SPIRITUALITY AND RELIGION

 

 

Many people today draw a sharp distinction between the spiritual and the religious, with the spiritual seen as good and the religious as bad.   If there is to be dialogue between the spiritual and the religious, we need to start with the meaning of the very word “spiritual”.  Already in the past the word had many meanings [1]   and there are a number of definitions of the term in the literature today, usually involving some form of conscious rising above our ordinary lives and our ordinary selves towards some higher goal.  Implicit in many of these definitions can be the idea that a person who does not consciously seek to rise does not really have a spirituality.  

In this paper, however, shall write of that spirituality that everyone possesses, whether they consciously wish to or not, for I shall speak of five quests that are inherent in our very humanity, such that no human being can avoid them.  To be seeking the spiritual is not in itself to be part of an elite, but simply to be part of the human race.  

I shall, therefore, present five different ways to approach the idea of spirituality.  In each case I shall start from the thoughts and feelings of people of today rather than from any religious teaching.  I shall then attempt to bring the five approaches into one.  Only after this shall I try to relate the two ideas of the spiritual and the religious.  

 

First Approach:  Seeking Purpose and Meaning  

There are certain fundamental questions about life that all people are constantly asking themselves:  Who am I?  Where do I come from?  Where am I going?  What is the purpose and meaning of my existence?   

Whether people are consciously aware of these big questions or not, they are in fact asking them and giving some form of answer to them.   The answers they give might be complete or partial, they might be satisfying or unsatisfying, they might include a divine being or they might not, but all people are giving some answer.  

We constantly ask these big questions because they reflect one of the most profound drives within human beings, the search for meaning.  Meaning is of the greatest importance to people.  When they become bored with their marriage or their job or their lot in life, they begin to feel that their life is going nowhere, that it lacks meaning.  And there are few things that so eat away at a person’s sense of dignity and self-worth as a loss of a sense of meaning in life. 

One person might give an answer as basic as “Making money and enjoying myself.  That’s what life is all about.”  Another might do no better than say, “Me, what’s good for me. That’s the purpose of my existence.”  Most people, however, would instinctively seek something more than this, for example, “Developing my full potential.”  Most people would also wish to include some form of reaching out to others, for example, “Helping the world to become a better place”.  Some might consciously bring God into the equation by saying, “Working with God to help this world to grow”, though some might merely seek the self-interested religious option of “Getting into heaven.”  Others might seek the highest goals by saying “Growth towards perfect love; that’s where the deepest meaning in life is to be found.”  In a world full of fears, however, many will settle for more modest goals such as “Helping my family to live a good and decent life” or the basic but common goal of “Trying to find, and even give, a little happiness.”  

Because of their fears, there is the danger that many people will sell themselves short by setting a goal and purpose for their life that is significantly lower than they are capable of.   This can lead to a lack of the strong and inspiring spiritual underpinning that could be there for them if only they would seek it, and they need to choose goals that will stretch them beyond their comfort zone towards something greater.  

This must be balanced, however, by a sense of realism.  I suggest that we need to answer three questions.  The first is: If an objective outsider looked closely at the reality of the life I have been living, what conclusions would that person  have to draw about the goals I have been seeking?  This would base my answer in reality.  The second question involves listening to the deeper longings within myself and then asking: What goals do I want to strive for?  How high do I want to aim?  And this will in turn lead to the third question: How can I bridge the gap between the first answer and the second?  

Whatever the answers might be that people give, high or low, turning inwards or looking outwards, generous or downright selfish, religious or non-religious, protecting a comfort-zone or stretching beyond it, these answers express an important part of the spiritual dimension of their lives as that term is popularly understood today.  In this broad sense the word “spiritual” indicates the answers we are giving to the big questions of life, where we find the source of purpose and meaning in our life.  

Not long ago there was a top-level meeting in the city where I live on the subject of illegal drugs.  Different people saw drugs as a health problem, a social problem, a law and order problem or an education problem, but there was no explicit and public mention of the fact that it might also be a spiritual problem in the sense in which I am using that word here.  And yet, it is when people have no sense of meaning in life, no satisfying answers to the big questions, that things like drugs and even suicide can begin to seem attractive.  We will not make serious progress against drugs and suicide until we confront the spiritual dimension of the problem.  Our society has been good at destroying many of the spiritual values of the past, but it has not been good at replacing them with other values that people might find truly satisfying, and this we must seek to do.  

It is good that people should do their best to put into words the answers they are giving to the question, “What is the purpose and meaning of my life?”  The answers will probably develop and change at different times in a person’s life, and we need to adapt, but it is good to think about the question and to have some answers in mind.  It is good that our answers should challenge us and lead us to seek higher goals.  It is an important part of the spiritual dimension of our lives.  

