Boulder, Colorado, the town I call my own, is not a particularly religious place. It hosts a significant research university and an impressive number of research institutes that draw terrific scientists, most of them atheists. You see a lot of Christian fish on the backs of cars with legs sticking out and the word ‘Darwin’ inside, as if the universe, like some Wild West frontier town, were somehow not big enough for both God and evolution. Boulder also has a sizable Buddhist presence, thanks to a Buddhist college (Naropa University) that started here in the 1970s. If I had to name the prevailing attitude toward religion here, I would call it agnosto-Buddhist spiritualism.
There might be a God, this line of thinking goes. But the presence of such an entity is not verifiable, and we like to believe only in what we can discern, so we’ll forget about organized religion and its outdated obligations. We’re obviously part of something bigger, though we have no way of knowing what that bigger thing is, so let’s live peacefully on earth, be kind to each other, and cultivate understanding in our own hearts in order to strengthen our connection to this thing we can’t name.
But we can do it without organized religion, this line of thinking continues. Please. Anything but organized religion, with all its rules and superstitions.
Some of my favorite people in Boulder espouse some version of this life view and call themselves “spiritual.” Quite a few of them are kinder, gentler, more in tune with the purpose of their lives, and more at peace with themselves than I will ever be. Some of them (my serious Buddhist friends, for instance) have deep, meaningful religious practices that I would love to emulate. But many more who call themselves spiritual tend to “roll their own” practices, bouncing between belief systems and mixing them to create a New Age melange that appeals to them. Hindu reincarnation with a bit of Earth Goddess worship, or Zen with a bit of native American mythology, or astrology flavored with Jewish mysticism. They like to say that since all religions have the same goal, they can therefore mix and match until they find a blend that “works for them.”
This mix-and-match philosophy allows people to feel like they are tending to their spirits while avoiding the prickly rules, regulations, and responsibilities that go along with organized religion. But searching around to “find what works for you” invites a spiritual sensibility that is centered around (and mired in) the self. Focusing on spirituality alone, in the absence of a religious structure, encourages a solo encounter with the divine—it’s just you and the nameless, nebulous Higher Power, without a troubling, demanding relationship to some fire-breathing God who chains you to old-fashioned, backwards ways of thinking. Spirituality is a sexy alternative to religion because it seems so modern, with its individualistic flair and its focus on self-perfection. But if practiced in solo fashion, it encourages us to view our spiritual journey through life as utterly unique—our own individual destiny that we, with luck and introspection, grow to understand over time.
Celebrating our uniqueness is not the point of religion, however. Religion asks us instead to recognize that our spiritual path through life is a shared one—a set of joys, terrors, and opportunities experienced by every member of our species throughout history. The Our Father and Hail Mary I say when I’m in spiritual crisis, for instance, are the same exact prayers that millions before me have uttered in the same circumstances. Religion operates through, not in spite of, this shared condition, and the sharing is deepened through ritual. Subscribing to a religion involves a kind of communal ritual work that is absent from self-wrought spiritualities, which focus on the individual’s solo encounter with the divine and can easily lead its practitioners away from a collective encounter with the divine.
That collective encounter takes work, and most people these days don’t want to work for a religion. We prefer to have our religion “work for us” instead, and we tend to think of our spirituality as something private, as a nestling of the self in an otherwise inaccessible interior garden. We don’t like to think of millions of other people—a ragtag, rotten-toothed bunch, smelling medieval and muttering dead languages—communing beside us as we cultivate our personal relationship with the divine. But that’s exactly what religion gives us, and when I hear New Age spiritualists saying that organized religions “don’t work for them,” I suspect it’s partly because they don’t like to feel that sweaty, incoherent mass of fellow worshippers so close to what they think of as the shrine of their most sacred self.
Self-wrought spiritualities encourage us to ignore the sweaty mass and think about ourselves, while religion asks us to pray with the sweaty mass. Religion expects us to pull our weight as participants, and part of that weight is the recognition that we are not alone. Being part of a religion means that you put a name on the Higher Power—God, Allah, Jaweh, etc. It means that you pray and fast and do penance to bring yourself closer to that named power in the same ways as those who did so before you. While spiritualities suggest that we’re all on our own journey, religion emphatically says, “Nope, we’re all in this together.” And not only are you in it with all your co-religionists alive today, but you’re in it with all those who are dead and all those who haven’t yet been born.
Quite a concept, isn’t it? A vast, interconnected community of the living, the dead, and the not-yet-living, worshipping the same way in a vast array of languages. It blows my mind every time I think about it, and that’s one of the reasons I don’t understand people who pursue alternative spiritualities because organized religion doesn’t “offer” them enough. If the interconnectedness to the living, dead, and unborn that organized religion asks you to embrace doesn’t “offer” you enough, then I would suggest that the spiritual problem resides within you, not within any religion.
