The past week's news in the United States should have moved those of us in the church community to think long and hard about what makes for a healthy environment for raising human beings. The formation of a fully-faceted human being—physical,
emotional, intellectual, social, spiritual—includes all dimensions of human
life, including the spiritual dimension. Human formation doesn't occur in a vacuum. Influences--including depraved ones--from all over can lay claim to the nurture of young people, and the results can include spiritual depravity.
Lately there has been a lot of talk about the phenomenon of 'spiritual, but not religious.' [See many good bloggers around this theme. like this one, quoted by Patheos. ] The Pew
study (referred to in my past few posts) had some investigation of that, but not a lot. What do people mean when they say that they
are spiritual, but not religious? What I
think they mean is that people do recognize that a human being has a spiritual dimension
(maybe undefined), but that such a part of a person has no relationship with
any particular religious organization or faith tradition.
I want to propose that there is a relationship
between the spiritual and the religious, and I want to use a very robust
metaphor to describe it, using an organic kind of understanding of 'religion.'
In any particular person, I want to propose that developing
a whole spiritual life is like acquiring a language, just as becoming a whole social
person is like acquiring a real spoken language. And more, I want to propose that what we call 'religious' is the institutional manifestation of that language, just as 'culture' is the institutional manifestation of the spoken language.
Let me elaborate.
Human beings are born into communities that speak a
language, a particular language. The
language has been living in the community of people who speak it for eons, into
the dark and unknowable past. The
language migrates and evolves with the community that speaks it.
A religion is a manifestation of a particular spiritual
language, spoken by a particular spiritual community. Spiritual nurture is like
teaching that language, and it requires the participation of and in a 'religion.' Remember, this is a
metaphor, so there are aspects of language acquisition that are not like
acquiring a religion. Let’s just see how far
this can take us.
First, religion is particular, just like a language. There are many spoken languages, just like
there are many faith traditions and communities, but there is no such thing as
a universal, general language that all humans understand, such as something
analogous to undifferentiated 'spirituality.' When a person is born, there exist already particular languages, not
HUMANESE in general. Children must learn
a particular language in order to grow into the culture of their
community. The language already exists,
with its grammar and vocabulary, with its literature and stories, and also with
its own cultural baggage. None of it is something
that a child can change wholesale or arbitrarily to the whims of her own ideas,
although each individual speaker can influence the language, even as they
contribute to its spoken and written history.
However, to do so, each speaker must participate in learning and
speaking it.
Go back to the above paragraph
and replace 'language' with 'religion' to see the parallels I’m drawing. The Church is in the business of teaching the particular language of Jesus. I don't mean Aramaic, but Christian. We teach the stories, vocabulary, literature, poetry, grammar and concepts that give a person the tools to incorporate and express spirituality in the Christian genre. That's 'religion.' Christian spirituality is religion with a particular shape. When we call people to Christian discipleship, we're inviting them to learn the language that will form their spiritual lives into lives that look like Jesus. Next...
Question: Are languages morally neutral? Are religions morally neutral?
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