One of the most vivid images I have from my travels is driving through the farmland of France, just south of Paris, and suddenly seeing, in the distance, a huge edifice 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 windows 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 under the shadow, or at least in the presence, of the other world, the heavenly world.

There is no question that such a time was less than idyllic. The church bears enormous responsibility for the perversions of power it employed. But the symbol is still poignant in its proclamation of the importance of the spiritual aspect of our lives.

It really is only fairly recently that we have become a secularized society. Only in the past few centuries has the mind been elevated to divinity and the soul dismissed as a romantic affectation. In our race for material goods, our celebration of scientific progress, our liberation from the superstitions of the past, we have committed a kind of suicide of the spirit 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 aching inside?

In the cathedral at Chartres, we discover the answer.

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 culture? The violence in our streets? The dissolution of the family? Is such horror a product of our turning our back on the spiritual side of our lives?

Certainly it is worth considering.