Jeff Hual brings back from a few years ago a piece by Lillian Daniel, in which she expresses her utter boredom with people who claim to be “spiritual but not religious.” She begins by recalling conversations with people on an airplane who go on and on about finding God on the beach and in sunsets rather than in church. . . .
From Lillian Daniel: Spiritual But Not Religious? Please Stop Boring Me.:
Being privately spiritual but not religious just doesn’t interest me. There is nothing challenging about having deep thoughts all by oneself. What is interesting is doing this work in community, where other people might call you on stuff, or heaven forbid, disagree with you. Where life with God gets rich and provocative is when you dig deeply into a tradition that you did not invent all for yourself.
Thank you for sharing, spiritual-but-not-religious sunset person. You are now comfortably in the norm for self-centered American culture, right smack in the bland majority of people who find ancient religions dull but find themselves uniquely fascinating. Can I switch seats now and sit next to someone who has been shaped by a mighty cloud of witnesses instead? Can I spend my time talking to someone brave enough to encounter God in a real human community? Because when this flight gets choppy, that’s who I want by my side, holding my hand, saying a prayer and simply putting up with me, just like we try to do in church.
Lillian Daniel is a United Church of Christ minister who is going to be too liberal for most of us in the Cranach Nation, but still. . . .She has written a book on the subject entitled When “Spiritual but Not Religious” Is Not Enough: Seeing God in Surprising Places, Even the Church
.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In