“We have gone from being within religion to being outside it.” – Marcel Gauchet[1]
When I was in college, I took a course on the Old Testament. For the final exam, the professor asked us to explain the evolving perceptions of God through 2,000 years of Hebrew history. The question was challenging because those perceptions changed quite a bit. Beginning with Abraham, who worshiped one God among the many, we end with the single, monotheistic God preached by the prophets. Beginning with a God who blessed or punished tribes and nations en masse, we end with a God who blessed or punished individual lives. Their beliefs were transformed over the span of two millennia.
Today, we wouldn’t recognize the religion practiced by Abraham. He chose obedience to the God of the Mountains (El Shaddai), a God who required Abraham and everyone in his clan to absolutely obey His directives. Obedience included Abraham’s willingness to immolate his own son, and every male submitting to removal of his foreskin. Both acts were signs of subservience to the new protector of their nomadic band. The devotion was total.
Although vestiges remain, Abraham’s religion was clearly of a different kind. The Gods worked their will within the world, and aligned themselves with particular human groupings, such as Abraham’s. It was a reciprocal arrangement that made the social group also the access point between its members and its God. Meaning and identity were found within this sacralized community and its communal rituals, by which they continually renewed their relations with the divine. People lived within their religion. Religion wasn’t a part of their lives; it was their lives.
By contrast, we live in a compartmentalized world, in which religion may perhaps be an aspect of what we do. As opposed to ancient cultures where religious beliefs were the foundation for everything, we live in a culture where being religious is a choice among many options. Even Muslims who pray five times a day, and Christians who show up whenever the church doors are open, still spend much of their lives in social activities where their beliefs are not required. Modern existence is segmented, rather than unified.
Many people today bemoan the lack of faith they find when their society is not permeated by their religion. However, even among the complainers, most wouldn’t have it any other way. The ability to think for ourselves, to pursue our own desires, to create our own meaning and identity, is only possible once we are freed from obedience to the group, and from the beliefs that once tied us to each other. The primacy of our individuality comes at the expense of our communal and spiritual bonds. Modern societies are not sacred societies; they are seen as very human. People choose to belong or cooperate, and we live with the evidence.
We can never go back to a time when the Sacred infused everyone and everything and there was a unified sense of divine purpose. I wouldn’t want to. Being a modern person, I like choosing for myself what to think and believe. But we must also deal with the inevitable results. We live within a secularized culture, in which organized religions become hollow, and a personal relation with the divine is not essential.
That doesn’t mean people lack a desire to connect with what has been made to feel distant. But that distance creates an ambiguity that did not exist in earlier times when there were socially defined methods for experiencing the divine. Modern minds find themselves on the outside, looking in, not sure what to look for. What are we to hear, or see, or do? What are we to know?
Those types of questions reflect the culture in which we live. When the Sacred is a segment of our experience, and an unnecessary one, a personal connection to the Creator becomes something we must seek out.
As the ancients knew, in their own way, God is not distant. The One is present in all and available to all. But rather than approaching God as something to be obtained or apprehended, a different mindset is needed. We are seeking a relation, not a thing.
A relation refers to the interaction between things. Interaction is where meaning is found; nothing has any meaning, except in relation to something else. More specifically, interaction is how the One becomes meaningful for us. A relation is what God offers.
Some relations offer the opportunity for intimacy, a closeness that transcends proximity. Developing over time, relations deepen, finding more points of connection, and an understanding that can’t be reduced to words. In time, you come to realize you are known by the Unknown.
[1] Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of The World: A Political History of Religion, Princeton University Press, 1997, p. 59.
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