21\u00a0 59%\u00a0 23%\u00a0 1mph E\u00a0 bar29.99\u00a0 steep fall windchill20\u00a0 Winter<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 First Quarter of the Cold Moon<\/p>\n
A friend\u00a0from California called me to ask, “What is the difference between religion and spirituality?”\u00a0 This is an often asked question.\u00a0 In part its puzzle represents what I believe is a category mistake.\u00a0 There’s an assumption implicit in the question that religion and spirituality represent aspects or spheres of the same thing.\u00a0 They don’t, at least as I understand the terms.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Religion, for me, identifies the institutional, external vehicle\u00a0necessary for the transmission of religious beliefs, teachings, history and insititutional form.\u00a0 In the instance of the Roman Catholic Church, a familiar example, then, religion is everything from the institutional forms like the parish, the episcopacy, the Vatican, monasteries and convents to the magesterium (teachings) to statues and artworks and liturgy.\u00a0 It may also include the inner life of an individual when that inner life attempts to conform itself to those forms and teachings.<\/p>\n
Spirituality, on the other hand, is always an inner journey, but never one in which the goal is forcing that journey down a certain path.\u00a0 Spirituality is about the freedom of the human spirit to search where it will for nourishment.\u00a0 It may be that some of that path will include methods conceived by others:\u00a0 contemplative prayer, zazein meditation, dream work,\u00a0 psychoactive drugs or ecstatic dancing for example.\u00a0 The end, though, cannot be forseen for the spirit is the essence, the heart, the soul of freedom and its seeking can never be constrained.\u00a0 This is why spirituality is often seen as inimical to religion; it refuses boundaries and escapes from dogma like air leaving a punctured tire or a deflating balloon.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In this understanding it is possible that religion and spirituality have nothing to do with each other, though I think the reality is otherwise, but the reverse of what most people imagine.\u00a0 Spirituality, as I said, is often seen as an aspect or sphere of religion, when, in fact, religion is the least interesting and most common expression of a vital spirituality.\u00a0 In this I follow Max Weber who referred to religion as institutionalized charisma.\u00a0 The Christian church in all its expressions, according to Weber, represents the institutional accretions that grew up around the extraordinary work and teaching of the man Jesus.\u00a0 According to Weber, the further and further we get from the original charismatic individual or group, the less and less vital and more and more bureaucratic a religion becomes.<\/p>\n
\u00a0Let me know what you think.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
21\u00a0 59%\u00a0 23%\u00a0 1mph E\u00a0 bar29.99\u00a0 steep fall windchill20\u00a0 Winter \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 First Quarter of the Cold Moon A friend\u00a0from California called me to ask, “What is the difference between religion and spirituality?”\u00a0 This is an often asked question.\u00a0 In part its puzzle represents what I believe is a category mistake.\u00a0 There’s an assumption implicit in … Continue reading Religion Is the Least Interesting and Most Common Expression of Spirituality<\/span>