Getting your bearings on the spiritual terrain

Landscape at Saint-Rémy (Enclosed Field with Peasant) early October 1889, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, Indiana (F641 ) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Atheism. Agnosticism. Spiritual but not religious-ism. Traditional religion. Reformed religion. Conservative religion.  Liberal religion. New religion. Agnostics who are spiritual but not religious. Religions that claim to be both traditional and liberal. Conservative religions that claim to be reformed. And in the midst of these and so many more options, chilly relations mix with loads of hot air, stirring up currents of thought and emotion that blow over the social landscape and portend more storms on the horizon. That herald further reshaping of how people understand the past and imagine the future.

What is the value of tradition and continuity? What are the risks of new revelations and interpretations? Is it necessary to find the right community with which to practice or the right guide to help you along the path? If so, how do you know which ones are right? How much do you have to study to really appreciate the real value or insights of a particular tradition or community? Is there a "genuine" core of experience and thought at the heart of such a tradition? Is it similar or even the same as the core of other traditions? Or is it better to go it alone when confronting the larger issues of living and of human existence? Is there value in such an examination of our lives, or is it just a waste of time? How can one go beyond just thinking or writing about such traditions, communities, and practices? How does one find and embrace authenticity? How does on really "get it"?

This past April marked the 8th anniversary since the beginning of this blog, my first attempt at blogging (I was hesitant to adopt the platform after seeing the much of the promise of message boards go really wrong). The above issues and questions, I think, reflect some of the stronger or more common underlying considerations for I've blogged about in my attempts to appreciate or understand what people (in post-Enlightment/Western or Western-influenced) societies mean by "spirituality" and "religion". In a way this is consistent with my larger life long interest in learning in general, and in understanding what we know/how we know it in particular.

One of things I've discovered is how many layers of misunderstanding and misuse there are for "spirituality" and "religion" along with related terms, concepts, attitudes, beliefs, rituals (and other practices), myths/narratives, and institutions. We take certain aspects of what we label as spirituality or religion, break them off, and use them to represent the whole range of what the spirituality and religion represent. (Check out this succinct summary of how I tend to see them -- I may need to write a book in order to develop and represent the larger vision of spirituality and religion that the summary and the contents of this blog suggest.)

Having familiarized myself largely with Christianity (beyond the contemporary evangelical fundamentalist perspective) and Buddhism, with smatterings of Taoism, Hinduism, and so on through many years of reading, discussion, debate, and even practice, I am of course in no real position to be telling anyone what to believe or why they ought to believe it. Nor am I any more of an expert than the many people who blog or write the books on the subject that occupy the space in the spirituality and religion section of your local bookstore. But those experiences and access to a blog give me as much of a chance to put my thoughts out there on the topic as anyone, even if there is less chance of those thoughts getting in front of people's eyeballs.

But you also learn from such efforts at trying to understand and describe your own concerns and confusion, as well as the times when you thought you were clever. And that insight can be of use to others who are exploring or who have become stuck while diving into the same issues. That's one reason I leave the blog up even if I haven't posted in nearly a year. And it's something that draws me back in, at whatever frequency, to get and share my bearings on my own journey and to listen to others sharing their own updates. I've been away for a while, which always helps with perspective.

Over the next week or two I'll be sharing a little of what the spiritual terrain looks to me at the moment if I take the time to stop to look around. I'd love it if you shared some of your own perspective as well. There's plenty of room in the comment area! ;o)

Will Christianity rediscover its relevance in the West?

A cross close to the church in Grense Jakobselv, Norway. Suomi: Risti kirkon lähellä Vuoremijoella, Norjassa. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Will Christianity rediscover its relevance in the West? While Christianity is growing in many parts of the non-Western world, it continues to age and shrink in the West while becoming seen as less credible and relevant. Yet in the United States, people are not simply rejecting anything and everything to do with either religion or spirituality. Some are turning to other traditions, such as Buddhism,while many are identifying as "spiritual but not religious". While some do refer to themselves as atheist or agnostic, not everyone who adopts such labels are hostile to religious and spiritual things.

This suggests that many folks who are abandoning or rejecting Christianity (the latter never having embraced it to begin with) are not simply "turning away from God", especially in the broad sense of God as some greater meaning to existence, a transcendent or higher power, or some deep inner light that cannot be explained or contained. They are specifically turning away from the contemporary Christian presentation of God. They are turning away from the social and political agenda associated in the popular consciousness with Christianity, especially when it involves shunning or shaming the poor, ethnic and religious minorities, homosexuals, and others who are marginalized and disenfranchised by society.

The confluence of cultural, social, economic, political, and historical factors that are involved in this transition are too complex to be mapped out and dealt with in detail here. I am going to focus on something that stands out to me, but I don't claim it is the only issue or the most important one when it comes to the decline of Christianity in the West. Yet I do think if it is taken seriously it could not only resonate in this age but actually help Christianity to remember itself. To move toward a reawakening. 

What religion offers (and what is doesn't)

Image via Wikipedia

A fast growing category in the West is "spiritual but not religious". Many of the people drawn to this designation look at abuses perpetrated in the name of religion and reject anything religious with a phobia bordering on neurosis, as if they might get religious cooties. Their experiences suggest that religion wants mental and emotional slaves and that being religious means accepting and affirming various ideas and propositions as "belief". But just because people screw something up doesn't mean the premise is bad. People screw stuff up all the time. Look at politics. Look at education. Look at anything really where humans are involved.

So we can either dump out the baby with the bath water, ignoring millenia of experience and insight, or we can become aware of the constant need for reform and humility. Religion offers us that experience, including effective ways to balance the tension between received wisdom and new discoveries and contexts. That's what we can gain from tradition, which also grounds us in a longer view of the spiritual path. The other thing religion offers is community, which is an essential aspect of any spiritual practice. Not a community to conform to or be lost in, but as a further grounding in the truth of our collective reality. The solo adventurer image may be tragic and romantic but it's just more fantastic nonsense.

As for what religion can't really offer, even when it claims to be able to so, it cannot give you enlightenment or salvation. It cannot give you the truth, even though it may point you towards it and offer time-tested ways to learn how to see it for yourself. At some point if we seek truth and salvation we have to let go and become vulnerable to ourselves and our situation in a total and unyielding way, without easy and fixed answers to prop us up. We have to have actual faith, working exposed and freely without a net and without assurances of specific outcomes. To float untethered in the ground of our being and know that all is well and that all will be well, open to all experiences we encounter with a spirit of acceptance and gratitude. The latter of course doesn't mean we stop caring or no long seek to aid those in need, but that we are willing to deal things as they are and as we are in an honest way.

When it works properly, religion can offer us training and support for such transformation. When it doesn't, it merely serves to reinforce the same urges, errors and tendencies that caused people to seek out and create religious communities and traditions in the first place. Religion becomes an excuse to not do the real work of sincere reflection and acceptance that need to be done and a substitute for meaningful and transformative faith. It becomes the kind of thing that makes people who want to explore spirituality feel the need to proclaim and identify as "not religious". Just another self-serving sham.