There was a time when I would have identified myself as SBNR—spiritual, but not religious. Now I'm more SAR—spiritual and religious; sort of an esoteric Catholic, semi-Buddhaholic, potential mother fakir. Not sure how to pin it all down beyond it being part of a branch in raccoonology. I became disenchanted with being SBNR, soon realizing that if you don't have a real religion, then you'll manage to come up with a pretty crappy one.
I'll go along that some need to find their own road to Shangri-la, but when I was on that path I found it best to read the signs where the trails have been blazed by greater souls than myself. And in those moments I cynically believed those greater souls (saints, sages, seers, super slackers) didn't exist, then I'd just find another off ramp to perdition. By not committing to a tradition, I began to intuit that I'd be wise to take religion more seriously than the cradled lightweights who have the label—but not the heart (see: me in my formative years).
At present, I take the catholic in Catholicism seriously—meaning I don't see any dissonance with exploring other spiritual views or practices, as long as I remain centered around tradition. Even the Roman Catholic Church, while seemingly believed to be rigidly dogmatic by the unlearned, embraces the definition of catholic: which is to be all embracing, allowing for a wide variety of things. This is the notion that nothing is to be excluded, yet put in its proper order of “both/and.”
G.K. Chesterton once said that Catholicism keeps its beliefs “side by side like two strong colors, red and white...[yet] it has always had a healthy hatred of pink.” With the SBNR disposition, there is way too much pink for me. And pink drowns the polarity/paradox of truths into bland half-truths.
I recently read a book by George Weigel in which he mentions his discontents with a shallow ecumenicalism that began to permeate during his formative years (ecumenicalism more broadly today could include the SBNR ilk). What helped bring clarity to his dissonance was a 2-page document by some of the most influential thinkers in North America at the time—called “An Appeal for Theological Affirmation” (a.k.a. the Hartford Appeal). This document highlighted some of the biggest errors that are made once we move away from tradition, with beliefs such as:
- Modern thought is superior to all past form of understanding reality;
- Religious language refers to human experience and nothing else;
- All religions are equally valid;
- To realize one's potential and to be true to oneself is the whole meaning of salvation;
- The sole purpose of worship is to promote individual self realization and human community;
- Institutions and historical traditions are oppressive and inimical to our truly being human;
- The world must set the agenda for the Church;
- The struggle for a better humanity will bring the Kingdom of God;
- An emphasis on God's transcendence is at least a hindrance to... social concern and action; and
- The question of hope beyond death is irrelevant.
While these themes were written in 1975, they appear even more relevant today with the SBNR movement. While there may be an impulse with the SBNR follower to rebel against religion in order to return to the essence of the teaching, there is often a lack of spiritual adeptness that often leads to a confusing eclecticism. We can see how this confusion creates an incoherent narrative where God is made a silent partner, religious differences and institutions are marginalized, experience is elevated over metaphysical rigor and revelation, cultural trends and novelty are privileged over a well traveled lineage, and human achievement is given more reverence than the grace of divinity.
The Hartford Appeal turned this posture on its head when it claimed “We did not invent God; God invented us.” Therefore, it was not up to us to cherry pick what makes us feel good, or what allows us to continue with our lifestyle choices, or what doesn't make any demands of us.
It began by challenging the view that “modern thought is superior to all past forms of understanding reality,” such that “modern thought” stands in judgment on tradition. This provocation opens us to consider the merit of this bias. While we are in some ways more clever than our ancestors, it can easily be debated as to whether or not we come close to their depth of being. Not to mention, that the modern notion that reason trumps faith is a limited view; where true faith is intertwined and prior to reason so that the mind is not closed upon itself. Our ancestors often saw reason beyond being merely instrumental and logical; but instead drawing on the whole of intelligibility.
By claiming “All religions are equally valid,” the Hartford Appeal notes that this “fails to respect the integrity of other faiths” and that “Truth matters; therefore differences among religions are deeply significant.” While there may be an esoteric core that the SBNR follower is aiming at with respect to the religions, the unique interpretations and revelations concerning that essence still do matter.
Weigel says, “And while worship is personally and communally enriching, it's a fundamental mistake to assume that the only purposes of worship are “self-realization and human community.” Worship is a response to God's initiative. We do not worship God because it makes us feel good or more connected; “we worship God because God is to be worshiped,” and doing so arises out of the fundamental human desire to know, love, and adore God.” The SBNR follower is more apt to worship something imminent, magical, or goddess-like than anything transcendentally omnipotent.
