The religious spirit, luminous and diabolical
In writing this blog, I am constantly updating the “About” page (see the header at the top of this page) as I fine-tune/rewrite how I describe my relationship to Christianity. Yes, at heart, we are narcissistic beings!
Oh, there it is again: that last comment betrays a way of seeing things that goes to the core of the Christianity I have been embodying and trying to heal for many years, for all of my lifetime, it seems. That is, the view that self-love and self-reflection are inherently selfish, ‘bad’, ‘un-Christian’.
In the comments below, my latest version of defining my religious identity, I might have also described myself as a recovering Christian - slowly bringing my personal religious shadow, family shadow, and the shadow of the larger Christian collective, into the transforming light of awareness….
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I was baptized at St Anne’s, Mazagaon, in Mumbai, India, but the parish I most remember in my earliest years was All Saints (Anglican) Church, Malabar Hill. Our parents gave us an ecumenical (Roman Catholic and Anglican) upbringing in both India and (mainly) New Zealand. As an adult, I spent many formative years as a parishioner of St Luke’s in the City, Christchurch.
In writing this section, I am shocked to finally realize that the major New Zealand churches that have been formative for me - Our Lady Star of the Sea, Sumner (where I was confirmed), the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament, All Saints Anglican Church, Sumner, and St Luke’s Anglican Church (where I was married and had both by children baptized) - were all destroyed in the 2010 Canterbury Earthquakes.
In addition to being a Catholic Christian, in both Anglican and Roman traditions, I am a member of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), which is now my primary spiritual family and home.
But our soul is bigger than any one group or identity. And our soul, paradoxically, is constantly threatened, in ways both commonplace and genuinely diabolical, by a tendency for religions and religious groups to become defensive, insular, possessive, and bureaucratic. As Angelo Spoto has observed:
…[paradoxically] religions tend to keep individuals from religious experience. As religions become institutionalized, the power seems to shift from the numinous phenomena at their core to the institutions themselves as “custodians” of the numinous. (1)
In Christian terms, the kingdom or reign of God - the primary focus of Jesus’s ministry - is bigger than any one church, or, indeed, the Church. The Spirit - that is, God amongst us, within, the life-giver, ever holy - blows wherever she pleases.
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As we are denied what we are promised and most yearn for - “religious experience”, contact with the Divine, within and without - we tend to fill up in other sorts of ways: work addiction, sex addiction, food addiction, compulsive caring for others, an addiction to intellectual mastery, control, and knowledge, an addiction to smartphones and AI chatbots, a punitive and anxious obsessiveness with regard to bodies, appearance, status, religious practice etc.
My family’s religious shadow, which keeps turning up in my life in surprising and often painful ways, is to be ardent followers (heroic rescuing egos, martyrs) of what I call Burnout Christianity:
Jesus as the man-for-others/being-for-others, pursuing a life of self-sacrifice and dedication to those in greatest need; spotless perfection, rather than wholeness, as the image of the sanctified, holy life etc.; the self, being-for-self, caring-for-self, self-inquiry and reflection, loving oneself, advocating for and defending oneself, in moments, when is needed, as morally and spiritually suspicious and ‘bad’.
There are liberal and conservative, masculine and feminine, Catholic and Quaker, fundamentalist and liberation theology etc., versions of this. Burnout Christianity is truly ecumenical!
Some of the above aspects are not bad in themselves, or wholly bad. But without being balanced - or when they are divinized and their opposites are demonized - they make us lop-sided, famished, and even quite diabolical.
It is one thing for the Son of God to take the sins of the world onto himself, to descend into the underworld to save the condemned souls therein; it is quite another for missionaries, teachers, priests, social workers, psychotherapists, mothers and daughters, fathers and sons - ordinary human beings - to be fed a lop-sided theological and emotional diet, to be impoverished in terms of understanding religious symbols, and to be constantly seeking God without, in the experiences and symbols of other (famous, better) Christians and religious heroes.
He [Rabbi Hillel] used to say: “If I am not for me, who will be for me? And when I am for myself alone, what am I? And if not now, then when? (2)
References
(1) Angelo Spoto, review of John Dourley, The Illness That We Are.
(2) On this saying of Hillel, see https://voices.sefaria.org/sheets/35125.1?lang=bi ; and https://www.hillel.org/if-i-am-not-for-myself-who-will-be-for-me-a-discussion-for-developing-a-practice-of-self-care/
