January 2026

Over the past weeks, moving through Catholic churches in southern Spain, one becomes aware not so much of doctrine as of atmosphere. Before one thinks anything, one feels something. The buildings do not merely house belief; they cultivate states of mind. They act rather like weather systems: shaping mood, narrowing or widening emotional possibility, establishing what feels natural, serious, or out of place.

The sensation is cumulative. One church alone does not define it, but after many, a pattern becomes unmistakable. The statues, paintings, and altars present a limited vocabulary of inner postures. Sorrow, penitence, awe before suffering, humility understood as abasement, and dependence upon intercession recur with remarkable consistency. These states are not demanded explicitly; they are offered, rehearsed, and normalised. The faithful are invited to resonate with them, as one might tune an instrument to a small set of familiar notes.

What is striking is not simply what is present, but what is absent. Certain mental states—joy in another’s wellbeing, lightness of heart, unguarded delight—are not prohibited, yet they appear orthogonal to the dominant register. They do not readily find symbolic support. Where joy appears, it is usually conditional: deferred to resurrection, justified by sacrifice, or contained within sentiment. It is not trusted in its own right.

This matters because cultures, like climates, train responses through repetition. A society that repeatedly rehearses compassion primarily as shared suffering becomes adept at solidarity in hardship, but less practiced at celebrating flourishing. A society that sanctifies guilt and sorrow as privileged paths to meaning may produce moral seriousness and endurance, but at the cost of emotional breadth. Over time, this conditioning seeps beyond the walls of churches into the ambient tone of public life.

It would be easy—and inaccurate—to reduce this to mere social control. The familiar phrase about religion as an opiate misses as much as it explains. These affective systems are not arbitrary; they are attempts, often sincere, to provide ways of orienting toward the transcendent. The states they cultivate are ego-softening: sorrow dissolves hardness, awe displaces self-importance, dependence undermines the fantasy of self-sufficiency. For many, such states genuinely open something that would otherwise remain inaccessible.

The difficulty lies not in their falsity, but in their sufficiency. What are meant as thresholds become destinations. The emotional mandala—this bounded set of trained states—both preserves and obscures the path. It keeps transcendence alive, yet domesticates it. Recognition is postponed in favour of reverence; seeing-through is replaced by sustained looking-at.

This pattern is not unique to Catholicism. Buddhism, too, offers mandalas of states—calm, compassion, equanimity, emptiness—that can quietly harden into identities or achievements. Traditions optimise for safety, reproducibility, and continuity. Genuine seeing-through-the-forest is rare, destabilising, and difficult to transmit. It cannot be mass-produced without distortion. That very rarity explains the prevalence of scaffolding, and the reluctance to dismantle it.

And yet, even within constrained emotional climates, there are cracks. Spanish cathedrals often possess a spatial intelligence that subtly contradicts their affective narrowness. The altars draw the eye upward through layers of depth: nested frames, rising tiers, gilded recessions. Sometimes mirrors or reflective surfaces suggest further space beyond what is materially present. The gaze is trained to expect continuation, to sense that what appears complete is not complete at all.

This architectural depth does something quiet but significant. It invites not another emotion, but a question about closure. It hints that meaning is not exhausted by the figures it presents. Even where the emotional script is heavy, the space itself refuses flatness. The building remembers transcendence, even when the iconography is cautious.

Seen this way, cultural mental states truly resemble weather. They shift with seasons—Lent tightening, Easter briefly releasing, Christmas warming without fully opening. They vary by latitude and history, from the cool restraint of northern Europe to the saturated intensity of Mediterranean and Latin cultures. They form climates rather than commandments, shaping what feels possible long before one reflects on belief.

To notice this is not to stand above it in judgement. It is simply to recognise pressure systems at work. One can respect the sincerity of these traditions, acknowledge their role in preserving access to the transcendent, and still observe how they narrow the sky. Very few glimpse beyond the trees; fewer still articulate what they see. That scarcity makes the proliferation of mandalas unsurprising.

What matters, perhaps, is not dismantling the forest, but remembering to look up. Not every climate encourages this. But when it happens—through architecture, through travel, through quiet attention—it reveals something traditions cannot fully contain: that the sky was never owned, only pointed toward.