By Reverend Laurie DeMott

Last week, we saw the spiritual Jesus; this week we see the religious Jesus.

Which is the Jesus you follow? The one alone in contemplation and prayer with his God or the one teaching the scriptures and discussing faith with other believers? Are you spiritual or are you religious?

This semester I am teaching a course at Alfred University called "Spirituality and the Environment." The course looks at how religion has affected our environmental views and how, visa versa, issues of the environment have affected our spiritual expressions. I call it "Spirituality and the Environment" because it covers both traditional religions and some newer less organized spiritual movements such as Deep Ecology or ecofeminism. This will be the fourth time I have taught this course and every time I teach it, I begin with a class in which I ask the students to try to define the words "Spirituality"and "Environment", and their related words, “Religion” and “Nature”. This is not an easy task -- even the Environmental Science majors struggle to agree on an adequate definition of the word ‘environment’ – but most often it is the words “spirituality” and “religion” that give them the most difficulty. To help them in their thinking, I ask them to call out the words that come to mind when I say “Spirituality” or “Religion”. And every time I have done this, the results have been the same: there is a distinctive difference in the tone of the words they associate with "spirituality" versus the tone of the words they associate with "religion". Let me give you some examples from this Friday's class.

Spirituality is, the students say, connectedness, enlightenment, serendipity, inner peace, hope, change.

Religion is -- war, money, power, rules, penance.

The word “religion” elicited predominantly unfavorable descriptions while “Spirituality” produced only good feelings from the 16 students in the room. And this is true year after year. The inescapable conclusion is that for 20 year olds, spirituality is good and religion is bad.

As I point out to my students, however, the definitions that most scholars use to define spirituality and religion in fact overlap. While there is no universally agreed upon definition, almost all scholars do agree that minimally, spirituality is the belief that there is an ultimate reality which we are able to encounter in part through an experience of transcendence, and religion is simply a specific method for achieving that encounter that is practiced in and by a community. In other words, to be spiritual means that you believe it is possible and necessary to attempt to transcend the boundaries of your own limited sight and understanding in order to connect with a greater reality, and to be religious means that you are most able to accomplish that transcendence through a particular set of practices or beliefs shared by a community. The Jew and the Christian may both be spiritual but the Jew achieves transcendence through the study of the Torah while the Christian achieves a sense of transcendence through the person of Jesus.

If religion, then, is no more really than a corporate spiritual experience, why does religion get such a bad rap while the spirituality that supposedly underlies it remains unscathed?

The problem, of course, is that word “corporate”. The author Kathleen Norris once asked a monk what the most difficult part of being a monk was and he answered without hesitation, “Other monks.” When we try to organize our spiritual experience into a form that allows for communal participation, we immediately run into some very practical problems – what form will our worship together take? What beliefs can we agree upon? And who gets to decide? To develop a community spiritual tradition necessarily involves drawing lines and that can be a dicey process. This week, Pope Benedict lifted the excommunication of a group of churches that had splintered from the Catholic church over some of the reforms of Vatican II. The Pope decided to widen the boundaries of what it means to be Catholic by accepting even those churches that still, for example, want to practice a Latin Mass. Of course, in doing this, the Pope ended up reinstating a bishop who denies the reality of the Holocaust and the bishop’s reinstatement has caused an outcry from many people who are afraid this move will lend support to anti-Semitism in the Catholic church. Anytime you draw a line, you will inevitably offend someone. On the other hand, though some may disagree with the Pope’s decision about where to draw the line in what it means to be Catholic, we can’t really protest his right to draw that line because every religious body does the same. Creating boundaries will inevitably offend someone, but without some defining lines, a religious organization would be in chaos. You would come to worship not knowing on any given week whether you were going to be singing hymns to Christ or sacrificing chickens to Baal. Even this church, which has drawn our lines more loosely than some, still agrees on the prominence of Christ, and the importance of the biblical text, and most importantly that any worship lasting over an hour and fifteen minutes is too long!

