(Spirituality, Vol.16, November-December 2010, No.93, pp. 370-374)
‘I’m not religious; I’m spiritual.’ ‘I believe in God, not in religion.’ Phrases like these have become something of a mantra. Perhaps they are the product of disillusionment with the churches, not only in reaction to recent scandals and their mishandling – and who could blame anyone for that? – but maybe they also reflect the reality that many thoughtful Christians find some official doctrines of the mainline churches not to be believable. This applies especially to issues of human relationships and sexuality and to medical ethics. Even more so, one of the strongest criticisms of religion today is that it has become superficial. A team of preachers visiting Ireland said, ‘The Irish have faith; but it is anti-intellectual, formalistic, and passive.’ There is nothing as dead – or as deadly – as dead religion. In speaking here of religion, I’m thinking almost entirely of the Christian religion, and more particularly of its Catholic aspect.
The spiritual journey
For those who take it seriously – and they are many – the search for a personal spirituality costs a lot; it is serious, searching, and, at its best, transforming. I think we all know unbelievers who put believers to shame by their moral sense, their service of others and their commitment to a spiritual search. Jesus commonly found a more responsive audience among the “outsiders” than the “insiders.” Alcoholics Anonymous are a (somewhat different) example, blending the gospel with personal experience, especially that of suffering, both endured and inflicted. They work to transform their suffering, so as not to transmit it. If spirituality is about how we handle our pain, AA groups make good spiritual teachers.
Jews tell a story about Rabbi Zusya of Anapol, who said at the end of his life, ‘God will not ask me, “Zusya, why were you not more like Moses?” But God may indeed ask me, “Zusya, why were you not more like Zusya?”’
William Shakespeare, who knew a thing or two about human nature, wrote,
‘This, above all, to thine own self be true,
and it must follow,
as the night the day,
thou canst not then be false
to any man.’
(Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 3, lines 78-80.)
Thomas Merton wrote, ‘My first obligation is to be myself and follow God’s grace, and not allow myself to become the captive of some idiot idea…. What matters is not spirituality, not religion, not perfection, not success or failure at this or that, but simply God, and freedom in his spirit’. (1) We spend much of our lives running away from ourselves, we hide within the artificial selves we construct, and may fail even to see that we’re doing this. We are divided selves; civil wars rage within us.
To find one’s true self, the self that God gave us, and live in fidelity to it, is perhaps the spiritual challenge to everyone, and the search, the journey, matters more than the arrival.
The limitations of spirituality
The outlook underlying the phrases at the top of this article is seriously incomplete. It represents privatized, Thatcherite religion, without a community dimension. In the Western world, individualism has become the dominant mental outlook, sometimes indistinguishable from self-centredness or selfishness. “My” God is always an idol, perhaps no more than a projection of my idealized self, a re-making of God in my own image and likeness.
Friederich Schleiermacher, in On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, written in 1799 (!), pointed out that, apart from historical religion – namely, the churches with all their faults – the individual in quest of God, however sincere that search, lives the un-confronted life. Without church, we may have more private fantasy than real faith, just as self-love that is not anchored in self-knowledge risks becoming self-deception.
A search for spiritual experiences, such as heightened states of consciousness, when it isn’t self-deception, may be a form of self-indulgence, a search for the gifts of God rather than the God of gifts. God’s gifts, when they come, are nearly always experienced as unmerited, unexpected, gratuitous.
The limitations of religion
The Jewish philosopher Martin Buber said forcefully, ‘Nothing so masks the face of God as religion.’ That’s damning. He is not the only one to have said it, ‘Religion is the safest place to avoid God, because God wants to lead us into self-surrender, and too often religion teaches us only self-control.’(2) Religion has failed many people: in the US, the biggest religious group is Catholics; the second is former Catholics – they outnumber Protestants.
‘Jesus was not brought down by atheism or anarchy. He was brought down by law and order allied with religion, which is always a deadly mix. Beware of those who claim to know the mind of God, and who are prepared to use force, if necessary, to make others conform. Beware of those who cannot tell God’s will from their own.’ (3) In the wake of 911, when mass murder was perpetrated by people who believed they acted in God’s name, this has particular force.
