ABSTRACT
The starting point of this book is expressed in the poetry of the song ‘Underground Sources’, composed by a well-known Czech folk musician Jaromír Nohavica. We live in a culture that longs to understand the deep sources from which it renews its life, and yet at the same time is hesitant to name them in any language that would sound too definite. Nohavica speaks of the ‘underground sources’, of ‘unknown streams’, of ‘searching for roots’ – it is a phrase that I have borrowed for the sub-title of my book. He states that in the ways we use words we already operate with worlds of meaning to which we have lost the key, a key that we seem simultaneously to want and not to want to find. He, like many of his contemporaries, has a love-hate relationship with the traditions in which meaning was ascribed to words less problematically, and for him Christianity belongs to these traditions. Paradoxically, though, he points out that longing for goodness, for transcendence and even for some forms of holiness belongs to a search that is open, incomplete, sometimes hopeless, and yet still has to be done.
