In Spirit and in Truth
Living in a world that wants spirituality, but mostly on its own terms - where can we find it?
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As regular readers will have noticed, and read, a lot of people are leaving church - or, perhaps it would be better to say in many cases they are leaving religion. Though the two things seem hard to separate in the living of real life. Religion here is the thing that is represented by doctrines and authority and dogma and practices that, if not obligatory in all cases, also are not completely optional. We have noted the (often understandable) reasons why some people are making this shift. But we have also noted that most of these people don’t want to leave spirituality. They want to experience spirituality, but without the trappings of a church - or of organized religion more generally. They want to connect to something bigger, while rejecting an institution or set of beliefs that explains our place in a world that is bigger.
They want to connect to something bigger, while rejecting an institution or set of beliefs that explains our place in a world that is bigger.
Alain de Botton comes at the question from a little different angle. He is an atheist seeking to engage some of the bigger questions of life. He is also the author of Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion. He writes of the need for what religion brings, or has traditionally brought, to a world that no longer believes. He is a very smart, curious, and brave intellectual - in seeking even a small favorable purpose for religion, he risks controversy among his peers. He says we all need a sense of purpose, of meaning, even of awe - including those who don’t necessarily believe in any sort of reality that inspires awe or that gives them meaning from without. They don’t want to live in an empty, cold, mechanistic world - even if that is the world, when pressed, they believe exists.
They don’t want to live in an empty, cold, mechanistic world - even if that is the world, when pressed, they believe exists.
Others approach this quandary from still another path. They keep religion, in a sense, but reject almost all of the traditional doctrine. They haven’t withdrawn from the religious life, or religious practice, but they are in a religious setting with very few, or perhaps no, defining doctrines or dogmas. It is a religion that seeks to provide a maximum of freedom - and so must have a minimalist approach to doctrines. Still others remain with a more traditional religious identification - even an Evangelical identification, without the practices - a form of functional atheism that just hasn’t found the path all the way to the logical end.
Add all of this up and it seems that many in our country who never believed, or no longer believe, in the Apostle’s Creed (or any definitive creed) still choose to reject a strictly materialistic, secular or scientific narrative as an explanation for our existence, our meaning, our purpose, or our destiny. While acknowledging on one level (or ignoring while accepting) the fact that, even if it is billions of years away, the galaxies will keep moving apart and the sky will grow dark and the sun will one day die, leaving nothing behind - not us, not our memory, or stories, or art, or anything - they search for some level of transcendence that will outlast them. Others believe in a spiritual reality, but one without form - one chosen from below rather than imposed from above.
And so where does that leave us? It leaves us in many searches for a meaningful spirituality. One of them bills itself as a “Secular Sabbath” a members-only program in Los Angeles with events in Mexico, Iceland, and elsewhere. The purpose is to
connect … members to a higher power, at a time when attendance at religious services across the country is dwindling.
Can You Find God in a Bikini? - Olivia Reingold - The Free Press
And the locus of spiritual searches most in the news lately is the annual festival in the desert called Burning Man. It was brought to mainstream attention this year because an unusual rainstorm turned the normally fine dust of the desert into a muddy mess. Making these searchers an easy target for humor. It is easy to laugh at people, especially people you don’t understand or seek to understand. But let’s try to understand for a moment.
Every year, tens of thousands of people gather in the American desert for a spiritual experience. In the words of the Burning Man Project,
Our intention is to generate society that connects each individual to his or her creative powers, to participation in community, to the larger realm of civic life, and to the even greater world of nature that exists beyond society …
We believe that the experience of Burning Man can produce positive spiritual change in the world …
The touchstone of value in our culture will always be immediacy: experience before theory, moral relationships before politics, survival before services, roles before jobs, embodied support before sponsorship.
Now I don’t know exactly what is meant by some of that (which might be my lack of understanding - or it may be they don’t have a specific meaning for some of it). But I can see why some people are drawn to it. If life is tedious, hard, sometimes dark (which we all know it can be) - without the beliefs and community and practices (even dogmas) that provide meaning, transcendence, and destiny - then some other spiritual experience may be sought to fill that void or answer those questions. Something will be sought - spiritual or material or experiential - to fill that void. So I get it.
