From the creator’s website:
In 2011, I stood in the shadow of the Temple of Transition. I taped a photograph of my wife’s recently deceased father to the inside of an archway. I roamed her hallways, silent. I witnessed a beauty that brought me to my knees, as Mike Ventimiglia writes: “I don’t know if I’ve ever seen Beauty itself out there, the essence of Beauty that Plato thought was the source of all lesser beauty. But I have caught a glimpse of the desert sun.”
I fell in love. But it was a different kind of love than I had ever experienced. It wasn’t a love of possession or lust. What I had found in the desert, within myself, was agape.
Agape, an ancient Greek word, has been expressed by Mike Ventimiglia in Christian terms as: “a type of love that is not intended to satisfy oneself, at least not directly. And this love not only saves us from death in childhood; it saves us from a narrowness and smallness of purpose as we grow. Agape is the love of transformation.”
For me, I called it devotion.
Academics and others interested in the future of secular religion could do much worse than to study the Burning Man Temple, here featured in Ian MacKenzie’s 2011 short film: