The Yapping Chihuahua Nipping At Our Heels
What's gnawing at our soul that won't go away?
Like the irritating miniature dog yapping at our heels, refusing to go away, Americans feel a peculiar gnawing at the soul that won’t let up. No matter how often we try to suppress this feeling through distraction, busyness, or self-improvement tools, it keeps returning.
Unlike the little dog we can point to and shoo away, this gnawing feeling is difficult to name. Today, many of us feel a strange emptiness. Not because we’ve failed, but because we’ve lost access to a larger story that once gave meaning to our lives.
In A Secular Age, Charles Taylor argues that for most of Western history, the world was viewed as a place where mysterious powers of cosmic origin intermingled with human life. Whether influenced by angels or demons, the stars and planets, or seasonal changes, human beings didn’t see themselves as walled off from outside forces, but rather, vulnerable to them.
These forces, at times incomprehensible, were always at work in the background of daily life. Nothing was viewed as random or empty of spirit. Cooperating with these invisible forces was necessary to ensure a prosperous and blessed life. According to Taylor, this was a time in Western history when not believing in God was nearly inconceivable. But not anymore.
Perhaps the gnawing at our souls comes from the modern tendency to reduce life to what can be measured and explained through the sciences of physics, biology, and chemistry. We’ve become ill-equipped to speak of mystery, meaning, and the sacred in a culture that no longer makes room for them.
It’s as if the predominant modern worldview has locked the sacred and mysterious into a closet and thrown away the key, insisting there’s nothing inside worth remembering.
Yet still, many people who identify as agnostic, atheist, or secular humanist speak ardently about the magnificence of our universe, the mystery of human consciousness, and our ethical responsibility to one another. But without a shared framework to hold them, it’s like trying to cobble together scattered stones without a blueprint to erect a cathedral, and not knowing what is meant to be inside.
What happens when we live for too long in a world that seems flat and without any mystery or sacredness? A world where the most important things are already figured out and self-assuredly explainable? A world where there are no surprises outside of our neatly constructed views on how the world works—and doesn’t. How might this affect our inner world, our ambitions, and our relationships?
In Dickens’ novella, A Christmas Carol, there’s a scene that depicts this tendency to rule out or deny the mysterious and the unknown.
Scrooge, an 18th-century, miserly businessman in London, is suddenly confronted alone at midnight on Christmas Eve by the ghostly appearance of his then seven-year-dead former business partner, Jacob Marley. Frightened and confused by this phenomenon, Scrooge is desperate to deny and explain away what is happening:
Ghost of Jacob: You don’t believe in me.
Scrooge: I don’t.
Ghost of Jacob: Why do you doubt your senses?
Scrooge: Because a little thing affects them — a slight disorder of the stomach. You… you might be an undigested piece of beef….
Unlike the earlier worldview in which the cosmos and human life were seen as deeply intertwined and penetrated by divine powers and spirits, the rise in modern science gave us a new understanding: we now inhabit a vast universe governed by impersonal laws that are measurable, explainable, and devoid of mystery. Any phenomenon viewed as out of the ordinary is promised to eventually be understood through the penetrating, trusted lens of the scientific method.
But what if the gnawing feeling we have isn’t something to be fixed?
What if it’s a call to remember something we’ve forgotten?
And what might that be?
Perhaps life once felt rooted in something larger than our personal goals, aspirations, and obligations. It belonged to a deeper story, a story that we still long to return to. A story in which our lives weren’t random happenstance or solely self-constructed, but woven into a larger tapestry of meaning.
A story that reaches back to what has been alive in us before we were self-aware, before we even understood human language.
Is there a shared presence we belong to?
The next time the barking chihuahua tries to chew on your heel, don’t just swat it away.
Ask it what it wants you to notice.