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.

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