Beyond Religion

On the true value of doctrine and imagery

The Pilgrim Road

What is your Buddha statue for? The mezuzah on your doorpost? The cross around your neck?

What place do mythic images, narratives, and forms hold in our imaginations? Are they in and of themselves sacred? Or are they signposts that guide us to a formless place beyond all images, concepts, and theologies?

Is our religion a destination, or a path?

These questions have plagued me for as long as I can remember. Mostly I find myself in the indeterminate tension between these contrasting positions, neither here nor there. I’ve sometimes envied those who take a more concrete stance, who put down roots in a single tradition to the exclusion of others, but I’m afraid that door is closed for me. I am on the pilgrim road, never quite leaving, never quite arriving, restless, and forever afoot.

In his book Myth and Meaning: Conversations on Mythology and Life, Joseph Campbell draws a useful distinction between what he calls “folk belief” with its physical imagery and concrete doctrines, and the more nebulous path of personal spirituality. “Spiritual truths are taught through religious images,” he writes. But it’s what you do with those images that’s key. For most religious people, their gods are real, the narratives true, and the commandments binding. For others, images, narratives, and gods merely point to the mystery beyond all forms.

In Myth and Meaning Campbell writes:

Popular religion believes its deities concretely, rather than reflecting back to the great unknown. In popular religion, it doesn’t matter what the god’s name is. The people turn to their gods for only three things: health, wealth, and progeny. “Please make the corn grow, please make my daughter well, or I will never burn another candle on your altar.” In Sanskrit they call this manifestation of divinity the desi, or folk belief.

But there is another term, marga, which is borrowed from the hunter’s vocabulary and means “the trail left by the footsteps of an animal.” This is the elementary or universal idea of a religious myth, the trail that leads you to the chamber of the heart where the treasures of enlightenment reside.” (70)

Most people are content to take up residence in a particular religion, grafting themselves onto an ideological tree and drawing identity from their embodiment of that tradition’s values, concepts, and aspirations. It feels good to belong to something. There are deep psychological and sociological forces at work. For others, however, religious forms were never the destination, they were a map pointing to something beyond, and like Alan Watts said, the map is not the place.

The purpose of making this distinction is not to divide humanity into two categories—the simple-minded and the sophisticated. The last thing we need is another elitist hierarchy. Instead, I think it’s helpful to explore the possibility of synthesizing these two stances into a single experience.

As Christians approach the altar for the Eucharist, opening themselves to a communal feast of the body and blood of God—to take God within them and become one with that God and with one another—might it be possible to engage with this sacred participatory theater while simultaneously feeling lifted beyond these images, these forms, and these doctrines to a boundlessness beyond the grasp of our ordinary mind? Could the desi (folk beliefs) be an opening to the marga (path) each of us must walk alone? Religions are for something, in the same way a train ticket is for something, and when you arrive, the ticket no longer has the same fuction or value it once had.

Myths as Means

In all of the world’s religions and across all borders—temporal, ideological, and geographical—well-intentioned gatekeepers have protected their treasures from the uninitiated. The distinction between esoteric (inner) and exoteric (outer) teachings has always been in play. What if we viewed mythic images as exoteric teachings, meant to convey something of the mystery to those outside the mystery? Later, after an extended period of immersion in those mythic images, narratives, and rituals, a glimmer of the mystery itself arises within the spiritual aspirant as non-conceptual awareness. In Eastern traditions this is called realization—a lived awareness of oneness has become real in you, not as a thought, but as an aspect of your being. This is esoteric knowledge. And by definition, it cannot be conveyed, it can only be experienced.

In The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Campbell writes:

The function of myth and ritual is to make possible, and then to facilitate, the jump—by analogy. Forms and conceptions that the mind and its senses can comprehend are presented and arranged in such a way as to suggest a truth or openness beyond. And then, the conditions for mediation having been provided, the individual is left alone. Myth is but the penultimate; the ultimate is openness—that void, or being, beyond the categories—into which the mind must plunge alone and be dissolved. Therefore, God and the gods are only convenient means—themselves of the nature of the world of names and forms, though eloquent of, and ultimately conducive to, the ineffable. They are mere symbols to move and awaken the mind, and call it past themselves. (221-222)

In Christianity, Jesus of Nazareth is a “form and conception that the mind and its senses can comprehend.” It’s hard to not like Jesus. A baby in a barn, an outsider, a healer, a social justice worker challenging norms, calling us to kindness, and upsetting the powers of oppression, both external and internal. It goes without saying that personifying the ineffable as this guy is the most successful mythic image in human history.

The Jesus Movement

In the early Jesus movement, before the gospels were even written, his followers began to deviate from traditional Jewish metaphysics by claiming that Jesus was much more than a prophet—he was God himself. Naturally, this radical departure shocked and divided the community. Judaism doesn’t do avatars (incarnations). So the apostle Paul went to work. A Pharisaic Jew and recent convert to the Jesus movement, Paul mounted a vigorous communication campaign. With a string of personal appearances and written communiques (now forever canonized in the New Testament), Paul tirelessly shaped the nascent doctrines of Incarnation (the divinity of Christ) and Atonement (that Christ’s death on the cross washed away our sin). In the coming centuries, through the offices of the Church, Paul’s understanding of the meaning of Jesus would become our own.

By claiming that an obscure rabbi from Nazareth was God in the flesh, Paul and others concretized the ineffable in a single human being. The idea that God would take human form was certainly not new—it’s an archetype found throughout world mythology and religion—but in the Jesus movement it would take hold in a particularly vigorous and persistent way. Now, two thousand years later, the divinity of Christ is a central pillar of mainline Christianity, and if you don’t embrace it you’re politely ushered to the outer rim of the circle where agnostics, freethinkers, and Unitarians congregate wondering if they missed something.

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Yosemite Falls, Yosemite National Park (Photo by author)

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Having it Both Ways

But what if it’s possible to be a Christian agnostic? What if it’s possible to fully participate in Christianity, but still see your Christian life as a pilgrimage, not a destination? Can you recite the Nicene Creed aloud with your congregation, respecting it not as binding doctrine, but as an historical snapshot of a moment in the early church when our ancestors struggled to understand and articulate a mystery that simply could not be understood or articulated?

What happens to our Christian faith if every cherished doctrine—the divinity of Christ, the virgin birth, the miracles, the death and resurrection, substitutionary atonement—are seen not as the ultimate or final stage, but as the penultimate stage, the second-to-the-last stage, beyond which lies the openness into which we must “plunge alone and be dissolved?” If this is the case, then the mythic doctrines and images are still of paramount importance, for they are the means by which we are readied for this final sublimation.

Finding My Religion

A dear friend and former Catholic priest, when asked what his religious views are, simply answers “panoramic.”

When we move into the boundless space beyond religion, oddly and perhaps surprisingly, we find ourselves in a deeper, more immediate sacred depth than we ever experienced before. The meaning of immediate is, after all, without mediation. There is nothing in the way now. We have gone around the middle man. We experience the Real, and our minds and mouths grow still. How ironic—that only beyond religion could we find the depth our religions promised.

But I’ll see you in church on Sunday anyway, or in the mosque on Friday, or in the synagogue on Saturday, or in the mondir, gudwara, or sweat lodge—or out in the line-up when the waves are clean, and the swell is strong, and the wind is a soft off-shore, and under an endless sky we will cut our own paths across the pathless water of our lives.