RELIGION
From the beginning, humankind has attempted to address the light in the darkness, to call it by name, to be in relationship with it. The light brings with it questions with no easy answers: Who are we? Why are we here? What does it mean?
Early man, according to Eliade, felt truly alive only when he conformed his personal actions, in ritual, to model some archetypal hero who performed the same act “in illo tempore”, in the beginning. He possessed an unconscious sense of the transparency of life, as if he was participating in something larger than his mind could grasp, yet his body knew, by the aliveness he experienced at those moments. He knew, on some level, this aliveness gave his life meaning.
This aliveness is the medium of religious experience. This aliveness is the presence of the sacred — the eternal that pulses all of life yet remains invisible to the human eye. This aliveness is the light in the darkness that reveals the sacred energy that releases us, in turn, from captivity of every kind, heals our woundedness, and opens our mind to higher consciousness.
Religion, in all its religious forms, is an attempt to call humankind to this deeper act of living, to being conscious, while still living on the earth, of this aliveness that pulses through man from an eternal source. It proclaims to its believers there is a pattern of living that, if one follows this pattern, there’s a better chance one will have a deeper, more joyous experience of life.
Religion is an attempt to speak to that part of man that is eternal and to nurture his connection with the divine. Early man experienced the rapture of being alive most exquisitely in ritual, in dance, in all the rich ways he reached out to that which he knew was larger than his own being. Religious ritual is an attempt, in contemporary form, to do just that – to pitch us out, beyond ourselves, to open up places within us we cannot in ordinary behaviors.
Earlier civilizations created myths to serve as metaphors for what can not be grasped but what is experienced by every human – birth, suffering, jealousy, love, death. Religious creed, code and cult attempt to systematize and sanitize these archetypal experiences. The transcendent, however, evades anything concrete or literal.
The safety of knowing stops the journey. The journey stops when one gets more interested in answers than in the questions. Religion is a starting point, not a sanctuary. The story of being put out of the Garden suggests this impossibility of a permanent resting-place. We are wired to outgrow where we are, commissioned to follow the divine wherever it leads, to wander mountain tops and deserts in search of this nameless reality.
In the end, all we have is mystery, and wonder. Inasmuch as we can rest in the unknowable, we will experience joy at the Center. We move from Center into the duality that expresses the whole and we do the only thing we can do. We dance to the aliveness that is life and we sing the song of consciousness as it awakens slowly in our being. The experience of this is more important than the articulation of this.
We are spiritual beings. We enter into relationship with divine energy in our innermost soul. We also long for outward expressions of this inner dynamic. Religion is the outward expression of the inner faith and belief of a community who come together to celebrate this belief. There is no one true religion; each religion speaks its truth for its time and its society. Spirituality is an inner relationship; religion is an outer expression agreed upon by the members who come together.
If religion can speak and not be too literal, if it can instill wonder and not be too invested in outcomes, if it can nurture its children and not be angry should they leave home, then religion will be a servant among us and point to that which is larger than ourselves. The more transparent religion can be – the more it points to something or someone larger than itself – the more it will be what it originally meant to be, a linking back to that mystery we long for in our deepest heart.