Being correct.
In her book titled, Called to Question, Joan Chittister defines religions as "systems designed to lead humans to the divine." She presents a thought provoking concept regarding religion and spirituality in the following writing:
"Religion is the mooring of the soul. Spirituality is its lodestone. Religion is, at best, external. Spirituality is the internal distillation of this external witness to the divine. Spirituality is what galvanizes us to fill up the lack we feel within us. It is the desire for wholeness that evades us. It is the burning need to find the more.
The very purpose of religion is to enable us to step off into the uncharted emptiness that is the spiritual life, freely but not untethered. We have under our feet the promise of the tradition that formed us and the disciplines that shaped our souls. We can then wander through the pantheon of spiritual traditions freely, going deeper and deeper into every question from every direction. In the end, then, we become more, not less, of what we ourselves know to be our own religious identity."
I don’t know why it is that people who believe in and want and live by mystery and ambiguity and people who believe in and want absolutes and unitary truth cannot share God.
The Bible is filled with metaphors and ambiguity, contradictions which require us to decide matters of faith and morals for ourselves, but with God’s help.
Others see scripture and church etc. as defining for us more completely what we should accept in faith and morals. These two attitudes are not opposites, they are on a continuum.
Does unity trump orthodoxy or does orthodoxy trump unity.
Why is it in religion that we need to deny the value of someone elses’ religion/piety/spirituality?
"Religion is the mooring of the soul. Spirituality is its lodestone. Religion is, at best, external. Spirituality is the internal distillation of this external witness to the divine. Spirituality is what galvanizes us to fill up the lack we feel within us. It is the desire for wholeness that evades us. It is the burning need to find the more.
The very purpose of religion is to enable us to step off into the uncharted emptiness that is the spiritual life, freely but not untethered. We have under our feet the promise of the tradition that formed us and the disciplines that shaped our souls. We can then wander through the pantheon of spiritual traditions freely, going deeper and deeper into every question from every direction. In the end, then, we become more, not less, of what we ourselves know to be our own religious identity."
I don’t know why it is that people who believe in and want and live by mystery and ambiguity and people who believe in and want absolutes and unitary truth cannot share God.
The Bible is filled with metaphors and ambiguity, contradictions which require us to decide matters of faith and morals for ourselves, but with God’s help.
Others see scripture and church etc. as defining for us more completely what we should accept in faith and morals. These two attitudes are not opposites, they are on a continuum.
Does unity trump orthodoxy or does orthodoxy trump unity.
Why is it in religion that we need to deny the value of someone elses’ religion/piety/spirituality?
posted by Thomas Van Brunt | 9:26 AM
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