Spirituality is...The Positive Opposite

 "You got your chocolate in my peanut butter!"
           Reese's Commercial

“I’m spiritual but not religious.”

In a frenzy of twisted logic, this phrase has moved from catchy to cliché to a standard response in popular culture. Think about how easily it rolls off the tongue – like any of the other auto-responses we have in our cultural competency.

How are you?   I’m fine.
How’s your mom?   She’s good.
What do you believe?   I’m spiritual but not religious.

The great irony is that as this phrase has been repeated over time it has become the very thing it wants to repel. It is a recurring tradition trying to communicate the idea the speaker is not traditional.  Like many populist assertions, it loses more meaning every time someone says it.

Part of the problem is that “I’m spiritual but not religious” is a completely backwards communication technique.  People who say this aren’t telling you what they believe. They are telling you what they don’t believe.  It shares nothing of who they are and serves as a mere signpost of who they are not.  They are saying:

They are not church people.
They are not opposed to science.
They are not bigots.
They are not Bible thumpers.
They are not gay haters.
They are not judgmental prudes.
They are not closed minded.
They are not brainwashed.
They are NOT RELIGIOUS.

This phrase isn’t a state of being or belief at all. It’s a protest against everything the speaker has seen and deemed unseemly, unholy and unfaithful in the faith.  It’s a T-shirt with an arrow on the front that says, “I’m not with THEM.”

It is easy to see how one would want to set the record straight about belonging with a group like the one those sentences describe. I don’t want to be them. You don’t want to be them.  Heck, even some of the people who are them don’t want to be them. And yet, still “they” exist.

Unfortunately, when we spend so much energy defining who we are not, it doesn’t bring us any closer to who we are. We need a word to take those phrases and convey the positive opposite. A word that says:

I am part of a community.
I recognize evidence of the system this world is built on.
I accept people as they are.
I read the Bible so you can see it through me, not hear about it.
I love and I believe God loves all people.
I don’t judge others.
I am open minded.
I am assertive and unique.
I am spiritual, disciplined, and faithful.

Where can we find such a word?  How about – “city on a hill?”  How about “salt of the earth?”  How about “child of God?”  When our spirituality is noted, but our religion denied, what we are really doing is conveying the simple truth that we don’t believe in the crusades, the political gospel, or the social oppression of rights in Jesus' name. We are conveying that we think the “religious” establishment brings those things to the table, and we want none of it.  But, we are also saying we are shapeless, lacking in clarity, and blowing in the wind. That lack of foundation and definition is neither holy, nor healthy.

Spirituality and religion are like love and marriage. You can have either one independently, but everything is so much better when the two are together.

To have a whole faith, to be all that we are in God on earth and in heaven, we must reconcile the two halves of faith life and find a way to be religious and spiritual once again.  Like the old Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup commercials – we need to find a way to get religion in our spirituality and spirituality in our religion.

Reese's Peanut Butter Cups - definitely spiritual

 

To get spirituality in your religion – you gotta live what you believe and believe what you live.

So when we bring our battling couple, spirituality and religion, into the room of our heart and ask them to stay together, how do we keep them enmeshed?  Living what we believe is a matter of conscious action and choices. Believing what we live is a matter of mental/emotional action and commitment. Holding those two realities in a symbiotic relationship is a matter of faith.

We tend to think incorrectly about faith. We hold onto the idea that to “keep the faith” is to make sure everything stays the same. We believe what our parents taught us which their parents taught them which was handed down through generations. But it doesn’t really work that way – even in genealogy. Preachers, teachers, time, experience and inspiration all put their marks on the faith as it is handed from one to another. That’s the natural way of it. After all, people evolve – why shouldn’t faith evolve? Faith is not about “never changing yourself.” Faith is about “never giving up on God.”   Faith is not about following the old never-changing way. Faith is about following God’s way.

We tend to talk about faith like we have anything to do with it – we say things like “I have faith it will work out” and “My faith life is vibrant” – but faith doesn’t start with us (and we really shouldn’t take much credit) – faith starts with God.

A few years ago, I required surgery and was referred to a local surgeon. I met him once, for about twenty minutes, and two weeks later I trusted him to cut my neck open and remove my thyroid. I didn’t trust my surgeon because I just happen trust everyone with a scalpel (in fact, I fear sharp objects and men who wield them). I trusted him because I knew his credentials were checked out by the state of Virginia, my insurance company, and the hospital privileges department. He has years of experience performing this operation.  I had faith in him because his record justified that faith. I didn’t do all that work. He did. I just walked in the office believing.

Faith in God is the same way. We have faith in God because God has done the work of creating us, relating to us, saving us, loving us, teaching us and connecting us to God and one another. We have faith in God because God has been there. God has done all the work. We just walk through our world believing, and acting on that belief.

So when our pain at the hands of church makes us want to dump religion, or when the questions and complexities of what we believe make us desire to jettison spirituality out the window and drive down life’s highway on auto-pilot, we need to stop. Then we need to examine how we live and what we believe about it, and have faith.

Peanut butter and chocolate, love and marriage, spirituality and religion are all destined to be together. The more we heal and create pathways for that reconciliation the better we can rid our world of that silly catch-phrase.   Then we can say:

I’m spiritually religious.
Or
I’m religiously spiritual
Or better yet….

I believe.