If spirituality is water, religion is…..
If spirituality is water, religion is…..
As I listened to Krista Tippet ask this of Pico Iyer (both of whom I admire greatly) I shouted out my own answer to the query before Pico got a chance to respond. Pico said, “If spirituality is water, religion is tea.” He then explained that he was borrowing this idea from His Holiness the Dalai Lama who said that kindness is water and religion is tea; meaning that kindness is essential while religion is a luxury.
I like what Pico had to say, though I find the explanation to miss the point. If spirituality is water and religion is tea, a way to flavor water, then water is what’s true and tea is a matter of opinion. You may prefer mint tea to jasmine, while I may prefer jasmine to mind, but our preferences are beside the point. The point is that we both drink water. Water is what is essential. Tea is a secondary.
Now to my own response shouted at the radio: “If spirituality is water, religion is ice!” Water is fluid; ice is solid. Water flows; ice clogs. Water seeks the lowest point; ice doesn’t move at all. For me spirituality is the free flowing happening of God in, with, and all things, while religion at its best is a still photograph, a moment of God frozen in time and mistaken for eternity.
I am not opposed to religion, but I am devoted to spirituality. I am not interested in dogma, doctrine, and sacred dos and don’ts; I am interested in what is happening as it is happening here and now.
For me spirituality is wild because God is wild, while religion is controlled and controlling because its God is tame and tamable. In fact I suspect that taming God is what religion is all about. We want a God we can control even as we pretend this God is in control. We control God through magic, ritual, and right belief. And when the wild God blasts our illusion of control to smithereens, we redouble our efforts at control.
As we Jews move into the month of Av and prepare to commemorate Tisha b’Av, the 9th of Av when the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed first in 586 BCE and again in 70 CE (this year Tisha b’Av falls on July 25-26) we are offered a chance to abandon the fetish to Temple and Priesthood, the core of our efforts to tame God, and learn to live with the untamed and untamable reality that is God.
Sadly we won’t do any such thing. Instead we will mourn the Temple’s destruction.