Why I Am Spiritual AND Religious

I have been thinking a lot lately about people who like to say, "I'm spiritual but not religious." Now I should say that I usually like these people - sometimes very much - who are often (but not always) twenty or thirty years younger than I am. Sometimes when I ask them what they mean by this, they don't have a very good answer. But I've realized that much of the time they implicitly or explicitly tend to make "religion" a synonym for some of the following words: dogmatic, certain, preachy, institutionalized.

I have a love-hate relationship with the Church which is, on the one hand, the mytical Body of Christ but on the other hand often doesn't act that way. In spite of it all, however, for me those who claim that the root meaning of the world "religion" comes from two Latin words that mean "to bind together" or "to connect" are on to something quite profound. Spirituality, or better still, spiritual practices, are personal. (Which is not the same as individualistic!) Spiritual practices are about finding ways to be in the presence of God by reading scripture and saying our prayers and being still enough to listen and meditate. All good stuff.

But religion is, for me, about community. It's bigger than what I do to feel closer to God. I am spiritual because I yearn to be part of something bigger than myself; I am religious because it is a way of life that makes me more fully who God means for me to become. I am spiritual because I am trying to be God's beloved; I am religious because I am called to love others.

One of the most important books I've ever read that addresses this issue is Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Life Together. Whenever I feel like it would be a whole lot easier to be spiritual and not religious (which it no doubt is) I re-read this little book, addressed to the underground seminary in Nazi Germany at a time when the world very much needed the Church to be something much more than "spiritual." The chapter that I find most important is the one on community. "The physical presence of other Christians is a source of incomparable joy and strength to the believer," he writes. It is a gift of grace, and the only proper response to such a gift is thankfulness. And then this: "we are bound together by faith, not experience."

Which I take to mean this: life together ain't easy. It's in one sense a whole lot easier to be spiritual than to be bound up with others in love, especially others we don't necessarily like very much. It takes an act of faith to commit ourselves to being bound up with one another. But it is only in so doing that we find our true purpose: and together we can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine on our own. Just because it's hard, doesn't mean it isn't good.

But again, some of this comes back to defining terms. I heard someone say yesterday that one reason that so many from the west find Buddhism so intiguing is that it is presented as a way of life, rather than a set of beliefs. Too often, religion in the west generally and perhaps among Christians in particular has been presented as a set of beliefs we need to affirm in order to be in. If that is what religion means, then I get why so many would prefer to be spiritual without the "trappings" of religion.

But Jesus told people to take up their cross in order to follow him. The earliest Christians were known as people "on the Way." The old language of the Church speaks of a pilgrim people; today we may speak more of our spiritual journeys. But the point is that Christianity IS a way of life. It is a way of life together with others. That's why I'm trying to be spiritual: because I am religious.