What is Religion?

October 1st, 2010 | 3 Comments

Preparing to teach a college class in religion has me asking the question, What is religion? In the context of a particular faith we can invoke the music, stories, ritual, and symbols that shape its identity, but the general question about the nature of religion is harder to address. What do people have in common when they practice religion?

Scholars trace the word religion to the Latin religare, which means to bind fast or connect, having to do with humans and gods. It contains the same root as ligament or ligature. So we can say that religion binds together the natural world and the realm of the spirit. It also connects those who share the same faith with one another, and it connects the various aspects of an individual’s life within a worldview that helps to make sense of one’s experience.

Inspired by Elizabeth Johnson’s Quest for the Living God, we might say that religion is the practice of bringing our hearts and minds to an attempt to live, along with others, in the awareness of the greater reality. It means concerning ourselves with what is really real. Mircea Eliade, in Patterns in Comparative Religions, also invokes the sense of ultimate reality when he says that “Sacredness is, above all, real.”

Religion is based in the experience of its founders and their encounter with this ultimate reality. It offers a framework for those who follow, helping them to understand and perhaps to experience the divine in a similar way. It also allows a community to grow around that shared understanding and experience.

Whether we view it positively in terms of community or more negatively as an institution, religion is an aspect of the collective. For better or worse, it’s what we do together in an attempt to find meaning.

Yet according to Joseph Campbell in Thou Art That, “Carl Jung says that one of the functions of religion is to protect us against the religious experience. That is because in formal religion, it is all concretized and formulated. But, by its nature, such an experience is one that only you can have. As soon as you classify it with anybody else’s, it loses its character.”Campbell accurately points out the tension between the needs of the individual and those of the group, a tension found not only in formal religion but in any group, from the family to the nation.

In my own experience, I find that religion at its best grows out of spiritual life. The spiritual heart of religion, as I understand it, is the desire to live in relationship with what might be called the Divine. Ideally, everything we do begins with that.

The religious community that I know well is the church, which is made up of all kinds of people at different places in their faith journey. Some of them would agree that spiritual life is the heart of their experience of church, others are mainly focused on the work informed by it. But over time, through discussions and worship experiences, from friendships and shared work, the church offers a place for all people to cultivate richer and more meaningful lives. At its best, and in spite of its worst, the church offers both challenge and encouragement to grow in myriad ways. From what I know of them, this is the way of other faiths as well. Religion can offer a framework in which to shape a life with greater meaning and joy.

What do you understand religion to be?

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The Spiritual Practice of Changing the Filter

September 17th, 2010 | 2 Comments

Today I’m drinking a glass of water that tastes much better than the one I had yesterday. Not that I noticed anything wrong with yesterday’s water, but I did notice that it was time to change the filter I use. The difference is dramatic, the taste softer on the tongue—something like cashmere vs. leather.

The water filter works beautifully when it’s fresh. It removes minerals and chemicals, yielding the clear, sweet essence of water. It accomplishes this by absorbing the unwanted elements, but after a time it simply cannot take in any more. The filter’s loss of function is subtle, incremental, and at first it’s hardly noticeable. But eventually the filter stops working, and will actually introduce impurities into the water if it isn’t changed. The water tastes bad.

All of which has me thinking about the psyche’s filters.

Messages, images, and information are everywhere, more than we can ever process. The needs, demands, requests, and unthinking effects of other people’s actions continually challenge our ability to respond. We cannot let everything in; there’s too much. But determining how to filter our experience requires effort.

When the air is thick with frustration and anger, callousness and mindlessness, that’s what we most easily absorb. Without a conscious effort to resist them, negative mindsets permeate our way of being. It’s important to see the world around us as clearly as possible, but to live compassionately requires being careful of what we allow to become part of us.

Yet even when we are mindful about the ways we sort and learn from our experience, eventually the filter becomes too saturated to do its work. The anxiety we encounter begins to color our own emotional life. Thoughts become infused with the taint of fear or resentment in the air around us. It’s time to change the filter.

