Getting Real With Religion

I’m more than comfortable with traditional religious language: god and soul are at the top of my list of useful terms. I resist those who try to insist that the definitions of these terms can only be determined by their most conservative adherents. Conservative and fundamentalist asserting such a position I understand. But when critics such as most of the recent spate of atheist authors do so it comes across to me like setting up a classic straw man. And, a serious missing of something wondrous about our human consciousness.

Here’s how I see it.

Religion is poetry. The language of faith points us to deeper truths that, as is always the case with language, the words fall short of.

So, I strongly suggest “God” does not have to be defined by the most conservative Christian usage as some sort of mega human whom one crosses only at great risk. That’s not the God of my liberal Christian friends, nor for that matter of most theists of various stripes with whom I spend time. And, important for me, there’s another totally reasonable and historic usage. Spinoza’s god is, to my mind, the real divine. And while it might be an appeal to authority, frankly if Spinoza was comfortable with the term, so am I.

As for soul. This is an amazing term that points to our deepest possibility. But must it be a literal entity that occupies the body but is not part of it? I don’t think so. Nor do many people who’ve found this term helpful. One good example I can think of right off the top is how John Tarrant handles “soul,” and at no extra charge “spirit” in his spiritual classic The Light Inside the Dark: Zen Soul and the Spiritual Life.

Frankly, I see no part of the human personality that isn’t fully rooted in our biology. While our personalities do seem somehow to have a quasi-independence (witness both psychosomatic illness and the placebo effect where one kills and the other heals), shove come to push, the body returns to its constituent elements, so does the soul. With death we fall into the great don’t know, body and soul, complete.

Some hear these words and think the consequences of such belief, or they might think dis-belief, is despair.

But, no, no…

The authentic spiritual path, best as I can find, is a relentless quest; is a process of peeling away belief, peeling away assumptions.

It is a relentless journey into the heart of not knowing.

So, even my best analysis, my seeing that the spiritual and the material are one thing needs to be held lightly. All opinions should be held tentatively. The mind is a trickster. A naturalistic spirituality seems more closely connected to the real than taking these beautiful metaphors as literal. This is why I like Stephen Batchelor’s Buddhism and Don Cupitt’s Christianity. But even this perspective needs to be held as tentative, subject to more peeling away, subject to surprise.

And what do we find in that peeling away besides one surprise after another?

Well, perhaps one insight is that in fact there are no nouns.

Perhaps, and it seems to me to be so, it’s all verbs.

As someone has wisely said, it turns out the journey is the destination.

Here: there is sadness.

Here: there is joy.

Here: there is the real.

Or, so it manifests to my mind and heart at this moment one more incarnation of the dancing God…