Being Religious

What does it mean to be religious?  Many people would probably think of church (or temple) attendance along with adherence to a specific set of beliefs.  But the term is much broader, having something to do with the role of the sacred in human life.

I have known many people who, like my father, attended no church, knew little about any particular denomination, yet had a religious perspective, an awe at the beauty of creation and the value of love. They honor and respect sacred places and holy traditions, perhaps sensing in them something ancient and profound. You might prefer the word 'spiritual,' yet that word, for me, suggests the cultivated inner life and a sense of the transcendent in the ordinary that 'religious' does not.

Joseph Mitchell (1908-1996), a North Carolina native who moved to New York in 1929 and began to write about the city, left an unfinished memoir, part of which is published, in all its copious detail, in the current New Yorker.  He lists, with apparent delight, the sights and sounds of the faces and places of the huge metropolis as only an outsider can.  Reading it, I was reminded of Whitman in his all-embracing catalog of life.

Mitchell captures something of the religious sensibility I am trying to define. Although a member of no church, he found himself attracted to churches, especially Catholic ones. Sometimes he went to several Masses in a single day, at different places, with different accents (Polish, Italian, etc.) and, having read a good bit, reflects on the religious impact his experiences had on him.  The following passage is worth quoting in detail:

"One dimly remembered observation about the ancientness of the Mass--that it and its antecedents go farther back into the human past than any other existing ceremony--began to haunt me. I began to feel that the Mass gave me a living connection with my ancestors in England and Scotland before the Reformation and with other ancestors thousands of years earlier than that in the woods and in the caves and on the mudflats of Europe. It put me in communion, so to speak, with these ancestors, no matter how ghostly or hypothetical they might be." ("Street Life," New Yorker, Feb. 11 & 18, 2013, p. 68).

He goes on to say how deeply satisfying this was because it was like finding a "tiny crack in the wall" through which he could look into his unconscious. As a result, he developed a respect for the Mass that had nothing to do with his beliefs about organized religion. It had a lot to do with the past and its presence in the liturgy.

I wonder how many people today are drawn to churches and other places of worship not merely because of the architecture but because they need, in a way impossible to articulate, to be part of a community that carries on a tradition of prayer. They need to be connected to a history wider and deeper than their own lives.

I know that, whenever I grow restless or distracted or bored at Mass, I will recall Mitchell's words and remind myself of what being religious in its broadest sense means and why it is important for me to be fully present there.

What Good is Religion?

"God will reveal himself to you in the depths of your soul," says the Abbot of La Grande Chartreuse in the documentary Into Great Silence. He is speaking to two newcomers to the ancient monastery in the French Alps, but he could be speaking to anyone who seeks ultimate meaning with an open mind and heart.

It takes a contemplative experience to find God, not formal theology or the study of doctrine; it is not a matter of the head but of the heart and head. This point is what Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and the recent writers on atheism cannot fathom.

Roger Scruton, in "The Sacred and the Human," a 2007 article in Prospect magazine even goes so far as to say that religion is not really about God but about the human need for the sacred. If the discovery of God is personal and interior, the study of God and the need to have religion is a primeval human need, one that precedes an experience of God.

At least that is what Rene Girard and other anthropolgists of religion have shown. Religion, so often mocked by outsiders, is really about the place of the sacred in human life and the kind of knowledge and understanding that come through experiencing sacred things, such as the rituals that connect the isolated individual with a broader community.
The essence of religion, Scuton shows, is not in myths or theology or doctine, but in moments that stand outside time, "in which the loneliness and anxiety of the human individual is confronted and overcome through immersion in a group...."

Religion, then, is an antidote to alienation and is the solution to violence. Whereas the atheist attacks on religion simplistically argue that religion is the cause of violence, Girard says that the opposite is true: religion is the solution to violence, which comes from another source. There is no society without violence since it comes from the attempt people make to live together.

Out of the conflict at the heart of society, Girard says, violence is born--along with a need for the sacred. Thus the need to experience the sacred comes not from an irrational body of primitive fears, nor is religion a superstition that science will replace. It is a solution to the aggression that lies at the heart of human communities. The solution involves renewal.

Girard, and Scuton, conclude by asserting that religion is not primarily about God but the sacred and that this experience of the holy can be suppressed, ignored or attacked but never destroyed, for there will always be a need for the ongoing renewal that comes from what religious experience offers: communion and awe as we look at the world from the edge. This is the mystical moment outside of time, which can lead the individual to the loving presence of God.

The basic point of all this is that those, like Hitchens, who have written profitable diatribes against religion have never explored the anthropology of religion in thinkers like Girard, and so their arguments are inevitably inadequate. They do not know what religion is.