Been on a bit of Jesus thing lately. Thinking about religion, considering the role it plays in our understandings of the world, its function as an ethical code, a yearning for something more, a mark of community boundaries and so on. And generally considering the importance that religious symbols and religious communities have had at various time in my life.
My folks were Catholic – radical Catholics of the liberation theology and Catholic worker bent. I’ve written about it here before – both the inspiration and the puritanism of it all – and continue to reflect on it a good deal in that way we do as we get older – reflect on the values and experiences that have shaped us. And I’ve been realizing, too, what a profound lack of any religious teaching or religious experience Mica has had. Not that I want her to have been raised religious, but I notice, as she gets older, how often the language and symbolism that I rely in is rooted in that radical Catholic tradition and how little she understands any of that. To the point that I doubt she could even give a 30 second synopsis of the life of Jesus.
Now, as far as formal religion goes, that’s not a big deal. But I do think it’s a big deal just in terms of learning. I mean, references to and evocations of biblical stories in art and literature are absolutely everywhere, and having a basic grasp of the players, the parables, the messaging, and the key symbols is important to really grasp the richness of so much of what is around us culturally. And history, and struggle, and political debate and the foundations of the culture we live in – those founding religious myths, their political legacies for good and for bad, their place as a real bedrock of the world she must contend with and take her place in – some general familiarity with the Christian story seems to me an important piece of any cultural arsenal.
And so, I have been trying to spend a little time talking about it, and have made a point of finding some movies on biblical stories, at least so she will have some knowledge of the story and the central themes. Mica, of course, just finds it all a big drag. But them’s the breaks. There’s shit you gotta learn, like it or not.
And beyond just the value of being literate in the foundational myths of one’s culture, there is something more that religion provides, I think – or, a few more things. 1) a shared symbolism which helps to bind communities together, provide common reference points, and widely-understood stories for teaching about the ethical values of the community; 2) a space for ritual, and – with ritual – a regular gathering of the community for no other purpose than to gather in reflection on what brings it together. And, from my mom, who is no longer religious at all but mentioned a while ago a couple of her thoughts on the core value of religion – 3) a sense of awe at creation and an explicit and ongoing recognition that there is more to the world than us alone; and 4) an understanding that each one of us contains within us the very best and the very worst of what humanity can be.
All four of these things seem important to me. They are not what first springs to mind when we think of religious communities; they are not the monopoly of any particular religion or religion in general. But they are features of ritualized spiritual practice, and they are intrinsic to such practice in a way they are not intrinsic to the rest of our lies. Which simply means that while it is possible to have all of the above without having religion, it requires a particular effort and intentionality to do so, and if we are intentional about such practices and develop rituals for them, we very soon enter the sphere of ‘religion’ whether we use that term or not.
So, I wonder about all this, and I wonder what we have lost socially and culturally as we have moved away from religious practice to a thoroughly-secular day to day existence. I wonder about the way religion functions for so many people now as an individual moment rather than a community practice, and the cost of eliminating spirituality from our everyday interactions. I don’t mourn the weakening of the institutional powers of the Church, the rebellion against strict codes of morality or presumptions of a universal truth or a chosen people. But when we abandon long-standing institutions and cultural practices, we do always lose something in the process. And I am increasingly noting those four absences, not just in my own life, but in social life generally. The absence of shared symbolism and a shared mythology for communication of ethics. The absence of ritual and places for community gathering. The loss of that awe and wonder at creation when we recognize our own smallness and its replacement by what John Ralston Saul refers to as “the dictatorship of reason”. The cultural loss of an acknowledgment of weakness, failure and frailty, and our emphasis instead on individual strength and individual self-sufficiency. It all adds up, y’know.
I am a materialist. I make sense of the world by trying to understand relations of power and struggle, social conflict, the rise and fall of institutions. Capitalism, state, the disposability of consumer culture, ecological collapse, enclosures and the breakdown of community – these are the social dynamics and relations I look to as I go forth in the world. And all this reflecting on religion doesn’t change that. Rather, I am thinking about all these things together, about the relationships between the rise of mass consumer culture, breakdown of communities, hyper-individualism and loss of spiritual practice.
And mostly, I guess, I am noting how my secular life, though rich in community and comradeship, is missing something I can only call a language of love. We on the left talk alot of justice and freedom and equality. But we don’t talk about love. We appeal to community and solidarity. But we don’t make an ethic or a practice of simply loving people. And that’s something that religious communities do speak of. And I wonder if maybe in fact that matters. Maybe in fact the airy-fairy ‘love one another’ does provide something to the formation of religious community that we don’t get from a political community. Maybe we need to start talking more about kindness, about generosity of spirit, about our own frailties and transgressions, about forgiveness and redemption – about love, just plain love.
Not that any of this is any replacement for political engagement, for structural analysis, for struggle and resistance. No, the religious community I came out of was full-engaged in material struggle, including armed struggle. When I think of what religious community offers, I don’t imagine for a moment any retreat from politics, from class, from the real struggle against capital and state. Not less engagement, but more and different engagement. Not less anger or resistance, but more and different expressions of that. Not less communism, but more – and a communism that is not out there, to be built, but right here informing our everyday interactions with not only our families and our comrades, but strangers and even adversaries.
No, not finding God. My religious community was never first and foremost about God, and God ain’t part of what I miss. But something unknown, out there, something that represented what we aspired to be as individuals and community, something that we did believe, on some level, accountable to, personally and spiritually. That I am missing.
Hmmm, interesting food for thought, as I head to the first social event in over a month tonight.
Perhaps another item in your required readings could be Henry Drummond’s “The Greatest Thing in the World”, a 19th century sermon/essay that explains in fine detail (but not so fine as to be boring, as “On the Origin of Species” was) why love is the most important component of Christian conduct. It also provides simple directions to have more of it in your life via purely mechanical, secular means.
While the essay/sermon itself may not be considered an important component of our collective cultural heritage, the chapter of the New Testament that it deconstructs so adroitly IS, though its importance is often overlooked by Christians themselves. I guess most NT readers are expecting mission statements and pep rallies, not field manuals.