‘Religious people have so often pretended to have all the answers. They have seen their mission as being to persuade, to enforce, to level differences, and perhaps even to impose uniformity. There is really something of the Grand Inquisitor in most religious people. But when religion begins to bully or insinuate, it has become unspiritual, because the first gift of the Spirit, creatively moving in man’s nature, is freedom and frankness; in biblical language, liberty and truth. The modern Christian’s mission is to re-sensitize his contemporaries to the presence of a spirit within themselves. He is not a teacher in the sense that he is providing answers he has looked up in the back of a book. He is truly a teacher when, having found his own spirit, he can inspire others to accept the responsibility of their own being, to undergo the challenge of their own innate longing for the Absolute, to find their own spirit.’(4) This is analogous to what Pope Paul VI said to Dominicans, that the challenge to them was to be Thomases rather than Thomists.
Much religion leaves little room for imagination, enquiry, passion, or human experience. It often stays at the level of tokenism, conformity, fulfilment of observances, and trying to become “worthy.” (I think of the bishop who used to say on public occasions, ‘Go to Mass, say your prayers and you’ll get to heaven.’) That is pharisaism – and practical atheism to boot. Have Christians ever understood why Jesus spent so much energy – perhaps a quarter or a third of the gospel – in conflict with the religious establishment of his time? We demonize them as hypocrites, thereby evading Jesus’ challenge, as if it had nothing to do with us.
Religion has often been a control system, with guilt and fear as the levers of power, and has even happily identified itself with that role. Concern for power and control is clear evidence of insecurity. ‘Bernard Häring said, ‘Many of the patterns and practices of present institutional religion reveal “behavioural atheism.” We need to be control freaks only when we don’t believe that God is in charge, or when we can’t trust God to be in charge.’ (5) The task of religion has too often been to make people feel guilty if they do not operate according to the belief system and the belonging system. But ‘to speak of the divine will is not to speak of what God wants – it is to speak of what God is. What is the divine will? It is, simply, love.’ (6)
Being a Christian has become identified with going to church, receiving the sacraments, reading the bible, etc. We often mistake the sign for the signified, the symbol for the reality, and the definition for the metaphor. In its worse moments, religion becomes an addiction, as stultifying and destructive as any other. Examples? Being hooked on observances, performance, and attainment; withdrawing into a devotional ghetto of visions and secret messages, while resisting the attempt to go beyond the motions into the meaning; doing liturgy on automatic pilot with a let’s-get-through-this approach, religion as form instead of substance. Such religion inoculates and anaesthetizes, is afraid of living and life. ‘If religion or spirituality creates a parallel universe that sets us apart, then it should be shunned because it’s taking us away from reality, and reality is truth.’ (7) ‘Religion is the sacred expression of the spiritual, but, if the spiritual experience is lacking, then the religious form becomes hollow and superficial and self-important.’ (8)
‘Religion is the best thing and the worst thing in the world. If you really want to hate and to act without scruple, do it “for God”; that excuses everything.’ (9) Religion often legitimizes the status quo, whatever that may be at the moment. It decides who’s in and who’s out, who’s worthy and who’s unworthy, dividing people into we the chosen and they the frozen. ‘Jesus made religion democratic and available; we turned it into an industry.’ (10) Priests are meant to be prophets of Christ Incarnate but easily become executives of Christianity Incorporated. How ironic that it is the formerly Christian countries which have become the sources and power-houses of secularism and atheism!
There is bogus religion: religion as entertainment, spectacle, therapy, or reward and punishment, with heaven-and-hell as carrot-and-stick on a cosmic scale. ‘The fear of becoming the subject of God’s revenge and punishment has paralyzed the mental and emotional lives of many people, independent of their age, religion, or life-style. This paralyzing fear of God is one of the great human tragedies”. (11)
Religion is sometimes a bogus substitute for spirituality, as when the saying of prayers keeps prayer at bay. Much of it is ‘a search for security and self-image, not for God or for love.’ (12) ‘If we do not meet God within our own unique selves, our religion can degenerate into an idolatry of the institution, or the worship of an ideology, a system of ideas’. (13)
Giving priority to orthodoxy over orthopraxy makes us strong on information, weak on transformation. ‘Our language is out of harmony with where people are at.’ (14) ‘The greatest objection that can be brought against Christianity in our time and the real source of the distrust which insulates entire blocks of humanity from the influence of the Church has nothing to do with historical or theological difficulties. It is the suspicion that our religion makes its followers less human.’ (15) It fails to take human experience seriously as a source of revelation, though the goal of religion is to humanize. The vocation of every person is to become a human being. That is integral to the meaning of Incarnation. ‘Religion is there to help us to find our true self and live in peace with it. It’s about being connected.’ (16)
The value of religion
The Christian faith has a sense of history. It’s about God intervening in the world. In the Hebrew bible, God called a group of individuals who had nothing in common other than being runaway slaves, and, through forty years of wandering in a desert, formed them into a people. ‘I will be your God and you shall be my people.’ (Jeremiah 31.31-34) God builds community.