 

            Second Approach:  Seeking Unity  

Some time ago I spoke with a nun who had worked for years in a poor village in a developing country and was home on a needed rest leave.  She told me that, after a week or so at home, she started to feel disturbed and even angry, and did not at first know why.  She then realised that what was making her angry was all the choices that were constantly being forced on her.  If she said “yes” to the simple idea of a sandwich, she was promptly asked whether she wanted white, brown, wholegrain or soy and linseed bread, and whether she wanted butter or low-fat or low-salt margarine.  And these were only the preliminaries to what she wanted on the sandwich and the sauce on top of it.  Did she then want coffee or tea, and, if so, Indian, Sri Lankan, Chinese or herbal?  Did she want to watch television and, if so, which channel?  She soon felt that there was not a moment of the day when she was not being forced to make choices that had simply not been present in the simple village life.  In that village life, she felt that she had some idea of what was truly important in her life, but that at home what was important ran the serious risk of becoming lost in all of these unimportant choices that were taking up so much of her time.  

It is only when we have a sense of what it is that is central to our life that we have a sense of unity, as everything else is then judged by this central value and accepted or discarded.  It was this truth that the nun felt was being threatened by all the choices.  

Some years ago I knew a man who all his life had had a passionate desire for new experiences.  He had travelled around the world many times and worked at many different jobs.  In between his travels he had married and fathered three children, but had never allowed his family to hold him back in his quest for the widest possible variety of experiences.  It was only when he became ill that he finally gave up his ceaseless wandering.  And it was only then that, for the first time in his life, he discovered family and the joy that was to be found in personal relationships.  This gave an anchor to his life, a central value by which to judge everything else, and he came to regret more and more the ceaseless desires that had driven him and that could never be satisfied.  He became a doting grandfather and, most noticeably, ceased to tell stories of his travels.  In his family he had finally found something that calmed his restlessness and gave a sense of unity to his life.  

At the opposite pole to the man I have just described, I once knew a woman who was so totally dedicated to her family that she was almost a caricature.  Anything that affected her family she cared about passionately but, if she could not see an immediate impact on her family, I don’t think she would have cared about World War Three.   

If, for most of his years, the man did not find anything to give unity to his life, despite his ceaseless wandering and searching, the woman certainly had a unity, but it was too narrow and left out important elements of her life.  Both cases would tell us that, if there is a natural tendency to rise higher in our search for meaning, people can more easily accept a sense of unity that is far less than perfect.  

If I may add a fourth story, I remember a visit I made to the Sinai Desert .  I had to leave all my belongings at home and bring with me just one suitcase.  In Jerusalem I had to leave this suitcase behind and take into the Sinai Desert only what could be carried in a small rucksack.  When we left our camp in the desert to climb Mount Sinai , I had to leave even the contents of this rucksack behind me and take only the essentials of water and some dried figs.  And what I needed to do at the physical level, I found that I also had to do at a deeper level if I truly wanted to use this visit to the Sinai desert to deepen the spiritual dimension of my life.  At this spiritual level I also had to progressively leave baggage behind me in order to come closer to what was most essential, to what gave a sense of unity to my life.  I saw why most major religions had begun in desert areas, where such stark choices are forced upon people.  

Most people feel rushed in modern life, so that they have little time to stop and think about where their life is going.  They feel that they are faced with too many conflicting duties and too many choices, and that the more important things can get lost in this bustle.  They can feel that different aspects of their life have become compartmentalised and have little connection with other parts of their life.  They recognise the need for unity, but find it difficult to achieve.  

Even in the middle of their busy lives in a modern city, it is essential that people somehow manage to find moments of solitude, a private desert or mountain top where they can withdraw, however briefly, and think again of what is central to their lives, that by which they judge everything else, that which brings a sense of unity to their lives.  In fact, the busier a person’s life is, the more necessary this becomes.  

If someone asks me to do something and I reply, “I’m sorry, I don’t have time”, what I really mean is that what that person is asking of me is not important enough to me for me to make time for it.  If it were important enough, I would make time.  Often the answer that I don’t have time is a perfectly reasonable answer, for we each have the same twenty-four hours in a day and we don’t have time for everything.  We have time only for those things that are most important to us.  In deciding what to do with each day I have to have priorities in my life, things for which I will find time.  The priorities will vary from person to person – parents must find time for their children, a prime minister must find time to face the major issues of the country, a monk must find time to pray.  So each must have priorities, things they will find time for.  And it is these priorities that give a sense of unity to their life.  

