SPIRITUALITY AND RELIGION

(An Edited Excerpt from Beyond Denial)

Many people these days are asking a lot of questions about how personal spirituality relates to established religion. For those of us involved in an ongoing faith tradition, one core insight is this: no specific religion, or the doctrines it espouses, must ever become objects of faith or belief in and of themselves. Religion is much better seen as a valuable resource than as a binding authority.

But even as we grow beyond looking to a specific religion as something to “believe in,” we may simultaneously—and to our great benefit—choose to participate in some form of religious or spiritual community, because such communities can still be vital vehicles for life-enhancing spiritual experience. Churches and mosques, synagogues and sanghas can all offer enormously helpful support for personal sustenance and growth, and for positive service to the world. 

And all this leads to an additional key understanding for the future of religion. We need to see that, like all other living things, each religion—and indeed, each and every approach to life more generally—must itself be continually evolving, growing and changing. 

The great Jewish rabbi from Nazareth understood this clearly. He was a master of what I like to call “sifting the tradition” which he had grown up in. He frequently pointed to elements of his Jewish birth tradition that were good and to be affirmed. But he also—and often—pointed to other elements of his own religious tradition that needed to be negated and grown beyond. 

Consider, for example, how he centralized the great teaching from the book of Leviticus that we “love our neighbors as ourselves.” (He then went on, pointedly, to present a parable in which the true “neighbor” was a foreigner from the despised minority called “Samaritans” who practiced a supposedly heretical religion.) 

But notice this: that same Jesus who embraced “love your neighbor as yourself” in Leviticus also—and equally pointedly—rejected another teaching from that same book of Leviticus, the one which taught people to exact “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” Here we find one of the many reasons that the Nazarene is such an important voice that we are wise to keep listening to. He taught clearly and unambiguously that although there are some important elements in religion that we need to say ‘yes’ to, there are other strands in religion that have become obsolete and that we need to say ‘no’ to. 

Figuring out which is which is, admittedly, hard work. But it is—it CAN be—a labor of love that is greatly worth undertaking.