Spirituality and Religion.

Religion must serve spirituality; spirituality needs religion to work.

If you pray, that's spirituality.  If you agree with someone else to pray together at a certain time and place, that's religion.  

Religion is just organized spirituality.  It only becomes toxic when the organization grows more important than the spirituality it should facilitate.  At the same time, without religion, spirituality festers into a private, personal self-gratification, and fizzles out.

Idolatry happens when something intended to play a limited and supporting role, begins to usurp the center and assume power for itself.  A relative good spreads to take over the place of primary importance.

In the Church, discipleship remains paramount.  The Lord Jesus gives the Church its mission when he tells them to "make disciples" and "teach them to obey everything that I have commanded you."  That means bringing people into the life of compassion, service, humility, forgiveness, gratitude, equity, peacemaking, and justice.  Everything the Church does has to play a part in this mission.  Its organization should facilitate it.  It's doctrine needs to provide a foundation and its mythology a guiding and inspirational narrative, for discipleship.

To make an analogy from a Buddhist saying: Discipleship is the moon; the Church is the finger pointing to the moon.  If we start to focus on the finger and forget about the moon, we have not only missed the point, but we have also neglected and rejected the mission.  

If we focus on the religion and forget the spirituality, we have also gone far astray.  At the same time, the spirituality has no traction in the world without its application in religion.  It would remain a personal hobby or habit of an individual.  It does not make disciples, which means that even the individual's spirituality fails.  There is no such thing as individual spirituality; the communality of it is part of its essence.  To authentically connect to Jesus Christ inherently means connecting to and with others.  Spirituality without religion would be inert and dead.

Hence Modernity's hatred of religion and its need to co-opt it.  Nothing is more dangerous to any Empire than that people start following Jesus Christ.  Better to have people imagine they can be spiritual on their own, without the communal organization of religion, because without religion spirituality evaporates.  Authentic spirituality means connection to others, to an Other, to all.  Modernity pushes a false, ego-centric, counterfeit "spirituality" to undercut religion, and therefore discredit authentic spirituality.  It advocates for and underwrites a toxic Gnosticism in the place of real spirituality, ensuring that people will "do their own thing" on their own, and not connect to do anything real, because that would mean a repressive and restrictive "religion."  And we don't want that.

A religion has authenticity when it facilitates a real spirituality, and a spirituality has authenticity when it helps people connect to each other, to the planet, to the Creator; in other words, when it connects and organizes into religion.  Out of that connection then, it guides, inspires, encourages, and supports outreach to others, especially those in need.

Hence, Jesus founds a community of people whom he calls, an ecclesia, a church.  And the Nicene Creed includes the church as an article.  "We believe [or trust] in one holy, catholic, and apostolic Church."  Because a living spirituality needs a religious community to give it traction in the world.

+++++++  

       

New Things.

Does our fetishizing change really work?

For my entire career in the Presbyterian Church, we heard a lot about change.  In particular we talked without ceasing about the "new paradigm," the "emerging church," the "next church," "adaptive change," and so on.  We have practically fetishized changed, even to the point of requiring churches to write about their enthusiasm for change on various documents and forms, even if they actually have no such enthusiasm.  

And we nearly always presented change as a very good thing.  How many sermons have I heard at various ecclesiastical gatherings about "Behold, I am doing a new thing; do you not perceive it?"  Most of those sermons seemed to indicate something good happening.  They don't mention that Isaiah here talks about the return of the people from exile in Babylon.  They do not appear to think about the Exile part.  

My generation, Boomers, always looked forward to "the revolution."  You can hear it in our music.  Like Thunderclap Newman's, "We got to get together sooner or later, Because the revolution's here, And you know it's right."  We always understood changing times as a good thing, in the end.  "This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius," after all.  

In one presbytery I served, the Executive Presbyter advocated for closing a small congregation (against its will) by giddily offering, "Let's see what happens!"  This idea, that change, even when it means killing something, will always result in something good, as in the claim by an American officer in Vietnam that "we had to destroy the village in order to save it," pervades Modern thinking.  Yes, resurrection means death resolving in new life, but does this mean we start killing things for how much good it will do?  Do we call it good change when we reduce a mountain to wasteland in order to extract the coal from within it?  The attitude explains a lot of the history of Modernity, which has sacrificed untold millions of people, and the integrity of the planet's climate, to its to gratify its desires and fulfill its fantasies about the future. 

Change has always meant deterioration, decay, violence, depravity, and chaos... just not for the rich, white, men who invented, managed, and pushed Modernity.  We have always managed to fob the cost off on other, less privileged groups.  We still largely prattle on about change as some kind of inevitable "progress" and positive evolution.  Maybe that still works for us.  But most of the people on the planet still know that change usually means things getting even worse.  Hence, many of them embrace the nihilistic, "burn-it-all-down" solutions offered by wanna-be autocrats.  Indeed, who imagined a time when liberals would steadfastly defend the establishment against change... because the change comes in the form of reactionary maniacs?  Who ever thought white conservatives would storm the Capitol building?

 

We face no more profound and comprehensive change than the intensifying battery of climate crises we now endure and try to cope with.  Yet we seem to think we can turn even this catastrophic change into something purportedly good by using it as an excuse to re-configure our economy, as if technology and business have the capacity to save us even from this... even though these impulses got us into it.