When you buy into a religion—let’s take mine, Catholicism—you don’t get a merely personal journey. You get a bunch of people on the pilgrimage next to you, plus all the people who took that pilgrimage a thousand years ago, plus all the people who will take it a thousand years from now. The communal experience is essential (the fundamental ritual of the Catholic church is called Communion, after all), and its shared nature is at the core of the religion. Delving into Catholicism for its purely spiritual aspects—the surface of its rituals, for example, which plenty of people draw from as they roll their own spiritualities—is like having dessert before your meal. Going to church to experience a mystical ritual is a great start, but if you really want to be nourished, you need to eat the rest of the meal. And you need to share it with that sweaty, rotten-toothed, medieval-smelling throng.
Some people balk at the meal that organized religion asks us to partake in because it isn’t about the self and doesn’t exalt the self. People complain that the meal is boring, that the ritual of going to church/synagogue/mosque every week and saying the same prayers over and over again doesn’t “offer” them anything. Then they leave the religions of their youth and go out to find (or invent) new ones, mixing and matching and jettisoning practices as their spiritual needs change.
But the point of cultivating a relationship with the divine is not what a religion does for you. Organized religions aren’t like chain stores, offering you the latest wares at the best prices. People who forsake religion for spirituality make the mistake of thinking that cultivating a relationship with the divine is all about them and their needs—as if the consumerist, market-driven mentality has finally taken over our souls. But religion isn’t about having a need-based relationship with God on your terms. It’s about living on God’s terms—working to understand what those terms are and yoking yourself to the living, dead, and not-yet-living community that exists beyond you.
We are not the stars of the show called life, but among the billions who have been called to the same show, the same adventure, the same trial. If we desire unity with the divine, then we should respect the divine by acknowledging— emphasizing, in fact—the proper place of the individual within the collective. This is what religion asks us to do, and what self-wrought spiritualities tempt us to avoid.
Once at a Boulder party I met a woman who outlined her journey through several alternative spiritualities. I, in turn, outlined my comings and goings in relationship to the religion of my youth. She declared that I was not a very spiritual person—not at all!—and I couldn’t argue with her. I’m not spiritual, I’m religious. There’s a difference, and it’s crucial.
Some might say it means everything.
Steven Wingate | Contributor
Steven Wingate's debut short story collection Wifeshopping won the Bakeless Prize for Fiction from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and was published by Houghton Mifflin in 2008. His fiction, poetry, cross-genre work, and reviews have appeared in Gulf Coast, Witness, Mississippi Review, The Pinch, Colorado Review, The Journal, Brand (UK), Waccamaw, Sonora Review, and elsewhere. His column on the writing craft and life appears regularly in Fiction Writers Review. In 2010-11 he will be Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA.
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3 Responses
Steven – phenomenal piece! I appreciate your bold, refreshing reminder; and willingness to say what most are not. Keep up the great work!
I really appreciate the thoughtfulness of this piece, particularly in how it deconstructs the usual divide between the traditionally religious and the spiritual. It gives so much to think about!
The thing that comes to mind for me personally, however, is that I am not religious for completely different reasons mentioned here. It’s not that the religions of the world don’t offer enough about “self” — but because I simply don’t believe in a higher power. In fact I find too often, the religious interpretations and explanations of a higher power to be all TOO centered on the self, too centered on what we want/need to believe. It seems thus, that long ago, societies did exactly what Steven says the spiritual are doing now: they “rolled their own” to create a higher power that served their own selfish needs/fears/desires.
Is it not possible to believe in the divine without believing in an all-knowing being that we answer to? I suspect that a great many who “roll their own” nowadays, those that call themselves spiritual, reject traditional religions because most religions demand belief in a higher power as admission. We can be awestruck by so much in life without having to assign all the great unknowns a narrative and a power structure that is too often selfishly interpreted, easily abused — and worse, quite often abusive.
Ultimately, while I maintain a lot of respect for many religious practices and beliefs, I find that my path is to strive to connect with the infinite divine, with the mysteries, with the millions living, dead and as yet unborn, but without surrendering to something I simply don’t believe.
Anyway, thanks for the stellar writing. Peace.
A variation on Drew Emery’s comment. First of all, a thoughtful and wonderfully expressed piece from Mr. Wingate. Second, however — most organized religions don’t seem to mirror, or express, the humility that they ask of the individual. Most organized religions are inherently self-superior. If they don’t acknowledge the worth of other organized religions, and in fact often denigrate them, can a tolerant and open-minded person genuinely belong to one, as I did for much of my life? (Presbyterian.) The only solution to this dilemma (I see it as a dilemma, anyway) is to adopt a more flexible religous posture, or search for a more flexible religion, or experiment with having no religion, all of which can create a highly unpredictable path.