In my line of work, I am accustomed to hearing people say: “I am spiritual, but I don’t believe in organized religion.”
At times I am tempted to flippantly reply, “The only religion I know is disorganized; when you find one that is organized, let me know. I’d like to join.”
This Easter Sunday an increasingly large segment of the American public will register its dismay, or disgust, or pure boredom with organized religion by staying home.
Anyone who follows the news can list the reasons for this alienation, including but not limited to the continuing pedophile scandal in the Roman Catholic Church. The slow and inept reaction from the Vatican hierarchy should concern not just Catholics, but the leaders of every faith, because it paints all religious institutions with the brush of indifference.
Just as corrosive to a life of faith are stupefying religious practices that make little sense, except to insiders, and lack a connection to the lives of people where they dwell spiritually, emotionally and physically.
Yet religious leaders, and their critics, would be mistaken if they view alienation from human religious institutions as alienation from God. There is a deep yearning across our land for a connection – a relationship – with God. Religious institutions fail when those who lead them fail to recognize the authenticity of that yearning.
I am frequently struck by how many people have no life raft when something goes terribly wrong in their life. It may be the loss of a job, or the end of a marriage, or a chronic illness, or the death of a loved one.
Such moments of crisis often leave people out-to-sea, bereft of dry land to stand upon to make sense of the senseless.
In such a crisis, some people grasp for dimly remembered religious teachings from their childhood. Yet those memories are so distant that they are often useless, and into that vacuum can come fatalism and isolation.
In the movie “Angels and Demons,” a cardinal asks Tom Hanks, who plays the hero sleuth professor, if he “believes” – if he has any faith at all.
“Faith,” Hanks replies, “is a gift I have yet to receive.”
In the biblical tradition, faith is seen as a gift, not an achievement. But the biblical tradition also presents faith paradoxically; people go to great efforts to find the gift of faith. Sometimes the gift is right beneath their nose, and they don’t see it.
In the Gospel of Mark 9:19-29 there is a story that captures the paradox well. The father of a sick child cries out to Jesus: “I believe; help my unbelief!”
That cry – “help my unbelief!” – brings people into communities of faith.
Why would anyone want to do any of this alone? The deepest questions of life, death, God, salvation, heaven and hell, are so large, so universal, so infinite none of us is capable by ourselves of finding fully meaningful answers.
Into that comes the legitimate purpose of “organized religion.” Together, in a community of faith, people have a chance to find the strength for the crisis that comes with life. Even monastics who live as solitaries come together regularly to support each other, sometimes only in silence.
Our American culture presents a bewildering smorgasbord of religious practices to choose from. In our multicultural society, there is a growing tendency to mix religious practices from the banquet table, with people taking a dollop of Holy Communion on Sunday with a side of Buddhist meditation on Monday, readings from Rumi on Tuesday and a yoga class on Wednesday and a kabbalah lecture on Thursday.
Certainly we can enrich our own spiritual life by learning about religious practices not our own, and there really is nothing to fear in that. But sampling is only a taste, and the sampler is missing the depth that comes from exploring a faith tradition grounded in a community of faith over a long period of time. I’ve been practicing Christianity for more than a half-century, and I am still finding corners to explore I never knew existed.
Inquiry, analysis and the tools of reason are gifts from God, and can yield truths and doubts beneath surface readings of religious texts and doctrines.
We also should give the benefit of the doubt to each other and other faiths. Can we refrain from assigning evil motives when we hear something we don’t like, or don’t understand, or don’t agree with? Giving the benefit of the doubt can break down walls of isolation and create islands of kindness so that each of us can grow as God would have us grow.
Isolation is not the only enemy of faith. Fear of doubt is an enemy to faith. Doubt can be a tool of faith by propelling us to ask hard questions and compelling us to not settle for easy answers. Communities of faith that leave no room for the expression of doubt can become self-destructive cults.
There is one final element to the life of faith sometimes overlooked by religious intellectuals and fervent evangelicals: The call to action by giving feet to our prayers.
A spirituality that never goes outside the church walls or beyond the inner life becomes self-indulgent. It is not a new danger.
One of the first leaders of the Church, Jesus’ brother James (a Greek rendering of the Hebrew name Jacob), was much concerned with how the early Christians were turning so inward that their faith had become hollow. The Apostle James wrote a letter, now in the New Testament, much overlooked by many modern Christians, that goes straight to a point that ought to be universal for all religions:
“If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and in lack of daily food,” he wrote, “and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace, be warmed and filled,’ without giving them the things needed for the body, what does it profit? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.
“Show me your faith apart from your works, and I by my works will show you my faith.”
Religion – organized and disorganized – is capable of great good and great evil in this world. The gift that can come to each of us is an infinite God who will show us the difference through faith.