Spiritual VS. Religious

Traditional religions are faced with interesting and critical times, particularly in the ever more secular West; at the same time, a pluralism of spiritualities and non-traditional religions are at rise…..

There begins a quest and an ever growing hunger for spirituality - while religion, for many, has become a questionable subject.

There is a substantive difference between religion and spirituality, and yet they seem to need each other in order to be life-giving and redeeming.


The main focus of many people today is a longing for an authentic God experience. You can say that a mystical wind is blowing through the different religions, which among others causes much restlessness and insecurity among settled religious structures and church officials of religions.

People today are searchers, searching for experience: you can say it with other words: People today are searching for spirituality, which they frequently hardly can find in the traditional religions.

What does one mean by ‘religion’?

Religion = religare = to connect:

· the human person unites himself with the Divine or is initiated into this unity

· the divine and the human being are brought into contact with each other, by different forms of culture, rites and liturgy

Therefore: religion is always a by culture determined certain form of expression of a

religious experience, and that’s why always ambivalent!

When talking about religion we immediately talk about a way to ’Salvation and Liberation’. This is the central message of all the three Abrahamite religions: Christianity, Judaism and Islam and all the three of them embrace as their objective the Salvation and Liberation of all human beings.

Salvation (in the sense of wholeness) and Liberation: this exactly is the great desire which each human being carries along in the depth of his heart.

It is the essence of religion to bring the person closer to God und to his fellow human beings, in order to participate in the Divine plan of salvation to work on Liberation towards a life in fullness, a redeemed and redeeming life in the Here and Now, in the concrete life situation of each human being.

But we always have to consider: God cannot be received ‘single’. He can’t be experienced outside of a concrete tradition of human beings, not outside very detectable and persistent attempts to find meaning, context and future.

The Divine manifests itself in the history of concrete human beings, as salvation history, rooted in the past, but working forth in the present, showing the way into a good future (Jer 29, 11).

We need to be aware that Christianity doesn’t have a monopoly position anymore.

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Diversity of Religions - Unity of Spirituality

What religions unite:

· deep spiritual unity: springs forth of the same divine origin

· her objective is salvation (wholeness) of each human being

· Religion: symbolical expression of spirituality
à Spirituality = In-depth dimension of Religion

The Divine as unreachable mystery

· Searching for the unreachable mystery à already touched by the Absolute!

· a mystery which has to remain without name and form:
- Jews: you may not make an image of God (Lev 19,4)
- Christians: Jesus wants us to pray to God as our father in heaven (Mt 6,9):
heaven = archetypical symbol of the mysterious and infinite
- Muslims: ”Allahu Akbar” = God is the greatest, the unreachable
- Buddhists: deeply touched by the mysterious character of the ultimate reality; it is not possible to give her any name; it’s the Absolute = Emptiness, Nothingness

· Continuously openness for the mystery of God: Deus semper major!

God as personal being

· as personal beings we are dependent upon a ”Personal You”

à We have a deep longing for a personal God

· out of eternal silence comes forth the Divine Word
Jews: Yahweh = Ex 3,14 = God is with us and among us Christians: Joh 3,16.
Muslims: Allah, the most high, revealed His Word by Mohammed, in order that the human beings can find the right way.
Buddhists: don’t know a personal God; but in Buddha a light is shining, so strong that it can bring each human being to final salvation.

God as all penetrating Spirit

· seeing God in everything and seeing everything in God
Jews: Jahwe, the God in their midst (sjekina)
Christians: Jesus = Incarnation of the Word of God, present in everything as light and life
Muslims: the mercy of God is at work among us
Buddhists: the healing power of the inner light shines healingly forth in the hearts of all

à Ethical attitude

Jews: trust

Christians: love

Islam: obedience

Buddhists: compassion

- Intense consciousness of the Divine Presence in our world

- Transformation of live in accordance with this consciousness and witnessing it

Whenever and wherever a religion gets out of touch of its basic essence, and works against the salvation, growth and liberation of the human person, it looses its identity, value and meaning.

