The Adventure of Spirituality
What is the difference between spirituality and religion? Do I have to belong to a religion to have a spiritual life? How do I choose a teacher, a path, a discipline?
On tour for her 1999 book, The Seeker’s Guide: Making Your Life a Spiritual Adventure, Elizabeth Lesser faced these questions as she traveled across the country. “These are the big questions of the hour,” she says. “And it seemed to me that Huston Smith would make an ideal partner for further explorations. We began discussing them over lunch when he was teaching at Omega Institute. I followed up with a letter, and he graciously replied. Several letters later, I realized that we had built up a correspondence worth sharing….”
As cofounder of the renowned Omega Institute, the nation’s largest holistic education and retreat center, in Rhinebeck, New York, Elizabeth Lesser has had a front-row seat for the expansive and liberating spiritual developments of the last 25 years. Given her proximity to so many of the Institute’s speakers and teachers, she could have spent most of her life in workshops. But after a while, she chose to study with only a very few of Omega’s teachers, noticing a disturbing trend shadowing the rich learning opportunities available at Omega and similar institutions: some of the kids in the holistic candy shop were stuffing themselves with so much variety that they were never nourished by the depth of any one tradition. Lesser began to understand that spreading wide must always be grounded by going deep. Otherwise learning does not take root and the student floats, always hungry, grasping at whatever sounds new and promising.
Lesser did not grow up in a religious household. “My parents were opposed to organized religions, although they were both spiritually attuned in their own quirky ways: my father worshiped nature and cultivated a life reminiscent of Thoreau’s; my mother loved all things ethical and mystical. Raised as a Christian Scientist, but embittered by its bureaucracy, she read to us from the Bible and from the Greeks and from other wisdom traditions that she found full of life.
“At nineteen I met Pir Vilayat Khan, and I took initiation with him in the Sufi tradition. He has been my main teacher, and Sufism my main path, for more than 25 years. Pir Vilayat’s is an unorthodox Sufism. My study with him was like a college-level immersion into world religions, even as it fulfilled my need to join a church community. Although I no longer belong to any Sufi group, Sufism is in my blood now, as close to me as my breath. To these core beliefs and practices I have added others, including study with the Tibetan Buddhist, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche; the Zen Buddhist, Philip Kapleau; the Jungian analyst, Marion Woodman; and a group in my area called the Pathwork — an elegant system that blends psychotherapy and Christianity. These are now also part of my living faith.”
A great fan of cultural diversity, Smith is an even greater fan of discipline. Best known for the standard college text, The World’s Religions, he also produced award-winning documentary films on Hinduism, Sufism, and Tibetan Buddhism. He has taught religion and philosophy at MIT, Syracuse University, and the University of California at Berkeley. In 1996 Bill Moyers created a five-part PBS special, “The Wisdom of Faith with Huston Smith.” At age 80, Smith is regarded as the preeminent religious scholar in America. Yet he is a supremely humble man, one whose creative spark seems never to dim.
Smith sees his own religious life as a progressive journey, but not one that abandons one tradition for another. He speaks of the different religions that he has adopted as “tidal waves” that crashed over him, bringing in their wake new insight. He began life as a Methodist, born into a missionary family in China. He is still a practicing Methodist, but when he was hit by the tidal wave Vedanta — the philosophical version of Hinduism — he became a devotee of that tradition. Later he would be overcome by the power of Buddhism, and then Sufism. Today he still attends a Methodist church, prays five times a day in Arabic, and regularly practices meditation and hatha yoga.
Dear Huston,
It was a pleasure to be in your presence again at Omega — to listen to you speak, and then to sit with you at lunch and bat around the question of the hour, “What is the difference between spirituality and religion?” I don’t think we got to the bottom of our conundrum, so I’d like to continue the discussion in writing, and hope that you have a chance to respond.
I’ve been reading The Holy Longing, Ronald Rolheiser’s new book on Christian spirituality, and I like what he says about spirituality:
“There is within us a fundamental dis-ease, an unquenchable fire that renders us incapable, in this life, of ever coming to full peace. This desire lies at the center of our lives, in the marrow of our bones, and in the deep recesses of the soul. At the heart of all great literature, poetry, art, philosophy, psychology, and religion lies the naming and analyzing of this desire. Spirituality is, ultimately, about what we do with that desire. What we do with our longings, both in terms of handling the pain and the hope they bring us, that is our spirituality . . . Augustine says: ‘You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.’ Spirituality is about what we do with our unrest.”
