Searching for God # 123

 There really is no avoiding, in a series like this, the exploration of the difference between one’s spirituality and one’s religion. 

In the introduction to their, Spiritual Traditions for the Contemporary Church, Roin Maas and Gabrial O’Donnell write, what for many is today a highly contentious sentence: 

It is a fallacy to think that we can be spiritual or have a meaningful relationship with God without being concerned about the specifics of doctrine. (p.17) 

Written in depths of the Christian tradition, the book follows with chapter titles such as: 

Reading for Holiness/ Monastic Life and the Search for God/ Mendicant Spirituality/ Anglican Spirituality/Ignatian Spirituality/Black Spirituality/Holy Women: Their Spiritual Influence in the  Middle Ages/Feminism and Spirituality......etc. 

In her book, “A History of God,” Karen Armstrong writes this: 

Reformers like Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556), founder of the Society of Jesus, shared the Protestant emphasis on direct experience of God and the need to appropriate revelation and make it uniquely one’s own. The Spiritual Exercises which he evolved for his first Jesuits were intended to induce a conversion, which could be a wracking, painful experience as well as an extremely joyful one. With its emphasis on self-examination and personal decision, this thirty-day retreat undertaken on a one-to-one basis with a director was dissimilar to Puritan spirituality. The Exercises represent a systematic, highly efficient crash course in mysticism. Mystics had often evolved disciplines that were similar to those used today by psychoanalysts and it is, therefore, interesting that the Exercises are also being used today by Catholics and Anglicans to provide an alternative type of therapy. (p.284) 

Something called a ‘direct experience of God’ today is so remote, even disparate from our contemporary consciousness, even our consciousness about religion, as to be not only mystical, mysterious, but almost fantasy-like. Evangelicals will speak about a ‘conversion’ or ‘born-again’ experience as akin to a ‘direct experience of God’ in that something seems to have ‘moved’ the aspirant towards some kind of life-altering moment. Indeed, the evangelical movement is structured, designed, trained and executed with the goal of increasing numbers of converts.  

The history, tradition and theology of the church has sustained a permanent ‘link’ between God and Jesus, whereas recent and bountiful scholarship, for example with the Jesus Seminar, has discerned, through exhaustive critical examination of available evidence, that much of the Christian church’s theology has emerged following the death and reported resurrection of Jesus, now termed the Christ, and has ignored the teachings, parables, sayings, aphorisms and wisdom of the Jesus of Nazareth whom they collectively consider to have been a sage, yet ordinary human being. And given the plethora of deep and divisive debates about such subjects as the divinity of Jesus, the church over centuries has evolved creeds which express what has come to be known as church dogma. Expecting ‘belief’ in the theology of such creeds has become a minimum litmus test for an acknowledged Christian. The veracity of a virgin birth, a deeply embedded conviction in a coming apocalypse, a conviction in a ‘resurrection’ following a death, belief in the holiness of a trinity (Father Son and Holy Spirit), the sacrifice and atonement implicit in the sacrificial death of Jesus, all of these considered the sine qua non of the Christian faith, use under serious skepticism and about among scholars and theologians. It is not, generally, they these men and women are determined to devastate, eradicate, demolish or exterminate the Christian faith. Rather, it is more a perspective that proposes a new challenging and rewarding examination of what Jesus actually said and did, prior to his death, as foundational to a new Christianity under a rubric Robert Funk for one entitles, Jesus for a new age. Are those who subscribe to a pursuit of these thoughts, proposals and invitations necessarily abandoning Christianity? 

Others, such as Jim Palmer, founder of the Center of Nonreligious Spirituality, while accepting many, if not all, of the Funk theses included as appendix to his book, Honest to Jesus, and recognizing the deeply disturbing and tragic reality of the inordinate number of men and women who have been profound wounded in and by the organized institution of the church, has sought first and finally created a digital space where open, honest, respectful, challenging, questioning and thoughtful human exchanges can and do take place among committed members. These men and women are interested in navigating the uncharted territory of post-religious life with honest questions, emotional spaciousness, and soul-level care---no doctrine required. (from the website of the Center for Nonreligious Spirituality) 

Under a title, De-Re-construction Tools & Practices on the website we read: 

Leaving religion is only the beginning. We offer practical tools, guided questions, and community-based reflection to help you rebuild inner consonance—so your life aligns with what you truly value. 