Then, there need to be reform movements:

And we see it happen looking into our own church history:

· After Vatican II the well settled Western Theology has been broken up to new life. More and more theologians united themselves with the quest for emancipation of their people.
- liberation theology = rooted in the concrete experiences of the poor with a explicit
option for the poor .
Her method: observation - discernment - action. The word is put to action = dabar!
- And this has to be the task of religion: not just continuing the biblical history by
proclaiming, but concretely living out the Word, resp. striving towards it.

· Half of the human race, that is women often have been oppressed by religions. Men are the mediators of salvation and representatives of the Divine, whereas most of the faithful are women.
And until now our church is characterized by patriarchy: a pyramidical system of hierarchical structures in church and society. Still many of our clerical structures have an oppressive effect - and how can you combine this with the essence of any religion as a way to salvation and liberation?
Feminine theology tries to go into dialogue in searching the truth, striving towards a discipleship of equals.

Religion can (and must) be redemptive, but also can contribute to or be abused for interests of power and oppression.


Protest and resistance against any form of suffering have to be the central content of any religion. Authentic religion must call forth compassion in view of the suffering and oppressed human being, wherever in the world, if they really want to give witness to connectedness (religare).

When a religion helps a person to grow in dignity and freedom, giving him the space to unfold and to become the person he/she is supposed to be, then the religion is truly a witness of God’s presence in our world.

And God may have then thousand names and different shapes, but always he brings about salvation and liberation in a human being.

As spiritual directors we belong to a religion concerned with salvation and liberation. But people today hardly can experience this in our religion. We have to be alert of this and look critical into the whys. How come that the breath of God (= spirituality) for many people today can hardly be found in our churches? While at the same time they are longing and searching for it in many different places.

And what are the implications for us?

Spirituality as life-experience embraces the whole of life: all what is breathing between God and men

Spirituality is not so much interested in God (à theology) of man (àanthropology) but looks at the relationship between God and men. The question is always:

What is happening between the mutual relationship of Divine reality and the human person?

And this becomes our first concern.

The divine - human relationship is characterized by a dynamic of growth. The God relationship cannot be caught in a static picture, like a video-picture on ‘pauze’.

Its exactly the continuous movement, which is so typical for the mutual relationship between God and men which the tradition of spirituality calls “process of transformation” .

- Gen 1,26: “And God said: now we are going to create human beings. They will be like us and resemble us.”

There are three important implications for spirituality:

· somehow there is a deep inner knowing that the human being is because he is created by a loving God. Our life is not our possession but we owe it to Someone greater than us.
More and more people today are realizing this inner truth.

· We are created out of nothingness into the image of God. You can look at our very first beginning as transformation into creation.

· the human person molded into the image of God is created to be like Him.
This is the spiritual way as a way of continuous transformation each human person is invited to go. It is a way characterized by continuously falling and getting up again -of, to say it with other words: in our life history we undergo moments of de-formation, re-formation, and again and again we are born out of nothingness, until finally, mutually, the human person is transformed in God and God in him - glory.

- as spiritual directors we are accompanying this process of transformation towards
redeemed and liberated life in fullness:

“The glory of God is the human being fully alive”.

We see how close spirituality follows the Divine-human-relationship, the fundamental basic and root of what we call religion.

The classical picture which in almost all religions is used as a metaphor for this process of transformation is the way.

Spirituality belongs to all religions. Every religion knows that the human being comes to a growing similarity with the Divine Image only by a inner, spiritual way.

Walking this way the human “I” can stretch out for the Divine “You” and also vice versa: it is the way where Divine “You” is stretching out and approaching the human “I”.

Christus is the way in Christianity.

Torah is the way in Judaism.

Mohammed is the way in the Islam.

