What Spirituality? Wisdom is like heroin to the Church

For the last two weeks I’ve been floating around different faith houses. It has become apparent how taboo spirituality is in religion. These places are institutions used by civilization to control spirituality. It is surprising how little spirituality is actually allowed.

Pick your religion and you get the same thing. Just don’t tell them something spiritual that is outside of their script. The patronizing attitudes from the spiritual professionals are quite amusing. As much as the Church, for example, tries to show that it can compete with the secular pain relief culture, using a revamped comforting-and-nurturing God, it really hasn’t dealt with its conformity issues. Society has moved on, and as much as the Church tries to get ‘hip’ and ultra-academic, it fundamentally does not understand our culture’s ‘yuck’ towards it. Human-centered spirituality is too small. Science has shown how much there is from understanding reality as inert matter. We have a taste for what is outside of the human, and this makes us inquisitive on the spiritual side of things. Religion thinks it is focused on God. But it is only concerned about one thing, the human.

Secularism is the child of Christianity. They share the same view that reality is only (God), humans and objective matter. The Church provides little spiritual reality outside of this. It is no wonder Western society threw up its hands. After 2000 years and the best minds working on the problem, it still has not answered the fundamental question: why was Jesus so confusing? The Church thinks it has. And what it doesn’t know, well, no one is supposed to know. Right now it feels that it has fended off 200 years of attack by science. The Church remains relatively intact. But even ministers trust a doctor over prayer to cure them.

Spirituality is such a taboo in religion, as it is in secularism. Ministers have an issue just defining ‘spirit.’ It is simply consciousness. We cannot see our thoughts. Why would one think they could see God? The Almighty is defined by the services he renders to humans. But unseen power is threatening, and we all have issues with domination. The record of abusive domination by power in the past makes us shriek at the Church. We prefer to be dominated by money, and the goodies offered by what it can provide. The marketplace gives us the belief that the elite have to treat us like an equal, or we will deprive it of its only power, money. So nice to be seduced. Shopping malls are so sexy. At least it produces tangible results. Business and science are based on numbers. We replaced an invisible God with invisible mathematics to base our survival system on. Reality is what we can control through an equation.

The last thing anyone wants to investigate scientifically is consciousness. Humans do not want to be reduced to a pile of chemicals firing in the brain. That would make us objects like the rest of reality. Heaven forbid. We’ll put our beloved dog out of its misery. But we will keep a human vegetable alive for decades. The only thing that is sacred anymore is human death. And we hide death in hospitals, funeral parlors, and slaughterhouses, and on TV. Out of sight, out of mind. Get on with life.

Human consciousness appears to be the last frontier, a taboo of sorts. Psychology is allowed to treat components of how we interpret our emotions. Like the environment, it is believed our problems can be solved like fixing a car engine. And we see through the meaning that religion is trying to create in us. Society has adopted the good stuff from Christianity and left the fluff behind. We are the best facsimile of Jesus’ heaven-on-earth yet devised: we heal the sick, few are hungry because of prosperity, and we can even bring the dead back to life on the operating table. We did it, not through ‘wisdom,’ but through knowledge. The mind has done a good job, while Christianity navel-gazed at ‘the heart.’ But this mysterious ‘awareness’ that we have gets little attention popularly. And we have been trained to look for the cause-and-effect of phenomena. If it can’t fit in to our reasoning, it is dismissed as an anomaly. Defining and quantifying consciousness remains slippery. We’ll figure it out later. Our concern is controlling what is outside of awareness.

What doesn’t fit is ignored. This is much like religion. In most mainline Churches, spirituality must conform to one of two criteria. A prayer is considered answered by the coincidence of events that form to solve a problem. The other is having a question answered by a word or phrase popping into one’s head, and suddenly everything makes sense. Outside of these, you have to study the Bible to encounter God. Anything else is threatening.

Wisdom in the Church is like heroin. It misinterpreted one of the Ten Commandments that ordered we have no other God but God. In all practical measure, religion took this to mean that there is no spirit world. It spent a couple thousand years wiping out all other spiritual knowledge in its path. What was left was merely wisdom directly from God/Jesus. The spirit world consists of only four units: God, Jesus, souls and the devil. Anything else defaults to the latter. That’s all there is outside of the ‘dust’ of molecules around us. Not much invisible consciousness around, which is good. We couldn’t take any more threats!

Wisdom is but a word or phrase that seems to blossom into meaning on its own. Civilized religion feels the need to control the meaning. One bit of wisdom is like a weed. It just keeps growing and spreading. It is strong stuff. But institutions are prisons, busy making their gardens the way they like. Theology is about making nice, neat, uniform rows in the field of spirituality. And without a greater context about what reality is, the dust of ‘Creation’ is like an empty field ready to plant. The power of meaning must be controlled, before it controls us. And wisdom, by its nature, can conflict with our own version of the meaning of the world. It is powerful. How else could a bunch of fishermen around Jesus go out and transform the psyche of the Western world?

But that’s all the Church has. It doesn’t know anything else about spiritual reality. It is only God, humans, and inert matter. Anything outside of this is taboo. As alternative spiritualities grow in favor, the Church is still scratching its head. How does it get free and independent individuals to buy back in to its narrow story? That concentrated 'kick' of wisdom from that one biography of Jesus? Does it suspect people realize it is limited, even with the Son of God in its stable? First science went off to discover that humans were not the center of the universe. Now many are finding out the same spiritually. Religion has not faced this simple fact. It would lose its authority. And it has no idea how to explore spiritual reality outside of humans and dust, even if it did.