The upper portion of my Brita pitcher is designed to hold the cylindrical filter securely and allow it to be changed easily. I just lift the lid and drop the new one in. Sometimes I wish I could do that with my mind, but our filters are more complex. It’s through spiritual practice that they become clean again.

The hardest part about cleaning or changing a water filter is remembering to do it. That may be the case with our psyche’s filters as well. The means of restoring spiritual strength and resiliency are as different as people are varied. But we all need our spiritual health to live fully and well. We need the ability to cleanse our thoughts, perceptions, emotions, and motivations. We need a way to experience the pure, sweet essence of life that will nurture and sustain us.

Cleaning the filter might happen through prayer or meditation. It might mean a walk in the woods, yoga, or an exercise routine. It can occur in the experience of music or poetry. It could result from our own means of artistic expression. It may grow out of our relationships or from doing our best work.

Spiritual practice restores us and enhances our ability to take in what we need for health and wholeness. In whatever way we find effective, it’s important to keep up with those practices that cleanse the filter. It changes our way of being in the world, and that changes the world.

What helps you to cleanse the filter?

If you’d like to read more, I’ve posted a reflection on the recent talk by Diane Ackerman as part of the Kentucky Women Writers Conference over at the KaBooM Writers Notebook. It’s called Paying Attention, and offers a look at one way of changing filters by closely observing the natural world.

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When a Week Holds Too Much

September 3rd, 2010 | 2 Comments

Some weeks I feel like nothing more than clay thrown on the potter’s wheel. Hollowed out by forces beyond my control, I see once again that I am not in charge here. Life presses in, making it clear that I have not reached my final form. The potter is not finished with me.

Yet just as I’ve been pressed and pounded, I’ve also been stretched and shaped. The vessel’s curved sides are taking shape, rising in accord with the potter’s vision in these last few turns of the wheel.

We have a great deal of freedom in what we do with our lives, but we are not in control. Sometimes the best I can do is to be good clay. I can try for the balance of malleability and resistance that allows the formation of a good vessel. I can try to sustain the cohesiveness that allows good clay to hold its form.

The sum of the past several days may feel like more than I can hold—challenge and loss, hope and disappointment, love and sorrow—yet the week has nonetheless brought all of it. So I act as I am able, and respond as I can. I cannot assuage my friend’s grief, but I can offer soup and love. I cannot make the world kind, but I can make laundry clean. I cannot make life easy, but I can be grateful for the ability to work.

I cannot see the future, but I can appreciate the beauty of the world around me. I cannot make my wishes come true, but I can take a risk and reach toward them. I can neither force nor forestall change, but I can accept the love and grace that remain constant.

The wheel keeps turning; a hand I trust remains on the clay. All will be well.

What is the turning wheel bringing to you?

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In the Meantime…or Late Summer

August 27th, 2010 | 3 Comments

August, for me, is the month before things really get started. Heavy with the accumulated heat of the season, it flattens all ambition. Even as the long days grow shorter, with summer slipping away, there is no energy to spare.

My daughter returns to college soon; life is about to change. Soon it will be time to take on new projects, but not quite yet. If there was ever a waiting time to fill, August is it.

What to do in the meantime? Tomatoes ripen faster than we can eat them, the urgent culmination of the season’s growth. The basil desperately tries to go to seed, anticipating the first frost that still seems far away to me. Summer wanes, yet for the moment I’m not ready to move forward.

I’ve been looking around at what needs to be done, giving the attention that’s harder to bring when I’m in the midst of things. I’ve culled cookbooks and recipe files; kept appointments with the vet, the dentist, the rug cleaners; read through magazines I’ve been saving; cleaned out the refrigerator.

In the meantime is valuable in its own way. A time of gathering energy, of clearing a path through the clutter of to-do lists. It’s a particular kind of waiting, like emptying the dishwasher while the tea steeps, or finding a good read while watching for a friend at a bookstore. It’s a way of attending, not “killing” time but filling it.

John Lennon reminded us that life is what happens while we’re making other plans. Our goals and hopes and plans are important, but so is the life we live on the way to attaining them, in the meantime. It’s good to remember that, because sometimes life surprises us with what is substantial and what isn’t. The things that look solid as a stone wall can crumble, and what may seem ephemeral as a delicate weed can endure among the rubble.

