Finding Meaning in Secular Times
In an age overwhelmed by competing narratives and fractured attention, philosopher and psychotherapist Mark Vernon argues that our crisis isn’t a lack of meaning but rather an excess of meanings that flatten experience into what he calls a “horizontal flatland.” In conversation with Elizabeth Rovere, MTS ’95, host of the Wonderstruck podcast, Vernon draws on William Blake, early Christianity, and modern psychology to make the case for recovering the vertical dimension, the realm of soul and spirit, as a way of living with more depth in an increasingly disoriented age. Wonderstruck explores the space between knowing and not knowing through conversations with artists, scientists, seekers, and storytellers. The following interview has been edited for clarity and readability.
ELIZABETH ROVERE: You describe the meaning crisis not as a lack of meaning but as an overload. Can you say more about this?
MARK VERNON: I increasingly feel it’s not that there’s a lack of meaning around, but a welter of different meanings. The crisis isn’t twentieth-century nihilism and emptiness; it’s an excess of opposing meanings. Everything gets increasingly collapsed onto a kind of horizontal flatland. Because of the horizontal nature of the world in which we live, it’s very hard to get a sense of how all this adds together or how to discern one path from another. What’s being lost is the vertical dimension. This is what spiritual intelligence can give us. We need it to navigate this meaning tsunami, but also because it’s who we are as individuals.
ROVERE: You see this in therapy, too, people trying technique after technique and still feeling lost.
VERNON: People come because they’re suffering, and the suffering is real. But what they’re often met with is a whole range of methodologies and techniques. A lot of it is useful, but it’s never-ending and can feel interminable. There’s always another stone to overturn, another residue of trauma. Psychology and psychotherapy often don't know how to deal with the transcendent, vertical, spirit-divine dimension. Without it, we get lost because there’s no orientation, no axis upon which all this other stuff can turn.
ROVERE: How do you help someone open to that vertical dimension, especially if they’re more skeptical or secular?
VERNON: With a kind of active listening. There’s no point presenting an argument in the abstract because it just becomes another idea to reject. You listen for when people reach a pause, an aporia, where they run out of ideas or feel frustration. In that moment of silence, that pause might be the crucial moment. Then you use the language that connects with their soul. One phrase I find resonant is from The Cloud of Unknowing*: everything you think you know about yourself, or about God, or about the world, you put into the “cloud of forgetting.” Then you wait with a dart of longing love. And from that will come the insights about who you are.
ROVERE: You describe that pause, the aporia, as a moment when something deeper can appear. You also use the Greek word kairos to talk about a different kind of time. How does kairos relate to these moments?
VERNON: There are two words for time in Greek. One is chronos, from which we get “chronology.” It's clock time, steady, regular, ticking second by second, and useful for organizing things. But when it becomes too dominant, it squeezes out another kind of time: kairos. Kairos comes originally from contexts like weaving, where the great weaver knows exactly the right moment to throw the shuttle through. It’s that sense of rhythm and pulse, which becomes a kind of spiritual knack as well. Kairos can be a big moment, but it’s often something to learn to live with, something that might be happening in every moment, like the rhythm of the weaving.
ROVERE: William Blake figures prominently in your work. How does he help us understand this vertical dimension?
VERNON: Blake famously talks about the minute particulars. It’s captured in one of his best-known phrases:
To see a world in a grain of sand
And heaven in a wildflower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.
This is very much a poetic invocation of how the universal is not discovered in some abstract space, but at the heart of everything that is.
ROVERE: You also discuss Blake’s line about joy: “He who binds to himself a joy does the winged life destroy…”
VERNON: Yes, this is very much about the difference between moving chronologically, step by step through life, and the kairological, the moment you give yourself to. Blake puts it beautifully:
He who binds to himself the joy does the winged life destroy.
He who kisses the joy as it flies lives in eternity’s sunrise.
It’s a very different kind of attentiveness, “kissing the joy as it flies.” It means participating wholly in the joy, not trying to possess it, but releasing into it.
ROVERE: This way of participating in life, rather than trying to hold onto it, seems to open into something much larger. What does this kind of letting-go ask of us?
VERNON: I think that's right, and the link to death is both at the heart of the wisdom and, for me, the great challenge of it. This letting go is ultimately a preparation for dying itself. Blake has another phrase that helps me: “every kindness is a little death.” When we offer kindness, we give of ourselves, not out of anxiety or self-concern, but for the benefit of someone else. It’s a little death of the small self, but also a stepping into a wider life, because in that moment, you feel the connection with someone else. In giving, you receive. Many wisdom traditions say this, and I think it becomes more of a second-half-of-life task: to live more and more in that mode. The question of death and dying isn't marginal; it’s central. Socrates said philosophy is learning how to die. And there comes a moment, if we’re lucky, when preparation for that becomes part of stepping into a wider life.
ROVERE: Since this is Wonderstruck, I want to end with wonder. How do you see wonder in relation to everything we’ve discussed?
VERNON: I think these moments matter because they shake us. As Jeff Kripal describes, they can be flips or ontological shocks, experiences that jolt us out of our assumptions. They make you think, What does that mean? Everything you thought to be the case suddenly can't be presumed anymore. That’s really important for our time because we need that kind of shake. But it’s only the first step. The next question is how we're going to remake our lives now that we’ve had this glimpse. That becomes the ordinary, everyday life we live, the kairos that might become a steady experience of revelation, where the world becomes a kind of constant symbol to us. As the Sufis put it, “Every face becomes the face of God.”
* The Cloud of Unknowing is an anonymous work of Christian mysticism written in the fourteenth century. The text is a spiritual guide on contemplative prayer.