Many people today are estranged, internally and externally, from a world of ever-increasing change and horrifying complexity. They have no central sense of history or personal destiny. The 19th Century western universe was rational, static and controlled by a benevolent power. A new era came to birth with the 20th Century, in which was found no simple rational pattern. There has been an exponential increase in technological change; and people experience a deep dread at seeing no end to the increasing rate of such change. At the same time there has been a collapse of images of the eternal, leaving no way of relating to final reality.
Throughout history, points of crisis have arisen at which societies have been unable to bridge the gap between their understanding of life and their real experience, internal and external. One such point in the 20th Century came with the realization of the most horrifying realities of human potential in the form of the gas chambers and atomic bombs during World War II. This arose at the 'peak' of civilization, when almost the whole planet was witnessing technological control. Human attempts to articulate the mystery evident in this struggle have been incomplete. The totality of life may be denied by being deeply rooted in the 19th Century image of the benevolent Father; or it may be manifested in a search for the creative force, for good, and in denying the brokenness encountered. Personal concerns are not with the creation of social structures but with the individual's relationship to life within those structures. It is not the creation of the symbolic life which reminds the individual of his or her encounter with the mystery of life, but the sense of after-life which is experienced in the encounter itself.