Friday, September 28, 2012

5am musings on Religion and Spirituality

The spiritual life is rooted in reality. It is not a separate experience which is worth-less or less superior than the one which a person wakes up to every day. To assume otherwise robs religion of its ultimate purpose: to act as a framework to understanding the Sacred.

It is often heard in 12-Step circles, or from those who have disgruntled experience with religion, "Religion is for those who want to avoid hell, Spirituality is for those who have been there". I hate to rob the spiritual experience of those who might agree with this statement, as I generally make a point to try not to judge any persons spiritual experience, as my own is questioned by the majority of people in my own faith tradition. Religion has certainly done its wrongs to many, and the word itself can carry its own set of heavy baggage, and to react to those wrongs and to find another pathway to peace is considered  normal psychology. However, the definitions most often used to define "religion" and "spirituality" have seemed to set the words in opposition of each other, a misconception which is worth addressing.

Religion, acts as a framework to understanding the Sacred. In our religious traditions we find not only a moral guideline and history of our ancestors in faith, but we find where God reveals God's-self. More specifically, we find how God manifests God's-self in the profane world in which we live. These manifestations are called "theophanies". Eliade writes that a study of religion could be reduced to a study of these theophanies. In the case of Christianity, God was manifested through the Incarnation of Jesus, and to those whom this theophany was revealed felt the urgency to tell of this theophany as the fulfillment of the Covenants from Judaism. From here, the history, moral guides and laws, rituals, the sacred texts, and the theological interpretation of those sacred texts, are formed into what we call religion. But all of the said is never the focal point of religion, but how God is revealed. It could be argued that even if a person who was raised in a particular religious tradition, that person no doubt was raised to have faith, but has not embraced the meaning of religion in their life until they have experienced a theophany in their own journey, from where they can fit that revelation to the ultimate theophany in which they believe in.

"We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience", writes Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Experience is fundamental in spirituality. In experience we hold our trials and errors and hopes and dreams. Experience may be something gathered in fragments (or bulks) from our pasts, but ultimately makes us who we are in the present. In our waking reality, we find what it means to be religious, to practice things which are considered wholly-other from the profane would. In the reality of our religious practice, we find what it means to be spiritual. Spirituality is linked to experience, an inner expression of the experience of religious practice which interacts with the Sacred. It is next to impossible to define spirituality otherwise. 

Through experience, religion over time will change, as will how a person understands God. How spirituality is expressed is subject to change. Life will always be changing, the Buddha went so far as to even teach the world we live in is chaos and suffering. But the experience of spirituality is constant, perhaps the only thing a person could ever truly consider constant in their life. This is the reality of spirituality. 












2 comments:

Diary of an Autodidact said...

Your perspective always gives me food for thought. I totally agree that the point, the end-all, of the Christian "religion" is the experience of Christ. A set of rules or traditions without an experience of the Divine is something much less.

Penny Sheppard said...

Beautiful explanation of the subjective spiritual experience of the Self in context of religion.