BLOG 1/17/17. DID YOU KNOW THAT EVEN IRRELIGION IS A RELIGION?
Those of us who profess to be followers of Jesus Christ, need to be alert and very sensitive to the realities of the real people with whom we mingle day by day, and to be sensitive to their responses to ultimate questions, or to anything that smacks of religion. We learn this from Jesus, who pretty much by-passed the religious establishment of his day, and wandered among ordinary persons doing helpful actions, and with message that registered with them. He didn’t really come to make persons more religious, but to meet the deepest longings of their lives, and to make them more human. At the same time, he realized that there were always going to be those who were hostile to what they conceived to be religion, and would build up anti-bodies against it. He wasn’t dismayed by this, and loved them all the same. Even the most apparently irreligious are actually religious–but don’t know it.
We live in this post-Christian culture in which what used to be commonly accepted information about the Christian faith is fading into obscurity, and more and more the really cool people we interact with are those for whom God is not even in their thoughts. They get involved in their daily pursuits, their occupations or professions, their families, their affinity for sports and entertainment–daily stuff– so much that they have no place for reflection on ultimate questions—even though those questions may voice themselves in silent moments.
Others are hostile to religion, usually because of some bad experience with it, or some betrayal by those who professed to be religious or Christian. Some seek that meaning in a whole plethora of other religions. Even today, in the New York Times, there was an article that the famous monastic Thomas Merton, and the famous Muhammed Ali found good in all religions—and that is undoubted a valid observation. Other world religions and contemplative orders do, in fact, often perform commendable good works. People with no religion at all are frequently at the forefront of humanitarian efforts.
But then there are the philosophers who put together what they consider bastions of intellectual disassembling of anything that pertains to be religious, as was true of the secularist George Jacob Holyoake, who defined secularism as: “the doctrine that morality should be based on regard for the well-being of mankind in the present life to the exclusion of all consideration drawn from belief in God or a future state.” Alright. That’s a choice, but it’s also a faith assumption, a religion, if you will. It is that set of assumptions upon which one bases his/her life.
We live, also in a culture that has been labelled post-modern, in which ‘truth’ is whatever I, or those in power, conceive it to be. As one ‘wag’ put it: it is the belief that there is no there, there. That also is a faith assumption. In our North American culture at this moment there is a vast popular religion of hedonism, where life is finding where the fun is, whether in entertainment, in sports, in finding the best restaurants, in physical challenges like running marathons. All of these are quite valid pastimes, but they can also become all that one lives for, and upon which one determines the meaning of one’s life …but don’t ultimately satisfy our need for the ultimate design of life.
But always there is buried down there somewhere ,in these friends of ours, these cool people, is that hungering to know what life is all about, whether it has meaning or hope. There is some longing after a spirituality that has always been elusive. There may be some quest for justice in society. Jesus knew this. He knew that while he fed the multitudes of the loaves and fishes, that they would soon be hungry again, but he offered them himself as one who is the ‘bread of life’ and the ‘water of life’ and that if they would come to him, that subliminal hungering thirsting would be satisfied. What we know is that we don’t argue others into faith, or communicate the gospel of peace by theological dissertation, but by our moving among real people always knowing that for all their apparent contentment, there is a “aching void” that longs to be filled. We are God’s agents of Christ’s gospel of peace.
“Come unto me, all you who labor and are heavy-laden and I will give you rest.” – Jesus –
