Religion and Spirituality
That is an intentionally off-putting title. Be warned, that is exactly what this blog is concerned with. Some people, like me, find this kind of thing entertaining. If you do not, don't bother with it. I won't be offended.
Somebody asked me recently if I was religious, and I told her, "No, but I am very spiritual." She was confused and asked me what the difference was, and I was startled and gave her some facile answer. She deserved better than that, but it was the last fifteen minutes before the shift ended, and we were both in a hurry.
Quick and Easy Comparison: Religion is a system by which people regulate their beliefs and spiritual practices. Spirituality is what your spirit or soul does, like your brain does thinking and your body does physical activity. There are practices and beliefs that use and enhance spirituality, such as prayer, meditation, a sense of wonder, a belief in a power greater than oneself, and worship.
With religion, if you follow all the rules of one particular set of practices, you don't really have to have spirituality. Sociopaths often belong to a church, for instance, and become respected members of a congregation, without actually having access to their own spirituality. It furthers their ends to appear to be spiritual by adhering to the local status quo.
I've participated in religions for a large part of my life. I've found over the last few years that religion doesn't work for me, unless I've made myself into a one-person religion.
I was brought up in a family where it was required that every family member go to church every Sunday. My parents were both raised in the Christian religion, though I believe they belonged to different "faiths," growing up. We moved every year or two when I was a kid, but we always joined the local Episcopalian church. They believe in infant baptism, but I was not baptized until I was seven years old. I don't know why.
I was "confirmed" when I was ten or eleven years old. Confirmation, at least in Episcopalianism, involves memorizing a lot of prayers, and knowing the answers to a lot of questions about what the sect believes. I did it, but even then, I didn't believe a lot of it. It was not something I had a choice about.
So, having been required to join and attend the church of my family's choice, I did the only logical thing for me to do: I joined the choir. Even as a child, singing was very important to me, and while most of the Episcopalian hymns really suck, singing just about anything does open up my spiritual sense.
Singing is not always a spiritual practice for me, but sometimes it is. When an activity causes a person to transcend the physical and mental, then it's a safe bet that it's spiritual. I can become very emotional about music. I have to be careful not to get too involved in what the radio is doing when I'm driving, for instance.
When I went to college, I started experimenting around with other faiths, such as the Baptists, the Catholics, the Presbyterians, and with other religions. I fell in love with a Jewish guy and underwent about ninety percent of the process of conversion to Judaism. When we broke up, that ended, and while it's an interesting and beautiful religion, it's not any more for me than Christianity is.
I took a course in comparative religions, and while I was a terrible student in most of my classes and only read the assignments years later in some cases, I followed this one pretty closely.
It occurred to me back then that Christianity, Judaism and Islam are actually the same religion, only with different foci. Jews and Catholics are more similar than Quakers and Catholics, for instance.
I experimented with being a Buddhist, though Buddhism was not originally intended to be a religion. I learned a lot about meditation and yoga as a physical means of reaching the spiritual.
Then, for many years, my spirituality shut down, and I lived as Nothing. Not as a spiritual being, not as an atheist or an agnostic: Nothing. I was spiritually off-balance for a long time, and only began to reconnect with a higher power after I got into some trouble and my daughter was born too early.
And even then, my spirituality was rudimentary at best. I can intellectualize anything, and I do it all the time; it's what comes naturally to me. I'm doing it right now. I was wrapped up in physicality for many years, then lost it, to a certain extent, during my long recovery from abuse issues. Substance abuse shuts down spirituality, and child and spousal abuse abrogate it as well. Incidentally, an old-fashioned term for child abuse is "soul-murder," and I think it's apt.
After dealing with my daughter's early birth, my husband and I decided to join a Lutheran church. He had been brought up in that faith, and we felt that it was the right thing to do, as new parents. After all, we had both been raised as church members, so there must be something in it.
We started going to the Lutheran church. It was a nice church, and the people were kind and friendly. I joined the choir. We went every Sunday, and had my daughter baptized on her first birthday. And then I started paying attention to what they were saying and doing. And didn't want any part of it. And didn't want my daughter contaminated by it.