The metaphor about the way does not say anything about the direction of the way - forward or backward or in meander…

The process of transformation doesn’t know any notion like ‘progress’, ‘stagnation’ or ‘regression’. Important is only: to go.

A process of transformation takes place in so called models of transformation. Such a model is a given space with the intention of a process of transformation (like for example religion). But the transformation cannot be forced. The word ‘becoming’ is here essential.

· the model of transformation ‘marriage’ intends two people becoming partners

· the model of transformation ‘study’ intends to become studied

· the model of transformation ‘religious community’ intends someone to become brother or sister

If we are already partners, there’s no need to marry; if we are already studied, we don’t need the study;

Implications for Spiritual Directors

Consequences of a healthy and mature Spirituality

· maturity asks for autonomy; but still religion often and on a wide scale is socializing women into the role of conformity and passivity.

- Christian doctrine and praxis do have contributed to this, instead of support women on their way to inner maturity

· Some women are thinking that religious maturity can only be achieved by total refusal of the biblical tradition, while others are convinced that their spiritual development requires that men and women should walk together and accept the challenge of a reconstruction of the commonly accepted male dominated Christian tradition.

· total equality of men and women

· the spirituality of a woman is different than the spirituality of a man: both need to search for a spirituality fitting to them;

· the psycho-existential and the socio-cultural explicitly needs to be considered and expressed

à the spirituality of women is always essentially liberation spirituality.

Women are more and more conscious of the predominant male experiences in the spiritual formation of women, which allows little choice to exercise other than ‘male’ virtues.

God is male and men are divine, while the OT is much more balanced in its language and talks about God as male and female.

They are searching for action in contemplation, solidarity, trust, openness, hospitality. Joy and celebration are important.

· spirituality is holistic, embracing all of our relationships: with nature, with others, our work and our free time.

Forms of spirituality are traces of the human searching for God in a world of human inter-activity.

For one part is spirituality a human undertaking, with moments of growth and deformation, solitude and transcendence, a process of searching which gives the human person his identity and where the reality of God becomes integrated and incorporated.

The identity of a woman expresses itself with a different voice than the identity of a man. Male identity expresses itself more in ‘separation’ and ‘individual achievement’, while female identity expresses itself more in ‘context and relationship’, responsibility, care and ‘inter-dependence’.

Modern critique towards religion

· protest against the impertinences of a ‘religious’ tactic that tries to cajole and pressure modern man, scientific and technological man, into having religious needs which he does not have.
This “religiousness” is negative, ambiguous, moralizing: it preaches on one hand that one must run to God and the Church/Temple as a refuge from life, yet once one has given the sacred its due, one can be unashamedly secular as regards making money and enjoying the good things of life, provided one maintains a rigid and negative set of standards in the matter of sex. One need not worry too much about things like war, civil rights, and so on, regarded as moral issues. One leaves such things to the secular authorities, and one prays for those concerned to get the right answers.
Religiousness preaches a need of and a dependence on God in order to emphasize a need of and dependence on certain specific religious forms, a definite style of life which sets itself up as the only authentic Christianity and which relies heavily on externals. (Thomas Merton)

· God is more than a working hypothesis, to fill in gaps left open by a scientific world view.
It is the realization of the presence of God in this present life, in the world and in myself, and that the task as a [insert religion] is to live in full and vital awareness of this ground of my being and of the world’s being. Acts and forms of worship help one to do this, and the Church/Temple, with her liturgy and sacraments, gives us the essential means of grace. Yet God can work without these means if He so wills. When I entered the Church/Temple, I came seeking God, the living God, and not just “the consolations of religion”.
(Thomas Merton)

· There is a substantive difference between religion and spirituality:
The former (religion) answers our questions while the latter (spirituality) “questions our answers”.
The message of Thomas Merton was a modern version of an ancient call of pietistic critique - religion without spirituality is fundamentalism, spirituality without religion is sentimentality.