Why Religion?

Understanding is overrated.

A Jungian therapist said it to me once. She was referring to my desire to understand my pain. At first I was horrified. I mean, I was a scholar of religion, keen on perfecting my ability to understand everything about everything and everyone, including myself. The comment struck deep, and my edifice of ideas trembled.

So what is the value of understanding? Particularly when it comes to matters of the heart and spirit?
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The question brings us to the ghost haunting our discussions of desire for spirit up until now: religion. In western culture, we tend to think of “religion” as referring to a system of beliefs and practices shared by a self-identified community of people. (Thank you, Emile Durkheim, and others.) When we want to know about a person’s religion, we ask, “What do you believe?” The implication is that religion is about people’s beliefs—what they think is true and good and beautiful. The implication is that being a part of a religion is a matter of understanding. It is a matter of deciding to believe that what its authorities and documents and history teach is indeed an accurate representation of what is. Choose it or lose it.

Here lies the trouble. An accurate representation. When religions make claims about what is absolute, infinite, transcendent or just plain true, they are making claims that cannot be proved by standards of scientific reason. Yet, we still operate with a sense that we can and should make rational decisions about participating in our religions based on whether or not they are true. If they are true, we believe, they will work to make us happy. They will satisfy our desire for spirit. We will know who, how, why, and for what we are. We will understand why we suffer.

This situation presents our rational minds with a conundrum. How are we to make a rational choice concerning which picture of what lies beyond reason is the best and truest?
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The situation can be unnerving. Not only is so much—if not everything—at stake, but there are so many competing possibilities, all marketing to us their visions of how happy and saved and right we will be if we believe what they do. The sheer bounty of options can provoke despair. It seems easiest simply to stick with what is familiar, dabble in many, or reject all equally. Thus we avoid the problem of having to choose what, in the end, cannot be chosen.

Or can’t it? Perhaps, when it comes to religion, understanding is overrated. Perhaps the reason why religion endures in our hearts and minds and cultures (if we can call religion an “it”) is not that it provides us with explanations for our suffering or for the origins of creation. Perhaps what we choose when we choose religion is not an understanding of the world, but something else.

Perhaps the value of religion—its purpose and efficacy—lies in the way it helps us discover and exercise our human bodily capacity for making and becoming who we are; for bringing into being the world in which we want to live—a world we love that loves us.
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Think about the religions you know. Yes, there are beliefs—one god, no god, many gods. Life is now; life will be then. Life as we know it is to be embraced, or then again rejected. There are also practices—physical actions people make with their bodies in prayer and worship, in song, and sometimes dance. There are also communities—groups of people who gather together to share in the same beliefs and perform the same actions.

However, “religion” is not any one of these things. Nor is it a simple sum of the parts. Something more is at stake here and must be to explain its stubborn persistence in human lives, especially given a world that forces it to defend itself constantly.

Religion is about making movement. Religion describes patterns of sensation and response—a complex weave of physical, emotional, intellectual movements that spur us to discover our capacity to make these movements. When we sing out or bow deeply, when we mediate for hours or twist our bodies into novel shapes, we are discovering our capacity to do so. We are feeling the pleasure—or pain—of making movements that make us able to think and feel and act as we do.

And when the movements we find ourselves making are ones that release us into a sense of greater power—when they help us to a sense of ourselves as capable of making them—then that religion works. It succeeds. We believe in it, because we know that we are different because of it. The proof lies in ourselves. In who we are becoming as we make the movements it encourages. We like the world that opens in and around us as we feel like this, sing like this, act like this--and yes, think like this.

In this view, religion is not about a picture, practice, or community, as much as it is a training ground for helping us learn to discern, trust, and move with the wisdom in our desire for spirit.
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Religion is a vital and inevitable part of human living. For what we do in religion exercises the creative reach of our bodily becoming as no other dimension of our society. It engages our full sensory range in the act of naming and making real our most remote and intimate horizons. To expect from religion that it provide us with answers is to limit our sense of our own bodily becoming to a matter of understanding. We are much more.

In religion we dream our dreams. We envision the world as it is, would be, could be, and should be. And as we do, we make it so. We participate in creation. And it is when we participate actively, in ways that unfold our potential to do so, that we feel the sense of vitality, direction, and belonging that lets us know that life is worth living. Worth loving.
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I remember a moment when Jordan was four years old. I was having a difficult moment and just blurted out, “You know, sometimes life is hard. And when it is, you just have to love it. You just have to love life.”

Jordan paused for a moment and replied, ”Yes, you gotta love life, for if you don’t love life, it won’t love you back.”

Next Week: Using the cycle of breaths to discern wisdom in our desire for spirit