rarely religious

It can be dangerous to put away your religion. Things slip away when you drown the fish and look towards something beyond the symbols of the transcendent. It's just easier wrapping your hand around the cross on your neck when things get tough. Worthless church time, however numbing and vacant of life changing power, has religious value. How people judge you without knowing you is powerful stuff. Being spiritual without having to pay that price is intoxicating. We all want "instant karma," whatever form that takes.

It's the affirmation of the Western World: "I'm not religious, I'm spiritual." What's ironic is that what seems to be a spiritual activity in our culture is the most basic religious activity in another. Prayers to Allah? I like the bowing and the wailing mullah, but I have a feeling that it's rigid religion for many of those folks bending towards Mecca. It must be a hassle taking care of your hair if you're a Buddhist, and how do you keep the outfits so Orange? I especially like that ash marking on the foreheads of Hindu believers. These all seem spiritual to me, but they are probably less so for believers raised in those faiths. Even meditation and mantras can be boring and repetition, I imagine.

Which isn't to say that you can't hold these exercises in a spiritual way, focusing on divine power. Calling something spiritual cuts through all religions and religious belief systems. We find the spiritual in the shadow of the religious, hopefully somehow connected to it.

Christianity is an especially unspiritual religion, prone to religious exercise more than most. It's probably because the Apostle Paul hijacked the faith on the road to Damascus and opened the doors for the Gentiles. We Gentiles really screwed up Christianity. In came Greek thinking and Roman pragmatism and out went all contact with the Old Testament. All that by the end of the First Century. Messianic Jews were in abundance for fifty years, with their emphasis on action, immediate thinking, and a strong sense of how God had worked in the past.

But then, as Pope Benedict the umteenth noted recently, Western Civilization saw a fundamental world changing union -the marriage of Greek philosophy and Christianity. How can that marriage be good for Spirituality? You can't get transcendent with Plato or meditate on the words of Aristotle. The purity of Christianity spirituality was soiled by Greek thinking: by hyper rationalism, passivity, a need for balanced thinking and the impossibility of putting together the dynamic tension of Jesus and the New Testament. The miracles that are at the heart of the New Testament are disparaged by Greek thinking. It took a Danish theologian to begin the freeing of Christianity from Greek thinking, and existentialism has broken down much of our need to operate in strict philosophical and intellectual confines.

Unfortunately, the tipping point of Christianity is towards religion. If you want to be a spiritual Christian in the West, with an intimate, ever present relationship with a personal, living God, you have to work at it. An extraordinary Church can help; much time in prayer, meditation and spiritual writings is essential; a small group of like minded people makes a different.

But, in the end, most Western Christians end up religious, dulled by the rhythm of life. It's just what happens.

It's what I struggle with each day.