The Kingdom of God is the central theme of the preaching of Jesus; it is a communitarian rather than an individual concept. Jesus does God’s work – building community: ‘May they all be one.’ (John 17.22) We cannot pray the Our Father if we choose to live in isolation.
The Trinity is relational; God is one, but not solitary. In an analogical sense, it could be said that the Trinity is about “community life” in God.
The Christian faith unites the spiritual and the material. The idea that the spiritual is what really matters is gnostic. Christian spirituality engages with the material world: the gospel is material – feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, visiting the sick and imprisoned (Matthew 25.31-46); it uses water for baptism, bread and wine for the Eucharist, olive oil in anointing, human sexuality in marriage. Two of the greatest exponents of Christian spirituality, Saints Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, wrote, ‘Works are what the Lord wants! He desires that if you see a Sister who is sick to whom you can bring some relief, you have compassion on her…; and if she is suffering pain, you also feel it; and, if necessary, you fast so that she may eat….’ (17) and, ‘The Lord walks among the pots and pans.’ (18) John wrote, ‘At the evening of life, we will be judged on love.’ (19) Christianity embraces the material, with God becoming human in Jesus as the exemplar. Spirituality is not authentically spiritual if it ignores the political, the economic, the social, the cultural, and the environmental.
Christian spirituality is accessible: it’s not esoteric, effete, or dilettantish, nor to be confused with an aesthetic sense; it’s not about knowledge; it’s about love. Not everyone can know, but everyone can love. It’s about commitment, rolling up your sleeves and doing something for others. God is not amenable to the detached observer.
Religion is about the O(o)ther; spirituality may become navel-gazing, with endless talk about “How I feel about myself.” Although Mother Church has often clasped her children to her bosom, afraid to let them go and grow, it is nonetheless true that the Christian religion challenges people to leave the play-pen and grow up.
Four elements of religion
Creed: It’s a cliché, but it’s true: if you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything. Some of the happiest people are those who have a few genuine beliefs, some core principles, who stick with them and live by them. (Faith, family and farm would be an example from the past.) An integrated set of values is priceless. Religion is about interpreting life, assigning meaning to it. Cultures which are vibrant, long-lasting, and able to withstand the storms of war, or economic or political upheaval, are those at the heart of which there is a strong core of beliefs that go beyond the pragmatic or the self-interested.
Code: Moral teaching is the fence at the edge of the cliff, the map and compass in the desert, the voice that shouts ‘Stop!’ to the person about to wander across the road in front of a car. Religion is not reducible to morals, but good morals are a sign that religion is authentic.
If every discussion of morals ends with, ‘You do your thing and I’ll do mine’, there is no common language or common values, no shared ideals, and that means no community, just fragmentation into lonely individuals. (Is individualism PC for self-centredness, or selfishness?)
Cult: The cult helps us in our moments of weakness. We’re not always in top form. We may be tired, bored, confused, demoralized, unwell, or experience any number of other limitations. Liturgical prayer, that is, the community prayer of a church, such as the Mass or sacraments, have a core which is substantially unchanged from day to day and year to year, and expresses stability and continuity; it also has other elements, such as readings, which change from day to day, and provide variety. By using “set” prayers, such as the Our Father, we don’t need to be at our best all the time. The words help us, they carry us along. We need a prop occasionally, and they provide it. But there is always freedom. There are as many ways of praying as there are people who pray. There is only one summit on a mountain, but many paths to it. ‘Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.’ (2 Corinthians. 3.17)
Human beings are ritual animals. We need rituals, especially for the great moments of life: birth and death, puberty and marriage, and for meals; we need rituals of reconciliation and of celebration.
