What Matters Most

(Today’s article is written by guest author Allen Simon. For bio information, see below.)

At its core, my sense of theology has been rooted in an agnosticism about God and a contrastingly deep engagement with just about every other meaning-making question or area of concern that has historically fallen under the domain of religion. 

For this reason, I sometimes like to get a bit cheeky and quip that I am “religious but not spiritual,” inverting the more popular self-identification as “spiritual but not religious.” 

But I really mean this. To me, “spirituality” entails connection with some higher power, which is not really a feeling I’ve ever had in any meaningful way, and is a feeling I’ve learned is not entirely necessary for making meaning in life. 

What is necessary for making meaning is having something(s) that matters deeply to you. And after 6 years of formal higher education in the study of religion, including an advanced degree from Harvard, and a subsequent 8 years spent researching and writing about it, I’ve come to the conclusion that, at its core, that is exactly what religion is all about.

Religion is about what matters most. 

Simple as that. All the ornamental and ritualistic elements are just so many means toward answering that question and committing to the answer one arrives at.

For some people, that answer is God. But it doesn’t have to be. Nor does “God” mean the same thing to every spiritually inclined person. 

Regardless of the answer, when I take a step back and think about what is needed most in the world right now, serious engagement with the question itself of “what matters most” is pretty high up there on the list.

From a very young age, I’ve always cared very deeply about figuring out what matters most in life. It seems strange to go through life without doing so, like toiling away with a bunch of loose nuts and bolts, and metal and wood, without at least some cursory idea of what you’re trying to build.

It’s tough to keep up with work, with relationships, with bills, with household chores, with current events, with TV shows, and now, with the latest AI models. 

We put our heads down to keep up and forget to look up.

Religion is the finger that gently lifts our chins up toward the skies once more. The kooky symbols and outfits and depictions of supernatural forces and beings have coalesced into a handful of globally enduring institutions over the years, but they’re all just systematic ways of reminding ourselves to spend time contemplating what matters most.

That’s religion in its simplest form.

Yes, for many religions, what matters most is God.

But really, God is more like a placeholder for the fundamental answers to the question of “what matters most?” 

Take “creation,” for instance: the creation of the universe, and of humanity, is what matters most (so the claim might go). We toil to feed and shelter ourselves, but once our most basic survival needs are taken care of, this is the thing that we should be focusing on. That’s why the first book of the Old Testament is Genesis: to its author(s), creation is evidently what mattered most.

From the focused effort to interrogate that question comes the concept of God, which itself invites its own questions: “Who or what is God exactly?” Which, to me, is actually just a restatement of the initial question: “What matters most?”

God is the Creator.

God is Love.

God is Peace.

All of which essentially translates to:

Creation is what matters most.

Love is what matters most.

Peace is what matters most.

So, to the extent that religion helps people explore what God is, and what God means to them, I think it is living up to what I consider its simplest, most sacred mission: helping people think through what matters most to them, which is critical to finding meaning and living a good life.

But to the extent that religion sweeps the question of “what matters most?” under the rug by slyly answering it with another question that it then refuses to adequately address—“what is God?”—I think it is failing in this mission, a failure which is reflected in the many emerging alternative religious identities today that go by names like “spiritual but not religious,” “spiritual naturalist,” “humanist,” or simply, “seeker.”

What is it that “seekers” are seeking? Religions have a tendency to rush to the rescue with answers, but seekers aren’t seeking convenient answers—they (we) instead are seeking something worth seeking. What we need is not help answering a question, but rather help thinking through that question: the question of what matters most.

Why many such people, myself included, often find traditional religion dissatisfying is that it all too often answers open questions like “what matters most” with closed answers.

What matters most becomes a particular concept of God, or even religion itself.

There is a parable that shows up in the writings and teachings of various Indian religious traditions, which reflects the deeply pluralistic religious landscape and attitude that has long been a characteristic of the Indian subcontinent.

Though it has many slight variations, the basic story is this: there are a handful of blind men gathered around an elephant. Each one touches a different part of the elephant, prompting them to arrive at very different conclusions about what this elephant is: the one touching the thick, rough hide of its leg feels something akin to bark and concludes it must be a tree; another touches its long, slender trunk and decides it must be a snake; yet another touches its smooth, pointed tusk and feels a spear.

Classically, this is interpreted as a parable about God, and how each religion—represented by each blind man—contains partial truths about a subject that is too grand for any single tradition to comprehensively capture. And it is meant to illustrate the folly of arguing over who’s right, when the wisest course of action would be to work together and piece all these parts of truth together.

