The climbing rose needs the wires to go up, or it will be eaten by slugs on the ground. But on the other hand, it is the rose, not the wires, which is alive, and if we hack the rose to the ground to focus instead on the wire, we have completely missed the point!
From the point of view of the philosophy of religion as I studied it in a Roman Catholic institution, what is meant by the “spiritual” is the “I-Thou” relationship with God. That is, it is the things which relate to experience and the living out of the relationship. So a theory of atonement belongs to academic theology – it is a matter of theorizing about what happened and what is – while participating in the Eucharist is, properly, a matter of spiritual life – a matter of prayer and being with God and receiving from Him. However, the theory of atonement may help orientate someone to understand the Eucharist and their Redemption more deeply, in much the same way as a picture can.
In which case, to be spiritual but not religious is like trying to relate to someone of whom you are utterly determined to have no knowledge.
Christian doctrine ought to give us the means to relate to God to understand and enter into the real relationship he desired for us. To be spiritual and not religious is to condemn yourself to seek and not to find. But it seems to me that this is almost entirely our fault, in making academic theology the master and not the servant.
That is, the truth about God is essential to our relationship with Him, and the true expression of love for Him and others is found in His commands and not in our fallen ideas and desires, but ultimately, if these things are made means in themselves, we are prioritising something which isn’t God.
On the “Religious but not Spiritual” side, which I don’t think anyone would try to claim, but is sadly often a correct criticism of Christianity in practice, a relationship also has an emotional content. Certainly it seems to me that most traditional Anglo-Catholicism now does everything it can to deny and shut personal response and relationship out of things, probably in overreaction to the substantial body of people in the Church of England who assume that feeling is everything, and refuse any sort of discernment as to whether this or that feeling should be acted on. It is natural enough, but we are in desperate need of correcting it.
I would draw a clear distinction between the fact that if a relationship never gives any emotional satisifaction or feedback, there is something wrong with it, and the notion that relationships are about this feedback, and that any commitment can be abandoned if it is not giving such satisfaction at this moment.
Both these things deny the full personhood of the parties to the relationship. To say that it is all right if a relationship never gives any emotional satisfaction is to reduce the person from a delighting, giving, receiving, living person, to a tool for an end. To say that a relationship should always and only give satisfaction, and can be ended the second it does not, is to do exactly that to the other party – plus, in all probability, reducing the engagement of both parties from real love and compassion to animal pleasure alone*.
That is, we will find that we pray in dryness, we will go through darkness, many suffer from emotional doubts and bouts of intellectual questioning, we will go to services which don’t really work for us in the sense of comprehending God’s presence, for all sorts of reasons, from the fact someone had a heart attack to the fact that someone was digging up the road outside with a pnematic drill, to the fact we were distracted because we had a bad night’s sleep, or that we were present on that occasion more because the service helped someone else, than because it was any use to us.
Most marriages go through bad patches. But there is a difference between accepting that this is likely to happen, and marrying someone to whom you are totally indifferent and going through all the motions of relationship completely disengaged from them.
It seems important to be clear that I am not criticising people for being inherently “Myers-Briggs Thinkers” and acting, even in close relationships, from a sense of what they ought to do rather than directly from an emotional preference. This has different advantages and challenges from those of us who are Feelers and are motivated primarily by emotion. I do not act on my logic, my logic acts upon my emotions and I act upon those. However, to have no capacity for relational feeling at all seems to be extremely rare and does seem to be a serious medical disorder: human relationships do by their nature involve feeling, even when not “touchy-feely”.
I am, ironically, much more inclined to see how the academic side of this problem can be corrected – chiefly, by learning to see tradition not as “doing what was done before” but as “consistent with the Christian world view as laid down by scripture and the reflections of Christians over the centuries on scripture”. This returns our judging to a standard resting in faith on the belief that God is active in all that is happening, rather than merely on a set of human propositions.
I would also suggest that we need to understanding properly that worship can neither violate theology, nor be reduced to it. The climbing rose needs the wires to go up, or it will be eaten by slugs on the ground. But on the other hand, it is the rose, not the wires, which is alive, and if we hack the rose to the ground to focus instead on the wire, we have completely missed the point!