The question continues to hang like a cloud, or perhaps a break in the clouds: 

Can spirituality be divorced from religion?....Can and does the church include spirituality in its rituals, theology and praxis, community and ministry? 

Central to these questions is the notion and the experience of transcendence. 

In her introduction to her scholarly tome, The Lost Art of Scripture, Rescuing the Sacred Texts, Karen Armstrong writes: 

...Neurologists tell us that in fact we have no direct contact with the world we inhabit. We have only perspectives that come to us through the intricate circuits of our nervous system, so that we all---scientists, as well as mystics, know only representations of reality, not reality itself. We deal with the world as it appears to us, not as it intrinsically is, so some of our interpretations maybe more accurate than others. This somewhat disturbing news means that the ‘objective truths’ on which we rely are inherently illusive. The world is there; its energy and form exist. But our apprehension of it is only a mental projection. The world is outside our bodie, but not outside our minds. ‘We are this little universe, the Benedictine mystic Bede Griffiths (1906-93) explained, ‘a microcosm in which the macrocosm is present as a hologram.’ We are surrounded by a reality that transcends—or ‘goes beyond’--our conceptual grasp. (p.4-5) ......But if the transcendent were simply a remote reality ‘out there’ that one glimpsed only momentarily, if ever, and from afar, ‘religion would never have caught on. We shall see that nearly all the scriptures we will consider insist that men and women must also discover the divine within themselves and the world in which they live; they claim that every single person participates in the ultimate and has, therefore, unbounded potential....We will see that the prophets, mystics and seers who deliberately cultivated these experiences insisted that these were only intimations of a Reality that lay unknowingly beyond. ( p. 7)  But without a careful cultivation of the holistic vision of the right brain, that transcendent insight would have been impossible. ....People did not merely seek an experience of transcendence; rather they wanted to embody and somehow become one with it. They didn’t want a distant deity but sought an enhanced humanity. This...is a major theme of scripture: people want to ‘get beyond’ suffering and mortality and devise ways of achieving this....(Today) We feel that a ‘better self’ lurks beneath our lamentably imperfect one: we want to be braver, more brilliant and charismatic. But the scripture go further, insisting that each one of us can become a Buddha, a sage a Christ of even a god. The American scholar Fredeick Streng has this working definition of religion: 

Religion is a means of ultimate transformation. An ultimate transformation is a fundamental change from being caught up in the troubles of common existence (sin, ignorance) to living in such a way that one can cope at the deepest level with these troubles. That capacity for living allows one to experience the most authentic or deepest reality---the ultimate. (p.8) 

The mountain of evidence that suggests, or perhaps even declares, that many individual and group experiences inside Christian churches have not merely blocked such a pursuit of ultimate transformation, while attempting to foster it, but have wounded many to the degree that ‘they’ (we) believed, and were fully convicted that we were primarily evil, estranged from God, and desperately in need of the external saviour of Calvary and the empty tomb to both forgive and heal us of our sins. 

If slavery is the black hole of the American Shadow, one wonders, paradoxically, if the foundational conviction of the ineradicable sin of every man might not be the Achilles Heel, the dark Shadow of the Christian church. And, with such a widely held cultural and ‘religious’ conviction or belief, is it any wonder that centres such as the one inaugurated by Jim Palmer a former Episcopal clergy have sprung up offering a place of acceptance, tolerance, and even celebration for and among those seeking to ‘get to know’ themselves honestly and unreservedly, and to live out the energies of their perceived ‘better angels’. 

The starting point of sin and evil, as propagated by the Christian church, is congruent with its corollorary: judgement, prosecution, punishment and isolation for the purported purpose of ‘deterrence,’ ‘correctivity’ and ‘social protection.’ And the literal, legal, empirical perception and apperception of reality only enhances the opportunities for both individuals and the society at large to develop, enhance, inflate and ultimately to succumb to the weight of “surveillance, prosecution, incarceration and the desperate darkness such a process can only deliver. Has the church been complicit, or even directly responsible for the current pursuit of ‘evil’ even though it is a perversion of the original intent, to be directed only at the occasional offenders? 

I apologize for not offering a declarative answer to the question of whether spirituality is or can be divorced from religion! For many months, I have struggled with the convergence of psychology, philosophy, history, culture and theology and continue to consider them both overlapping and inseparable. The academic, scientific, empirical model of pursuing all complex questions, often balkanized by academic subject, has rendered much of our public debate shorn of the nuance, complexity, paradox and ‘unknowability’ that pertains not only to our relationship with reality but also with God.