Human beings are incurably and necessarily religious. Our souls, even if ignored, will also seek transcendence, ecstasy, wonder and awe, and to connect with something larger than the small world of our egos. Modernity has excluded religion, maligned its importance, and even identified it as an impediment to human evolution and the wellbeing of the planet. The critique isn’t without merit: religion has been used to justify indescribable acts of evil, perpetuate racism, sexism, and the pillaging of the Earth.

Yet we need religion. Without it, human beings are cut loose from the moderating and mediating role it plays to heal and guide what’s hidden within, the unconscious material the soul wrestles with in order to emerge, evolve, and led each of us into the fulness of our humanity. Religion and spirituality aren’t about a naive, privileged, myopic, and escapist navel-gazing. Religion is the way human beings have found ways to transform the trouble inside us, so we’ll make less trouble outside us; religion helps us discover the good within us so we can manifest our goodness in the world outside us.

We need religion, but most of the religion we have is not what we need. It’s too captive to the ego, and to the literalism and institutionalism that has made it largely irrelevant to the crafting of a humanity capable of living beneficially and sustainably on this planet. For too long it’s played up to the disenchanting effects of Modernity’s long affair with materialism, positivism, and rationalism.

Religion that does us good will foster:

  1. an attitude of reverence toward the web of life

  2. a sense of the sacred in the ordinary, every-dayness of our lives

  3. an openness to the transcendent in ourselves, others, and nature

  4. an experience of community as a crucible of transformation

  5. life as a work of art, a path of flourishing

In order to be a means of individual and societal healing, religious communities cannot fall into old patterns of a degenerate, institutional religion (Latin: degeneratus or ‘no longer of its kind). Unconscious piety, sectarian dogma, and insipid moralism are forms of a debased and institutional and conservative religious habit that’s departed from the source of religious life— our mystical encounter with the Ineffable. Religion that heals and supports the evolution of our race as well as a sustainable and beneficial human presence in the cosmos must be a religion that nourishes the daily needs of the soul through embodied experiences with the Mystery we call God.

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