De Mello: “Spirituality is the most practical thing in the whole wide world. I challenge anyone to think of anything more practical than spirituality as I have defined it – not piety, not devotion, not religion, not worship, but spirituality – waking up, waking up!”
Human beings are creators, and what we create are worlds. A “world” is a construct of language, a habitation of meaning, a web we spin for the sake of establishing some measure of security, orientation and purpose across the expansive and fathomless mystery we call reality. Like cocoons, we weave our world-homes and crawl inside.
Then we fall asleep.
But just as a cocoon is only intended as a temporary compartment, an incubator for a time as the swooning caterpillar undergoes metamorphosis, our worlds aren’t able to permanently contain the creative energy of the human spirit.
I saw it too many times in my career as a pastor, and later as a counselor: there is a “spiritual frustration” behind all our fussing and fighting, all the crime and unrest, all the neuroses and sink-holes of depression that are swallowing so many today. In ministry I wasted much time and energy – before I realized what was really going on – placating this restless demon and restitching the splitting seams of outgrown worlds.
The general trend in the current conversation on religion and spirituality is to define it – spirituality – as your private practice of prayer, communion with your higher power or inner guide, along with any odd assortment of ideas, symbols and rituals that make it meaningful to you. Religion, on the other hand, is “organized religion” – public, dogmatic, authoritarian and traditional.
In other words, boring and irrelevant.
The truth is, religion has become rather disconnected from life on our planet in this global age. As its boundaries bump up against rival belief systems, religion becomes increasingly reactive, defensive and violence-prone. But it’s also the case that religion is losing the currency game. Adherents go to church and sing praises to a deity they’ve never met, for the simple reason that he is only a literary character, what I call the mythological god.
As I’ve explained in previous Conversations, the mythological god is a personified representation of what some human beings regard as the supreme power behind the universe. So far, so boring. He got more interesting as the tribe fashioned this deity into its own likeness, with a rather unstable personality, a really BIG ego, and all the necessary vengeance at the ready for sinners, outsiders, and enemies.
Back in the day, a tribe (as I’m calling it) was a local human group of stratified classes, ranks of authority, strong boundaries, a deep genealogy and a tight moral code to keep it all from falling apart. Religion functioned as the center-pole around which this arrangement was oriented, and the mythological god was positioned at the top of the pole. The icon of sacred order.
All around the planet during this tribal age you could find the same general set of ordained functionaries, positioned and properly respected as guardians of truth. Priests looked after the ceremonial aspect, scribes kept the scrolls in order, and prophets or shamans served as therapeutic inlets of ecstatic experience – just enough conscience or craziness to preserve the illusion that Someone Else is in charge.
At some point, however, the evolution of human consciousness produced a more individually grounded and skeptical intelligence. People started to wonder why the god they heard and read about in the holy books wasn’t still sounding down from the clouds or filling the temples with holy smoke.
The guardians did their best to protect the tradition and its orthodox heritage by making up “adjustment stories” about the god’s heavenly transcendence, our loss of direct contact with him due to our fall into sin and depravity, and about how the god was preparing for an apocalyptic return – very soon, and maybe tomorrow. Don’t rock the boat.
So for centuries now, individuals living in the dawning light of a higher spiritual awareness have accepted these adjustment stories as sacred revelation.
It’s a little like all the minor adjustments that astrologers were making to the earth-centered universe before Copernicus. Because Earth was really traveling through space and whirling around the sun, earlier scientists had to make mathematical adjustments to the orbital paths of the other planets, in order to keep them moving in perfect circles around us. This was because god only works with perfect circles, not ellipses or squiggles.
In some of my earlier Conversations I’ve been pumping for a “post-theistic” spirituality. As theism is a conceptual model of religion based on the objective reality of a divine personality “up there” and in charge, “post”-theism is an invitation to contemplate the possibility that this god, along with the world-order he supervises, is intended as an evolutionary incubator of spirituality.
A defensive theist may well cry, “Atheism!” But the “post” in post-theism is meant as an acknowledgement of theism’s strategic place in human spiritual formation. It’s closed system – however large this closed system may be permitted to get – provides the security, orientation and sense of purpose that human beings need.
To say that its god lives only in the myths is not to deny his existence, but instead reflects a new-found appreciation for sacred stories and their power to shape and reshape consciousness. Just because god’s existence is literary and not literal, doesn’t mean that he’s now obsolete and better left to the dark ages.
Religion is the outer structure to spirituality’s creative life, the body to its soul. Post-theism is not what comes after religion, and neither is it just a word to validate the kind of designer superstitions available under best-seller titles at the local bookstore. It’s a way of seeing spirituality in an evolutionary context, and religion as the staging area of our awakening.
Truth in religion is in the flexibility of its present arrangement, as well as in its willingness – let’s call it faith – to release the need to be right, in order that we might become more real.
There’s nothing more practical, and more urgently needed today, than waking up.
Tracts of Revolution 