Very nice, very wholesome.

My interpretation of this parable, though, is to see it as a perfect illustration of how, all too often, the “what matters most” question gets lost in the shuffle.

If you take this story at face value, I think we would all have to agree that what matters most in this particular scenario is:

“Hey, there, friends. There’s a friggin’ snake and a friggin’ spear, and maybe this is not the right time or place for us to be having a philosophical pissing contest about whose elephant-groping should be considered the most authoritative.”

Both forms of religion exist today, just as they always have: the form that replaces important questions with inadequate answers, and the form that is more dedicated to exploring those questions, always resisting the impulse to answer them with finality.

The reason I’ve always leaned toward the literary side of religion is that literature is not confined to a particular time or space. If the institutional resources religion has to offer in your particular community are helping you explore the question, “what matters most,” great. But if they are not, you don’t need to give up on the enterprise of religion entirely.

If “God,” for instance, is not a satisfying answer to the question of “what matters most” for you, there are countless pages of texts from across religious traditions spanning all of recorded human history that can help you think through that question.

And yes, this still holds true for God-centric religions like Christianity, which has a rich history of mystics and theologians for whom God is what matters most, but who recognize that that answer is itself another question that demands gallons of ink worth of contemplation and inquiry: Meister Echart, St. Teresa of Avila, Teilhard de Chardin, and C.S. Lewis, just to name a few.

And then there are, of course, countless other thinkers you can turn to for very different pictures of what matters most. It’s not always a single thing. “What matters most” is different from “what is the single thing that matters more than every other thing?”

For Confucius, it is some combination of knowledge, order, and relationships; for Lao Tzu, maybe a mix of simplicity, balance, and harmony; for the Buddha, it might be truth, wakefulness, and loving kindness.

My point is that religion is and will remain an important and valuable way to probe the question “what matters most?” It’s not going away. 

And by it, I mean the total collection of all that religion has produced, not just “religion” as a league of powerful institutions that thrive off of making others feel bad for being different. Religion is much more than that.

The sacred spaces and art and literature and rituals are all so many ways of temporarily extracting us from the bubble of our day-to-day lives that makes us feel like the elements of basic survival—working, eating, sleeping—are what matter most, rather than being the means that enable and motivate us to ask what matters most.

All of these elements of religion are various channels through which we can routinely immerse ourselves in a different kind of bubble that forces us to think beyond the day-to-day. And, by repeating those rituals and/or engagements with religious spaces and cultural artifacts, we are training ourselves to keep that question top of mind with greater and greater frequency beyond the religious bubble.

Shunryu Suzuki, one of the great teachers and popularizers of Zen Buddhism in the West, once noted that “when your practice is calm and ordinary, everyday life itself is enlightenment.” In other words, religion can (I think should) be a kind of training that facilitates constant, serious focus on that question, regardless of what we might be occupied with in our lives at any given moment.

There’s a lot not to like about the current state of some religious forces and institutions in the world today. But wherever there are thick, dark webs of corruption and lies and charlatanism, I’m convinced that there is a core of goodness and truth at the heart of it all. In fact, I’m convinced that these webs can only grow in such places. The important task is to continually clear these webs off and polish that core so that it maintains its luster.

It is easy to just see the dark webs, which causes many good people to leave religion behind, failing to see the very valid reasons that exist for sticking with it, while bad people remain and double down for all the wrong reasons.

Whatever the deal is with all these emerging alternative religious identities—spiritual but not religious, new age, neo-pagan, even my own “religious but not spiritual,” if you want to throw that in there and adopt it as your own (for a small licensing fee, of course)—however amorphous and cringy they can seem at times, I think they are seeking that core of goodness.

It is too early to really pin down what these religious identities are, what their core beliefs are, what they will become, and whether they will continue to splinter or eventually coalesce into a singular, more defined thing. But I do think they have the potential not to compete with or replace more traditional institutions and forms of religion, but to wake up and inspire them, reminding them that what matters most is asking the very question:

“What matters most?

 

Bio: Allen Simon received his Master of Theological Studies degree from Harvard Divinity School in 2018 and has since worked primarily as a ghostwriter and a consultant at various organizations, including the Office of Religious Life at Stanford University. In addition to his ghostwriting work, Allen’s writing has been published in Wayfare Magazine and Carus Books’ Pop Culture and Philosophy series. He is also the author of the “Uncertain Stories” Substack publication, where he writes a mix of short stories and nonfiction essays on writing and spirituality.

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