In some ways, because I believe in the reality of the spiritual world, I may have more in common with the Burning Man people than those holding to an empty, almost secular, cultural form of religion that has no real life connection to transcendence or spiritual experience. I may be closer to a Burning Man participant than I am to a person holding the remnants of a religious culture without any religious practice - or any room for the miraculous that can invade our actual lives.
As C.S. Lewis, one of the most influential Christian thinkers of the last century said of an empty and dogma-less religion growing fashionable in his time -
There is in this minimal religion nothing that can convince, convert, or (in the higher sense) console; nothing, therefore, which can restore vitality to our civilization. It is not costly enough. It can never be a controller or even a rival to our natural sloth and greed. A flag, a song, an old school tie, is stronger than it; much more, the pagan religions. Rather than pin my hopes in it I would almost listen again to the drum-beat in my blood and join in the song of the Maenads …
C.S. Lewis - from the essay Religion Without Dogma? (God in the Dock)
A religious belief without the power of true spiritual reality can’t do anything. It, as Paul wrote, has the form but not the power. It might give us an identity, it might allow us to hold on to a cultural expression … but it can’t redeem, restore, transform.
But a replacement spirituality that we try to bring about by our own devices also can’t redeem, or restore, or transform. We might have an experience - a beautiful experience - one of self-discovery. It might even be among other like minded people in the desert. But, in the story I believe we are in, the story outlined in the Apostle’s Creed, we don’t bring about a spiritual experience on our own. We live in a spiritual reality - we can participate in it - but we don’t create it, we can’t define it. We are subject to it. I get the impulse to find the truly spiritual in a beautiful desert experience - but I think that is looking in the wrong place. Lewis finishes his thought:
... Yes, almost; almost I’d sooner be a pagan suckled in a creed outworn.
Almost, but not, of course, quite. If one is forced to such an alternative, it is perhaps better to starve in a wholly secularized and meaningless universe than to recall the obscenities and cruelties of paganism.
C.S. Lewis - Religion Without Dogma? (God in the Dock)
I get it. I understand the search for meaning in community, in ritual, in spiritual experience. I just think that is a search in the wrong place.
Jesus had a memorable conversation with a woman who went to a well in the middle of the day. She was a Samaritan, and the Samaritans had their own way of worshiping God. She seemed to try to justify their manner of worship to Jesus. Jesus replied that her people worshiped what they did not know.
Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.”
Jesus - John 4:23-24
God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth. Both things. Worship is the truest of spiritual experience, but we are taught here that we don’t get to make it up. True spiritual experience that can transform, console, redeem, restore corresponds to the truth of the actual spirituality we are in. And it is practiced in the Spirit. That is capitalized to indicate Jesus is talking about the Holy Spirit - a particular, unique, personal Holy Spirit. (Those are statements of doctrine - but any statement about these words is a statement of doctrine - I don’t think we ever get away from it, but that is probably a different article.)
I don’t know what comes from, using the words of Jesus “worshiping what we do not know”, but I can’t believe it is good. I am fairly certain it cannot redeem or transform in any Christian understanding of those words or be transcendent in any positive sense of that word.
I get it. I really do. But I don’t think people will find what they really need to find there. I think what people are looking for can be found on the terms that the God who is worshiped in the Spirit and in truth has given us. He wants to be found. In his grace, He may choose to appear on other places and settings, of course - he is not bound to my confines. But He does seem normally to bind Himself to the instrument He has ordained for His worship. I think that is through His people, in the community He has ordained (however mysterious or befuddling we may find that), in the church that is His body.
Links
Leaving the Church and Being the Church - Mike Sherman - The Embassy
Having the Form, Denying the Power - Mike Sherman - The Embassy
The School of Life - Alain de Botton, Founder
Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion - Alain de Botton
Can You Find God in a Bikini? - Olivia Reingold - The Free Press
Burning Man Project - burningman.org
Religion Without Dogma? - C.S. Lewis - God in the Dock
Your piece seems to come from the stance that institutional religions/churches basically ‘get it right’ with the exception of a few outliers. I tend to think that, with humans, it’s always a constant slide towards Phariseeism, especially when those humans are part of an establishment that basically thinks it’s getting it right. When those institutions don’t have built in inflection points that ask ‘where are we getting it wrong?’, the average churchgoer will just leave because there’s no other way to communicate that they want something that actually is higher and better than what’s being offered. Church websites should include exit surveys maybe lol?