Soon and suddenly, we’re pulled into the forward momentum of September. It happens so fast I’m in it almost before I see it coming. This year August has cooled down early here, with the autumnal weather bringing a corresponding change of pace for me. Those languid days seem slow, but they pass quickly by. September will soon be upon us.

What do you do in the meantime?

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The Things that Save Our Lives

August 13th, 2010 | 3 Comments

I’ve begun reading Barbara Brown Taylor’s An Altar in the World, a title that speaks to the significance of our embodied lives and our daily experience of the world around us. Her book explores the meaning inherent in our physical existence. The chapters describe ways of inhabiting our bodies and our lives that help answer the spiritual longing for more—“ more meaning, more feeling, more connection, more life.”

“The accumulated insight of those wise about the spiritual life,” she says, “suggests that the reason so many of us cannot see the red X that marks the spot is because we are standing on it.”

The friend who recommended this book called Taylor’s “an earthy spirituality,” and it is exactly that. She rejects the separation of earth and spirit, of body and soul, found in many spiritual writings. She sees that split as more an injection of the history of Western thought than the essence of a life of faith. She makes the point that Christianity at its heart reveres the life of the body through its reverence for the Incarnation. In her words, Christianity takes body and blood very seriously.

Barbara Brown Taylor is an excellent writer and I am finding both pleasure and meaning in her work. I appreciate the way she describes the practices that keep her grounded in the world and, at the same time, connected to the divine.

But the question that keeps prodding me is one she lifts up in her introduction, a question from which her book arises. Asked to speak at a church gathering, she inquired what the priest wanted her to talk about. In his wisdom, he went straight to the heart of life and asked her to “Come tell us what is saving your life now.”

There’s a question. What is so important right now that our lives depend upon it? How do we hold onto what will give life meaning or at least keep us from the pit of despair? Our answers change, but the question remains essential. I’m learning something from how she answers that question, and thinking about how to answer it for myself. I think conversations in which we can share the things that are saving our life are themselves part of what saves us.

For me, the process of learning to see helps. I’m learning to see how the spiritual resonates in the physical world, learning to see patterns in how life unfolds, learning to more clearly see other people. I think that learning to see is a way of learning compassion, as well.

So I would love to hear—What’s saving your life right now?

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Clearing a Path to the Spring

August 2nd, 2010 | 2 Comments

When Jesus says, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest,” he could be talking about church leaders. In entirely different contexts over the past few days, I’ve happened upon articles and presentations about clergy burnout, and I know the same thing happens to lay leaders of the church. There’s something wrong with this picture, and the solution goes beyond recruiting more workers.

Photo by Laura C. Brown

The church is a busy place. There’s a lot of work to do, people to serve, and programs to fulfill. We do our best to educate the young, comfort the sick, and reach out to those in need. Hopefully we also find meaning and create community as we carry out the work.

But do we find God?

We need the sustenance provided by a spiritual life. It strengthens us for all this work we’re doing, but more importantly our spiritual life helps us gain perspective on what we most need to be doing. Prayer and discernment help us to see clearly, to respond effectively, and to spend our strength wisely. Individuals need the strength and stability of a deeply rooted spiritual life, and the church community needs it as well. Yet even though it’s the basis of health, we don’t spend much time on nurturing individual spiritual practice at church.

We act as if participation in a church constitutes a spiritual life. We assume that church members have their relationship with God covered. But is that true? When people show up at church looking for God, how can we help? We can put them to work and make them feel part of the community, but is that enough?

Participation in a loving community may be what many people are looking for. But how can we show those with a spiritual thirst the way to the spring they seek? And how can we refresh those who have grown weary?

The Christian tradition offers centuries of wisdom and experience from those earnestly seeking God. Yet many seekers never find their way to this richness of the Christian faith. Many feel they must carry on their search elsewhere.

As a church and as individuals within it, we need to know our way to the spring that waters our community, our ministries, and our lives. It’s the same spring that Jesus visited when he went out early in the morning to pray, and where he spent the hours before he was arrested.

