This week’s brief reflection is a follow-up to last week’s. A number of people have asked me to clarify the meaning of faith and how it is related to religion. Yes I have touched on this in the past, but perhaps it is good to review it for followers of my blog new and old.

 

FAITH IS AN EXPERIENCE: In the Faith Experience people do have an experience of the Divine, often described under various names: God, Creator, Father, Mother, Allah, the Ground of Being, etc. To be open to the faith experience, we need quiet and reflective time.

We are often so busy doing that we neglect simply being.

Sometimes people cannot put a name on their deepest human experiences. I still remember the observation by Dag Hammarskjöld (1905 –1961) who served as the second Secretary-General of the United Nations from April 1953 until his death in a plane crash in September 1961. He wrote: “God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder the source of which is beyond all reason.”

And these days I resonate more and more with the words of Karl Rahner (1904-1984) one of the most influential Roman Catholic theologians of the 20th century: “I must confess to you in all honesty that for me God is and has always been absolute mystery. I do not understand what God is. No one can. We have intimations, and inklings. We make faltering attempts to put mystery into words. But there is no word for it, no sentence for it.”   

BELIEF: Belief is the attempt to put into words the meaning of our Faith Experience. Belief is really theology which is “faith seeking understanding.”

RELIGION: Religion is an attempt to interpret and systematize Belief. Any religion is a system of beliefs and practices that helps people understand and live their faith experience. Religion therefore gives people: rituals, ritual places, ritual  leaders, sacred books, sacred places, sacred days and seasons, codes of morality and creedal statements of belief. Religion provides helpful aids – MEANS – that point people to the Divine. That is good and proper. But religion is not Faith. Sometimes religion gets distorted and very religious people can be very ungodly. And all religions go through a four-stage life cycle.

RELIGION LIFE-CYCLE:

(1) They begin with the charismatic foundational state, e.g. the primitive Christian community.

Here men and women had such a vivid lived awareness of the Faith experience that they had little need for institutional structure. They relied on do-it-self and charismatic ways of praying, speaking, and celebrating. Men and women, who were local leaders, presided at Eucharist. It all seemed so very natural and normal.

(2) Then when people started thinking and asking  “how do we safeguard what we have and how do we pass this on to the next generation?” the religion entered stage two.

This is the stage of institutionalization: important statements like the  Gospels are written down, set ways of praying like official sacramental rituals and gestures are established, and properly authorized leaders are established. Ordination was then created as a kind of quality control mechanism to make certain that the Christian leaders are competent and reliable. Ordination, please note, was not originally about power over people and not about sacramental power!

(3) After some time, the religion enters stage three. I call it the stage of self-focused short-sightedness.

The institutional religion becomes so self-centered and so self-protective that it becomes less a means and path to the Divine and more and more the OBJECT itself of religious devotion. This stage comes close to idolatry.

In stage 3, the religious institution and certain institutional leaders, become religious objects and are treated like IDOLS. People get so involved in acts of religious veneration that they miss or distort the Divine.

(4) When stage three happens, the only solution is REFORMATION.

Reformation demands a serious effort to regain the vision and focus on the Divine – the spirit and life of stages one and two. To recapture the vigor and creative enthusiasm of stages one and two and create new structures and theological explanations to guide contempory believers.

All religions need periodic reformations. The old saying in Latin ecclesia semper reformanda est was true yesterday and is certainly true today: “the church must always be reformed.”