Without religion, life is barbaric

‘I  become anxious when I’m in church.” This is what my friend said in refusing to accompany me to Mass. “Of course I like church buildings, especially the cathedrals — when there are no praying people in them,” he added, with apparent embarrassment.

Though passionate about spirituality, he was hostile to what he calls the “mumbo-jumbo”, meaning religion. This is a common sentiment in our age. People want to share divine life but are averse to organised religion. They want to move beyond the complacency of belief into struggling nakedly and honestly with the idea of God. Could this be the reason that the face of God is elusive to us, because we don’t meet God with our lives but with made-up religious formulas?

Abram, before he became Abraham, was amused by his own unfailing faith in God, bargaining and laughing at the seeming absurdity of it all, but he was never embarrassed by it. Jacob’s struggle with God dislocated his hip, cost him more than 14 years of his life working as a peasant slave, but it gained him a nation, Israel.

Simply put; how does the Church renew faith without undermining religion? And, indeed, is this desirable? What did Jesus, the Christ, mean when he said to his disciples, who were admiring the stern beauty of Jerusalem’s temple, that there comes a time when not a single stone of it would be remaining, and people then would worship in truth and in spirit. Are we nearing that time?

As a person of faith I tend to be endlessly amazed, even enraged, that most of the creative ways of looking at the world are accomplished by people of no faith at all, while contemporary religious art, discourse and spirituality tend to be bland, bloodless, parochial and boring. Surely the God who renews the spirit of creation is forever doing something new in the universe, and is anything but dull. Yet there seems to be a prevalent lack of creative thinking in the Godly, to an extent that when you want to worship you feel the need to leave part of yourself at the church or temple door to be acceptable.

The misunderstandings are sometimes mutual. I often hear from my friends that the Church knows nothing about how they think or how the world works. I tend to differ with them, explaining that my experience has been that whenever I look at something deeply enough, I always find the Church has been there before me, especially the Roman Church in its long history.

It might, for instance, be easy for someone like me to understand the dangers of pantheism in the presently popular movie, The Avatar. But for someone who knows nothing of the absurdities that can be reached by pantheism, and about the Church’s struggles against these distortions throughout her history, the warning may sound prudish and finicky. Religion matters; its decline is always accompanied by something crude and barbaric waking up in our nature.

I might be wrong, but I believe something new is being created in the world; something that’ll stand on common ground to those who approach religion with open minds and faithful hearts, and those whose love of God makes them seek divine transcendence without committing to any particular religious practices. One approach this could take would be to seek a common ground through tradition; others might do so intuitively, the way the patriarch used to before God became the mighty warrior and was just a providential kind stranger.

It would seem that Christ’s Talmudic cathedral, that tool of transcendental and eternal renewal, is being erected in the world. And to those who have eyes to see, things are starting to look more like the City of God than the Tower of Babel. This would certainly not be the first time the world has been overtaken by the kingdom of God.