Religion or spirituality?


Which is which?

When I was attending university and full of myself, I used to take great delight in distinguishing between "fashion" and "style."

"Fashion," I would say self-importantly, "is following a trend. Style is a statement of self."

The problem is that the two are connected, fashion follows style. And sometimes fashion influences style.

In the comments for this post, two readers suggested that religion is not spirituality. One went further and said that Paganism is not religion. And since that beats the heck out of the idea I have been working on for a Thursday post, I'm going to run with it. These are my opinions and beliefs, feel free to disagree.

As I understand it, the usual distinction is that spirituality is the personal journey while religion is imposed from outside. That definition is lacking, but it might be close enough for our purposes. If any one has a better definition, I'd love to hear it. This definition sounds remarkably like the distinction I've made between a revealed religion and an experienced religion.

The lines aren't as hard and fast as we might like them to be.

Most of us are going to approach spirituality first through religion*. It's what we do to find our own rhythm, our own song, that spark inside of us that reflects and manifests the Divine. Being human, when we do find something that works better for us, we're going to try to take it "off the mountain." But people may not accept what we've found. Or they may know about it already, but have decided that it doesn't fit the current situation.

With the explosion of Pagan books, I think there are those who follow "Pagan religions." Their experience is shaped by their reading and studies, not directly by the Divine. It's always at least once removed. It has become a revealed religion.

Obviously that isn't true for everyone.

I think there are also people who are more "traditionally religious," but are deeply spiritual. They've moved beyond the Outer Mysteries of mainstream monotheism and into their own Divine nature. That certainly means something more than "a personal relationship with Jesus."

Obviously that isn't true for everyone.

You're probably not going to recognize someone else's spirituality until you have recognized your own. That means that most people can only perceive spirituality by comparing how pious someone is. If they do the right things and say the right words, that makes them "spiritual."

Except it doesn't.

And that is where the confusion comes in. Many people don't develop their own spirituality, but they do develop their own religion.

*When I first studied Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences, I was amazed at how much of human experience Dr. Gardner had left out. One of the obvious lacks was what I called gnostic intelligence, that is, experience of the Divine. I should have written something about it, others now routinely talk about "spiritual intelligence." Anyway, my thinking was that just as there are people who are extraordinarily gifted in athletics or sciences, there are going to be those who are amazingly gifted in gnostic expression. Extraordinarily gifted are going to be few and far between, and there is no guarantee that they will "click" enough with the world to make a difference, but the theory explained much. If they are gifted enough, such a person won't need to go through religion to find spirituality, anymore than a gifted musician would need someone to guide them through scales. Most of us don't have that advantage however.

Posted: Thu - March 16, 2006 at 04:32 AM
 ◊ 
 ◊  ◊  ◊  ◊ 

Random selections from NeoWayland's library


Technopagan Yearnings
© 2005 - 2010   All Rights Reserved