Religious Fascination

I am fascinated by religion, and the process by which humans have created structures and norms and beliefs and practices which allow us to connect with the deepest aspects of who we are, the Source we come from, and the Destiny we are headed toward. I am fascinated by the sheer variety of rituals and art and foods and clothing through which people get glimpses of the Divine. I am fascinated by the constellations of overlapping and diverging beliefs about God and creation and humanity and final destiny. I am fascinated by the process of moral reasoning, through which ancient texts collide with contemporary experience to forge new paths into a (hopefully) better future. I am fascinated by how all of this intersects with our particular place in space and time, in the unfolding of history and culture, to form our sense of personal identity and collective destiny. But to truly study and embrace religion, we also have to embrace something like this insight from Acts: 

From one ancestor God made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and God allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him—though indeed God is not far from each one of us. For ‘In God we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we too are his offspring.’ (Acts 17.26–28)

All cultures and societies and religions exist on a continuum as means by which we “grope” for God and “find” the God in whom we exist. This is a continuum of the fullness of Truth, with complete fullness on one side (found only in the fullness of Godself in whom we find all Life and Love and Light) and complete emptiness on the other side (found in absolute deception and destruction and death). From a distinctly Christian perspective, we may notice that the fullness of Truth is embodied in the person of Christ who is God Incarnate (cf. John 14.6-7). Thus to confuse the fullness of Truth with a religious institution or set of beliefs is both misguided and a subtle idolatry, even if that institutional religion is some version of the Church which bears Christ’s Name. No religion or culture is the fullness of Truth (which is God in Godself), and no existing religion or culture is fully devoid of Truth (or else they would self destruct and cease to exist). Thus, all existing religions and cultures exist on that continuum, with some admixture of Truth and error, and some capacities to help us grope and find God, alongside some tendencies to miss the mark. 

It is not the case that one is all “right” and others are all “wrong”. As if the entirety of human spiritual experience is a kind of binary switch that is turned off or on. How strange it would be for God to give us all such a depth and breadth of experience and relationships, only to say that none of it matters at all, so long as we do not get the right answers on a test, or we did not do peculiar rituals in a particular way. That reflects an arbitrary and capricious and reductive and small view of God which cannot be harmonized with our passage from Acts above. Rather, it is the case that there are many dimensions of religion and spirituality and ethics which overlap and intertwine within (and between) religions and cultures. And the warp and woof of this tapestry of human religious experience is rich and fascinating, filled with overlapping insights and rich textures, alongside appalling ugliness and cultivated blindness and rank hypocrisy. Exploring and discerning all of this became fascinating once I made the realization that Christ journeys with me as I trace the footprints of God walking through the garden of human history. Because if the path exists, it still has some capacity to bring us closer to God, even if it is a winding and dark and circuitous route. So go with God, and seek Life and Love and Light, knowing that God is with you on the journey.