“The experience of disenchantment is the beginning of mature religious consciousness… while the Sacred expresses itself through particular symbols, any simple identification of symbol and the Sacred is naive… In the Catholic world of the immediate past there was a tendency to merge the symbols of sacrality with the Sacred itself… Mystery had completely handed itself over to Church authority. In the process it ceased to be Mystery and became rule… Disenchantment is an experience of Mystery reasserting itself. Whenever a person mistakenly equates Mystery with finite reality, he creates an idol. An idol is not a symbol of Mystery but the pretension to be Mystery itself. It insinuates a total revelation and creates the false consciousness that Mystery has dissolved into total availability.”
~ John Shea, Stories of God
