We Need Religious Institutions

Atheist spirituality is an encouraging development. I'm always glad to see an interest in wonder, beauty, awe, and mystery. And gratitude. Especially gratitude.

Spirituality, though, isn't just about pleasant experiences of inspiring (usually) nature. It's about making our peace with quotidian annoyances, tragic loss, and every single moment of this dear life. It's also about living compassion for others, not merely a private enjoyment of sublimity.

Spirituality must be developed. Spiritual experience may descend upon one unexpected, in a great exhilarating whoosh, yet integrating that sudden awareness into all of one's life takes some work.

Spiritual development requires discipline: daily study of spiritual texts, daily journaling or prayer, daily silence, and an ongoing habit of calling yourself back to mindfulness. (For more on this, see the Lake Chalice series that begins here.)

The spiritual atheists say that spirituality doesn't require "God," or the supernatural, or religion, or religious institutions.

Lake Chalice has ventured before into alternative ways of understanding "God," and why neither "supernatural" nor "not supernatural" are helpful terms. (See the four-part series that begins here, as well as "Respond to WHOSE Love?" and "Parts of Speech, Parts of God.") Rather than repeat itself on "God," and "supernatural," today Lake Chalice turns to the other alleged who-needs-'em items: religion and religious institutions.

Spiritual development, for atheists or anybody else, requires a regular discipline. Spiritual development, for atheists or anybody else, also needs the resources of a community that embodies a tradition of practices and texts and the habits of using them to make meaning.

I know that religious community is difficult. I know that it would be so much easier if it didn't have people in it. But that's part of the challenge, part of the practice ground for working out your peace with all of life, even the difficult parts.

It's worth it.

For all their flaws and pettiness -- indeed, partly because of all their flaws and pettiness -- those other folks that you'll find in church, synagogue, temple, mosque, or sangha -- they will help you see your own flaws and pettiness. My congregation continues to help me see mine.

We can learn to grow spiritually -- in church, together -- if we do the work -- in church, together. Whether we are atheist or theist, we need religion. I don't mean the authoritarian religion. But our spirituality needs a community of accountability -- that is a place where we can account for ourselves to others. We need a place where we can sharpen and deepen our religious-spiritual insights: a place that will call us on our stuff, will hold up the mirror so we can see ourselves when we hit those places -- as we inevitably do on the the spiritual path -- where we can't tell the difference between genuine wisdom and the ego's love for deluding itself with a story about how wise we are.

There is nothing challenging about having deep thoughts all by oneself.

If I'm serious about spiritual depth, I need the humility to place myself in a relation of accountability to a long and rich tradition -- a tradition of many people who have wrestled with what I'm wrestling with, who have, like me, been fooled into thinking they "got it" and "had arrived" but who eventually came, through connection with a community of fellow spiritual travelers, to see through that delusion to a deeper wisdom.

We need places to do our work, whatever spiritual work it may be that is most important for your growth.

For some of us God is a part of spirituality. For others of us, God isn't. Either way, we need each other on the spiritual path: a community committed to deepening on the path together.

Amen.

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This is part 6 of 6 of "Atheist Spirituality"
Previous: Part 5: "What's Missing From Atheist Spirituality"
Beginning: Part 1: "Back in MY Day"

What's Missing from Atheist Spirituality

I've read Andre Comte-Sponville's The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality. I've read a number of eloquent postings described as "atheist spirituality," and watched some lovely Youtube videos on spiritual atheism. These self-identified atheists have some beautiful and important things to say about the nature and function of spirituality in our lives.

But there's something missing. Several somethings.

One, how do you encourage spiritual experience in yourself? In the material I've surveyed, they talk about spirituality as an accident, a big whoosh experience that blows your mind. They talk about those rare moments. They don’t say anything about how to make them more common. They don't say what practices, what discipline, to take up.

I agree that when those whoosh experiences happen, they are an accident. You can’t make them happen. But there are things we can do to become more accident-prone.

The atheist spiritualists provide some hints. If the grand Tetons or waterfalls blow you away, then get yourself out to the mountains and to waterfalls more often. Yes, that’ll help. But if you go there all the time, you get used to it – it isn’t so reliably amazing.

We need intentional practices – a spiritual discipline: journaling, silence, study, and a group to meet with. We need friends along the path, we need to enlist the social side of brain and get it also tied in to the spiritual project, otherwise, we simply run out steam and motivation for the other practices.