The pathways to that spring become overgrown when we focus solely on ministry, cut off from the spirit that sustains it. We need help finding our way to the source and keeping it clear of debris. Something within us thirsts for the living water there that brings wholeness. It’s a spring we need to visit again and again, and the world will benefit if the church can show the way.

Is there something the church could do to help clear that path for you?

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Moving Forward When We Don’t Know the Way

July 30th, 2010 | Click to Comment

When my daughter was in elementary school, there was one year when math was more than a class—it was a foe that demanded months of wrestling before she could pin it to the mat. Those afternoon homework sessions required a lot from both of us; it took all the patience and humor, strength and courage we could muster.

But the most important breakthrough came when I finally realized that she believed she was supposed to already know how to work the new problems. She cut herself no slack for the process of learning a new skill. If she couldn’t master it immediately then it was too scary, too hard, and too far out of reach. The first thing she had to learn was that it’s ok if you don’t yet know how to solve a problem. You’re not supposed to already know everything. You’re learning. That’s your job.

After that, it was just a matter of learning to work the problems. She overcame her math anxiety—better than I did at her age. And I came to appreciate the importance of not being intimidated by problems we don’t yet know how to solve. Years later, it remains a good lesson to remember when I need to move forward and don’t know how.

We all face problems that we’ve never encountered before, requiring resources and abilities we have never used. People who have passed through a time of change often speak of finding strength they didn’t know they had. They look back and see the growth that occurred as they rose to meet the challenge. Life seems designed to foster our development in this way.

The issues we face have been there for others as well. Whether the challenge arises from a particular situation or in the larger context of the changes in our lives, we are not alone. There is a source of wisdom and clarity that far exceeds anything we can know on our own. That Source is at work, urging us toward where we need to be and helping us to get there. It’s ok to take one step at a time; it’s ok to only see one step at a time. God works through those steps, leading us to move in the right direction. People with insight and experience can also help, and often appear on our path as if placed there by a loving guide.

We can trust that we’re being led forward even when progress is hard to see. It’s easier to remember that when I know how to work the problem. But it’s even more important to remember it when I feel I’m not up to the task. “Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not be afraid,” are the words of Jesus in John. This deep reassurance is part of the gift of faith. Not knowing how to proceed doesn’t mean I can’t meet the challenge. It means relying on the abundant resources available. It means remembering to pray, and to open my eyes to how prayer is answered.

What helps you move forward when you don’t know the way?

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Libations

July 26th, 2010 | Click to Comment

I love the word libation. It suggests an experience set apart, invoking the spirits as well as mixing them. It acknowledges the fine complexity of ingredients from aged and distilled essences to juices squeezed fresh from the fruit. It captures the sense of ritual in measuring and pouring, selecting the particular gleaming glassware, and finishing with a fresh garnish.

The alchemy of a shaker is a powerful magic to wield, a container within which texture, temperature, and flavor combine to yield something altogether new, a frosted elixir poured from its mysterious depths. The visible process of a blender is more transparent, almost hypnotic, as colors and textures roil until they are transformed under its power. The musical swirl of a swizzle stick and ice mesmerizes in its own way, yielding the luxurious simplicity of a potion clear as crystal.

It’s one thing to pour a drink, but quite another to prepare a libation. It’s an offering for all the senses, an experience to savor, and a privilege to imbibe.

The word libation comes to us from the Greeks. It was originally a drink offering made to the gods, and came to mean both the drink and the act of offering it. It was poured out as a sacrifice—language that permeates Christianity through the description of Christ’s life as poured out for others.

To prepare a libation is to prepare an offering, even if we no longer make its presentation to a deity part of the ritual. For us, to partake of a libation is to participate in the goodness of life. To share a libation is to acknowledge together what has been poured out to create a world capable of yielding what is beautiful and good.

Alcohol may be an ingredient in a special drink, but not always. In ancient days a libation was sometimes water—especially in the desert where it was appreciated as a precious liquid necessary to sustain life. Today we may use sparkling water and add fresh juices, or blend our ingredients into a smoothie. But a beautiful drink in a sparkling glass retains a breath of awe.

