BEEN THINKIN’ ABOUT… COMMON CATHEDRALS. The limestone cliffs on Highway 165 near Table Rock Mountain tower above the road and above the lake which flows, ribbon-like, far below. Brief afternoon sun highlights the bluff, etching ancient karst rock in warm relief. Cathedral walls in nature are easy enough to overlook on a busy schedule — just another rock cliff, just another bunch of trees, just the lake below. Even here, in the miracle of space and air and stone and life, the mind reduces the experience to the mundane — shopping list, budget, schedule, bills, bottom-line. The moment fades, magic light tracing down a world in motion. The shadows fall.
An hour later, the now-waning “super “moon rises over a field, the moon bold and orange, then yellow, framed in sharp relief by cedar groves and electrical lines. There is holy magic in the moon, but even that is categorized and boxed up neatly — just more meteorological data — and the enchantment is gone. We throw around the words “secular” and “religious” and argue politics and music and more, but what happens when the religious simply becomes another form of the secular?
There is ancient wisdom in the hills and hollows, the wind in the trees and the last rays of the sunlight tracing wordless poetry down the side of the mountains. And always, there are two paths — much like Harold Bell Wright wrote over a century ago. That then-famous author spawned our Branson tourism, perhaps without meaning to do so. His work has since been called overly sentimental and even problematic. Call his books what you will, he was not nihilistic and for that, I’m grateful.
Nihilism is, in short, “a viewpoint that traditional values and beliefs are unfounded and that existence is senseless and useless.” As with most philosophies, I appreciate the challenge of ideas, the tug-of-war in discourse. But I am not a nihilist and cannot be. There’s too much magic in the world, magic that even talking heads and conventional wisdom and dry academe and the at-times-life-sucking need to make ends meet cannot extinguish for me.
Overhead, the midnight constellations wheel — Canes Venetici, Corona Borealis, Cassiopeia. Even the names sound like magic on the tongue. The air is biting, the sky clear, mysteries and magic in the dark black. The breeze is a prayer in the night. Creation is majestic when one takes a moment to slow. Since my sudden and unanticipated dismissal from church in October, my mind mulls over the world around me even more than before — especially since my interest in the metaphysical was cited as the reason to get rid of me. Rather than accept the label of heretic — my faith in God has not changed — the experience has placed culture, and church culture, into sharper relief.
German philosopher Nietzsche famously wrote, “God is dead,” not in celebration but instead warning that secular thought had taken precedence. He was not wrong. Nature abhors a vacuum and the human spirit’s need for meaning, for direction, for enchantment is as necessary as is breathing. In the absence of enchantment and purpose and something greater than ourselves and even mystical, we fill our interior soul space with corporate brands or political party, scientism or academe, or the ridiculous worship of ourselves. These are false gods that will die. And we become like that which we worship. That is the inescapable nature of reality.
In the 20th century, the American church became more secular, more modern, more acceptable to “modern audiences” who were looking to network, country-club style. The church appealed to our own selfishness. Comfort and a sense of moral superiority — whether that be in “better” doctrine or in increased “cultural sensitivity” — is a powerful drug of the soul, but this is not enchantment, is not life-giving, and is not life-changing. Now, miracles and magic are relegated to two holidays (Christmas and Easter), and anything beyond that which doesn’t fit neatly into a box is shunned as dumb “folk superstition” or just called evil.
The human soul longs for the enchanted and hopes for a life with meaning, a world beyond this one with its drudgery and ever-mounting expectations. And so, for this holiday season, I will be decorating a real pine and letting its scent fill my house and again marveling at the small and the miraculous, the beautiful overlooked moments. I will force myself to slow down and breathe, and again appreciate the rise and fall of the sun and moon, grateful for the Christ’s light in me, in others, and in the heavens above, holy candles in the dark. And I will kneel again in my soul, finding solace in the overlooked and common cathedrals.
— Joshua Heston, editor-in-chief, StateoftheOzarks
© StateoftheOzarks 2025