Two, how do you integrate that whoosh experience into your day-to-day life? Over and over people have a kind of opening experience, and it feels great. Then it becomes a fading memory of a pleasant sensation.

If you have had such an experience, you learned something crucial about your oneness with the world in that moment. The moment itself, however, didn't teach you how to then live that truth in your life. It didn’t tell you how to remember the insight you learned so you could apply it to regular life filled not with infinte deep starry skies but traffic jams, unreasonable bosses, and pouting children

Three, how do you bring that spirituality effectively to the healing of the world? Spirituality is not just about ga-ga moments, nor is it just about integrating those moments into daily life so that you cope more calmly. Spirituality is about taking that upwelling of your heart’s compassion and turning it into action for others. We need organizations of people to do that – and to help us do it.

Four, I’m concerned about the thin-ness of this spirituality. The spiritual atheist writers have convinced me that their spirituality is very deep in that one moment of experience. But does the experience of the beauty carry over to the tragedy? I do not find in these folks who wax rhapsodic about spiritual experience but stay away from religious institutions, a direct addressing of life’s pain and suffering.

It's one thing to see the divine in a sunset. How about seeing divinity in cancer? Cancer is nature, too.

If you're using spirituality to turn your back on pain and suffering, or numb it with the aesthetic bliss of sunsets, then not only are you not religious, but you're only half spiritual. The spiritual path calls for facing and embracing the cancer too. Spirituality is about making our peace not just with beauty and wonder, and not even just with the challenging and annoying, but with the devastatingly grievous.

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This is part 5 of 6 of "Atheist Spirituality"
Next: Part 6: "We Need Religious Institutions"
Previous: Part 4: "Reverence: Primal and Tribal"
Beginning: Part 1: "Back in MY Day"

Reverence, Primal and Tribal

In the latest issue of our denominational magazine, the UUWorld, our great Humanist minister, Reverend Kendyl Gibbons, writes about “Primal Reverence" (see here).

First, reverence comes from the ga-ga experiences of nature – for Gibbons, it’s waterfalls. A waterfall:

“makes me want to weep, want to dance, want to fall on my knees and be one with whatever that is, in everlasting praise.”

Second, reverence comes from the inspiration of heroically compassionate people. Gibbons mentions

"Paul Russesabagina, the Rwandan hotelkeeper who risked his life to shelter his countrymen from genocide at the hands of their neighbors."

She mentions Harriet Tubman, Gandhi, Aung San Suu Kyi, Nelson Mandela, Michael Servetus, Jesus, and "every mother who has ever gone hungry so that her children might eat," and "every soldier who has ever died so that his comrades might live," and "every rescue worker who ran up the stairs of the World Trade Center on that awful day." She says:

"Somewhere, there is a hero -- living or dead, close or distant, historical or mythologized -- a hero of conscience or mercy, of generosity or duty, whose story whispers to your secret heart."

Third, there is just the opening up that doesn’t come from any particular source, natural or human. Gibbons describes spirituality as many spiritual atheists do:

"The realization of the open secret, that there is no goal, no test to take, no one keeping score; that that which is not broken is always present, whether we have a name for it, whether we are paying attention; and the final recognition you are -- that each of us is, that unshakable truth -- and that you have been here all along, waiting for the exiled self's return."

With this realization comes:

"that sense of tender, compassionate self-awareness and rock-bottom peace; that return to a wholeness that cannot be achieved, but is there all along, no matter what."

Spiritual health, then, is the growing ability to access and process these three areas of "primal reverence."

"Just as we grow and mature physically, and keep ourselves healthy with regular exercise; just as we grow and mature mentally, and develop our minds through learning; just as we grow and mature emotionally, and deepen our relationships by sharing ourselves with other; just as we grown and mature ethically, and build moral character from the values to which we are loyal; so I am persuaded that we also grow and mature spiritually."

I have also written about spiritual fitness as something we can develop just as we can develop physical fitness, intellectual fitness, and social-emotional fitness: see here.

Among these descriptions of spiritual sources and development, Gibbons sprinkles repeated references to skepticism. She is at pains to let us know that we don't have to become dupes of authoritarian religion in order to have and develop our spirituality. On the one hand, this feels a bit odd to me -- somewhat like the English professor who, while lecturing on a poem, keeps reiterating an insistence that each metaphor "is just a metaphor; please don't take it literally," and, "this is a poem, remember; we don't evaluate it the way we would a work of science, history, or news reporting."