The Hartford Appeal goes further to take on the propensity toward “modern thought” with the notion that “imperfect human beings cannot create a perfect society... God has his own designs which confronts ours.” The modern pursuit of liberation from all constraints, including death, becomes a dehumanizing endeavor as it obscures our destiny to be with God. The SBNR follower is playing the modern game with pagan toys, and in the end falls short by distorting or watering-down the teachings, discipline, and structures that truly can be life changing!
Instead, spirituality without religion becomes an insubstantial recreational attempt at “personal growth” that can be compartmentalized along with all the other current-day hobbyist pursuits. “No spiritual quest can progress very far without becoming religious” (May).
And so if we can't even master ourselves, how do we expect we can master the right sort of path for ourselves? Weigel notes: “It's not something we [can] make up for ourselves. It's something we can only receive as a gift.”
We are always living from and asserting ideas based on first principles, whether or not we are aware of what those may be. This is what first principles are: the axioms of our belief system, in which our belief system can never prove (“that's right!” says Gödel). Because first principles are not to be proven, but can only be confirmed!
For most of us, first principles operate in the background and may be inherited from tradition and common sense. As Edmund Burke pointed out, life would become impossible if we tried to think through every new situation from first principles from a blank slate, disregarding both our own experience and the wisdom of our culture.
Other aspects of first principles can only become to be known through an illative sense. This is John Henry Newman's notion as how we go about making primary judgments; not just from reason and logic, but many fragments of experience that distill into a single and unified conviction. This includes an accumulation of our sentiments, observations, tradition, imagination, intuitions, and instincts.
While these are deeper convictions, we can never have complete certainty of them. Besides, certainty never belongs to the mind. If we are blessed, we can be certain of Truth in our heart, but only have certitude (or sureness) once we speak of it. First principles have the ring of Truth, but are not Truth in itself.
Think of these principles like an asymptote—a line approaching a given curve, but never quite getting there while going on for infinity. All we can do is aim for some coherence that vibrates higher as we approach the horizon. Without coherence, we will falter from Truth even further. Poor principles, bad consequences.
This leads me to articulating my first principles that inform my life. I've taken these from a recent post by Edward Feser who states them so well; however, I did make some edits to massage these closer to my convictions. Here are the seven key principles:
1. The cosmos has a systematic unity, given by the divine that is both outside (transcendent) and within (immanent).
2. This unity reflects an explanatory hierarchy and in particular a “top-down” approach to explanation (as opposed to the “bottom-up” approach of naturalism), especially in the two key respects that the simple is prior to the complex and the intelligible is prior to the sensible.
3. The divine constitutes an irreducible explanatory category, and is to be conceived of in personal, as well as impersonal terms. The divine is relational and absolute—both triune and one.
4. The person also constitutes an irreducible explanatory category. We can't be reduced to nature or nurture.
5. Persons are part of the hierarchy and their happiness, as well as purpose, consists in recovering a lost position within it, in a way that can be described as “becoming like God.” [The quest, thus, has no external 'object,' but is reality itself becoming luminous for its movement from the ineffable, through the Cosmos, to the ineffable. — Eric Voegelin]
6. Moral and aesthetic value is to be analyzed by reference to this metaphysical hierarchy. The good and the beautiful are not relative, but universal. The divine is in all things, but to different degrees.
7. The epistemological order is contained with this metaphysical order. Truth is not relative, but universal. Once again, the divine is in all things, but to different degrees.
Assuming you were a materialist and relativist, your first principles would reverse many of these statements. Everything would be reducible to nature (or nurture), and there would be no hierarchy or systematic unity. And your principles would have no coherence to explain intelligibility or higher order/values.
If you were an pantheist, everything equally would be an immanent spirit. But without a transcendent, there would no distinctions around a higher order/values nor would there be any motivation for “becoming like God.” There would again be a lack a coherence, as the world would mostly be explained away as an undiscriminating divine oneness.
First principles matter! So as they say: as above, so below.
As an interesting exercise, I recently asked a group I meet with to come up with a new decade intention—sort of like a New Year's resolution with a significantly longer time span. I couldn't fairly ask others to consider this without looking at this for myself. I'm not particular fond of resolutions, since I see persons as part of an ongoing process. And to break up the intentions of our life's arc or teleology into discreet calendar years seems a bit absurd. Yet, there may merit in taking inventory of where we are in the moment, so we can become the people we were meant to be for eternity.
