Okay, so all this comes down to a shift that both Steiner and Barfield recognised in our human perception. The world is literally showing up to us differently now, to how it did for our ancestors. And I think this shift goes a long way in explaining our current predicament in relation to our received religious language, as, for the most part, it really isn’t working for us anymore. I can illustrate this point for you. If you take, for example, any miraculous happening in the Bible, such as Moses’ parting of the Red Sea, and you come at it with 21st Century questions and a rationalist liberal mindset, what comes out the other side is stuff about tidal movements, or sustained winds causing the tide to abate. You get naturalistic explanations, complete drivel basically. Our need to read and understand things in such an exacting, formalized, narrow way, stymies our ability to read it at all. We can’t simply reduce such episodes to a consciousness we already feel comfortable in. As someone once said, we don’t have ears to hear.

Now, perhaps this is no loss. Perhaps our shift in human consciousness is for the better. Perhaps we don’t need the insights of old-time religions, or the insights of any number of imaginal worlds. Perhaps all those myths have nothing for us now. And I am honestly torn on that question. Torn as any good post-modernist would be - I believe everything and nothing. But I would certainly be very suspicious of anyone who wanted to claim with any certainty that there is no value there to be gleaned, that there is nothing there to be discovered. My intuition tells me that it is a land brimming with wisdom and insights, and as such, it is a landscape worth travelling into. And if this is correct, even partly correct, then it would follow that there is something within us, in our inner world, calling us to a higher state of consciousness, calling us to change. And this is quite pointed for us. It’s quite antithetical to our contemporary Unitarian movement. We are so good at accepting one another, affirming one another, creating safe spaces for one another. But challenging one another, or calling one another to do better, or inviting one another to consider that there is a possible progression in our consciousness to be had, a development which we make possible by travelling into our interior worlds, well, that is more challenging, that moves us out into uncomfortable, uncharted waters.

But this is exactly what Barfield would have us consider. He would suggest that our participation in the world now is missing something, that the evolution in our human consciousness has set us on a trajectory towards greater atomisation, towards a greater awareness of ourselves as individual souls set apart from the great totality, the cosmic poetic whole of the universe. And if we were to carry on down this path, it would lead to greater and greater alienation, a hell of sorts. The challenge for us is not to go back. We can’t go back, we can’t now sacrifice our individuality for a cosmic sense of wholeness - we must do both, we must be fully individuated beings that seek after a deeper communion with that universal soul which moves across the face of our planet. We must pay attention to our inner worlds, and re-discover that rich, poetic, metaphorical language, and re-discover the imagination, and recognise it for what it is: a doorway into seldom-trod realms of wisdom.

Amen.