On the other hand -- as I indicated in the June 15 Lake Chalice ("Spirituality, Please, Hold the Religion") -- I understand that a lot of horrible things occur under the name "religion," so I can see why Gibbons would feel the need to reassure her readers that primal reverence does not commit one to ugly religion.

The language in which religions are taught and transmitted has three functions. It has a poetic function, an ethical function, and a tribal-marker function. You'll notice that none of them have much intrinsic connection to believing -- in the normal sense in which I might believe that OJ Simpson did (or did not) commit murder, that the chances are high (or low) that there is intelligent life on other planets, or that the quickest route home at 5:00pm is to take (or avoid) the Expressway.

The poetic function isn't about whether you believe it in the normal sense. When T.S. Eliot writes: "I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas," the question isn't whether to believe this or not. (Can you imagine the silliness of a debate between one side, upholding the proposition, "Resolved: That T.S. Eliot should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas," and another side opposing the resolution?) As with a beautiful painting, our task is not to "believe" it, but to open ourselves to take in the beauty of what is presented. That beauty helps us, somehow, to understand that life makes sense. The Psalms are the most obvious poetry. The startling grace of Jesus' parables, and of the gospel stories about him also function poetically, as does the narrative of the Deuteronomic history (Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings). All of the Bible can be read as poetry in the broadest sense.

Choosing to devote one's primary poetic studies to William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and John Keats does not preclude also appreciating Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Robert Frost. So, too, choosing to devote one's primary poetic studies to the 66 books, Genesis through Revelations, does not preclude also appreciating the Bhagavad Gita, the Dao De Jing, and the Dhammapada.

Some religious language, in addition to its poetry, has a more direct ethical or guiding function. It says, "Here's something to try that might make your life better." Be still and know that I am the lord; do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God; be mindful each moment; everything in Proverbs. These are not matters of believing either, in the normal sense. Rather, they are invitations to aspire to live by the guidance offered. You don't have to "be" Christian to learn from the wisdom teachings in the Christian canon, or "be" Muslim to learn from the teachings in Islamic texts.

Religious language also functions as a tribal marker. "I believe in the Bible," has almost no meaning except as a marker of tribal identification. It demarcates who is "us" (in this case, the tribe that asserts belief in the Bible) and who is "them."

Tribal markers aren't a bad thing. We are a tribal species, after all. The chalice symbol is a marker of my tribe, and I'm proud of it. If you really love the poetry of Mary Oliver, or the ethical guidance of John Stuart Mill, or the approach to psychological understanding of Carl Jung, there's nothing wrong with joining the Society for the Advancement of Mary Oliver's Poetry, the Millian League, or the Jung Club, and making that membership a central part of your self-identity. Community is a good thing.

However, when the tribal function of religious expression is prominent, folks who aren't sure they want to identify with the tribe find it hard to relax into the poetry and the wisdom of a religious tradition.

Personally, I yearn for the day when the national Unitarian Universalist publication talks about reverence without feeling a need to sprinkle in the distracting paeans to skepticism -- the day when it simply goes without saying that reverence, spiritual experience, and spiritual maturity imply none of the crazy beliefs, practices, or actions that have sometimes, over the last couple millennia, gone by the name of one or another religion. But I understand that not all Unitarian Universalists are there yet. Gibbons' readers needed reassurance that spiritual growth need neither imply loyalty to odious tribes or doctrines nor threaten their own tribal identity as Skeptics.

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This is part 4 of 6 of "Atheist Spirituality"
Next: Part 5: "What's Missing from Atheist Spirituality"
Previous: Part 3: "Spirituality, Please, Hold the Religion"
Beginning: Part 1: "Back in MY Day"

Spirituality, Please, Hold the Religion

The spiritual atheists recognize the importance of spirituality, and they want to liberate spirituality from the institutions they see as dangerous. "We don’t need 'God'; we don’t need the supernatural; we don’t need churches or mosques or synagogues or temples; we don’t need religion," they say.

Setting aside, for now, the points about god and the supernatural, let's look at the points about religion and religious institutions.

I appreciate the point that a lot of what goes by the name of religion has been more harmful than helpful.

