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All Things Considered Commentary
National Public Radio
Spirituality and Religion
Ellen Charry
January 2001
One of my students recently said to me, "I have been reading philosophy lately, but I find there is a hole in my heart, and it is becoming a chasm." Others enter therapy seeking to get their lives under better control, only to find that something elusive escapes the therapeutic insights. We move from job to job, perhaps relationship to relationship, town to town, looking for something new, something else.
Spirituality has moved in where religion once dwelt. We try on various spiritual paths like dresses on a rack. Some we piece together ourselves trying to make a patchwork quilt out of bits of cloth lying around, or scraps that we scavenge. The pieces, however, often resist being integrated into a beautiful pattern.
Our self-constructed philosophies may open vistas to self-understanding, but finally may be unable to warm us precisely because we invented them ourselves, for we have cut ourselves off from both the past and from others. If spiritual paths have been disjoined from the structures and historic communities that gave them birth, they disappoint precisely because they fail to provide a deeper identity than our personal narratives. Can they truly help us if on one hand they fail to call us to account, and on the other cannot succor us with the wisdom of the ages worked out by companions who trod this way before? And so we become spiritual vagrants. And we are still alone.
Perhaps we prefer vapid spiritualities to religion--I mean religions that come with sacred texts, prayers, songs, saints, foods, rituals, and obligations--because we are afraid of being located. Religion comes not only with an elaborate way of life, but an identity that indelibly marks us as its own. And that takes it out of our control.
Authority became problematic for the children of the 60s who rebelled against the ordered life of their parents from the 40s. Question authority became the watchword. It was applied indiscriminately, pressing us to make our way in the world with only our own resources. These have proven to be far weaker than we expected. Our allergy to authority has not only made us fear a disciplined life in the fashion it has been practiced for centuries, it has frightened us from placing ourselves under the authority of God.
Spiritual floundering is not a modern invention. Sixteen hundred years ago, Augustine of Hippo experienced all of this himself. As a young man, he turned his back on the religion of his childhood and went round to all the spiritual gurus of his day seeking a philosophy of life, only to find that the one he settled on was a fraud. Embarrassed in front of himself, he returned to the Catholic faith his mother had taught him. Reflecting back on this in his famous autobiography, written as a prayer to God, he wrote, "our hearts are restless until they rest in you."
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