Rituals of pouring an offering upon the ground are rare these days. But the loveliness of a drink specially prepared, and the privilege of sharing it with people we love, is a moment worth noticing. Even in these overfull days, centuries removed from the drink offerings to the gods, a libation still captures our attention. It leads us to pause, to appreciate, and perhaps even to pour out our thanks.

The drink in the photo is a Sea Breeze, a pleasure to have at the beach last week. What counts as a libation for you?

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A Prayer at the Shore

July 16th, 2010 | Click to Comment

God of power and mystery,

Long we have stood in awe on your shores—

the endless expanse of sea and sky—

humbled by vastness in which we are held

and grateful to belong.

Photo by Laura C. Brown

Ceaseless waves speak of eternity

with crashing surf, the pull of tides.

We walk through foam when the surge is spent,

restored in the refuge of the immense.

But now we are stricken

by our own reckless sovereignty.

The fathomless sea measures the reach of irreverence.

Oil-soaked wings and gasping mouths

indict our choices, our hubris, our sin.

Lost lives and wasted marshlands,

ruined livelihoods and filthy shores—

work of the small and sullied gods

that we have made,

who trade paradise for a golden calf,

untempered by humility,

risking life for the chance of gain.

We are caught in the spreading slick

of blindness and indifference.

We depend –

for food and shelter, travel and trade—

on a society in want of discernment.

We rely on patterns not of our making

and confess that we perpetuate

a culture in need of change.

Forgive us our thoughtlessness,

and foster in us the desire for wisdom

in those decisions that are ours to make.

Lord, we are not self-sufficient.

We need your help to be the stewards

you created us to be.

As we lament the carelessness

may we learn to care;

In our dismay at destruction

may we learn to protect.

Lord, hear our cry. We have sinned, we were wrong.

We have fouled our home and harmed your creation.

We confess, we repent. Please help us to change,

To heal, to cleanse, to learn, to pray.

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The Path Back to the Garden

July 6th, 2010 | 6 Comments

I’ve recently read two good books: Women Food and God by Geneen Roth and The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. At first glance they seem to be about very different subjects—making peace with food and making art. But reading them in close proximity has me thinking about them together and finding connections I didn’t expect.

Geneen Roth’s work arises out of her experience with compulsive eating and her years of helping others separate food from the emotional issues tangled up with eating. But her insight is into addictions of all kinds. Seeking refuge in the addiction is how we abandon ourselves, withholding the attention to our own hearts that can show us what we most need to know.

She describes it as:

an attempt to avoid the absence (of love, comfort, knowing what to do) when we find ourselves in the desert of a particular moment, feeling, situation. In the process of resisting the emptiness, in the act of turning away from our feelings…we ignore what could utterly transform us.

Steven Pressfield’s work is about overcoming the resistance that arises in anyone attempting to do something new. An artist must recognize and conquer the impediments that inevitably arise when we try to shape a new creation, realize a new vision, or express a new idea. Resistance would enforce the status quo, having us abandon our risky calling and with it our highest self.

He writes:

To yield to Resistance deforms our spirit. It stunts us and makes us less than we are and were born to be. If you believe in God (and I do) you must declare Resistance evil, for it prevents us from achieving the life God intended when He endowed each of us with our own unique genius.

Both writers see the work we’re called to do as deeply connected with the divine. Both understand how easily we are kept from that work, and the heartache that ensues. Roth urges us to remain present to ourselves when we’re tempted to flee. Pressfield insists that we show up to do the work even when it feels impossible. They are connected.

Being present to ourselves allows us to do the work. Doing the work makes us present to ourselves. Both place us in the presence of God. Taking refuge in addiction is a kind of resistance to the life we’re called to live. Allowing resistance to come between us and our true work creates a false refuge in which we can never find a fulfilling life. Both are an attempt to hide when God calls our name.

An addiction cuts us off from the Tree of Knowledge standing in the center of the Garden. But as soon as we bring our attention to our behavior, to the thoughts and emotions driving it, the addiction shows us the way back. Likewise resistance keeps us out of the garden we were created to tend. No other work will give us satisfaction until we climb over the walls that stand between us and our calling.

What’s the next step leading back to the garden?

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