We live in a world where people plant bombs – on themselves, in cars, in buildings – and fly jet airliners into buildings – and are led to do so in a way that is enmeshed with their religious understanding and is facilitated by their religious institutions.

We live in a world where, only somewhat less violently, people want to take away women’s reproductive freedom, and punitively stigmatize gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people, and their thinking makes heavy and frequent reference to their religion, and their activism on these points is facilitated by their religious institutions.

We live in a world where our children are liable to be told by their classmates that they are going to hell.

We live in a world where a few people make it their life's mission to devise elaborate refutations of evolution, and where more than a few people work to change the public school science curricula to present their religious views as science.

We live in a world where our own experience of many religious institutions is that they are authoritarian: they don’t allow questioning; they don’t allow critical thinking; they demand uncritical acceptance of authority. They say that the authority is a book, but the perceptive quickly see the authority really is a community of human leaders who have settled on one interpretation of that book, when the book itself equally well – or better -- supports very different conclusions.

We live in a world where we see that “faith” so often means “believe what the authority figure tells you to believe and pray what the authority figure tells you to pray.”

We live in a world where countries that measure higher on religiosity also measure higher on violence, drug and alcohol addictions, teen pregnancies, imprisonment rates, and high school drop-out rates.

No wonder it seems important to separate spirituality from religion, from the "god" that religions seem to focus on, and from any religious institutions.

No wonder there would arise the need to claim the depths of awe and wonder, serenity and compassion, abundance and acceptance, indissoluble union with the great All, and of belonging to the universal -- while at the same time pushing away as far as possible anything that looked like a religion or a religious institution.

No wonder.

I get that.

That is so not what religion means to me – that is so the exact opposite of my experience of my religion – but I do see how someone could be led to say, “Religion prostitutes the awe and the mystery – bottles up our essence and tries to put a lid on the wonder we naturally feel.”

They haven’t seen religion as Unitarian Universalism envisions it.

And that’s a shame.

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This is part 3 of 6 of "Atheist Spirituality"
Next: Part 4: "Reverence, Primal and Tribal"
Previous: Part 2: "freshabundantsimpleunifiedsilentserene"
Beginning: Part 1: "Back in MY Day"

freshabundantsimpleunifiedsilentserene

Andy Walters described his Atheist Spirituality on his blog, "The Journey":

"As a spiritual atheist, I mean that I reject the supernatural but affirm the reality and value of what most people usually mean when they say 'the divine.'...[The divine is transcendent love, and] Transcendent love is valuing others’ interests above your own....Practicing respect, humility, compassion, and altruism, for example, is intensely gratifying....It is the divine -- the part of me that “transcends” my ego....Second, by “divine”, people also mean inner peace -- being unafraid of what is, has been, or will be....When I experience it, I am flooded with a sense of “all-right-ness” with myself and my circumstances. Although it is a sense of acceptance, it does not rid me of the desire to better myself and my circumstances....Awe is the final component of what people usually mean when they speak of the divine. Divine awe is a sense of utter astonishment and wonder at the mystery of existence...the degree of awe that can come from observing the mystery of existence....For thousands of years, humans have mapped out the divine and many have explained it in terms of the supernatural. With the advent of modernism, however, that language no longer makes sense. But that doesn’t mean that the divine isn’t real -- it only means we need a different vocabulary to describe the same reality. I call it spiritual atheism." (Walters' whole blog post: see here)

Walters, too, videotaped himself offering his reflections:

Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud, also a self-identified atheist and author of The Future of an Illusion (1927) about how religion is an illusion, nevertheless spoke of “the oceanic feeling:” “a sense of indissoluble union with the great All, and of belonging to the universal” – as a wave belongs to the ocean.

Andre Comte-Sponville, the French philosopher I mentioned who authored The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality, speaks of a number of features of spirituality:

A freshness of experience:

“All at once, it is as if everything were new, singular and astonishing...beyond all forms of reason.”

Spirituality is the feeling of plenitude, abundance:

“We spend most of our time running after things we do not possess, things we consider to be missing and wish to procure for ourselves. We are prisoners of lack….Yet there are occasional moments of grace, when we cease hoping for anything other than what is....Moments when nothing is missing.”

We feel a deep simplicity of all things – the complication of judging separate things as good or bad for this or that purpose falls away, and things just are – and that’s very simple.

