If you have read this blog very often, you will know that the contrast between religion and spirituality is a favorite topic of mine. That distinction, and the failure to understand it, goes to the heart of the modern crisis of traditional religion. It is the explanation for the growth in the number of people saying that they are “spiritual but not religious.”

And what is the difference? Recently, I found a YouTube “short” which explains it, I think, as concisely as it can be explained. Rebecka Celastrina, a young Italian spirituality teacher, does so in less than two minutes,. I’ll reprint the whole transcript since it is so short.

Before my own spiritual awakening, I didn’t really understand the difference between religion and spirituality. I thought they were essentially pointing at the same thing in just different costumes, and with some being more new age and some being more ancient or more traditional. But there’s a distinction that I’ve come to see as fundamental.

A religion asks you to believe. Spirituality asks you to seek. And those are not the same movement.

Belief at its core means accepting something as true that you haven’t directly experienced. And you accept it as true because an authority told you so. It can be a parent, it can be a tradition, a priest or a holy book, or even culture itself. The source of the belief is external, and it comes from the outside and moves inwards.

But a genuine spiritual process moves in the opposite direction. It starts with a question, not with an answer. It treats experience as more trustworthy than doctrine. It is willing to dismantle everything it thought it knew in service of finding out what is actually true.

On a spiritual path, you are always a seeker. The moment you stop seeking, the moment you have found the answer and settled into it, you have actually left the path. And this requires something that most of us aren’t comfortable with: the willingness to hold uncertainty, to not need a final framework, to let the truth be the only authority, and to stay honest about how much of it you still haven’t found yet. That for me is the beginning of real wisdom.

For quite a while, I viewed religion and spirituality as being in competition with each other, almost opposed to each other. If you were one, then you weren’t the other. But the distinction Celastrina makes here is helping me see them differently. Now, I realize that you can be one or the other, or both, or neither.

I’ve been very critical of contemporary religion for its lack of spirituality. But I’m starting to wonder if that isn’t like criticizing my dog for not being more like a cat. As Celastrina implies here, perhaps religion isn’t about spirituality, and spirituality isn’t about religion. “A religion asks you to believe. Spirituality asks you to seek.” Those are indeed very different “movements.”

In recent years, it’s been popular to claim that the Latin origin of the word “religion” means “to bind together.” Apparently, there is some doubt about that, but the point is still made. Religion is a social “movement” (to use that word again) which binds people together around a core of common beliefs. Thus, religion is about creed (Latin credo = “we believe”) and ritual, the group’s actions which help unite them.

For millennia, religion was the social glue which held communities, tribes, ethnicities, nations, and empires together. Religion gave such groups a common understanding of life and the world which supported shared myths, values, ethics, morality, behavior, and culture. This almost always involved belief in God, gods, spirit(s), or some non-visible dimension to reality.

Religion provided answers to fundamental questions about life and existence: why are things the way they are and how should we live because of those answers? The answers usually came in the form of stories, often preserved in sacred writings of some kind, and repeated and celebrated in rituals and festivals.

Spirituality, on the other hand, is solitary rather than communal. It also seeks answers to fundamental questions, but from personal awareness and reflection rather than external authority. Teachers and “gurus” are not authorities in and of themselves but share their own experiences and thoughts. These are of value only if they guide you to a personal “awakening” to your true nature. Knowing one’s true nature then leads to a deeper understanding of life and being, resulting in acceptance and peace.

It’s taken a while, but what I have come to realize—and accept—is that most religious people are not interested in spirituality or awakening. Conversely, many, perhaps most, people on a spiritual path have little interest in religion. Neither is better than the other; they are doing different things. But that hasn’t always been obvious and has resulted in confusion and conflict.

Perhaps most confusing is that many, if not most, of the so-called founders of the world’s “great” religions were actually spiritual seekers and teachers, and not intentionally religion creators. This is especially true in Asia. Neither Confucianism, Taoism, nor Buddhism have explicit religious content, but religious practices developed around them over time. This is especially true of Buddhism, resulting in it being common, especially outside Asia, for people to follow Buddhist teaching but not its religious practices.

Now I’m going to go out on thin ice and say that I believe the same is true of Jesus and Christianity. The Bible in general has an ambivalent attitude towards religion. In the Old Testament, religious practice is accepted as what people do, but without enthusiasm. In the founding story, for a long time God refuses to have a temple built for him but Solomon finally goes ahead and does it anyway. When it is destroyed by foreign invaders a few centuries later, God doesn’t seem particularly upset. In fact, the prophets, who often rail against Israelite religion, interpret it as God’s judgment on the nation’s apostasy.

Today, Jesus is often described as having been a faithful Jew. I’m not sure if that’s true, but I’m also not sure what it means. For one thing, there was not one way “to be” a Jew. The gospels tell us he went to the synagogue (a new institution then) a few times but almost always caused a commotion. He also went to the temple but predicted its destruction and symbolically shut it down with his money changers’ table-turning incident.