As well as a sense of purpose and meaning, therefore, people also want a source of unity, something that unites all the different facets of their life into one whole.  In order to do this, they know that they need to look very closely at their lives and select those few things that are truly important, such that everything else must be judged by these few essentials and give way to them.  Whenever they do this, they are attending to the spiritual dimension of their lives. 

 

            Third Approach:  Seeking Wholeness  

Many parents see in their first baby a great composer or painter or writer or scientist, an Olympic athlete, a prime minister or president.  Most of these dreams will not be realised, but they reflect the fact that every baby is at the beginning of a journey towards all it is capable of being.  

The desired end to this journey is different for each individual.  We live in an age when people can have unrealistic ideas of perfection and consider themselves failures if they do not achieve them.  The reality is that we all have disabilities.  Indeed, those who are called disabled can often be the true realists, for they more frequently accept their disabilities and learn to live within them, while the rest of us can deny our limitations and seek an unrealistic perfection.  

Some babies will be physically stronger, some will have higher intelligence, some will have greater artistic gifts.  But none will have all possible gifts in all possible fields.  Throughout their lives all will carry two packs on their back wherever they go.  One pack will contain their cultural baggage, the limitations imposed by the time and country and culture into which they are born.  The other will contain their psychological baggage, the limitations imposed by their genes, their upbringing and the events that have affected them.  They can do something about lightening the load, but they can never be free of the packs.  

Within these limitations, the task of each person is to advance as far as possible along the road towards all that particular individual is capable of being.  This will involve the development of their whole persons – their physical, intellectual, emotional, social [2] , artistic, moral and spiritual being.  

According to their circumstances, most parents do all they can for the physical and intellectual health of their children.  They are also concerned for emotional and social health, but these are so complex and subtle that the results are more varied.  Artistic development is sometimes fostered and sometimes not.  Moral and spiritual growth can sometimes be the first consideration and sometimes the last.  And yet all seven forms of growth are essential parts of our journey towards all we are capable of being.   

To take a simple example, a person who, according to age and state of health, has worked to be physically fit will have more energy to go out and help other people, while the unfit person will not have this energy.  So why would a truly spiritual person not care about physical fitness?  

It is, of course, legitimate to emphasise one or the other.  The manual labourer and the athlete will emphasise physical development.  The teacher and the scientist will have spent much time in intellectual development.  The psychiatrist will see the harm that can be caused by lack of emotional development.  The painter or sculptor or musician will be concerned with artistic development.  The person who seeks to inspire change in society will look to social development.  The person with a passion for justice will want moral development and the person with a passion for wholeness will seek spiritual development.  

And yet no one of these seven forms of development should so dominate that the other six are neglected.  The person who is all muscle and no brain, the intellectual who cannot relate to people, the artist who uses and abuses people in the pursuit of art, the moral person who constantly judges others, the person who, in seeking the spiritual, despises human qualities  -  none of these persons represents the end of the journey towards all we are capable of being.  

On the one hand, denying the talents we possess in all seven of these areas is not humility, but fear or laziness.  Each of these areas has been given to us by God, so that we may grow and then help other people.  We are meant to develop in all seven areas, so that we may have a true sense of wholeness.  On the other hand, developing our talents is not an end in itself or something to be used exclusively for our own benefit.  The best way to develop our talents is through helping others and so that we might help others even more.   

In this context, the spiritual element consists in recognising all of our talents in all seven fields as gifts, greeting them with wonder and gratitude, sensing a duty to develop every talent to its full potential and use it for the good of all people, recognising the talents of other people and being grateful for them too, avoiding the futile comparisons between others’ talents and our own, and accepting that every talent is also a challenge and hence a responsibility.  

Unless we attend to the spiritual element, there is something missing in the development of the other six, for it is the spiritual element that provides the context, the sense of wholeness, within which the others can work.  

 

            Fourth Approach:  Seeking Integrated Energy  

We all have restless, insatiable desires within us. [3]   And these desires are stronger than any satisfaction of desire we can receive, for desire is an unquenchable fire, so strong that it renders us incapable of ever coming to full peace.  We are not serene persons who occasionally become restless, but driven persons who only occasionally experience peace.  Desire can be experienced as aching pain or delicious hope, but, since many hopes are not fulfilled, the aching pain is never far behind the delicious hope.

  “Hope deferred makes the heart sick.

  but desire fulfilled is a tree of life.” [4]

 

The spiritual dimension of our life concerns what we do with that desire, what we do with our unrest.  One of the greatest writers on the spiritual life, St. John of the Cross, began his great work on the subject with the words, “One dark night, fired by love’s urgent longings…”  For him it was the urgent longings of desire that were the starting point of all spiritual life.  