When people hear the same stuff, over and over, from early childhood through their adult years, they stop hearing the meaning and the nuances of it. I had been away from religion for years, and as a 30-year-old recovering drunk, druggie and abuse survivor, I was noticing all the sexism and threatening talk and evil garbage that comes attached to Christian spiritual practice.
For example, one of the reasons that I am not and never will be a Christian is that I refuse to profit from a death by torture. And I don't believe in Original Sin; what a daft concept! I think the idea of "salvation" is both irrelevant and silly. I do believe in some form of reincarnation, but I think it's also irrelevant. I mean, what possible help or harm could it be, since, really, all we have is this precise exact moment?
Sorry if I'm offending any Christians reading this, but I can only speak for myself and how I see things. I will read your blog with an open mind, if you should choose to rebut mine. I don't think you'll be able to convince me, but I'm willing to let you try.
So, I became a pagan. I suppose in some ways I still am one. A pagan, strictly speaking, is just someone who believes in "country" lore, and I do that. I watch and appreciate the weather, I treat minor ailments with herbs and massage and other non-invasive means, and the deity I talk to is male, female and genderless. I read tarot cards with an extremely high success rate. I believe that there are lots of aspects to life on earth that are unexplained and unquantified by science, and may be unreachable by scientific practice.
But I'm not a Pagan with a capital "P" as that makes it into a religion, where you have to believe certain things and perform certain practices. I have done spells in the past, and they work, just like prayer works. I don't do them any more, though, because I think it's unnecessary, and even a little rude.
I mean, the character who is running things, the one who connects us all and sees the big picture, IS the big picture, already has it covered. Me messing with it doesn't do any harm, but it is a little like a child "helping" Mom make dinner and then leaving a huge mess for her to deal with. Mom can handle it, but it's just so unnecessary. She puts up with it so the child can learn.
For me, anyway, it's better to just wait and see what happens and not be too concerned for the outcome: I try to just go with the flow and find ways to cope with it after the fact. The trick to it is having faith that it's all going to turn out okay in the long run. I know, it's not much of a philosophy, but it works for me.
There's a pretty cool website called, "Beliefnet" that has a test where you can check what religion matches up with your personal beliefs the best. Here's the URL, in case you'd like to play with it: http://www.beliefnet.com/story/76/story_7665_1.html?WT.mc_id=NL54
I am apparently a very good match for the Quakers. But I'm told that in practice, they aren't the pure Freethinkers they're cracked up to be. I only know this by hearsay, though. I've heard that they tend to be very self-righteous and judgmental. I hope I've been misinformed. But any religious faith that has a set meeting time and place isn't going to work for me.
I do my spiritual practice everywhere, at any time. Mostly, I pray and try to stay open to the Universe. Sometimes I get very clear answers. Actually, I suspect that the "answers" are always there, all the time, but that I have to be in a receptive frame of mind, or I have to be holding my mouth right or something. I'm not sure how it works.
But when I connect with it, it's wordless, overwhelming, and all-encompassing. It makes me shake and grin and go all teary. It's hard to describe! There's no mistaking the meaning or the intent, but it's so big, it's like it takes over my whole body and mind and whatever else I have. When I try and think about it later, words get in the way and warp the meaning. But it's all I have to work with.
I know that any verbal interpretation I come up with is going to be missing something-almost everything, actually. So I try to bypass the words and go for that overwhelming Presence as often as I can. I don't think I can get so used to it that it won't knock my socks off every time. I understand why religious texts are so confusing and contradictory and weird. This stuff is not made for words. And that takes a lot for me to admit, as language is my very favorite tool. I've often said that there's nothing you can't say in English. This is the exception.
And it loves us and everything we do is okay. Free will is really real. There is no hell. Whatever there is after death, it isn't punishment. There are no pop quizzes on the catechism. Looking within for the right and wrong of things and making choices based on the response of my best self is the best I can do. And prayer and meditation help me do that.
It really will all work out okay in the end.
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