Review: Reclaiming the Sacred by Jeff Golden

With the masterful pen of a mystic scholar, Jeff Golden delivers a profound assessment of the modern world and a bold schematic for salvation in Reclaiming the Sacred: Healing Our Relationships with Ourselves and the World.

To explain the discipline of a book like this, it is perhaps easiest to use the author’s own words – “The science of happiness, abundance, and belonging.” Explaining the instability and corruptibility of today’s world, as well as the path that led us here, Golden attempts to redirect the course of society through positive adaptation and intentional shifts in our belief structures, artfully deconstructing capitalistic impulses and our modern obsession with money.

Golden instead illuminates more fundamental sources of pleasure and satisfaction within our lived experience. Ultimately, the goal seems to be one of enlightenment – both reclaiming and redefining the term “sacred” through logic, fact, critical thinking, pragmatism, and compassion. This is not a soft or easy read filled with redundant self-help platitudes, it takes a hard look at the state of the world – depression and poverty rates, hunger and strife, environmental degradation, and energy consumption.

Diving into the disconnection modern society has between wealth and satisfaction, the book is a solid indictment of conspicuous consumption culture. Golden directly addresses many of the imminent crises of our age without glossing over the rough realities the world is facing. This blunt honesty, particularly at the start of the book, makes it easier to sit back and absorb the wisdom in the pages that follow, rather than wondering when the sales pitch is going to start.

Seamlessly peppering the writing with striking figures and data, without ever losing the point or getting lost in the weeds, this is a well-orchestrated thesis that accomplishes precisely what it sets out to do. From Golden’s science-based reference, accompanied by countless verified references, he posits a reconstruction of global perspective. Rather than casting judgments from ivory towers or academic heights, he seeks out the gritty truth from the mouths of those who have lived it – activists, youth leaders, revolutionaries, the poor, the marginalized – and poses their words next to timeless philosophies and legendary thinkers, an equitable playing field of voices that makes the book even more impactful.

Perhaps most importantly, in a time of so much negative news and doom scrolling, the book instead focuses on the psychological, emotional, and social factors that make us happy, instead of focusing on how to fix what’s broken, which sometimes feels like an impossible proposition. While the title may suggest a more religious bent to the prose, the vast majority of the book reads like a sociological and philosophical treatise, clearly presenting the playing field and then dissecting the detrimental forces at work.

On a technical level, the prose is remarkably polished and tightly edited, with an economic use of language when it comes to anecdotes and exposition. Offering an eye-opening reframe for modern life that actually makes one feel uplifted and hopeful, rather than wallowing in all the ways the world has gone off the path, Reclaiming the Sacred is an exceptionally written commentary on modern life.