A true spirituality must do two things.  It must foster the greatest possible energy and fire within us and allow it expression; otherwise we would achieve less than we are capable of.  But it must also keep us integrated, so that the energy is not wasted by firing off in every direction.  

If we feel no energy within us, but only depression or cynicism, our spirituality is failing.  But it is also failing if we feel energy, but lack adequate control over how that energy is used.  The absence of a dam where one is needed is an absence of energy, so that for large parts of the year the soil is without water and cannot produce a crop.  A dam bursting is energy without control, causing death and destruction.  A dam releasing a controlled amount of water is a source of power through hydroelectricity and of irrigation for the surrounding countryside.  

We must find a balance, a creative tension, between order and chaos.  Too much order (control of energy) and we die of suffocation, too much chaos (energy without control) and we die of dissipation.  This creative tension explains why we sometimes feel such intense contradictions within us.  

In earlier times people had a healthy fear of the harm energy can do, so they surrounded it with prohibitions and rituals, especially in the fields of sex and religion. All too often, however, this tendency ran the danger of becoming a path of fear and prohibition, of rejection of the energy itself.  This may have given a certain social stability, but ultimately it was an attempt by those in authority to protect people from themselves, and it could not do this without also taking away both their energy and their sense of responsibility for their own actions, and hence their ability to grow as they should.   

Many people of today have reacted against these prohibitions and demanded the right to access and manage energy without the need for such rules.  In many people this tendency has been a sign of growing maturity that has greatly enhanced their ability to grow.  Their reaction against religious restrictions has been a perfectly correct one.   

It must be added, however, that in a number of other people the tendency has been a sign of the child claiming a control it does not have.  In these latter cases, the result can be a fluctuation between being out of touch with the source of energy (depression) and not being able to control it (restlessness).  While it must be openly admitted that many religious forces of the past went to an extreme of control, it is no solution to go to the opposite extreme of removing all controls.  Naiveté about the sheer power of energy and the difficulty of finding the right balance between access to energy and control of its power is one of the major spiritual stumbling-bocks of our age.  If we do not find a balance between energy and control, we can be like adolescents, with bodies bursting with hormonal energy, who reject all rules or guidance from elders in dealing with this energy.  The energy inside us can be simply too much for us, and when we attempt to handle it without the proper reverence and safeguards, we can find ourselves stripped of joy.  

Fire and water have always been important in religious symbolism.  Fire symbolises energy and passion, water symbolises a cooling down, a holding in containment.  In our spiritual life we are forever in a forge, heated and shaped by fire, then cooled by water.  

 

Fifth Approach:  Seeking Love  

Love is the deepest longing of the human heart and comes from the very centre of our being.  All other desires and longings within us can be traced back to this source and are different expressions of this one fundamental longing.  It is so deep that nothing on this earth can satisfy it, not even all the loves of our life put together.   

Within this fifth and final approach, the spiritual dimension of our lives consists in the response we are giving to this deepest longing of our hearts, the longing for love.  

Whenever we try to say anything about this longing in words, however, we find that we ask too much of the poor little word “love”.  The ancient Greeks at least came closer by having three words to express three different aspects of love: eros (desire), philia (affection) and agape (self-giving love). [5]  

Since the time of Freud, eros and its adjective “erotic” have been largely restricted to sexual desire, but in earlier times the word included all desire.  Eros or desire is the unquiet aspect of love: the fire within, the restlessness, the loneliness and nostalgia for better times, the wildness and ache at the centre of our being.  It can be felt as a pain, dissatisfaction and frustration, but it can also be felt as an energy and pull towards beauty and creativity.  It is a subject of eternal fascination, and we love stories about desire, sexual attraction, journeys into the unknown, tragic loss and triumphant regaining. [6]   We can desire something with all our being and yet, when we achieve it, find that it has done little to assuage the deepest desires of our heart.  Ultimately, all desire, no matter what form it takes, is a desire for love.  

Philia is the affection that we feel for those close to us.  We want them to be an important part of our life, we want all that is good for them, and we want these things so much that strong feelings are spontaneously engaged.  Philia can include all the feelings of romantic love and all the tenderness of true friendship. 

Agape goes out to others without looking for anything for oneself.  It is the genuine love one might feel for people on the far side of the world who are dying of hunger.  It does not exclude affection (e.g. the self-giving love of parents), but it extends even to people for whom one has no feelings of love.  It is the type of love that can be known only from the actions it prompts and, if it prompts no actions, one must query its existence.  It exists within all people who have not totally hardened themselves to others.  If some self-sacrifice would prevent a war between two countries, most individuals would be willing to make that sacrifice.  Even if the condition were attached that no one would ever learn of the sacrifice, most people would still act.  