I believe that religions emerge to respond to our unrest. They help us find peace as we struggle to reconcile irreconcilable human issues, like: how do I live a generous and moral life, and at the same time, how do I “follow my bliss”? How do I make holy choices when these two urges — for service to others and for service to self — meet in the crucible of my daily life? How do I balance my conflicting longings for individuality and community, freedom and responsibility, power and meekness, wildness and civility?
As I have progressed along the path, I’ve not found it possible to pick just one organized religion as my main response to the unrest. I’ve noticed this to be true for many other people, as well. I think that if done with sensitivity we can follow a path that moves through a variety of traditions. We don’t have to make a lifelong commitment to one faith in order to plumb its depths and reap its rewards. I think of my own spiritual life as one lived in “serial monogamy;” I’ve made a serious study of one faith (as well as other disciplines like science, psychology, healing work, etc.), and then moved on to immerse myself in another tradition. I call this evolving path, “spirituality.” In affixing the word “spirituality” to the large umbrella of my faith, I in no way mean to denigrate religion.
These are some of the thoughts that our lunch meeting sparked for me.
Would you care to continue the conversation?
Sincerely,
Elizabeth
Dear Elizabeth,
It is not a flattering commentary on my life to note that your letter, which I am only now getting around to answering, was written over a month ago. With one exception, which I will come to, I think I agree with everything you say, and say very well. I love the Ronald Rolheiser quote. Thank you for it.
That is not to say that there are not differences between us, creative ones I trust. I will skip the generation gap, which I mentioned when we were together. I suspect that old people always feel out of step with the generation that is taking over, which is to say with the world that is leaving them behind. But that’s normal and not (as far as I can see) worth probing. One difference, though, merits comment.
I have nothing against spirituality in itself, but I am concerned with the way it is debasing language by (wittingly or not) turning religion into a bad word. My students during the last decade of my teaching are my population. Spirituality was invariably a good word for them; I never encountered a student who did not think that she had a spiritual side to her nature. Religion, by contrast, was not a good word for them; they equated it with dogmatism (we have the truth and everybody else is going to hell) and moralism (don’t do this, that, and the other thing). At first I attributed this to unfortunate brushes they had had with churches and synagogues, but toward the end I came to suspect that they were merely stereotypes they had picked up on campus, for as far as I could tell, most of them seemed never to have darkened a church door.
So with spiritual a good word and religion not, what’s the difference between them? Religion is organized, institutionalized spirituality. Is the problem with religions religious or institutional? On balance the latter, I think. By their very nature, institutions are mixed bags — I don’t know a single one that doesn’t have a shadow side. Show me a pretty government. Healing is wonderful, but the American Medical Association? Learning is wonderful, but universities? The same is true for religion. Even so they are (as I sometimes put it to my students) necessary evils — we have to take them on and try to minimize their defects because they are the only way that spiritual truths gain traction in history. Had Jesus not been followed by St. Paul who created the Christian church, the Sermon on the Mount would have evaporated in two generations. The Buddha knew that and created the sangha to prolong his dharma.
You should have the last word, so kindly respond to this.
Sincerely,
Huston
Dear Huston,
You began your last letter with an apology for not getting around to answering a letter from me “written over a month ago.” Now it is my turn to apologize. It has taken me almost six months to respond to your last letter! Please excuse such a long lapse of time. As usual, family and work life intervened — kids home for college break, work, and more travel for my book. This week, as a soft rain readies the Hudson Valley for spring, I am attacking a pile of long-neglected letters.
I once heard you compare the human being to a lantern that contains within it the flame of the divine. You said, “A lantern may have a functioning light within it, but it may be coated with dust and soot, sometimes even with mud. Sometimes the light does not shine through at all. Religious practice helps the faithful clean the surface of the lantern; that is what all the great traditions are for — to help us remove the dross that conceals divinity, so that the light can shine through.” I agree with you. In fact, I think you may have defined the purpose of all spiritual life — “to clean the surface of the lantern.”
In my own life, religious practice has certainly helped me clean the surface of my lantern, but religion is just one part of my journey toward the light. To religion I have added psychotherapy, physical healing work, and other disciplines. In fact, it seems that as humankind evolves, new ways of purification are always being discovered and refined and worked into the collective repertoire. I think that during our era, psychology has been a tremendous boon to the spiritual seeker. It has its strengths and weaknesses, as sure as religion does.
