I don’t hold to a lot of dogma about religion. My first tenet is that all of this, every set of religious beliefs, every bit of philosophy, all the learnings of our elders, is made up. As indeed is everything. (Made up != not real, of course, but “real” is subject to shifting definitions and I’m not going to attempt that here.)
What I mean by made up is that it doesn’t matter whether all our subjective realities add up to a singular, unassailable reality. (They don’t.) What matters is that when you strip away everything we think we know, we seem to still be here, existing, together. So we need to figure out how to treat each other, because that doesn’t seem to be something we can avoid.
At its best, I think religion is an ongoing dialogue about how we treat one another. I think divinity is something we choose to participate in. Divinity is here, all around us. We make it as we go by the ways we approach the world. When we love each other well, as fellow beings on this planet, we create divinity.
I have participated in Christian churches in the past because that’s the culture I grew up in. I’m not attending one right now, but any churches I take part in now? Same deal. My relationship with the idea of Jesus is complicated. So Christianity is not inevitable for me. (At the risk of needing asbestos undies, I’m gonna say I see a lot of religious communities kinda like dogs that look at your finger instead of where you’re pointing.)
But it matters to me to be part of a community of people striving to treat humanity better and interrogate our own humanity. That doesn’t have to be a religious community. But church is where I have consistently found myself wanting to be a better human toward my fellow humans, and I value that.
It’s an odd thing, because I have experienced and often continue to experience church as a hurtful, exclusionary place. Because I don’t consider myself a Christian, per se. Because the rest of my identities (barring my whiteness, which has never had to be uncomfortable) have been placed at odds with achieving full humanity in the eyes of so many churchgoers.
I know a lot of people who don’t have casual feelings about church. A lot of former believers for whom a nondogmatic, expansive relationship with religion has been made impossible. I don’t think most Christian churches encourage that kind of flexibility. The word devotion gets used so frequently for a reason.
I don’t have a neat conclusion. Still looking for a moral and spiritual place to rest. Still connecting with folks who feel as I do about the moral imperatives at stake. Still unsure whether church serves that purpose for me, but it might be my least worst option. God and I will continue to have long conversations about the degree to which we believe in one another. But I will still look for divinity everywhere.
Called 