All true love starts as desire, leads to affection, and then rises to self-giving love.  For example, a couple desire a child (eros), are overwhelmed by feelings of affection and tenderness when they first hold their baby in their arms (philia), but, as soon as they get the child home from the hospital, they quickly discover that this love involves immense self-giving (agape). [7]   Religion can make the mistake of seeing this process in terms of a line moving upwards, in which self-giving love is the higher love, and desire and affection are left behind.  But the process is a circle, not a straight line, for it is important that self-giving should not leave desire and affection behind, but be constantly strengthened and renewed by them.  

Our whole life is a response to this multi-faceted longing for love within the depths of our being, and the response to love is the spiritual dimension of our lives.   

To take a simple example, a young person might come to love the violin and work hard to learn to play it.  This love will give the person three things.  Firstly, it will give a sense of achievement in doing something worthwhile and through this a sense of deeper love, and hence of meaning.  Secondly, because it gives a sense of meaning, it will also give the energy to keep on pursuing the love, so that the person will continue to work hard to master the instrument.  Thirdly, at a later point the love can actually create a significant part of the person’s very identity, so that, if you asked another person “Who is that?”, the answer might well be, “Oh, that’s the violinist.”   The love has then become at least part of the person’s answer to the big questions of life, a feeling that part of the reason for the person’s very existence is to be a carrier of the beauty that violin music can contain.   

In the same way, other people become lovers of husband/wife and children, lovers of nature, science, literature, animals, sports or an almost infinite variety of other things.  

The object of our love can be

• any person such as a husband or wife, a child or a friend,
• any object such as an animal, a flower, a painting or a gemstone,
• any activity such as playing or listening to music, walking by the sea or studying history,
• any idea such as a passion for justice or a search for perfect beauty. 

The spiritual dimension of our life then comes from the sum total of the loves of our life.  The more genuine love there is in our lives, the more spiritual we are.  

There are three conditions.  Firstly, the love must give people and things the freedom to grow.  It must not be the possessive love that suffocates, the conditional love that manipulates, or the selfish love that seeks only one’s own good.  It must also not be the mistaken love that denies one’s own good, for all genuine love must benefit two people, the lover as much as the beloved.  Love is not an ability but a capacity, for it consists in creating space in which people and things are free to grow. [8]   If love does not create the freedom to grow, it is not true love.  

Secondly, if it is to give meaning and energy, the love must in some manner be returned. [9]   Flowers return our love, just by being beautiful, even though they will wither and die.  Activities can return the love we give them, though they can also give us bad days when we feel that our love is not returned.   A passion for justice can bring much frustration, but it can also bring a powerful return of love.  Persons are by far the most satisfying, for no object or activity can return love in the way they can, but they are also the most dangerous, for no object or activity can hurt in the way they can.   

Thirdly, there must be some balance and proportion among the things we love.  If the young person I mentioned earlier spent so much time practising the violin that there was no time left over for people, the love would have become an obsession that would suffocate rather than allow to grow.  

There are many paradoxes in love.  If we want to see our love returned, we should give without thought of return.  Love is not bought or sold, it is always gift.  It is fallen into rather than planned.  The more we love another person, or even a thing, the more we must make ourselves vulnerable to be hurt by that person or thing.  And yet, despite these paradoxes, it is love alone that gives meaning to our lives.  

The fragility of love reminds us that we should never take it for granted.   On one occasion when I visited a refuge for homeless youths, there was a young man there who had had to appear in court that morning on a charge.  I noticed something moving on his upper arm and asked what it was.  He unzipped a pocket there and took out his pet mouse.  I asked whether he had had the mouse with him in court and he said that he had.  My first thought was that this was a dangerous thing to do, but I then thought that, if a pet mouse is one of the few things in life you love, if it is one of the very few reasons you have for getting up in the morning, then you will insist on keeping it with you in all circumstances.  It was a reminder that, after all the talk, many people do not find love everywhere they look and have to take the little they can get.  

The world we live in has destroyed many of the values of the past.  At times it presents to us things so grossly superficial that they cannot possibly provide lasting satisfaction.  The search for love and meaning is universal, profound and at times desperate.  We can never take love for granted, and it is good to be grateful for the love that we have in our lives.  

 

            Bringing the Approaches Together  

Can these five approaches be brought into one?  I believe they can, and the indications are to be found in two things I have already said.  In speaking of a young person learning the violin, I said that the sense of meaning and satisfaction given by making progress gave the energy to keep on practising and making further progress.  In its simplest terms, it was love that created energy.  In mentioning the great mystic, John of the Cross, I referred to the same phenomenon, for the energy he presented as the basis of the entire spiritual life was that of “love’s urgent longings.”  

