What’s It All About?

On a whirlwind trip to Houston, Texas to offer expert witness testimony at a criminal trial, I had no choice but to wear my court clothes on the plane.  I was going directly to court from the airport.  Court clothes meant black suit and black clerical collar.  It is not my preferred outfit on or off a plane.   I dreaded the conversation it would occasion and did everything I could think of to send the message, “I do not want to have a conversation with you.” Open book, iPod, headphones, a simple smile of acknowledgement and minimal eye contact.  I do this on planes anyway. I am an introvert; I don’t fly to make friends.  It’s just harder to pull off when dressed like a cross between Darth Vader and Father Guido Sarducci. 

Sure enough, when the beverage cart came my seat mate saw his opening, “Are you like a priest or something?”  I guess the “or something” was the category.  I smiled politely and said that I was a minister.  “Really, why are you headed to Houston?” 

“Business,” I replied and started to put on my headphones, but I wasn’t quite quick enough. Sure enough he started to tell me all about himself. “Well, I am spiritual but not religious.”    

I don’t know what it is with people. When I meet a banker I feel no need to confess that I have never balanced my check book.  When I meet a plumber I am not overwhelmed with a desire to talk about my ability to sweat solder pipes.  But when someone learns I am a minister, it is true confessions.

Spiritual but not religious; it’s the not so new term for folks who haven’t given up on God but are more or less over organized religion.  Phyllis Tickle calls this growing group the de-churched: those who have burned out of church life for one reason or another.  She is quick to point out it includes some folks who still show up on Sunday morning but have one foot out the door. 

It’s an expression of the disconnect people feel with organized religion. 

On one end of the continuum it is a way to believe whatever you want; take a little from here a little from there, toss in some communing with nature and there you have it.   At the other end of the continuum it describes true seekers who find the church falling far short of the place where their hungers are fed. Most folks are somewhere in-between.

If people who don’t show up at church claim to be spiritual but not religious, it is often because to them the church is religious but not spiritual.    

Think about the wise people in your life–not the smart people, the wise people. Smart and wise are two very different things. Smart comes from learning and studying.  In the world of “religious but not spiritual” smart means knowing creeds and doctrines, citing bible verses and knowing six dollar theological words.  It has its place. 

But being wise is beyond what we know in our heads.  It is about what we know in our bones.  It is what happens when we join head, heart, spirit and body.  It is a maturity that joins faith, belief, experience and spirituality in ways that shape and feed each other.   It is part of what it means to die to self.  In contemporary parlance it means to get beyond the ego.

Richard Rohr notes that the ego is utterly inadequate to see what is real.  It is largely useless to talk about the very ground of your being. Getting beyond the ego means dying to the old viewing platform of the false self.

Faith and religious life are strongest when the whole person is valued as the arena for God’s transforming work. The sign that God is at work in our lives is a hunger that demands we grow and change because life as we are living it is no longer fulfilling.  If you want to hope for something, pray for something, hope for and pray for the hunger.  It is what sets it all in motion.

By always reaching toward an authentic faith we are led to humility and not hubris. Anything less and we have succumbed to being religious without being spiritual. 

Robert Fuller suggests that spirituality exists wherever we struggle with the issue of how our lives fit into the greater cosmic scheme of things. This is true even when our questions never give way to specific answers. We encounter spiritual issues every time we wonder where the universe comes from, why we are here, or what happens when we die. We also become spiritual when we become moved by values such as beauty, love, or creativity, justice, or shalom. These are all things that reveal a meaning or power beyond our visible world. An idea or practice is “spiritual” when it reveals our personal desire to establish a felt-relationship with the deepest meanings or powers governing life. 

It is a radical notion: to be spiritual and religious. 

When we embody the spiritual and religious we come to deep knowledge that what is truly radical is

• Wisdom that is constantly transforming the boxes into which we put God in so we can stay in control.
• Religion and spirituality feeding each other, changing each other and keeping the church and its practices relevant.
• Beyond our egos and self-styled identities that divide us from one another.
•  The church embodying an authentic spirituality where vital religious practice creates life changing community.

And that is the beginning of what it is all about.