  

I have read several good books forecasting Pentecostalism as the future of the church.  Harvey Cox, Phyllis Tickle, and perhaps James K. A. Smith suggest this.  Pentecostalism has many different forms, but it is the fastest growing branch of Christianity, by far.  How do we feel about this movement as our future?  Yes, the explosion of the Spirit at Azusa Street did express something radical, new, and good in its multi-racial, classless, inclusive character.  But the movement soon soured into exclusive racial segments, and tended to drift in pathological directions.  For one thing, the "prosperity gospel" pervades a lot of Pentecostalism.  And who foresaw anything as toxic as the New Apostolic Reformation coming out of this?  Much of Pentecostalism drips with White Nationalism, conspiracy theories, and the advocacy and perpetration of violence.

Whatever the next Christianity looks like, especially any movement trying to ride the Holy Spirit, the most essential reality we have to keep in the center of our consciousness remains "Jesus Christ as attested in Holy Scripture."  He must remain our grounding and our goal, the Source of our energy and the form that energy takes when flowing through us into the world.  Otherwise we will drift into the same kinds of atrocities that have characterized the Church in every age, when it sells out to the Empire, and starts doing whatever people want.

The book of the Bible that most concerns change and new things, of course, is Revelation.  Revelation depicts the violent and spectacular collapse of Empire, finally giving way to the emergence of a New Heaven and a New Earth.  We do not get to the latter without passage through the former.  Actual change will always mean traversing the proverbial nine miles of bad road.  It will mean disintegration and deconstruction, before the wonderful new thing can appear.  

Jesus Christ and his Kingdom/Commonwealth is always and only the new thing emerging in the world with, within, and among us.  Everything else is same old same old, even with revolutions.  In the words of Pete Townsend who knew that revolution means going around in a circle, they're just, "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."  In the meantime we maintain a steadfast witness to Jesus Christ, the Lamb who was slain and yet who now reigns, by living his life of compassion, justice, equity, inclusion, forgiveness, humility, and joy.  He is always new, always present, and always real.  The Creator always wins in the end; but before that we suffer defeat after defeat.  Nevertheless we live in the light of that final victory which does still shine on us, even in the storm.

+++++++

   

  

On the Impossibility of Thinking for Yourself.

Occasionally I meet folks who say something like, "I refuse to think the way the Church wants me to think.  I would rather think for myself."  Then invariably they come up with a lot of thoughts that merely unconsciously reflect and express what Empire has indoctrinated them to think.

I recently saw our local Encore Players' spectacular production of Inherit the Wind.  The fact that, in the play, both Brady and Drummond affirm or debunk the literal reading of the Bible means they both reflexively think according to the categories installed in them by the reigning Empire of the time: Modernity.  On these terms Drummond inevitably wins and Brady inevitably looks like a moron.  At one point in the play, I believe it is Drummond who says something to the effect of not wanting to have only one dominant book in our schools, be it the Bible or Darwin.  And yet, there is only one kind of teaching allowed in schools today, and it is that of the reigning ideology of Modernity. 

Under Modernity, we all learned to imagine "thinking for yourself" as the height of intellectual maturity.  In reality that almost never happens.  No one thinks for themselves.  Our thoughts do not come to us except as conditioned by and filtered through our personal and social context.  And that context assumes the shape given it by Empire.  When we think we think for ourselves we most likely unwittingly think in the way Empire wants us to think by default.  Under Modernity, this meant thinking in terms of the mythology and beliefs of Modernity: for example, individualism, reducing truth to facts, radical secularism, materialism, and so on.  

As Dylan sang, "You gotta serve somebody," we could as easily realize that you gotta think like somebody.  When we imagine we think for ourselves, really we only think according to the default of our society.  We think with our egos that enslave us; we think according to the categories of Empire we have learned since infancy.  

But, in the New Testament, metanoia/repentance means thinking differently, according to the mind of Christ, our Essence.  The whole mission of the Church supposedly shepherds people from reflexively thinking what Empire demanded they think, to thinking in a very different way, according to the love of the Creator and the goodness of the Creation.  Unfortunately, and obviously, the Church has regularly capitulated to the dominant Empire and failed in this one essential job.  Indeed, we let the categories, criteria, methods, and models of Empire even creep in and determine our own theologies and spiritual work.  

But we never relinquished the one thing necessary: Jesus Christ as attested in Scripture.  And, even though Empire attempts to control, co-opt, coerce, and adulterate this one thing, we have always retained it.  He is always there, waiting for us to pay attention again.  And occasionally, in every generation, some people get called to do just this.  Christ summons them to discipleship.

The turning point that has to happen is this realization of our own conditioning, our own utter lack of objectivity, that the way we have always thought was not better, more advanced or enlightened, but always according to a specific ideology... and not a particularly good one: an ideology responsible for more death and destruction, degradation and depravity, than that which guided any previous Empire.  We howl in indignation at the very idea of having the Bible taught in school; but we habitually think of the ideology of Modernity as objective, neutral, enlightened, and good, when it is actually the most toxic system of ideas and practices ever inflicted upon the Earth.   

We call this turning metanoia/repentance, and Jesus offers it as the Way out of our suicidal, homicidal impasse.  Indeed, if we do not start thinking differently, and then acting very differently, our world and perhaps humanity has no future.  We're going to have to start thinking and acting according to the self-emptying life and includisve, nondual teachings of Jesus Christ: characterized by compassion, humility, joy, inclusion, wonder, gentleness, nonviolence, generosity, gratitude, and a sense of communal connectedness with and in all things and God.

Instead of thinking for ourselves, which is really thinking Empire, maybe, in Jesus and by the Spirit, we can start thinking with and for... all.

+++++++