A path toward renewal in a time of religious decline

Several years ago, when John Philip Newell (pictured below) and I were teaching different classes at the same time at Ghost Ranch in northern New Mexico, we had a conversation that led me to rethink the idea of "original sin."

Philip, former warden of Iona Abbey in Scotland and a leading expert in Celtic spirituality, has a way of making me and others rethink things.

His new book does that over and over again. It's called The Great Search: Turning to Earth and Soul in the Quest for Healing and Home, and it was published just yesterday by HarperOne.

In many ways, the book is Philip's response to the decline of participation in institutional religion that has been evident first in Western Europe and now in North America. In short, one of his primary explanations of this movement away from traditional faith is that people are not very interested nowadays in learning what religion has to teach about God. Rather, they're much more interested in some kind of personal experience of and with God in their lives. So they're searching.

"We are," he writes, "seeking healing as an Earth community, and we are longing for a new sense of home spiritually. . .(W)e need new vision if we are to find healing in our relationship with Earth and one another."

To help readers with this search, Philip introduces them to the lives and writings of nine people who can be guides, including Martin Buber, Carl Jung, Julian of Norwich, Jalaluddin (sometimes Jalal al-Din) Rumi and Rabindranath Tagore.

This, Philip writes, is a wonderful time to be on such a search because we "are living in a moment of grace. It is the realization of the interrelatedness of all things. It is a consciousness rising to the fore in nearly every great discipline of thought and study, inviting us to know that what we do to a part we do to the whole, and that the well-being of each is fulfilled only in the well-being of the whole." (That view seems similar to what's called Ubuntu theology, which is often associated with Bishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa.)

The chapter on Austrian-Israeli philosopher and theologian Martin Buber is especially helpful as Philip unpacks what Buber meant by an "I-Thou" versus and "I-It" relationship. He writes:

"'Everything is waiting to be hallowed,' says Buber. Everything and everyone is yearning to be truly seen and reverenced." That idea contains within it one of the cores of healthy religion -- the concept that each human being bears the image of God and is precious in God's sight. First, of course, we have to recognize that about ourselves before we can usefully acknowledge it about others and prevent ourselves from dehumanizing anyone.

To achieve that, Philip writes, will require us "to commit ourselves to turning again to the sacred essence of one another and Earth. It is this that will enable a true restoration. . ."

In the chapter on psychologist Carl Jung, Philip notes that Jung questioned whether the world's religious traditions "have penetrated deeply enough beneath the surface. Many of us today share Jung's doubt. Is our desire for light being sufficiently nurtured by religions as we know it? If not, how do we more fully access the yearnings of the Spirit within us? And how can our religious traditions more deeply serve these yearnings?"

Philip's warning to institutional religion is clear and sharp: "If religion fails to enable a direct experience of the divine, depending instead solely on the testimony of great teachers and prophets of the past, it will collapse. If it is not pulsating with the warm red blood of experience and a fresh awareness of the living presence of the Spirit within us and among us, it serves no useful purpose for the well-being of humanity and Earth today."

And in his chapter on Rumi, he adds this: "Let go of everything that is not love. This will be the rebirth of true religion."

My hope is that all people of faith (or of little or no faith) will learn from this book that each of us can find a road that leads to a lively, generative spirituality that can help heal our wounded world.

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A GRASSROOTS EFFORT TO UNPLUG CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM

This RNS opinion piece describes how a mostly apolitical couple in Texas began to put two-and-two together to figure out a source of much of the political and social division they were finding. What they found was Christian Nationalism.

"Understanding this worldview," the article says, "helped the (couple) connect dots between the fights they saw fracturing their small Texas community and, increasingly, the entire country. They created a website, called 'See It. Name It. Fight It.' to educate others about Christian nationalism, how to identify its influence in their communities and how to fight back against it. Today, they have more than 20,000 followers on X."

I find that encouraging because recently I've given a couple of talks to different church groups about this subject and have used a book called Baptizing America, which I wrote about here, to acknowledge the role that Mainline Protestant denominations, like mine, have had in creating and maintaining Christian Nationalism, which I describe as being rooted in the unbiblical idea that God has blessed the U.S. in a unique way -- an idea that amounts to idolatry.

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ANOTHER P.S.: My friend from boyhood, Markandey Katju, a former justice on India's Supreme Court, has written this article about anti-slavery activist John Brown and, well, me. So if you need an airy diversion today, now you have one.