Religion: Like a Rope in the Storm

Before powerful electric lights punched through the rural darkness, farmers in the Upper Midwest would often tie a rope between the house and the barn – especially if they knew a blizzard was coming. There were stories of men and women who had lost their way in whiteouts only to be found frozen a few feet from their front steps when the storm ended.

Our word “ligament” is related to the word “religion”; both of them come from a Latin root meaning “to tie” or “to bind”. So I think it’s legitimate to say that anything we use to keep our bearings in the blizzard of modern life’s challenges and distractions is like that rope the farmers used to follow from the barn to their home – and thus is our religion.

Let’s examine some of the ropes that we use – and that human beings have always used – to find their way through the blizzard of life:

Ritual: Rituals are usually associated with religion and complexity as illustrated by this video. But people who have just lost a loved one or gotten a cancer diagnosis can tell you that sometimes it’s the rituals that get them through the day. Brushing your teeth, feeding the cat, walking the dog, taking out the trash are humble reminders that life goes on. If the ritual is infused with deeper meaning, such as lighting the Sabbath candles or taking communion, people can find an even deeper meaning. Memories of holiday meals and kneeling beside a loved one at the altar rail come flooding back both to hurt  . . . and to heal. But ritual alone can also get in the way of real life, as anyone knows who has ever had to break the news to Mom that you are going to your fiancé’s house for Christmas so you won’t be joining the family for breakfast on Christmas morning.

Rules: Rules help us get back on the path or keep us from losing the way, in the first place. Theists and atheists all have made some decisions about what they will and won’t do even when no one is looking. All of us know the temptation to break those rules. Most of us, looking back, are glad for the times we were true to our sense of morality and are sorry for those times we weren’t. But rules alone can keep us from living a full life, as well. How do we relate to people who have different rules?  (You probably ran into this question the first time you slept over at a friend’s house).  How do we live with ourselves if we have broken our rules? If our rules are “sacred” how can we adapt them to new circumstances? If we chose our own rules, why would we follow them when the going gets tough? And as you can read in last week’s blog, we break our own rules even when there doesn’t seem to be a good reason to do so.

Reason: Since the 18^th century in Western culture, we have used reason as our rope. Indeed, all the others, including rules and rituals have to be “reasonable” if we are going to follow them. Reason works – usually – in the blizzard of life, if we really will sit down and think things through. No matter how much the advertisers and politicians and powerful interests want to snow us, 2 + 2 still equals 4.  And St. Augustine once said if your reading of the Bible says that 2+2 = 5, you need to read the Bible again. But, reason can quickly become rationalization. Few cultures were as “reasonable” as early 20^th century Germany, yet it produced World War II and the Holocaust. Reason can get us through the blizzard or it can be part of the snow.

Tradition: Traditions are contained in religious rituals, but especially in the Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, traditions are also contained in sacred texts and the whole history of the interpretation of those texts in theological treatises, sermons, hymns, pious stories, ethical codes and even legal doctrines. Traditions inform rituals. Without a Haggadah, Passover is just a big dinner. Without a cross or an empty tomb, Easter is just a sugar rush. Without the Qur’an , Ramadan is one very long month of fasting. As Tevye will tell you, a fiddler on the roof is able to scrape out a happy tune without breaking his neck because tradition helps him keep his balance. But it is that same tradition that causes Tevye to disown his daughter, Chava, when she decides to marry a Gentile.

Spiritual Experience: Human beings have experiences that can be so vivid that they actually change the direction of their lives. These experiences may become like the bright electric lights that now guide farmers from the barn to the house in the middle of a blizzard. One things traditions do is to give people a way of understanding what has happened to them. Whether they refer back to Moses talking with the burning bush; Jesus in the wilderness; Muhammad in his cave; or the Buddha under the Bo tree, the “Wow! What just happened?” quality of these events can take on meaning and help a person understand that he or she isn’t crazy or alone. Rituals can sometimes be the contexts for such experiences. Isaiah is doing whatever priests do in the Temple when he has his vision. John Wesley was in church when he has his heart-warming experience. Unlike rules, rituals, or even reason and tradition, spiritual experiences never make people feel like crap. They may make people feel VERY humble, but that’s a lot different than feeling long-term shame, and despair, because no matter how humbling the experience may be, you also know – if you have such an experience – that the spiritual world exists in ways you never dreamed and that something or more likely, Someone, cares about you who is a whole lot bigger and more wonderful than you ever imagined.

The problem with spiritual experiences is that they too can be falsified. Any teenager who grew up in an evangelical culture knows the pressure to “be born again” and how much you need to be able to “testify” to meeting the Lord Jesus personally. There is also a very fine line sometimes between these experiences and mental illness.

My own “tradition” within the Christian tradition is Wesleyan and it is part of a larger Anglican tradition that tends to balance out all these “ropes”. The rituals, rules and texts of tradition get balanced against reason and direct spiritual experience. I can check those spiritual experiences against the tradition, and the rituals keep me going when the experiences run dry, and the rules keep me from going over the edge, until I break them, and then the spiritual experiences pull me, one more time, out of the pit of despair. It’s kind of crazy, but it’s my rope.