The starting point for the spiritual in our lives and for any spiritual quest we undertake is the insatiable longing for love in the most profound depths of the human heart.  This longing is so deep and so powerful that it determines every decision we ever make, every action we perform.  And it is this love alone that gives us our sense of meaning, our sense of unity, our sense of wholeness and the energy that drives us.   

It is love alone that gives us a sense of meaning.  Every time we love anything at all, it gives us a certain sense of meaning, and our total sense of meaning in life comes from the sum total of all the loves of our life.  There is no other source of meaning.  To set goals for our life means to determine those things that we love more than all else.  A person whose ultimate goal is making money is a person whose greatest love is money and the things money can buy.  A person whose goal is what is good for self is a person who loves self above all else.  A person whose goal in life is to create a better world is a person who loves this world and all the people in it.  

In the same way, our sense of unity comes from those things that are central to our lives, such that all other things are subordinated to them.  And this is simply another way of saying that our sense of unity comes from the greatest loves of our life.  

Our sense of wholeness comes from the same source, for a proper understanding of love includes not only a love of others that wants to reach out to them with all our gifts, but also a self-love that wants to recognise, develop and use all of God’s gifts to their fullest extent so that we may better reach out to others.  As the Buddha said, “If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete.”  

Our sense of integrated energy is simply another way of speaking of love, for the deepest source of energy within us is the insatiable longing for love that drives everything we do.  

The spiritual life then consists in more and more recognising and understanding the centrality and power of this longing for love in our lives, and in finding the balance between accessing the energy this love creates and learning to channel its energy into goals that give even greater meaning, unity and wholeness to our lives.  

If the word “spirituality” does not mean this, one might fairly ask what it does mean.  

 

            Spirituality and God  

When we come to look at the relationship between the spirituality I have described and religion, it is important that we do so in two stages.  The first concerns our relationship with God, the second our relationship with a church or religious community.  In this section I shall consider solely the first stage, the relationship with God.  

 

                        What Kind of God?  

The very first question to ask concerns the kind of god we are talking about, for authorities within most religions have all too often presented to their people a god of anger and control.  Whenever this has happened, religion has presented a god that a true spirituality cannot respond to, for it has created a situation where control of energy has been more important than access to and release of creative energy.  A god of anger represents a religion based on fear rather than love, and so can not give people a true sense of meaning or unity or wholeness or energy and can not answer their longing for love.  More than any other single factor, it is the worship of an angry god that has been the cause of spirituality and religion being so divided today.  If spirituality and religion are to be brought together again, religion must offer a sincere apology for the angry god of the past and show clearly that it has now changed radically.  

Many people of today, in reacting against the angry god, have simply rejected that god and moved towards some form of agnosticism or even atheism.  Other people have sensed that the problem has been the manner in which the divine has been presented rather than the divine itself, but they have solved the problem of the angry god by going to an opposite extreme of a god of soft love.  If I may use an analogy with parents, this movement has gone all the way from parents who beat their child into submission to parents who spoil their child.  It has created the idea of a god of soft and indulgent love, a god so “loving” that nothing is asked of people and they are challenged to nothing.  Under such a god it is just as certain that people will not grow as it is that spoiled children will not grow as they should.  The followers of this god can go so far as to deny the very existence of right and wrong, personal responsibility or standards of conduct.  

Healthy ideas of the divine must be found in the middle between these two extremes, and we can take our start from our understanding of what makes people good parents and good teachers.  The best parents and teachers love children, but with an intelligent love that knows when to give a child a big hug and when to challenge a child to further effort.   Their overriding desire in all they do is that the child should grow to become all he or she is capable of being.  There is a place for obedience, but it is never an end in itself.  Obedience is a means and growth is the end it must serve.  So parents and teachers will seek to inspire children to want to grow and they will place before them challenges that are appropriate to their age and level of development, for it is in large part by meeting these challenges that they grow.  

In a similar way, the glory of a true god is not to be found in obedience but in growth.  People cannot grow under an angry god and they will not grow under a god of soft, indulgent love.  They will have a true freedom to grow only under a god who loves them and, because of this love, wants them to grow to become all they are capable of being, and so is not afraid to challenge them to grow.   

Only within this understanding of the divine is there room for spirituality and religion to walk together.  To try to bring spirituality and religion together without addressing the question of the kind of god people worship is a futile exercise and will, indeed, be counterproductive, driving the two further apart.  

 

                        To Fly Beyond the Stars  

Every time we experience love for anything at all, we feel some satisfaction and sense of meaning in our lives, but we also know that we long for a deeper and fuller love and meaning.  We feel that we are somehow prisoners within our bodies and long to escape and fly beyond the stars.  Our longings are infinite, for ultimately we long for perfect love and perfect meaning.  Any understanding of life that does not even attempt to speak to this infinite longing will not satisfy us.   

