Catherine McCann is a counselor, spiritual director, and author in Dublin, Ireland. Also a gardener, she has created a prize-winning Shekina Sculpture Garden. Her recent doctorate, from Dublin City University, researched people's experiences while there. In this exploration of new paths toward the sacred, McCann is interested in the quest for meaning. She begins with an examination of human experience, making the point that today we respect the "authority of experience" rather than the "experience of authority."
In a chapter on "The Religious Dimension of Human Experience," McCann looks at the difference between faith and belief and ponders the mysticism of everyday life. She moves on to an examination of the sacred in Old and New Testaments, Rudolf Otto's idea of the holy, and Jurgen Moltmann's and Lynda Sexson's views on the sacred/secular distinction. After looking at the aesthetic dimension of human experience, McCann shows how imagination, intuition, and desire create conditions that enable us to savor the sacred in the world.
All of this philosophical material leads up to a chapter on place and another on gardens as a context of the Sacred. In the latter, McCann shares a history of gardens in different times and cultures. They have been places where the Sacred speaks in a variety of languages, a truth she illustrates with the experiences of visitors to her Shekina Sculpture Garden. New Paths to the Sacred ably documents the widespread yearning for meaning that is a trend of the times.