Andre Comte-Sponville

We experience unity: the gap between self and world vanishes, and you feel the oneness.

And language falls away into silence. We perceive that the world is not made of separate subjects that have various predicates. The inner monolog stops, the conceptual categories of words are set aside. All we can say is simply this, this, THIS – until even that one word, too, falls away.

“This is what I call silence. It is the absence, not of noise, but of words – not of sound, but of sense. The silence of the sea. The silence of the wind. The silence of wise people, even when they speak.”

The normal experience of time leaves us, and each moment has a quality of the eternal in it: the eternal now.

With spiritual experience comes deep serenity and acceptance – not because all is well, but because all is.

“It is rare and marvelous to experience, at one and the same time, mystery and self-evidence, plenitude and simplicity, unity and eternity, silence and serenity, acceptance and interdependence. Such are the summits of human existence, which can be reached only very exceptionally,...Only rarely do we inhabit eternity – or rather, only rarely are we aware that we inhabit it.” (Comte-Sponville)

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This is part 2 of 6 of "Atheist Spirituality"
Next: Part 3: "Spirituality, Please, Hold the Religion"
Previous: Part 1: "Back in MY Day"

Back in MY Day

"Atheist spirituality"? What? Huh? Atheist spirituality? Wow.

Browsing through the bookstore at last year’s Unitarian Universalist General Assembly, I saw this book: The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality, by Andre Comte-Sponville. He’s a French philosopher. I apologize for the national stereotyping, but I admit that what popped to mind was the thought: “There's no atheist as atheist as a French atheist.” And he’s writing about atheist spirituality.

Since then I have seen this phrase, "atheist spirituality" in a number of places. "Atheist spirituality." My, my. The times they are a-changing.

Things used to be simpler. (Do I sound old? “I tell you, when I was a boy . . .”)

When I was in fourth grade, I heard the word “atheist,” asked what it meant, and shortly thereafter decided I was one. This was a scandal to my classmates in small-town Georgia. I was "the class atheist" from then on through high school.

So I can tell you, when I was a boy, things were simpler. Atheists didn’t have something they called "spirituality." We didn’t use that word for our experiences. We eschewed – and sometimes outright scorned – words such as spiritual, sacred, divine, transcendent. We weren’t so keen on awe, mystery, or wonder either. Those were the days!

Back in the day when

"men were real men, women were real women, and small furry creatures from alpha centauri were real small furry creatures from alpha centauri," (Douglas Adams)

and atheists were real atheists, the only point that atheists were concerned to establish was that they were ethical. "It’s perfectly possible to be good without God," was the main atheist message. But these atheists today want to tell us not just that they are moral, but that they are, in fact, spiritual.

Spiritual atheists. Well, I have learned to accept that there are plastic glasses, tight slacks, and jumbo shrimp. Why not spiritual atheists? Times change, words change. The language itself evolves, and so, apparently, do atheists.

Here's a sample: some lines from a Youtube video called, “My Spirituality as an Atheist”

"…I’d have to consider myself a spiritual person. I’m not talking about some ghostly, ethereal soul…inside my body….I’m talking about the essence of human….I use the word “spirit”…rhetorically. [It means] the action or ability to see beauty, to feel wonder, and to be in awe. Religion…prostitutes the awe and the mystery….They bottle up our essence and try putting a lid on the wonder we naturally feel. They fail, of course. Religion points to the man behind the curtain in an attempt to answer the mystery – when…there is no man….The Grand Tetons….A pile of stars…still and perfect….At times I can be so overwhelmed by the sensation of being alive that I cry or I laugh or I scream or I just breathe deeply. I never once imagined that to be supernatural….Being humble is simply the feeling of recognizing the reality of one’s small significance to a universe so massive. Being grateful to be alive doesn't require a person to be grateful toward….I am one with the universe. Not metaphysically, but physically. I am as much the universe as a supernova: made of the same particles, governed by the same forces. I am genes that mutated randomly then were selected naturally based on their success in survival. And I love apple butter on a biscuit. I collapse in awe at the magnificence of this place….I breathe appreciation for it all. I have to – with all my essence, with all my spirit."

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This is part 1 of 6 of "Atheist Spirituality"
Next: Part 2: "freshabundantsimpleunifiedsilentserene"