Nevertheless, when you combine the necessity to draw lines with the frailties of human nature, the communal spiritual experience that we call religion can quickly be consumed by power struggles and institutional survival. Instead of fostering compassion, religion ends up too often promoting division and war. Instead of worrying about one another’s spiritual health, churches too often end up obsessing over the health of a budget. Instead of providing a place where people can transcend our human limitations to encounter the divine, religion can become a place where people are dragged further down by our human limitations and where there is not a whiff of the holy to be found.

And so some people have come to the conclusion, like the 20 year olds in my class, that all religion is dangerous and we should stick to cultivating a personal spirituality. Why gather at all? Why struggle to agree on a form of worship instead of just doing your own thing? Why follow a prescribed set of teachings when you could read from any book at all in the quiet of your own living room? Why did Jesus bother with the synagogues when he could have just stayed in the wilderness and prayed?

Well, I would argue that no matter how tempting it is to write off religion, it is in fact impossible for a person to be truly spiritual in isolation. True transcendence cannot be accomplished alone because it is a contradiction in terms. To be spiritual is to transcend the limitations of our self in order to encounter something greater than ourselves, but how can you transcend your self when you are the center of that spiritual experience?

Now, I know you are thinking, ‘but what about meditation’? I think meditation, like prayer or a quiet morning Bible study, can certainly give you a sense of the holy realm that lies beyond you, but to be truly transcendent, a person engaging in such practices must remain connected with a larger community so that you are constantly confronting the recognition that your ideas are not the only ideas, your experiences not the only experiences, and that you are not the sole authority on what is right and wrong and good and whole. William Sloane Coffin said, “There is no smaller package than a man wrapped up in himself.”

A few years ago an article in the New Yorker described a study conducted by the Harvard Business School which looked at the development of new surgical techniques. The researchers studied why it is that some doctors adapt quickly to new techniques while others learn more slowly, and what they found was that the doctors who learn most quickly are those who are part of a surgical team that works together frequently and debriefs after each surgery. Another doctor may perform the surgery just as often as one who is part of a regular team, yet not become as adept as the team’s surgeons, because the team shares their mistakes and their successes and learns as much from one another’s experiences as from their own. The researchers concluded that it is not just the repetition of practice that makes the difference; it is the sharing of practice that most counts.

In the church, we move from our private spiritual encounters to come to “practice” that spirituality together. Here we are forced to confront ideas and experiences that may not be our own and allow those differences to move us out of our self-absorbed worlds. Here we share our mistakes and our successes and learn from one another so that we can begin to transcend the limitations of our self and move toward a reality that is deeper, broader, and greater than any one of us alone. I heard of a minister once who so wanted to remind his congregation of the importance of this part of being in community that he instituted a hymn sing in which the members of the congregation are not allowed to shout out their favorite hymns, but instead had to suggest hymns that they really don’t like but knew were someone else's favorite hymns! Our experience is not the only experience; our understanding not the only understanding. To encounter the breadth of God, we must move beyond our limited self into community.

Jesus went from the wilderness to the synagogue, from the private to the communal, but just as he hadn’t remained in the wilderness, neither did he stay in the synagogue. He moved on from there to teach in the city of Capernaum, and to bring his healing to the home of Simon Peter, and to teach the crowds on the shores of Lake Gennesaret. Jesus spent his ministry constantly on the move as he went from village to home, from street to the countryside, from lake shore to mountaintop.

If our personal spiritual experiences are not to become self-absorbed, we must seek the company of the faithful, but if our corporate experience is not to become institutionally absorbed, we must take our spiritual journey one step further and together move beyond the walls of the church. Jesus declared, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor."

When we are able to encounter God not only in the privacy of our personal prayer and in the shared faith of one another, but even in the homeless shelters, in our office places, in the prisons, while holding the hand of a dying man, while wiping the tears of a starving child in Haiti, while listening to the angry protests of our teenage daughter, while caring for a wounded land, then and only then will we have been truly able to transcend our limited selves to glimpse the fullness of glory that is God.

From the solitude of the wilderness to the community of the faithful and out into the world beyond. This is the spiritual journey to which we are called.