I’ve said it many times in this blog: Religion is not the problem; bad religion is the problem. Religion that has gotten locked up in itself is the problem. Religion that has lost its roots and lifeline to the Source and Mystery whose discovery had sparked a vision and launched a movement perhaps centuries ago – that’s the problem.
In this post we will trace this lifeline of religion as if it never lost its way.
For obvious reasons, we won’t be taking any of the existing religions for our subject, but religion itself: the response and manifestation of that primordial experience of Mystery.
Every actual religion falls off-center from time to time, and some have faltered far afield from the wellspring of their original discovery, becoming dry, brittle, and lifeless – and then may come a renaissance as the almost hollow and rotten thing finds new roots. Because every existing religion has such a complicated history and some have just died away, we will follow the trajectory of religion according to its design intention.
If the design intention of an apple tree is to flourish and produce apples, then what is the developmental aim of religion as such?
You might protest that I am engaging in fantasy, for a religion that is healthy, flourishing, and productive just doesn’t exist – and never has existed. At some point they all get mired in dogmatic convictions and perfunctory traditions, killing the faith and spiritual intelligence of their people. A few hostages find the courage to get out – by increasing numbers these days.
That’s the inevitable fate of every religion (in your opinion), so it’s a waste of time imagining how things could go differently.
I guess all I can do is ask you to suspend judgment for now and hear me out. Just as you wouldn’t toss aside the methodology of science because of some “bad apples” who play at science but not in a sincere or serious manner, I think we should refrain from dismissing religion itself on the basis of a few (or numerous) pathological examples we can find.
And I agree with you: they are all around us.
What I want to explore is a kind of methodology of religion, a more general theory and practice for proceeding on the road to fulfilling its intrinsic purpose. The aim and purpose of religion – let me just put it out here right up front – is fourfold:
- To focus and ground us individually in the Present Mystery of Reality;
- To center and connect us to one another in moral community;
- To situate and orient our community in the larger context of time and space; and
- To inspire and guide our progress toward human fulfillment, awakening each of us to the possibilities of our true nature.
You’ll notice that this methodological framework of religion does not specify what members should believe, how they become members, or the process by which an individual advances through the various stages of faith and membership.
True to the etymology of the Latin term religare, religion serves to link our self-conscious center of identity (the ego) back to its Ground, to our Community, to the Cosmos, and to the human Ideal.
My diagram depicts three distinct religions, each its own color and with its own unique history, customs, and beliefs. The boundary of each religion defines it, separates it from the surrounding field, but is also where that religion engages with the world in attitudes ranging from outreach and welcome, superiority and suspicion, renunciation and exclusion, even – when the religion has completely lost its soul and spiritual compass – to persecution and violence against nonbelievers.
The differences among these religions were not intended in the beginning to separate them from each other, but are rather products and symptoms of special conditions that developed in response to, and in the creative effort to make meaning of, an originary experience at the spiritual wellspring. Each religion’s doctrinal (belief) system and devotional (worship) practices are also relatively unique for this reason.
Even today, the inherited myths, shared rituals, core beliefs, and guiding vision of each religion provide the conditions for a present breakthrough in awareness to that same timeless realization.
Let’s name the field represented by each bounded community and tradition of faith its zone of genetic integrity. Truth in this zone has to do with the authentic witness a religion offers to its originary experience. Not whether its myths are factual accounts or its god is objectively real, but the degree in which the religion provides a clear channel to that experience and links an individual ego to those four dimensions of ultimate concern: Ground, Community, Cosmos, and Ideal.
So far, perhaps, I have begun to reconstitute a respectable definition of religion that even skeptics and atheists might accept.
But now we need to shift our attention from the local zone of genetic integrity, to a vertical axis that leads to the Ground of Being in one direction (within, downward, and deep), and in the other direction (around, upward, and beyond) to the Global Commons where all religions must learn to coexist and cooperate in the one world they inhabit together.
We’ll name the descending line of each religion, illustrated in my diagram as a spiral staircase, its mystical path. The spiral design corresponds to a proven truth, that the deeper insights and experiences in religion are cultivated through such disciplined (repeated, even ritualized) practices as meditation, mindfulness, and contemplative prayer.
In contemplative prayer, a practitioner or devotee might begin (top of the spiral staircase) in what is conceptualized as a “conversation with god.” As they descend deeper into the practice, however, this “I-Thou” polarity dissolves into a Present Mystery below the range of concepts, thoughts, and thinker alike.
This deeper realization is often conceptualized in terms of “communion with God,” where the case change indicates a breakthrough from thinking about god (the literal definition of theology) to an experience of God, beyond name and form.
Every religion must carefully protect and “religiously” perfect its tools and practices of mystical descent to the Ground of Being within, in order to preserve a clear path to the spiritual wellspring of Mystery. As a consequence of getting fixated on secondary and tertiary concerns like ranks, roles, and rules, leaders and devotees can lose sight of the center altogether, and thereby forget their point of entry to the Ground of Being within.
Returning to the zone of genetic integrity and now moving outward from the center to its threshold boundary, also brings us up the central axis and into the Global Commons where religion engages with the larger world. This ascending line is religion’s ethical path, leading through the disciplines of constructive dialogue and creative visioneering, where it participates with other religions and global stakeholders in the Great Work of a “global ethic” (cf. the important initiatives of Hans Küng).
This global ethic is based on the shared values of covenant fidelity, universal compassion, unconditional forgiveness, and absolute devotion in service to human liberation and planetary wellbeing. (See my posts The Progress of Wisdom and Curriculum Spiritus for a deeper exploration of these four principles.)
These days especially, the truth of religion is a measure of how involved and committed it is to this Great Work of an ethically enlightened global community. If the relative isolation of religions, once upon a time, allowed them to focus on concerns internal to the zone of genetic integrity, today such ignórance (willful ignorance) is no longer sustainable.
Despite all its bad examples, a strong argument can be made – I’ve endeavored to put in place the framework of such an argument here – for seeing religion as a key (even the key) to a brighter future for all of us.
We need to be linked back to the ultimate concerns of being human, here and now, if we are to have a future at all.
Tracts of Revolution 