The worship of relevance

[W]hatever the degree of his secularism or even atheism, man remains essentially a “worshiping being,” forever nostalgic for rites and rituals no matter how empty and artificial is the ersatz offered to him.

…

To anyone who has had, be it only once, the true experience of worship, all this is revealed immediately as the ersatz it is. He knows that the secularist’s worship of relevance is simply incompatible with the true relevance of worship. And it is here, in this miserable liturgical failure, whose appalling results we are only beginning to see, that secularism reveals its ultimate religious emptiness and, I will not hesitate to say, its utterly anti-Christian essence.

Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World, Appendix 1.