Where is true religion?

Where is true religion?

Some notes (adapted and enhanced) from a novel by Tom Robbins (sorry, do not have the title of
by Paschal Baute, pastoral psychologist and storyteller.

Early religions were like muddy ponds with lots of foliage.
Concealed there, the fish of the soul could splash and feed.

Eventually, however, religions were politicized and taken over by the Powers That Be (PTB) When this happened religions became aquariums. Then, hatcheries. From farm fingerling to frozen fish stick is a short swim.

In religions supported by PTB, spirituality and radical response to grace could not be encouraged nor affirmed because these led to too much individuality and autonomy, splashing too high or too vigorously, and therefore threatened the status quo.

Mystics were always suspect as "out of control," either ignored. silenced, punished or in earlier times: put to death. If they heard voices that did not come from the PTB, they had to be dangerous and eliminated, like Joan of Arc, and many others. Or Galileo, restricted to his home for the last 15 years of his life. Or many other scholars who gave up or destroyed their work when they learned that the official church disapproved of it. Organized religion has always be fearful of enthusiasm. In some cases rightly so, given the vast harm done to multitudes during the religious wars of Europe, the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the fanaticism of today.

Of course, religion's omnipresent defenders are swift to point out the many comforts it provides for the sick, the weary, and the disappointed, the least, lost, last and lame.

True enough. But God/dess is not simply a therapist. The Divine Mystery does not dawdle in the comfort zone or merely provide hospitality! If one yearns to see the face of the Divine, one must break out of the aquarium, escape the fish farm, to go swim up wild cataracts, dive in deep fjords, confront the Tremendum Mysterium. One must explore the labyrinth of the reef, risk the depths of the strange, befriend the shadows of running waters.

How limiting, how insulting to think of God/dess as a benevolent warden, an absentee hatchery manager who imprisons us in the "comfort" of artificial pools, where official intermediaries sprinkle our restrictive waters with sanitized flakes of processed nutriment which we are taught to revere, and regard such feeding as the epitome of spiritual bonding, as the ultimate.


A longing for the Divine is intrinsic in Homo sapiens. (For all we know it is innate in squirrels, dandelions, and diamond rings, as well). Maybe we approach the Divine by risking faith, by enlarging our souls and illumining our minds–by discovering my own, my very own authentic spirituality. Could it be that is the reason we are here, to discover who in this vast mystery I am? . . . standing between the vastness of the cosmos and my own deep and erotic longing for the infinite, and my wandering searching? Who am I?

But such soulful search and activity runs counter to the aspirations of commerce and politics. Politics is the science of domination, while persons in the process of enlargement and illumination are notoriously difficult to control. Therefore, to protect its vested interests, politics usurped religion a very long time ago. Emperors bought off bishops with special paid appointments. Kings bought off priests and monks with land, adornments and endorsements. Together, they drained the shady ponds and replaced them with fish tanks. The walls of the tanks were constructed of ignorance and superstition, held together with fear. It was not important that the farm-bred fish understand anything or even know what they were doing. The vernacular was not necessary.

After the tanks were in place, nobody talked much about soul anymore. Instead, they talked about spirit, or about Spirit. Soul is hot and heavy, messy and sensual. Spirit is cool, abstract, detached, cognitive. Soul is connected to the earth, its waters and gases. Spirit is connected to the sky, concepts of heaven and talk of transcendence. Out of the earthly gases springs fire. Firepower. Empowerment.

It has been observed that the logical extension of all politics is war. Once religion became political, the exercise of it, too, could be said to lead sooner or later to war. "War is hell." History unwaveringly reveals the political uses of religious belief for control, domination, and oppression: war against soul. Thus religious belief propels us, we could say, particularly for devout unquestioning believers, straight to hell. Today also. Fundamentalism is the birth mother of terrorism and religious intolerance.

Each modern religion has boasted that it and it alone is on speaking terms with the Deity, and its adherents have been quite willing to die--or kill-- to support its presumptuous claims.) [a.k.a. kill abortionists for Christ, a.k.a., the blending of "religion" and politics in Ireland, Bosnia, a.k.a. Islamic terrorists, a.k.a. American fundamentalists who won't even talk to other Christians, or Catholic conservatives listening to Limbaugh who have it Right: "Liberalism is a Sin".

Not every silty bayou could be drained, of course. The soulfish that bubbled and snapped in the few remaining ponds were tagged "mystics." They were regarded as mavericks, exotic, scary, inferior, to be avoided. If they splashed too high, they were thought to be threatening and in need of extermination.

The fearful flounders in the tanks, now psychologically dependent upon addictive spirit flakes, had forgotten that once upon a time they, too, had been mystical. They had forgotten that a mystic is not a special kind of person, but every person is a special kind of mystic, a soul-fish that has lost its way.

Religion is nothing but the attempt to institutionalize mysticism, to make it "safe" for others and PTB. The catch is, mysticism does not lend itself to institutionalization. The moment we attempt to organize mysticism, we destroy its essence. Organized religion, then, is mysticism in which the mystical has been diminished, teflon coated, suppressed or killed.

The function of professional theologians is to demystify religion, to make it sane, rational and believable, while at the same time, to affirm a special class of persons to function as intermediaries of understanding and grace between the Divine and common folk. When they graduate from the seminary they cannot talk the language of the people, but they are filled with concepts of their teachers and academicians. They have become fish farm management staff. Most seminarians are less able to talk to and with common folk as the result of their new professional education.

"Concepts create idols; only wonder understands anything." Gregory of Nyssa in the Fourth Century.

Organized religion has become, by its protection of the status quo, a paramount contributor to human misery. Organized Religion no more realizes that it reads Scripture only through the lenses of its own culture, power and privilege than did Caucasian religious people read the bible finding support for slavery for 19 centuries. Organized religion has been called the opium of the masses. The question today is whether it has become a cyanide to the development of authentic disciples, to genuine spirituality, to the soul required to renew society, to the development of radical discipleship needed so urgently in today's world. Where today, in today's churches, do we find this personal search encouraged, aided, supported, enhanced, developed? Where? Where can we find an encouragement to question, to explore, to discover for oneself? Where do we even begin to look for sojourners and the mentors we need?

Bernard Haring, the Catholic theologian, or was it Karl Rahner, said that the church of the future would only be saved by its mystics. From farm fingerling to frozen fish stick is too short a short swim for those called to search for their own spirituality, to love Wisdom where-ever they find it today.

Meditation: what strikes you in this short essay?
How much risk does your faith involve? What does it cost you?