On the one hand, we have the only “spiritual” determined to seek the emotion of a relationship without any content of an actual, known person to whom we might relate. On the other, we have the only “religious,” stating doctrines and facts and actions, but refusing to allow us to relate to the person about whom they are said, because room for personal response and personal practice is so determinedly downplayed.
At present, it seems to me that even the Anglican Church, once so keen on personal relationship with God, has in fact forgotten about its importance, in, for example, its attempts to replace non-ordained participation in the Precious Blood with the theory of Concomitance and an extremely narrow idea of what constitutes reverence (if it was about infection control, we’d instantly have changed the manner of reception – used separate cups or had the priest intinct the Host for the laity – we would not have refused anyone full reception). We’ve actually replaced the paradigm of the Last Supper and the whole reality of Communion with Christ with a bit of theological speculation which, though almost certainly correct in itself, is simply not relevant.
A similar theme runs through the way in which “including children” involves having everyone present at a service, with the children allowed to run about screaming and throwing their toys about. It is “worship” because we are going through the motions, not because a situation has been created which encourages everyone – or indeed anyone – to pray. When the toddlers are looking up entranced from their picture service books – showing perhaps, photos of their own priest and church – to see the Consecration, or are at least playing with Mary and Joseph dolls quietly on a carpeted floor if not in the mood or not quite ready to be following the service, that would be inclusion. I have worked with children enough not to underestimate the difficulty of achieving this. However, it seems to me that there is a serious issue in the fact that we do not seem to see the need to try to make inclusion mean joining in to their real capacity, and allowing everyone else to do so, rather than simply happening to be in the same room as a service.
I believe “spiritual but not religious” to be paradoxical in its terms, but I also think it is caused by our own misuse of theology – to reduce people’s worship, rather than to assist it. This is very dramatically seen with the Precious Blood, and, in a rather different way, with the “just let the children make whatever noise” attitude. In the first case, academic theology is used as a reason why people should be forbidden the fullness of worship, and reverence as a way of disobeying Christ’s ordinance, in the second case, the importance of including children (let the little children come unto me) becomes a reason for creating a culture of church services with an atmosphere in which almost no-one – children, parents, other members of the congregation – can engage consciously in worshiping and praying and developing their relationship with God to any significant degree.
So – and these are only two examples of a much wider manifestation – we end up with the situation where the doctrine and practice of the Christian religion, far from doing for people what it should do and giving shape and form and (in God’s time) fulfilment, to what they are seeking spiritually, actually stands in their way – which means that people cannot recognise it as the true answer to their hopes, because what we are actually offering them is genuinely not really what it should be.
The instinct to seek God is inherent, but we are placing barrier after barrier rather than helping people find Him.
I say this from the standpoint of the way my own faith has been shaken in the last few years. I haven’t gone down the “spiritual but not religious” route, and I am not going to – I have a strong commitment to doctrine as God-given – but I can see why people would.
It seems to me that this is a fault we need to correct – that we actually need to recover both doctrine and spirituality (in the I-Thou relationship that will include emotional response sense) and to see them as necessary to each other – and to put that into real practice, by trying to give people room to engage and develop rather than seeing worship and ethics as a sort of mechanical thing. There are no shortcuts. The heart itself has to be corrected: it has to come as it is into a relationship with the only one who can truly redeem and correct it, and it has to be in relationship with the only One who can truly satisfy it.
Theology should not be more important that development, nor should development be left to go in whatever false direction it likes, never able to find what it seeks, because what it seeks is being squashed out of it by the very thing which should most support it.
I think we need to see the support (religion, theology) as necessary to the survival and flourishing of the rose (the “spiritual”: the I-Thou relationship with God), and the rose as what the support is there for. I think if we tried to act on that sort of premises, rather than accepting the divide, we would soon find clearer and better guidance.
Cherry Foster
*”Animal pleasure” in the society of others is a good thing in itself – it is part of our creation – but in a person should always exist alongside its trancendence into something deeper :-S. This is a typical issue in Christian ethics: most of the time, things fall short of fulfilment, rather than being bad. The thing is good in itself, but it is bad that it is as much good as there is, because a fuller good should have been.
Handmaid's Distaff 