I've distilled some recent preoccupations around this “triple h” phrase of hope, humor, and homing in that I'd like to try to engage with as a practice over the next decade. I could have probably said these things mattered to me in my younger years, but they had a different flavor—often operating at a lower octave as the preoccupations of youth never allowed me to deepen their significance. Hope for me as a younger man, would have led me to dreams around achievements in career and relationships. My ideas around humor would have been limited to being gratified by satire or irony at another's expense. And if I was homing in on anything, it was just sharpening some skills to get affirmation or approval from others.
And if these concepts have a different meaning to me now, and going forward, I can truly thank that cliché of a good old fashion mid-life crisis. The things that worked in the past to preoccupy our deeper soul level wounds, don't work so well when you see time caving in on one's youthful zeal. We can be overcome by an existential dread and anguish, novel enthusiasm can begin to wane, and we can sense fractures in belief systems and passions that once gave us an identity. But with this dissonance, we can also feel a calling to go deeper while going through it. It's as if there is an invitation to change through the suffering, and not become static in one's being.
Looking at hope, its primary enemy is despair. Despair becomes this insidious posture that nothing will change, and that somehow God made things this way. It is one that I can feel creeping in often; where I can see my karmic ideas around my circumstances were meant to be. But looking at this from a different vantage point, I can see how prideful this is. Whatever despair I may feel is not God trying to crush me, but may actually be an avenue to higher virtue and a deeper way of being. In Catholic theology, hope is one of the three transcendental virtues, along with faith and love. Hope is grounded in faith meaning we need this hope to come from someplace beyond ourselves, and in time, it can lead us to a deeper love where our limited selves have been used up for some greater embrace. Whatever finite things we hope for will always be ephemeral, and eventually leave us unsatiated by a deeper longing. Moreover, hope may not be getting the things we want, but ultimately may need. As Václav Havel said: “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”
Humor is a quality and creative endeavor I admire in and with others. I recall an ex-girlfriend mentioned that she had a friend who couldn't decide whether to join a monastery or become a stand-up comedian. While I found the juxtaposition amusing, I also didn't see these choices as that far apart. I often can learn just as much about human nature from watching an act by Bill Burr or Dave Chappelle as listening to a monk's dharma. Moreover, the levity of good comedy lightens us up, and in the laughter we can feel an authentic moment of release that can bring us closer to God. While there is certainly a dark side to it, I still see that aspect as a wholesome revealing. It calls us to look within, and not take ourselves so seriously. It places light on the shadows of our humanity, and to take inventory of where these fallibilities reside in us. Life may be a human tragedy from one level, but can also be seen as a divine comedy from another. Humor can be a vehicle that gives us some distance from our adversities, bring us in to deeper communion with others in friendship, and draw us closer to a mysterious presence in our laughter.
I've probably been homing in on an unlimited longing for most of my life. When I was in my early twenties, I confronted my father after he attempted to give me life advice that there had to be more to life than work, family, and money. He said to me bluntly, “there isn't!” A dread overcame me, but there was still a part of me that wasn't buying it. I had to flail around for a while before I found some reliable fingers that were pointing towards that “more.” Once I got a taste, I knew that to be at home in life, I would need to home in on Truth. This became my quest, and while it still fires with many cylinders, I am more aware of a spiritual dryness that still overcomes me. Part of this has resulted with too many preoccupations that lack significance and take me away from a deeper yearning. I recall reading Mark Manson's The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck a couple years back. His variation on a Buddhist insight is not that we should say f--- it to life, but f--- it to the things that don't matter in life. Sometimes this requires courage as it requires going against the cultural grain. Other times, it's just a matter of having some will to avoid the vices of unhealthy escapism and narcissistic gratification. Moreover, I feel it has to be a real surrender and repentance. As I get older, the stakes get higher and I can no longer play the god of my life. I need to give over to the mystery, and allow myself to be guided as to what I am to become.
The practice of hope sustains me when I fail at this homing in, and humor gives me permission to not take myself so serious in the process. I can only home in on the mystery when I remain vulnerable to life and fall in to the love that truly guides me; and while this may be a decade long intention on my part, there will always be a place of unknowingness as to how this unfolds beyond whatever I may intend.