People sometimes mistakenly believe that I have entered the ministry to shake their faith and to destroy religion. I say “mistakenly” because I believe that true faith is what emerges only after we have been radically honest about our lives.
Religion can be a helpful scaffold for nurturing the human spirit, but it can even more easily become a prison for hearts and minds. No one can honestly deny the atrocities and failures of religion. Most traditional religion does not answer the great questions of life. Still, I believe the answer to bad religion does not lay in spending our lives laughing at the people groping for light. I believe we need to re-connect with the deep human aspirations that originally gave birth to religion. Then we need to free those aspirations from the fossilized forms of religion that remain.
To believe in a religious symbol or to disbelieve in a religious symbol are both ways to miss the point. Living symbols are not superficial beliefs but beacons reminding us there is something more profound than our deepest values, something more expansive than our widest truths and something more creative than our highest purpose.
To me, “faith” is a trust in the life process, not in religion. But it is hard to sustain that trust without symbols that remind us of wider truths, rituals that awaken us to deeper qualities and practices that remind us of our shared life.
Healthy religion ALWAYS calls us beyond itself and into the shared living some call “love.” We do not need to call it “religion.” We do not even need to use the symbol “God.” Call it what you will, but do not let yourself go numb to your own aspiration to give yourself to moments of wonderment, to the aspiration to live your life as an art, and to give yourself away in compassionate service to our one common life.
Authentic faith can only emerge after our comfortable truths have died. I am not attacking religion to destroy it, but to seek out its deeper roots. The phoenix of love cannot be born if it has not passed through a terrible flame.