According to the gospels, Jesus most common religious practice seemed to be to go off by himself to pray—the common practice of mystics. Similarly, in Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, Jesus counsels people to go into their closet, close the door, and pray in secret. He is regularly denounced by the various religious authorities for his irreligious practices and teaching. Apparently, Jesus had no formal training yet is popularly called a rabbi who teaches “with authority” unlike that of the officially designated teachers.

In other words, Jesus behaved very much like a spiritual guru. He showed little interest in either the temple-centered or synagogue-centered religion of his day. His goal was neither to preserve Judaism or reform it. But neither did he seem interested in starting something new. The gospels, of course, try to tie Jesus to the movement which became Christianity, but those attempts seem concocted and don’t fit with the rest of Jesus’ ministry.

Today, few if any scholars believe Jesus intended to start a new religion. That role is now more often given to Paul. But I’m not sure even that works, as Paul basically viewed the world to be nearing its end with Christ’s imminent return. He had no long-range plan. But his theological ideas, integrated with such practices as baptism and the Lord’s supper, did provide a framework for the Christian religion which followed when, awkwardly, the world kept on going.

The result was a religion with a very formal structure of authorities, doctrines, and practices but centered on an ancient teacher of spiritual life and personal fulfillment. Followers of Jesus and followers of the church have been at cross purposes ever since.

In its first centuries, as the church became an urbanized cultural institution, spiritual-oriented Christians (who became known as the Desert Fathers and Mothers) left the cities for the wilderness of Egypt. From that point on, such Christians, typically identified as mystics, had a tenuous relationship with the church, barely tolerated and often persecuted.

Perhaps the greatest of these was Meister Eckhart (1260-1328). Remarkably, he was acknowledged as a great teacher of church theology, but his spiritual teachings were more than church authorities could bear. Conveniently he died on the brink of excommunication, or worse.

In modern times, as the church came under increasing criticism, the Christian mystics were rediscovered, both within and outside the church. A great example of this involves the renowned Catholic monk and writer, Thomas Merton. He attributes his own spiritual renewal to being introduced to Eckhart by a Zen Buddhist teacher, D. T. Suzuki. Eckhart was also an important influence on the prominent Protestant theologian, Paul Tillich, and is cited frequently by the popular Franciscan friar and best-selling author, Richard Rohr.

So, what’s going on? I’ll share some thoughts but I believe this subject needs much more study and reflection than it’s been getting.

Traditional religion everywhere has fallen on hard times. The great religions have not figured out how to adjust to the modern world. Their ability to create community and give life meaning has been undermined by science, nationalism, political ideology, and consumerism. And yet, religion still has genuine appeal. Churches, temples and shrines are still attended, though in much smaller numbers than in the past. Shared story and ritual still have value in creating community and meaning, but are often overwhelmed by modern materialist culture. As I’ve said before, we can’t turn back the clock or un-know what we know. We’re never going to find God on a mountain top or in the clouds.

Yet it would seem that, in the case of Christianity, the great stories of the Bible, and the rituals and festivals based on them, can be reimagined, not as guideposts to “salvation” but as a framework for living with meaning and purpose, individually and collectively. In other words, Christianity needs to figure out how to be a religion again, to figure out what religion means in the 21^st century, rather than be the countless other things it has tried to be recently because they seem more “relevant.” Christianity will never play again the role it had in the Middle Ages, but it doesn’t need to. We’re not in the Middle Ages. It needs to figure out what role religion can and should play today.

Spirituality, as I’ve said, is an individual path. Its goal is not to create a new worldview to place oneself in but to answer from experience the question, “Who am I?” I believe the spark for the growing interest in spirituality is the hollowness of the roles people are given today as paycheck collectors and consumers. There is also an increasing dissatisfaction with all the proposed identities the modern world has to offer, whether from economics, politics, biology, psychology, or the remains of medieval religion.

Finally, and perhaps the most influential cause, is the building suspicion that all the past answers to our identity questions have fallen short as we watch the building crisis of human civilization. Not only are we spiraling towards ecological disaster, humanity seems to lack the ability to even begin to address the problems we have created. So we wonder, “Who are we that we are bringing such a cataclysm down upon ourselves?”

But in order to answer that in the plural, we are realizing that we first have to ask, “Who am I?” And for that answer we need to look, not to past or present authorities, but to our own deepest sense of being. This is the spiritual path.

Teachers past and present can guide us, the silence of prayer and meditation opens us, and the crucible of daily living peals away our delusions and illusions. Together they move us into the depths of consciousness and awareness, of “isness” as Meister Eckhart called it, of pure being. When Moses asks who he should say has sent him, God responds, “Tell them, ‘I am’ sent you.” When Jesus identifies himself in the gospel of John, he says, “Before Abraham was, I am.” The spiritual path is the journey to discovering that that is the real and most important identity we all possess.

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