It is in this that atheism has been given too easy a passage in recent years, for it has been allowed to limit itself to criticising the defects of various forms of organised religion.  Because it must be admitted that religion can so readily lead to excess, the criticisms are too easy, and I find myself agreeing with many of them.  But there must come a day when the demand is made that atheism give a more positive account of itself, when it is asked how the longing for perfect love and perfect meaning that is present within the depths of every human being can flourish in a world of atheism.  If everything in human life is the result of pure chance, the blind interaction of molecules and chemicals, what happens to any form of spirituality?  In the world of atheism, what explanation is there of such things as our longing for perfect beauty and truth, our profound sense of hope, or our innate desire to grow to become all we are capable of being by doing what is right and avoiding what is wrong and by reaching out to others?  What basis do we find for human dignity?  Where do we find a satisfying centre to our existence around which everything else can revolve?  What answers can we give to the basic questions of life concerning purpose and meaning?  Where do we find meaning, unity, wholeness, integrated energy and love?  

Unless and until atheism can give satisfying answers to these questions, many human beings will always reach out towards some power, some intelligence and some love that is beyond anything that can be explained by molecules and chemicals, for they will be reaching out to a love that answers the seemingly infinite depth of the longings they find within themselves.  

This is the dilemma that we face.  There are obvious problems concerning belief in God, especially evil and suffering, but there are also problems in not believing in God, for there are most powerful forces within us that a world without God does not speak to.  We can at times feel that we face the most unpleasant choice between a god who allows evil and suffering and a world without meaning.  

It is, therefore, the longing for the infinite that opens up the link between spirituality and religion.  Part of our understanding of religion is that it is a form of spirituality that sees God and infinite divine love as the ultimate source of the love-energy within us that drives our life.  It believes that the love we long for in the depths of our being is so great that it can ultimately be satisfied only by divine love.  It believes that meaning, unity, wholeness, integrated energy and love find their fullest satisfaction in God and will remain forever unsatisfied without God.   

 

            Divine Love and Human Love  

In addition to presenting an angry god, religious bodies have, unfortunately, all too frequently made a second mistake.  I have already mentioned that they can see love as a straight line moving upwards from desire and affection to the higher plane of self-giving and stopping there, rather than as a circle in which self-giving is constantly renewed by desire and affection.  In a similar way, because of the importance religious bodies have seen in reaching for the infinite, they have too often spoken of divine love as though it were the only love that really mattered, and this is simply not true.  Indeed, if I were told that a certain person had a burning love for God, but loved nothing and no one else, I would instantly know that something was radically wrong.  Jesus insisted that love of God cannot exist without love of neighbour, and there is a psychological as well as a religious truth to this statement.  A religious body is failing its people if it presents some contradiction between love of God and love of the world God created, if it tells them to turn their backs on “the world” and be concerned exclusively with “the spirit”.  There is much wisdom in the words of a Jewish writer, “People will be called to account by God for all the legitimate pleasures they failed to enjoy.”  All genuine love is a sharing in divine love and leads to God.  

Most people’s sense of love comes, above and before all else, from their relationships with other people and from the many ways in which those relationships are expressed.  After this, it comes from flowers and music, from colour and perfume; from the marvellous complexity of nature, from stars and planets and from atoms and particles; from the fluid grace of a horse or cheetah or eagle or dolphin; from music and dance and poetry; from a passion for justice for the poorest people in the world and a desire for reconciliation with the dispossessed.  It comes from all these things and many more, and even then it still leaves them with a profound sense that all these loves are not enough, that there must be something more.  

It follows that it is the very depth of the longing for love within them that leads many people to believe that it is only divine love that can meet the depth of this longing.  Without divine love, there is always the danger that we will ask too much of objects and persons in this world.  Music can express exquisite beauty, but we cannot demand total meaning of the whole of life from a violin.  Romantic love can be overwhelmingly beautiful, but it is dangerous to demand total meaning in life forever from one other limited person.  God alone can meet the bottomless depth of our longing for love.   

This leads to the idea that a spirituality that includes God must consist in nothing less than a love relationship with God.  Those who in any way put truths to be believed, moral rules to be followed and/or external expressions of worship before the love relationship are leading people astray.   

 

            Spirituality and the Religious Community  

Just as the desire for infinite love that we find within ourselves can demand that we include God in our idea of spirituality, so the need to reach out to others that is inherent in love demands that we include other people in our idea of spirituality.  A purely private spirituality that concerns only ourselves and excludes other people will never satisfy us, precisely because the longing for love in the depths of our being is the source and the unifying force of all that is spiritual, and love essentially reaches out to others.  