Community: we are social animals; we need each other; there is no DIY humanity or Lone Ranger salvation. Humans were meant to live in community. Interdependence, not independence, is the name of the game. Religion can give a sense of continuity with a tradition which is the lived experience of generations. That means the individual doesn’t have to examine every issue from the beginning, alone.
‘Why do we need the church?’ a friend asked John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, while they sat by a fire. Wesley took a burning brand from the fire and set it down on the hearth. After a while it stopped burning and cooled. Then Wesley picked it up and put it back on the fire. It quickly heated up and caught flame again. ‘That’s why we need the church,’ he said.
Three essential areas
The Christian faith helps in three core areas of life:
Relationships: They are at the heart of all living. Fundamentally, there are four: with God, with others, with the self, and with nature (of which latter we are a part.) These relationships are themselves inter-related; they inter-act on each other. They may be described separately, but they are lived inseparably. The whole of life is one: a lack of respect for God, for instance, not uncommonly results in a lack of respect for the person.
Motivation: A basic human question is: ‘Why should I care about anyone?’ We may reply, ‘If we don’t care about each other, we won’t have a very human society.’ True, but that doesn’t carry us very far. It’s not a very compelling motive, especially in the hard cases. Christianity, by joining love of God and of neighbour inseparably, and by pointing to examples of self-sacrifice in the life of the Christian community, motivates.
Conscience: Every human being has the right and the responsibility to form and to follow their conscience. Not everyone has the time, the energy, or perhaps the intellectual capacity or even inclination, to examine every issue from the beginning, and to work out for themselves what is right and wrong. The Christian community has a body of teaching developed over twenty centuries on probably every major issue that challenges the person. It’s a great resource to draw on in developing a conscience that is intelligent, responsive, and firm.
Finally
Religion and spirituality are like stained-glass windows – but what matters is the light. In the final analysis, the Christian religion is not about a church, a teaching, sacraments, or morals. It’s about a person: Jesus. Jesus is God’s answer to the human question, ‘What’s God like?’ If we want to know what God is like, how God thinks, we look to Jesus for answers. Jesus is the human face of God, ‘the image of the invisible God.’ (Colossians 1.15)
Footnotes
(1) John Howard Griffin, Thomas Merton: the Hermitage Years; a biographical study, edited by Robert Bonazzi, Burns & Oates, London, 1993, p.34, quoting from Merton.
(2) Richard Rohr, Simplicity: the Freedom of Letting Go, Crossroads, New York, 2003, p.122.
(3) Barbara Brown Taylor, “Truth to Tell”, Bread and Wine: readings for Lent and Easter, Plough Publishing House, Farmington, Pennsylvania 15437, USA, 2003, p.89.
(4) John Main OSB, The Inner Christ, DLT, London, 1994, p.38.
(5) Cited by Richard Rohr in Hope against Darkness, Saint Anthony Messenger Press, Cincinnati, Ohio, p.61.
(6) John Main OSB, The Inner Christ, DLT, London, 1994, p.303.
(7) Richard Rohr, Eucharist as Touchstone, a CD.
(8) John Main, Death the Inner Journey, Benedictine Priory of Montreal, Canada, 1983, p.8.
(9) Richard Rohr, Culture, Scapegoating and Jesus, a CD.
(10) Richard Rohr, Living the Eternal Now, a CD.
(11) Henri J. M. Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Story of Homecoming, DLT, London, 1994, p.121.
(12) Richard Rohr, Gate of the Temple, a CD.
(13) Gerald W. Hughes, God of Surprises, Darton, Longman and Todd, London, 1985, p.41
(14) Richard Rohr, Fire from Heaven, a CD.
(15) From Pierre Teilhard de Chardin SJ, Le Milieu Divin: an essay on the interior life, Fontana, London, 1957, p.68; see also p.83.
(16) Richard Rohr, On contemplative prayer, a CD.
(17) Saint Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle, Chap. 5, para., 3, page 11, The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila, translated by Kieran Kavanaugh OCD and Otilio Rodrigues OCD, Institute of Carmelite Studies, Washington DC, 1985.
(18) Foundations 5.8.120.
(19) Sayings of Light and Love, n.60.