Because there are different modalities that work to cleanse away the dust and soot and mud, I have looked for an overarching phrase to encapsulate them all. Spirituality comes close to fitting the bill. This is all I mean by the word — one that contains a wide variety of wisdom traditions all dedicated to helping the human being “remove the dross that conceals divinity.” To me spirituality is the wise art of making one’s life a sacred adventure. We do this by continually cleaning the unique lantern each one of us is given at birth. Because we are human we will make false starts and mistakes; we will stick around in some traditions long after they have stopped helping us clean the surface. In fact, sometimes the very traditions we adopt to help us remove the dross, begin to obscure the light themselves. Often we leave one path, travel another, and later — older and wiser — find ourselves back on the original path, finally able to mine its wisdom.
The question, to me, is not IF one needs more than one wisdom tradition over a lifetime, but rather HOW to move in and out of these traditions in a responsible, compassionate, and effective way. On my book tour, in cities all across America, people voiced a reluctance to engage with organized religions if it meant they had to make an exclusive commitment. They asked questions like, “If I join a religion, do I have a choice in which aspects of the organization I get to embrace and which ones I want to abandon or change?” Or, “I don’t want to be part of a religion. But how do I create community and teach my children about God?” In Milwaukee, a former Jesuit priest commented, “Jesus said, ‘New wine cannot be poured into old wineskins.’ Do you think it is time for us to create new forms of worship?” I’m afraid that I often did not have satisfactory answers to these questions.
Do you?
Sincerely,
Elizabeth
Dear Elizabeth,
Religions are time-tested traditions filled with proven pointers on how to proceed through life. Of course you must cultivate self-responsibility within any tradition, but I certainly do not advocate throwing out whole traditions in order to create entirely new ones. That seems like a tremendous waste of some of humanity’s most glorious creations. Religions are not all-good, nor are they all-bad. Rama Krishna compared religion to a cow. “A cow kicks,” he said. “But it also gives milk.” The problem with cafeteria-style spirituality is that Saint Ego is often the one making the choices at the salad bar. What tastes good is not always the same as what you need, and an undeveloped ego can make unwise choices. I believe that it is most helpful for people to choose one main meal, to commit and focus on that tradition, and then to add to it if the need arises. I am a firm believer in vitamin supplements. Christianity is my main meal to which I have added several supplements over the years.
But back to my real concerns about the way spirituality is working (I don’t say intentionally) to denigrate religion. In the public mind spirituality gets the good points, religion the bad marks. Of which there are, needless to say, many, but I find little effort to balance the account responsibly. Some points that should be kept in mind: Without the support of the mainline churches and synagogues, the civil rights movement of the ’60s could not have succeeded; Without their opposition, there would have been U.S. troops in Guatemala and El Salvador in the ’70s; The synagogues and churches of Berkeley unite to serve a hot meal to 200 homeless people 365 days a year, and take turns offering overnight shelter in the winter to those who want it. Where is spirituality in this picture?
The day after the recent earthquake hit Istanbul, the San Francisco Chronicle published a list of 10 organizations to which contributions for relief could be sent. Half of them were religious; I was happy to find Methodist World Service listed along with Catholic World Service and the others. Spirituality wasn’t on the list.
What demands and proscriptions does spirituality carry with it? When Barbara Walters interviewed Monica Lewinsky, she quoted Clinton as having confessed that he sinned and asked Monica if she felt that she had sinned. Monica squirmed uncomfortably, and then she said, “I’m not very religious. I’m more spiritual.” I admit that my relating this is a low blow in our discussion and in a way apologize for mentioning it. My intent is merely to balance the record and try to restore religion to even terms with spirituality.
As a lifelong student of world religions, I value religion for its role as the winnowed wisdom of the human race. As I have said before, certain aspects of religions are far from wise, especially their social patterns — their support of the mores of their times in regard to class distinctions and gender relations. But in their view of the nature of reality, there is nothing in history or in the modern world that rivals them. Cafeteria-style spirituality (or New Age spirituality as it is sometimes called) is a mixed bag. Its optimism and liveliness appeal to me. But how deep does it go? Has it come to terms with evil? Where is its social conscience? Where are the New Age equivalents of a Mother Teresa or a Dalai Lama? So, at its best New Age spirituality is an energizing force, but at its worst, it can be a kind of private escapism, devoid of the power to do real good in the world.
