The essence of religion, for me, has never been holding on to an idea of God. The heart of religion, for me, has always been a sense of profound reverence and gratitude before the gift of being itself.
I will admit, when I was a child, I ached for a magical being to reveal itself to me. I searched and prayed for someone to step forward out of the background and make life enough, to make ME enough.
Over the years I realized that a silent sense of grateful reverence and a sense of interconnectedness with all being was all the religion I needed.
I do not believe the gift can be given by religion, but I do believe religion can be a way of sharing it. I see no contradiction in participating in traditional religion so long as we remember that the gift we are celebrating is within every one of us and beyond any of us.
I no longer try to reduce the transcendent source of being to objective existence. To paraphrase Martha Beck, I no longer fixate on things I can touch and now care about the stuff that can touch each of us in the heart of our common being.