Bound
Together
Fr.
Tony’s Midweek Message
January
2, 2019
I
overheard a young couple talking this morning on the radio. She told of her discomfort at coming of age
at puberty, and how awkward everything felt.
He replied by saying, “Well, I was raised religious, so I always felt I
was going to Hell.”
Yikes. I had inadvertently glimpsed into, I think,
the main reason for the “spiritual but not religious” label many Pacific North
Westerners apply to themselves: being
“religious” means for many self loathing and condemning rejection of our own
natures.
The
word “religion” comes from the Latin re-ligio,
or firmly binding together. It
originally came into use to describe the constraints that faith puts upon
us. Unfortunately, for some this has been
reduced to a list of “thou shalt nots” including a whole bunch of activities
that evolution has made pleasurable for us, like even moderated alcohol
consumption, enjoying food, and sexual bonding.
“Religion” thus conceived is a prude’s game, a stick with which to beat
up on oneself and bully others for enjoying simple pleasures and activities
that cause no one harm.
Of
course, many otherwise innocent pleasures can be subject to abuse: overindulgence
in food or drink, promiscuity without commitment or relationship, or even
exploitation of others. Our faith indeed
proscribes such abuse. But if this is
conceived of as a matter of on-or-off pure/impure, clean/unclean,
virginal/sluttish, or spirit/flesh rather than a matter or relational wholeness
and health, we have reduced our faith to the bad “religion” my young friend had
rejected as part of growing up and learning to become a healthy adult.
When
Jesus in the Gospels says that it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles,
but—like lying, abuse, and exploitation—what comes out of it, he was teaching
that the ties that bind in religion are not about purity codes of behavior
that, once violated, will get you thrown into hell. They are about having integrity of heart and
how we treat each other. As James 1:27 teaches, undiluted and genuine religion is to take care of orphans and widows in their suffering and
to keep the world about us from corrupting us.
The constraints our faith puts on us
are all summed up in Jesus’ word: love
God for all your worth, and love those about you every bit as much as you love
yourself. Living into this means caring
for each other, treating others as we want to be treated, and taking our own
preferences as no more important than the preferences of those about us.
If this is how we see our faith’s
constraints, then the spiritual is the religious, as vice versa. The ties that bind us in religion are the
ties that bind us together, as beloved and loving children of one parent. They are not burdensome, but joyful. As Jesus said, “My yoke is easy, and my
burden really nothing at all.”
Grace and Peace,
Fr. Tony+
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