Sincerely,
Huston
Dear Huston,
In your last letter you asked, “What demands and proscriptions does spirituality carry with it?” The self-regulated kind of spirituality I have been talking about (the kind that allows for democracy and diversity; the kind I call “the new American spirituality”) demands only one thing from the seeker: to take responsibility for his or her own reverence and virtue. It puts the onus on the individual to love, to forgive, and to be peaceable from the inside out. Spirituality demands that we act out of love not because we’ve been told to love by an authority figure, but because we have faced and transformed the hatred and fear within us, and thereby learned to love. Spirituality postulates that love cannot be legislated; it can only come from within. We’ve had thousands of years of rule-based theologies that demand love and proscribe hatred, envy, and inhumanity. It’s been a noble experiment, and yes, some people belong to groups that engage in very kind acts for the benefit of others, but how deep and sustainable is their selflessness? Gandhi said, “You must become the change you wish to see in the world.” Spirituality is about becoming what we love about God; it is not about blame or shame or guilt and the strange proscriptions that humans devise to prevent or punish the evil that dwells within each of our hearts.
In one of your Omega lectures, you said something that has kept me on track on my own progressive spiritual journey. “The heart of religion is not altered states but altered traits of character.” This simple line has been a touchstone for me, helping me to gauge my spiritual progress. I know that religions aim to help people do more than just follow rules. I know that they offer proven technologies for “altered traits of character.” But I am afraid that many of the flock are merely following the rules out of habit or fear, and therefore their characters have not really been altered; they and their societies may have the veneer of righteousness, but scratch the surface and you will quickly find unresolved feelings, anxieties, and prejudices that have always kept humanity from growing up and waking up.
On the other hand, a spirituality that does not find its grounding in religious discipline often suffers from shallowness, narcissism, and loneliness. I value that criticism and for that reason have included religious tradition in my own spiritual brew. I know for myself that my years of serious discipleship with Pir Vilayat Khan gave me direction at a time when I really needed it and left me with a strong spiritual backbone and a community of fellow seekers.
I now see the spiritual process as one that happens in stages, and that at each stage the seeker must commit fully to a discipline, even as he or she stays open-minded and alert to the rest of the world. At different times in my life I felt called to heal or nourish specific parts of myself. Early on in my studies I was most attracted to the exploration of consciousness, and found my spiritual home in Sufi meditation and Christian mysticism. When I was a young mother holding down a stressful job, the practice of Buddhist mindfulness meditation became critical to my ability to stay sane. When I was going through a painful divorce, I began Jungian psychology and body-centered approaches. Psychotherapy was revelatory and effective in helping me “alter character traits.” I was a midwife for ten years and include that as part of my spiritual education: it helped me heal the split between body and soul — a negative contribution from Christianity. I believe this Church-sanctioned soul/body split has had a tremendously violent impact on our society and the planet.
So, adding up all the twists and turns of my spiritual path, I conclude that it is not just religion that taught me how to walk with love and light through my life. Religion, mythology, psychology, science, bodywork, and the rough and tumble of everyday life — each has taught me about living an ethical, mystical, and magical life.
I look forward to hearing about the twists and turns of your own path.
Sincerely,
Elizabeth
Dear Elizabeth,
You made one assertion that surprised me, the one concerning “Christianity’s tremendously violent impact on our society and the planet.” It surprised me for being unnuanced. How much of the damage you are thinking of was due to Christianity and how much to the fact that the people who perpetuated it happened coincidentally to be Christian and behaved in the way greedy and power-hungry people tend always and everywhere to behave? Do you fault Buddhism for what nominal Buddhists are doing to the Tamils in Sri Lanka, or Islam for the violence against the East Timorese in Indonesia? Was it Christianity that produced colonialism, or the fact that nations that happened to be Christian had the power to satisfy their greed because they acquired technology before Asia and Africa did? You get my point?
The second nuance I miss is any attempt to weigh Christianity’s violence against its contributions. What would Western civilization be without Christianity’s icons and cathedrals, its requiems, Saint Francis, its Dante, mystics, Christmas, and the like?
Your assertion brings to mind a moment when His Holiness the Dalai Lama visited Syracuse while I was there. At a colloquium, Agahendanad Bharati, an Austrian turned Hindu swami, tried several times to get the Dalai Lama to say that Buddhism was a more peaceable religion than Christianity. When His Holiness dodged the questions and Bharati put it to him a third time, the Dalai Lama said, “If I say anything against someone else’s religion, the Buddha would scold me.” My next visit to Omega is upon us. It will be good to see you there again.
