I have a lot of sympathy for New Age folks. Not sympathy with their ideas (if one can use such a strong word as "idea" for the quicksilver emotionalism and muddy mixture of suburban folk religion that is the New Age), but sympathy with the elemental movements of the heart that seem to animate much of the New Age. I myself was a pagan at one time. That is not to say I was a Wiccan, nor that I painted myself with woad and sat naked, pounding drums in some Men's Circle. Rather, I was raised in the suburban garage band culture of Wayne's World, darkening the door of a church perhaps five times in my life, unbaptized, clueless about the gospel, filled with superstitious fears and pagan notions floating about in pop culture -- "without hope and without God in the world," as Paul said.
Spiritually bereft as I was, it more or less fell to me to grope my way through the murk toward whatever light I could find, with lots of voices in our culture shouting "Lo! Here! Lo! There!" as I did so. Confronted with the crude materialist reductionism of the scientistic culture of the late 20th century, I rejected it by a sort of intuitive gut instinct as a thing of inhuman gloom and nihilism. I didn't know much, but I knew the world was far too mysterious and beautiful to reduce it all to physics, math, electricity, power, politics, or any of the other diagrams of thin, watery rationalism. I experienced nature and human beings, not as a pile of raw materials, but as . . . well, something charged with grandeur. And so I sought what was behind nature without knowing that was what I was doing. I "felt after" the dear freshness that lay deep down things.
Nor was I wrong to do so, judging by Paul's words to the Athenians in Acts 17. For in "feeling after" God I eventually found out what (or rather Who) I was feeling after, by His grace. Such seeking God with the imagination is the very essence of paganism and constitutes a huge part of what countless New Agers are doing. For the New Age is, in large degree, a reaction to the same materialist meaninglessness that appalled me.