Words Spiritual and Religious

Language is such a mysterious thing.

I’m curious about the origins of human language. I suspect the study of language potentiality within great apes will reveal much. Of course they lack vocal cords and other speech organs, but at the same time appear to possess an ability to grasp the structures of language and so can learn sign language. at the same time I’m intrigued by the language mimicry of certain birds, who can do the sounds without apparently the ability to understand.

As with everything human it appears what we possess we share with other creatures, differing never in kind, but always only in degree. Although where that degree can take us!

Here I’m not particularly thinking about our ability to create grammer, but with vocabulary.

Words.

I love words.

An old and dear friend said of language and she mainly meant vocabulary is like play dough, it’s meant to be played with.

There is no doubt words shift and change. Prevent once meant to lead.

On my minister’s list serve there’s been quite a hubbub of late regarding the current use of the words spiritual and religious. And these are the specific words I’m thinking about today.

Only a few years ago they were synonyms. Today they clearly stand for different things, although exactly what those different things are is much less clear.

In general use spiritual stands for something good, while religious stands for something bad. Usually the good spiritual is personal and the bad religious is institutional. But any standard use obviously hasn’t yet settled.

Me, I use the word spiritual a lot. I simply crib from the etymology (spiritus: breath) and use the word more or less consistently as “that which gives life.”

Religious has been more difficult for me as I’m not as positively inclined to the idea of, or even the possibility of private spiritual experience.

Now, my first run at that sentence I wrote “private religious experience.” For me the terms are mostly synonymous, as has been the case until relatively recently. This sets up the difficulty.

If religion is to stand for institution, I can’t take it as purely bad. for two reasons. One, we need institutions. Two, rather more radically, we have no life outside of each other. So, at some level it’s one point. Institutions are the ways we live together. They can be good, bad and indifferent; but we can’t forgo them. Not in any serious way. They both deal with how we find our life.

I feel we need to look for the ways to foster that interiority which so many of us have come to value, but also have the ways that check, foster and support that interior life. So, accepting the dichotomy of spiritual as private and religious as corporate, I suggest we need to resist making one good and the other ill.

Otherwise, I fear, spiritual will come to mean, as one wag on that minister’s list suggested, “any warm fuzzy feeling.”

If that were to be the case, it would be a sad thing, indeed.

That is, if it is really meant to be about what gives us life.