Andrew Sullivan has a post today on "Reverent Agnosticism", quoting A. J. Jacobs—"Whether or not there is a God, I think there's something to the idea of sacredness."
Sullivan writes:
And there are times when intelligent believers, in periods of doubt or just spiritual drought, pray without assurance the God is truly there; or attend Mass or other services and feel and see nothing. But they still show up; and they still pray: unsure but still aware that what is beyond us will not always be clear to us, and the the struggle to believe is as important as the achievement. If this is "reverent agosticism," then it is another phrase for thinking faith. J.K. Rowling speaks to it in the Harry Potter books. Here's a recent quote of hers, debunking the notion that somehow her work is anti-Christian. It isn't. It's just not fundamentalist. Money quote:"The truth is that, like Graham Greene, my faith is sometimes that my faith will return. It’s something I struggle with a lot. On any given moment if you asked me [if] I believe in life after death, I think if you polled me regularly through the week, I think I would come down on the side of yes — that I do believe in life after death. [But] it’s something that I wrestle with a lot. It preoccupies me a lot, and I think that’s very obvious within the books."
This takes a bit of untangling, but in the end it leads to something that's been on my mind for some time.
The church, in the broad sense—all of its various incarnations over two centuries—has had a great deal of influence on thinking about matters spiritual and moral. The result is a cultural tendency to accept, more or less, the following equation:
Religion=Faith=Belief=God=Life-after-death=Prayer and meditation=Reverence=Spirituality=Sacradness
Which is taken to be the opposite of:
Secular=Reason=Evidence=Atheism=No afterlive=No Prayer=No Reverence=Rejection of the Spiritual=Materialism
No rationale is given for this point of view—we just breathe it in with the culture.
But the world does not divide this way.
There are many people who believe in God, but are part of no religion; have faith, but no religious beliefs; reverence, without prayer or meditation; spirituality, without God.
More importantly, there are many who have a sense of the sacred without believing in God, who meditate without praying, who combine faith and reason—or spirituality and materialism.
So, when Andrew Sullivan leaps from Jacobs comment that there might be such a thing as sacredness without God, to the idea that "reverent agnosticism" (Jacob's term) means "struggling to believe", he's assuming the first equation—he finds it impossible to separate the ideas of "sacred" and "God", and thus must reduce a "reverent agnostic" to a "thinking believer".
Llikewise, Rowling equates faith with a belief in life after death.
The same set of assumptions, by the way, are made by many atheists, who automatically believe they must reject any sense of the spiritual if they recognize that there is no hard evidence of the existence, in the physical world, of God.
I began questioning those equations while I was still a believer—noticing how unwarranted the assumptions we made were.
Now that I stand on the other side, I find it offensive to be told that I can't have a spiritual life without believing that gods exist. I find it offensive whether I am being told that by a Christian or an atheist. The spiritual dimension is a natural part of human life—and I mean that as opposed to supernatural.
I do not have to posit another, quasi-physical, world, filled with God and angels and demons and quasi-material "souls" in order to find life or friendship holy. I don't have to cast aside reason or empiricism to have a rich and meaningful inner life.
I've been trying, recently, to find a name for this point of view. I played with "spiritual atheism", but the term implied that one had to be an atheist to participate, and I don't think that's true.
I've settled on "natural spirituality", which is a term others have used, in various, and sometimes conflicting ways—so I'll define what I mean by it here.
Natural Spirituality is "natural" because:
- It is rooted in the natural, rather than the supernatural world,
- It is rooted in the wisdom tradition, which is more natural to humans than the legal tradition,
- It accepts, and approves of human nature,
- It is based in the valuing, and encouraging of the individuals nature,
- It is parallel to natural philosophy—the name early scientists gave to science—in its independence from the authority of power.
- Email me if you can think of other reasons.
Natural Spirituality is "spiritual" because:
- It recognizes that we live within the realm of consciousness—of spirit—as well as the material realm,
- It recognizes the spiritual side of our experience as a reality, without requiring it to be either supernatural or an illusion,
- It understands that the spiritual, though intimately connected to the material, is a legitimate point of view,
- It reserves judgment on the nature of the spiritual, and of its connection to the physical, rather than simply writing it off.
- And other reasons, which you can email me about if you like.
Natural spirituality is the experience of watching a sunset, the choice to live with integrity, the process of finding out who you really are. It's the sum of our life's constant encounters with mystery.
It isn't owned by any particular tradition, it can't be denied except by willful ignorance, and it is every humans birthright.
At least, that's what I think today.
