More Spirituality, Less Religion, Please

I am a thoroughly unreligious person; there is no belief that I hold tightly, nothing I hold intrinsically sacred. Yet spirituality is at the center of my life, and also its periphery.

Some think that religion and spirituality are basically the same. From this point of view, to be spiritual without religion makes no sense. Yet I am, and many other people also profess to be such.

Here, I will put forth the position that far from being similar, there are actually significant differences between religion and spirituality. To be a little more precise, I should say that within the broad domain that is considered religion/spirituality, one can separate aspects of this domain into two sets, and that one can adhere to one of these sets without adhering to the other. 

In his book, Hymns to an Unknown God, Sam Keen explores this distinction between religion and spirituality. He writes:

To oversimplify slightly, there are two paths we might take that promise to lead us in the direction of the holy, two different ways to seek answers to the perennial existential questions that face every human being – the path of the religious pilgrim, and the way of the spiritual seeker.

He goes on to clarify this distinction:

Religion presents the faithful with an authorized map of life – precepts to be followed, the example of lives of saints, saviors, and bodhisattvas to be imitated, taboos to be avoided, commandments to be obeyed, traditions to be respected. Thus, the religious life is a pilgrimage to a known destination. The end is given as well as the means. 

Of the spiritual quest he writes:

The spiritual quest is the reverse of the religious pilgrimage. The quest begins when an individual falls into a spiritual “black hole” in which everything that was solid vaporizes. Certainties vanish, authorities are questioned, all the usual comforts and assurances of religion fail, and the path disappears. A spiritual quest is the effort to discover the meaning of life. It is experimental, an exploration of a country not yet mapped, whose boundaries are not yet known. 

Keen provides a list of the differences between a religious life and a spiritual quest, including the following:

• Chief virtue is obedience to the will of God vs. chief virtue is openness, waiting, listening.
• Revelation vs. awareness.
• Based on miracle, mystery, authority, a revealed scripture vs. based on searching for evidence of the sacred.
• The Gothic urge to rise above it all  vs. the incarnational thrust to get to the depths of things. 

I think that is a reasonable listing of key differences. I would, however, like to add one more item:

Religions tend to promote an “us” versus “them” attitude: Jews vs Gentiles, the faithful vs. heathens, etc.; spirituality tends to emphasize that there is a universal common within which we are all one, despite differences of belief, nationality, gender, etc. This universal common gets called such things as God, Allah, Braham, Tao, Nature, the Great Mystery, and others.

The spiritual quest of which Keen writes, when successful, often leads to a powerful experience – a communion, however brief, with the universal common. Rather than a quest for “the meaning of life,” as Keen characterizes it, I would call spirituality a quest for this communion, and this communion gives to life a fulfillment and sense of meaning. 

Up until fairly recently, most spiritual quests were taken within the context of a specific religion. But now, as many spiritual naturalists will attest, such quests are often taken outside of a specific religion. 

Such questers, however, have available to them a variety of religious traditions which can provide guidance for their quests. On my own quest, I received guidance from the writings of and personal interactions with Buddhists, Taoists, Christians, Sufis, as well as others. 

Each of the large religious traditions has a body of writings for the seeker of spiritual communion. This is one thing these traditions have in common. 

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The idea that there is an element that all religions have in common has been called the perennial philosophy. Since he wrote a book titled The Perennial Philosophy, Aldous Huxley is often associated with this term. However, he did not invent the term nor is his the final word about it. Others associated with the term include Rene Guenon, Frithjof Schuon, Ananda Coomaraswamy, and Marco Pallis. With the exception of Pallis, these writers, and others of a group known as the traditionalist, were rather hostile to naturalism as it was understood in the early twentieth century. 

The writer, translator and editor Stephen Mitchell is a better known exponent of the Perennial Philosophy. His two book, The Enlightened Heart: An Anthology of Sacred Poetry, and The Enlightened Mind: An Anthology of Sacred Prose, are a wonderful collection of writings from teachers, mystics, philosophers, and poets from various religious traditions and some who were outside such traditions. I think they are a better selection of writings than those chosen by Huxley.

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While I have presented the case for the separation of the ideas of religion and spirituality, I think that ideally they belong together. Religion should provide a foundation for spirituality and spirituality should be that towards which members of a religion aspire. I think of it like a New England church with its spire rising high above a welcoming space for the religious congregation. (The spire being an apt symbol for spiritual aspiration.) Unfortunately, I think that at present this is seldom the case; probably it never has been.

I think this is why so many people who seek a deeper spirituality have left the established religions. Unfortunately, some seek their spirituality in the wrong places, such as drugs. And some settle for the exotic blend of occultism and supernaturalism offered by some forms of so-called New Ageism.

All of this is highly relevant to SNS. We do not offer a simple, so-many-step program for spiritual attainment or anything very exotic. But we do honor the individuality of each person’s quest and offer a supportive environment for other spiritual questers, whatever stage of the quest they are on. I think we could do a better job of this, but that is a discussion beyond my scope here.

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