Let us reflect a moment on the word religion. The Latin, religio, denotes obligation, bond, reverence, while religare means “to bind.” Hence this word, which has taken so much flack as we begin the 21st century, means to bind us together in bonds of obligation and reverence. And while we still seem alright with the ideals of reverence and community, nothing seems more terrifying to us as the idea of being obligated. Indeed in this age of not-committal language, we go so far out of our way to avoid any connotation of obligation, which we now take to automatically mean oppression.
We are all free-agents, free floating between ideals. On occasion, when we like an ideal, or a ritual, a symbol, a god so much that we pluck it from the ether and it becomes part of our personal spirituality. So we become “kinda of christain,” or “kinda buddhists,” or “kinda wiccan.” In this spiritual questing the individual selects those aspects of a belief system that resonate with him/her (the “choice cuts” if you will) and all those selections come together in the individual, which then becomes the only way to relate to others: on an individual basis. All these kindas are the result of the same sort of individualistic approach that can only be practiced in a society that has a consumer relationship to eternal truths. Where is the community in this? Where is the other? Where is our neigbour whom our Lord has commanded us to love as we love ourselves?
We want to be spiritual, but on our terms. We order our spirituality from Ikea, it’s the latest fad, the pre-fab spirituality. Of course this type of approach to the inner life is only worth as much as the accessories that come with it, and one need only look at what the flatscreen as done to the tube to realize its ultimate destination.
Gandhi knew this. He understood exactly what he was talking about when he named worship without sacrifice as the seventh deadly sin of the modern age. That word, sacrifice, (which has also become a taboo of the postmodern era) means to “make holy.” When we worship we sacrifice ourselves. We offer to God the sacrifice of thanksgiving, and limit ourselves so that we too can be made holy under the bonds of obligation that we surrender to in faith that the Lord’s will may be done through us.
This is what it means to be a sacramental people, and it is a great liberty to live in limitation. It is within boundaries that the soul flourishes. As the French theological Jacque Ellul has said “the more narrow the canyon the more fierce the current.” This can be a bitter pill for the North American palette as we understand limitation to mean a restriction of freedom, an imposition to the multiplicity of potential opinions and experimentation that we are free to invoke. But anyone who goes to the supermarket without a list knows they’re setting themselves up for a longer, more arduous time as they will face the paralyzing reality of having unlimited opinions.
Think of going to buy toothpaste and being surrounded with 32 different brands! The consumer standing before the line up weighing the pros and cons of minty-fresh to organic fennel. We are burdened by a thousand petty opinions that typifies our age as the age of anxiety, where all opinions are open to us and we are left alone with them, free to be ruled by choice. This is the alienation of the individual in the marketplace of a commercialized spirituality. It is a freedom that sucks the soul out of you as it means to live in constant re-evaluation, forever looking at the menu while you starve to death.
Consider this during your Lenten practice: that you are practicing a freedom from want as opposed to the freedom to want. As Bartholomew, the Ecumenical Patriarch of the Orthodox Church, has written “fasting implies a sense of freedom. Fasting is a way of not wanting, of wanting less, and of recognizing the want of others…[it] involves the process of absorbing pain and transforming it into renewed hope. It ultimately implies focusing on what really matters, prioritizing what one values, and acquiring an attitude of responsiveness and responsibility.”
This is the great challenge issued to us Christian North Americans, to be in this marketplace of spirituality but not of it. We have such an opportunity to offer guidance and clarity to those who are genuinely seeking a relationship with God. We can do this because we have a history, a practice, a gift of discipline that has been passed down through the ages by the handmaidens of Christ. We have the gift freedom to offer this angst ridden world, and we will be judged by how we have withheld it from those in desperate need of it.
