stained glass and massive architectural scope. But even more than that is the symbol such a structure represents. Built nearly a thousand years ago, it sings of a time when the holy and the mysterious were a central part of our lives, when all of us lived in the presence of another world, a heavenly world.

It really is only recently that we have become a secularized society. Only in the past few centuries has the mind been elevated to divine status and the soul dismissed as a romantic affectation.

In my own lifetime, the elimination of the old "blue laws" that restricted activity on Sundays has taken place. In our current race for material goods, our celebration of scientific progress, our liberation from the superstitions of the past, we have committed a kind of spiritual suicide that has left many of us wondering what is missing from our lives.

Why, if we have advanced so far and so wonderfully, do we still have this emptiness lingering inside?

The answer can be seen in that beautiful cathedral south of Paris.

Our human history is filled with examples from every time and every culture of the importance of the spiritual in a society’s well-being. From native shaman to the power of the Pope, our past acknowledges the importance of this aspect of our nature.

The rituals of every society declare this value and yet, in recent years, such vitality is ignored. Ritual time and sacred space have become, for many, nothing but relics of the past, symbols of a less sophisticated, too superstitious time.

Where has such thinking led?

Dare we point to the crumbling of our own culture? The dissolution of the family? Is such horror a product of turning our backs on the spiritual side of our lives?

Our spirituality is as inherent to our being as our physiology. Ancient cultures were often far wiser in recognizing this than our own.

Just as we need to care for our biological needs, I am convinced we must also nurture our spiritual ones.

Such nurturing may take many forms. It may range from ancient liturgical practices to a simple walk in the woods, but when it is ignored, we run the risk of illness as grim as anything that can attack our bodies.