The reaching out to others includes two elements.  It means that our love is directed towards those most in need of love, such as the poor, the sick and the lonely.  And it means that we will be far more effective when we work with others in our reaching out.  In the language of integrated energy, the desire to reach out to the neediest requires the fire that comes from God, while the need to work together with other people requires the water of control of our personal wishes so that we may more effectively work as part of a team.  

At their most basic level, this is why religious communities exist.  In their essence they are places where people seek meaning, unity, wholeness, integrated energy and love by working together, supporting one another, and together reaching out to those in greatest need.  

Unfortunately, this is also where serious problems are to be found, for these noble goals can coexist with less noble ones.   I have already referred to the most important of these less noble goals: a) the placating of an angry god and the consequent controls that prevent spiritual energy from being fully accessed and expressed; b) the extolling of divine love at the cost of the denigration and suspicion of human love, let alone of sex.  Almost invariably these two goals are combined with a third: the preservation and growth of the institution that the religious body has become, and particularly of its authority structures, siphoning off much important energy that could otherwise have been directed outwards.  

In these matters many people today believe that religious bodies have over the centuries gone to an extreme. And when people perceive that some group has gone to an extreme, there is always the strong temptation for them to oppose this extreme by going to the opposite extreme.  There are several ways in which this has happened in relation to spirituality and religion.

• In opposing the extremes of control imposed by the churches in the past, there is today a strong tendency to resent and oppose all controls.
• Religion is said to be about certainties and obedience, while spirituality is said to be about search and freedom.
• Religion is said to be about private morality while spirituality is about social justice.
• Religion is said to be about praying that God will solve the world’s problems, while spirituality is about doing the work to solve those problems ourselves.
• Religion is said to be about prayer and contemplation, while spirituality is about action and responsibility.
• Spirituality is said to be about self-denial, while spirituality is about a proper self-love.
• Religion is presented as anti-eros, anti-sex, anti-creative, anti-enjoyment, anti-this-world, while spirituality is pro-eros, pro-sex, pro-creativeness, pro-enjoyment, pro-this-world.

Rolheiser perceptively describes the situation as that of a demanding-father Christianity and an adolescent modern culture, both resentful and failing to understand the other.  We can look on like the wife-mother who loves both but does not know how to bridge the gap between them.  She feels that each possesses part of the truth, but both fail to grasp what is most essential, for both fail to place love at the centre of their thinking, feeling and acting. [10]  

The first response must be to change “either…or” into “both…and”.   

Religion must be about both accessing the maximum amount of energy within us and about learning to use that energy in the most fruitful manner possible.  

Religion must be about both putting in place the basic and necessary certainties without which human life would fail to provide meaning, unity, wholeness, controlled energy and love and providing abundant freedom for that sense of wonder and enquiry without which human life would shrivel.  Religion must be about finding a proper and creative balance between the two.  

Religion must be about both matters of private morality, for this affects who I am in my deepest being, and everything that comes under the heading of social justice, e.g. a concern for the good of all, a reaching out to the most needy and a sense of the part I play in the successes and failures of the entire community to which I belong through such things as the use of water or the creation of carbon deposits.  

Religion must be about both prayer to God and action in the world.  It must not be about asking God to do our work for us or working as though we needed no help to solve all our problems.  Religion must be about God and ourselves working together.  

Religion must be about both prayer and contemplation and action and responsibility.  

Religion must be about both a proper sense of self-love and self-worth and about a true sense of self-control and being in charge of my own life.  

Concerning the last opposition mentioned above, I must say that modern spirituality is largely correct, and, while nothing in human life escapes the need for necessary control of energy,  religion must learn to be far more pro-eros, pro-sex, pro-creativeness, pro-enjoyment, pro-this-world.  

It follows that, if there is to be a re-uniting of spirituality and religion, the churches have much work to do.  I suggest that the most profound changes of attitude required will be those of a) rejecting the angry god from every aspect of the church’s life; b) stressing the complementarity of divine and human love;  c) moving from a stress on the need for external control of energy to the fostering of the maximum energy possible while helping people to find within themselves the necessary control of that energy; and d) the consequent passing of as much power as possible from authority structures within the institution to individuals.  

It must be added that, on the other side, the people of today will need to move beyond the sense of individualism that so dominates in the Western world, and appreciate better how individuals need community, both in order to grow themselves and in order to reach out to others more effectively.  Without this better understanding, it is difficult to see spirituality and religion coming closer together, for the idea that we grow in and through community is essential to religion.  

If much work remains to be done, dialogue between religion and the modern world is still possible.