It's the first Sunday in Lent, and so I think I'm going to stay away from the political stuff for awhile and focus, instead, on some themes that give us hope. So this morning I was thinking about the difference between religion and faith, and it reminded me of this letter I wrote my son when as a way of responding to some questions he was asking about religion. So I thought I'd post it here as a foundation for other things I want to say later.
Why is there any religion at all? A lot of people don’t think they need it. In fact they would say it’s boring and a waste of time. Kind of like Homer Simpson in that episode where he has the best day of his life when Marge and the kids go to church and he stays home to drink beer and watch football. But even Homer believes in God; he's just not "religious" like Ned next door. So can you believe in God and not be religious? Yes. Does it make a difference whether you're like Homer or like Ned? Yes, again, but, thankfully, those aren't the only choices. So the question remains: Why be religious?
I guess the best answer to that question starts with the recognition that people have always been religious. It was just natural. They wouldn't even think of being anything else. It was for them like it is for us to be an American, but like being an American you can be either a good one or a bad one. Every civilization in the history of the world has had a religion. It was just taken for granted that there was the ordinary world that people lived in on earth and then there was a mostly invisible world in which spiritual beings lived, the gods of the Greeks, Egyptians, and the Hindus, or the One God (plus angels) of the Jews. People have always believed that the spiritual world was as real, and maybe even more real than the physical, material world we live in.
It’s only been recently, the last couple of hundred years, that it became possible to think differently and still be respected. A lot of pretty smart people began to question the whole premise that assumed that there was a God and a spiritual world. A lot of people argue that we've evolved out of the kind of childish mentality that needs a big Daddy God in the sky. That God and the spiritual world is just a fantasy that people made up to make them feel good. And is religion really a good thing if people are willing to kill one another if they have a different one? And others suggested that instead of thinking of God as some great being out there somewhere, why not think of him as an image of what human beings could become. And those are interesting questions, but it gets beyond the scope of what I want to talk about here. The point I want to make today is that in the history of the world 99.9% of the people who have ever lived have been religious in one way or another. And that the percentage might be lower now and in the future, but not all that much lower. It's not a matter of making something up; it's a matter of recognizing what makes sense not on a head level, but on a soul level.
Why is religion primarily a soul thing and not a head thing? Let's look at the meaning of the word. The word religion comes from the Latin word “religere.” The root of the word ‘ligere’ means ‘to bind’, like tying something together with a rope. And the prefix ‘re’ means ‘to do again’. So religion comes from a Latin word that means to bind together again. I’ve always taken that to mean that a religion is the way human beings try to hold together two things that had been separated, the spiritual world and our world. The two worlds are separated because of the Fall [See my "Sinning Originally" posts.] and if it wasn’t for religion tying the two worlds together, our world would go one way and the spiritual world would go another way, and that would create some bigtime problems.
Anyway, that’s what prayers and liturgical services like the mass are designed to do—to find a way of keeping the spiritual world linked to our world on the earth, and to help us understand better how the spiritual world is relevant to our lives and to how we live on the earth. Isn’t that the point of the Our Father, the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples when he said, “Our Father, who art in heaven, holy be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
The part that’s relevant to what I’m talking about today is where the prayer says “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” That’s the part when we acknowledge that a lot of what we’re trying to do on the earth is to live according to the way that God in heaven would want us to live, and that’s what religion is for, to help us to understand better what God’s idea is about how we should live.
There are lots of intelligent, good people who cannot bring themselves to believe in the existence of a good God. Belief is a mysterious thing. I agree with those who think of it as a gift, but I believe that it's a gift that is offered to people in dozens of different ways. And one has to make a choice about whether to accept it or not. There are lots of reasons that people are religious these days. For some it is a given, like being born an American, but the only ones I take seriously are the ones who are religious by choice, who have been offered and accepted this seed gift then try to grow it into something vibrant and strong.
What that means for you remains to be seen, and I'm sure it's something we'll have lots of conversations about as you get older.
I would add to this that there's a lot of faithless religion out there, and in my view, it's better then not to be religious at all, because it gives religion a bad name.
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