We are a society that has been silenced about matters of the spirit. For many of us in the secular West, these things simply aren’t discussed anymore, certainly not among strangers, but even rarely between friends and family. We remain silent out of both respect and fear. The silence born from respect is a good thing. We greatly cherish our freedoms and none more so than the freedom of the mind. This is a great privilege many have died for, and our willingness to allow others to believe as the will is a great virtue.
Our silence is also born of fear though, and this silence has a cost. As children, we grow up without guidance from our parents who fear speaking of death because they themselves have yet to come to terms with their end, or from our schools who fear treading on any particular personal fantasies, or from traditional faiths whose ancient values seem so out of place in our modern world, we create our own private fantasies about life and death. We each end up living in our own private spiritual mirage created from movies, stories from our childhood, and tidbits gleaned from religious holidays.
Because we each create our own spiritual worlds, we don’t discuss them openly. We don’t discuss them because we haven’t really fully considered them and feel ashamed of our ignorance. We don’t discuss them because we know they are fantasies without rigor. Most importantly, we understand that because each of our fantasies are unique to ourselves, any attempt to share them with another will most likely lead to a conflict without resolution.
This spiritual silence is a great tragedy for the world. Matters of the spirit, no matter how deeply buried, affect us in all that we do, and without discussing them openly, our weak foundations cause us to drift into meaninglessness. The greatest tragedy, however, is that in our silence we are always alone. Humans weren’t designed to sit in silence about the core of their beings. We long to listen and share these deepest matters of life with those we call mentors, students, friends and lovers.
The exception to this world of silence about the spirit are the communities of traditional faiths. Here the foundations of spiritual belief are prescribed from birth. Others join, first in curiosity and finally in acceptance, as they are guided in these matters for the first time. As someone who was once deeply involved in such a community, I can attest to the power and joy of this kind of spiritual sharing. By making matters of the spirit public and by creating a common language, members of traditional faiths are able to build connections with each other we simply lack in secular society.
I am unconvinced, however, that it is the substance of these traditional spiritual conversations that create the closeness. Just the opposite in fact. I suspect that traditional faiths live on in spite of their substance. They live on rather because of the richness of the relationships between their practitioners. It is the community and trust that is built between people who share regularly about these deepest matters of life that sustains beliefs that would have otherwise long ago faded into history.
This is the fundamental dilemma of traditional faith in our modern world. It is becoming increasingly untenable for people to set as their core belief one prescribed by a primitive people hundreds if not thousands of years ago. What if we didn’t have to make this compromise though? What if we could share a common core without having to resort to a special way of thinking? What if we had a shared language about matters of the spirit that encouraged us all to speak plainly about life and death?
This is why, once again, it is the acceptance of death that is at Thanatism’s core. Believing that we all die doesn’t require us to mutually adopt some ancient magic. Believing that we all die doesn’t require us to take a leap of faith. Death is just the opposite. Nothing in life is as statistically certain. Death is utterly common, and yet, in spite of this, because it is so intimate and deeply set, there is no belief more able to wrest our commonalities from their prisons of isolation than to mutually accept that which to this point we’ve all agreed to deny.
Thanatism doesn’t require that we come from any particular culture. Thanatism doesn’t require that we accept the word of an ancient people whose thoughts about anything else in life we would never countenance. Thanatism gives us the opportunity to take the most present spiritual matter that each of us will ever know, and bring it forth with each other, so that we might share with each other that which lies in our deepest core.