What is Religion

Since the 18th century, we in the West have laid far too much emphasis on accepting certain creedal positions about God. Faith has come to be identified with belief, and intellectual assent to a theological option. But this is a peculiar development. In most traditions - certainly in Judaism and Islam - religion is not about accepting a complicated belief system, but about doing things that change you. You are expected to behave in a certain way. Muslims, for example, fast during Ramadan and give alms, which are supposed to increase their compassion and sense of identity with the poor. The Koran is very sceptical indeed about theology, which it calls zanna: self-indulgent guesswork. God is indefinable; no establishment or institution can have the last word on the divine.

We often think about God in too simplistic a way, as a being 'out there' that watches over us. But this has just been one way of approaching the divine. Increasingly people find this type of theology incredible, so they give up on religion. My own view is that we have intimations of holiness and sacredness that are transcendent and ineffable. That means that they can never be enunciated rationally. God is not a reality like an atom that can be demonstrated by facts and logic. God is an entirely different kind of reality.

Repeatedly, for example, the most eminent Jewish, Christian and Muslim thinkers insisted that God is not another being, not even the Supreme Being. It is better to say that God does not exist, because our notion of existence is too limited to apply to God. God is Nothing, not another being. As one very great Greek Orthodox theologian has it: 'God is not one of the things that are. God is not one of the things that exist.' And in the same way, the Buddha always refused to define Nirvana, and Confucious on principle never mentioned the Tao.

The experience of an indefinable transcendence, holiness or sacredness has been a fact of human life. Even though I don't share the traditional notion that many people have of God, I don't want to dismantle their faith, however. In fact, I don't think it matters what you believe in - and most of the great sages of religion would agree with me. If conventional beliefs make you compassionate, kind and respectful of the sacred rights of others, this is a good religion. If your beliefs make you intolerant, unkind and belligerent, this is bad religion, no matter how orthodox it is.

Karen Armstrong

Inward Journey

In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters down, if you drop with them farther over the world's rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which bouys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, end evil its power for evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here. This is given. It is not learned.

Annie Dillard Teaching a Stone to Talk

Quoted by Parker Palmer in his book Let Your Life Speak who goes on to reveal something of his own journey:

The spiritual journey is full of paradoxes. One of them is that the humiliation that brings us down - down to the ground on which it is safe to stand and to fall - eventually takes us to a firmer and fuller sense of self. When people ask me how it felt to emerge from depression, I can give only one answer: I felt at home in my own skin, and at home on the face of the earth, for the first time.

Florida Scott Maxwell put it in terms more elegant than mine: "You need only claim the events of your life to make yourself yours. When you truly posses all you have been and done... you are fierce with reality." I now know myself to be a person of weakness and strength, liability and giftedness, darkness and light. I now know that to be whole means to reject none of it but to embrace all of it.

Some may say that this embrace is narcissistic, an obsession with self at the expense of others, but that is not how I experience it. When I ignored my own truth on behalf of a distorted ego and ethic, I led a false life that caused others pain - for which I can only ask forgiveness. When I started attending to my own truth, more of that truth became available in my work and my relationships. I now know that anything one can do on behalf of true self is done ultimately in the service of others.

Others may say that "embracing one's wholeness" is just fancy talk for permission to sin, but again my experience is to the contrary. To embrace weakness, liability, and darkness as part of who I am gives that part less sway over me, because all it ever wanted was to be acknowledged as part of my whole self.