Sincerely,
Huston
Dear Huston,
I think you are right that my words about Christianity’s violent history were unnuanced and biased. I agree with you wholeheartedly that with or without religious institutions mankind is capable of both creativity and destruction. It’s part of our nature. When we organize into groups, both our creativity and our cruelty are magnified. I like to say, “Whenever two or more of us are gathered in anyone’s name, there’s trouble.” But it is also our nature to gather in groups, and so, every religion, or at least most of them, has inspired people to create beauty and brotherhood, even as they have whipped up followers to wage war and make life miserable for select groups of people (like women, gays, and people of other faiths and races). So, you are completely correct to take me to task for singling out Christianity, and to mention only the shadow side of Christianity’s contribution to human history.
The pure teachings of Christ are blameless in history. I love Jesus’ teachings. I have deep respect for those who follow his doctrines of love, compassion, and transcendence. And many churches and denominations have contributed mightily to our art, literature, music, and to the civil liberties of all people. I belong to a local church choir that has, over the past fifteen years, performed the great masses of the classical masters. Recently we joined with the choir of a nearby African-American Baptist church whose chapel had been burned to the ground by arson. We sang a program of classical and gospel music to raise money for the rebuilding of the sanctuary. Praise God for the teachings and institutions that inspire such glorious music and brotherhood.
But I don’t think it is enough to say that the shadow side of a religion is activated coincidentally; that the greedy and power-hungry people within a certain religion would be greedy and power-hungry regardless of religious affiliation. I think that religions have to take more responsibility than that. Religions are not only the core teachings of an enlightened being. They are a belief structure that sanctions certain behaviors, and outlaws others, for individuals and society. Each religion’s stamp on human history has been different, and those differences correspond directly to the doctrine. What goes on in Muslim society or Buddhist society, or any society, for better and worse, is based on particular laws and moral doctrine, and can look quite different from what goes on in other religious cultures.
I agree with you that there are many factors that contribute to a people’s destructive behavior. One of the reasons, but not the only reason, that Christian societies acquired technology before African societies, or that they embraced colonialism, is that as a Christian ethos evolved, it supported those behaviors. Many early Church leaders did more than preserve the Sermon on the Mount for perpetuity. They also bent Jesus’ ideas to fit a worldview of domination of man over nature, rationality over emotion, and expansion over nurture.
Those who read into the Bible that nature is a pagan wildness to be controlled must be held accountable for their part in defiling the environment. As long as the Roman Catholic Church uses scripture to justify its foolhardy stance against birth control, it must assume responsibility for a certain percentage of our earth’s overpopulation. Those who preach intolerance against the civil rights of others in the name of Christ, or who use his name and the money of the faithful to gain political leverage, are more than mere coincidences of religion. They may be mutations of the pure Word, but they spring from the same tree.
It seems to me that religions have been redefining themselves throughout history. Do you think that maybe we are going through a reformation of sorts, an upheaval of values that will result in radical changes to the structure of existing religions? I do, because I notice that it is not only the New Age spirituality movement that is changing the way Americans worship. If an Orthodox Jew stepped into the Woodstock Jewish Congregation for Passover here in my town, he would faint! If a Roman Catholic nun visited a mega-church in the Southwest, I doubt she would find much she could relate to. American Zen and Vipassana Buddhist centers, stripped of Eastern ritual, would bore a traditional Tibetan Buddhist right into the Bardo [in Buddhist belief, the place the soul resides between incarnations]. Times change; God shows up in different names and songs and ways of praise. Isn’t that just the way of evolution?
I am hopeful that we are entering a wonderful time of spiritual awakening and religious change. To me, 1999’s Papal apology and the great strides that women and gays are making within Protestant denominations are signs that Christianity may indeed be moving with the times. The inroads American Buddhists are making into the more misogynist and myopic forms of Buddhist practice are also signs of evolution. Hopefully reforms in Islam will continue and change for the best. Because if current religious institutions do not consciously embrace evolution, they will become chapters in history books, in the same way earlier faiths have become.
I will say in closing before we see each other again in a few weeks at Omega, that our correspondence has enriched my belief. Your forbearance with the dark side of religion, and your passionate respect for its power to transform and heal, have made an impact on my thinking. I find myself more grateful for the religious teachings and communities that have made a difference in my life; I am more careful not to single out Western religions in terms of their negative impact on society; and I am keeping my eyes and ears open for the saints of the New Age! I’ll report immediately if I find one.
Sincerely,
Elizabeth