Losing Religion to Find God
There’s a concept in many Eastern faiths known as “non-attachment”. This virtue mainly calls us to not grow attached to outcomes, desires, or worldly concerns, but it can also be used to say that one should not grow attached to “signs”. In this context, a sign is essentially the quality, name, or essence we ascribe to something. So, for example, when I say “God” my mind is admittedly flooded with images of old white men in the sky sitting on thrones or lounging on clouds. I think of a personal being of immense power and desire. But, as you might know from my other blog posts, that’s not actually how I would describe God. Despite this, the “sign” of God in my mind has been so thoroughly shaped by the culture around me that it clouds my actual beliefs and image of the divine. The sign becomes a stumbling block on my walk towards God.
And herein lies one of the biggest issues with discussing faith: All things are signs - every word is a sign for the meaning attached to it and every concept elicits a mental image. Because of this, we start to see the wisdom in the Buddha’s guidance that his teachings are a finger pointing to the moon, but are not themselves the moon. It is so easy to get caught up in the “proper” ways to think, behave, and practice when it comes to faith that we start to lose the plot. In short, we mistake the finger for the moon. We start to practice religions about God rather than religions of God.
Perhaps the most succinct way I’ve heard it said comes to me from comedian Pete Holmes (thought he heard it from someone else) who says, “God is the name of the blanket we throw over the mystery to give it a shape.” As I’ve said before, all discussion about God is ultimately metaphor, and this quote perfectly encapsulates that. When we say “God” we are using a constrained concept to discuss something far beyond language or understanding. This is where I think tradition religion often fails.
Returning to the notion of religions about God, let us look to something like Christianity, which has been described by some Biblical scholars as having undergone an early shift from being the religion of Jesus to being a religion about Jesus. When we look at the gospels and we read what Jesus taught and how we modeled himself, we see and hear a man who calls us to action. He tells us to love, teaches us how to pray, calls us to better ways of life. What he never does is provide a list of creedal “I believe” statements by which we are to be bound. Those wouldn’t come around until a few centuries later as a defense against “heretical” beliefs.
This is the fine difference between those two. In the religion of Jesus, we are called to live lives modeled after him. In the religion about Jesus, we are required to assent to a set of belief statements concerning him. For many throughout the centuries, the question of whether someone believed the right things has been paramount in discussions of religion. Millions have been hunted down and slaughtered, wars have been waged, and unknown destruction wrought over disagreements about the jot and tittle of ecclesiastical law. Did it matter if the Huguenots were charitable and prayed to Christ and loved one another? No. They were heretics. They didn’t believe the right things.
And this is what I mean: We have made religion a sign. It elicits in us a specific mental image (different from person to person), and that is what we follow above all else. Jesus was pointing to the moon and we have forgotten to follow where he pointed. We have instead bogged ourselves down in dogmas and doctrines that obscure the divinity that already permeates the world around us. We get hung up on matters of belief over matters of action and therefore forgo the latter to nail down the former, causing untold suffering as a result.
Perhaps it is time we finally listened to Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He taught a “religionless Christianity” which was based around an active, lived faith in the world over superficial traditions and rituals. For Bonhoeffer, God was not best found in the cathedrals or the rote traditions, but rather in the concrete experiences of actual human beings living in the world around him. In fact, I believe all religions can learn a thing or two from Bonhoeffer in this regard. It is past time for “religionless religion”.
The divine is present to us at all times, and without need for intermediates. God resides at the very core of your being. You do not need rituals or permissions to engage with Them. Stop looking at the finger and instead bath in the soft light of the moon.
