The Mountain of God

Religion is generally an idolatrous affair. Seriously. I know this sounds odd coming from a minister--someone ordained to uphold religious truth--but perhaps I am just a freak.

I have traveled a good bit and have met people of many faiths. I cannot say I have ever met a person of no faith, just of no religion. I have never met a person who did not believe in anything: every sane person I have met has had a sense of right and wrong, justice and injustice, etc. Faith is there; it is often not conceived or articulated using an established religion.

Religion is the attempt to understand the thin places. It is the attempt to articulate the experience of something "Other." Or someone Other. That's when the trouble starts. We take these experiences of the numinous and force them into concepts that we can understand, concepts that can only be as big as our mind has developed. Then we call that concept "God." But it is not God. It is only our understanding of our experience of God. Yet once we name our understanding as God, we then enthrone our understanding and worship that. Religion is an idolatrous affair.

Ultimately, for religion to serve us, it is helpful to remember that it is a path up the mountain of God. It is not the mountain. It is not God. It is a path. Yes, I do believe there are many paths, and I will address that in a later post.

I follow the Christ path, the Jesus Way. In him I discover life and balance. With him I understand better how to love and forgive (and be forgiven). Beside him I am called to the Way of the Servant: loving as he loved, living as he lived.

It is a hard path. Jesus never promised it would be easy. Quite the opposite, in fact. But I only find it a treacherous path when my religion slips into doctrine and dogma, seducing me into ortho-credo as opposed to orthopraxis and ortho-agape.

Keep me humble, God, and help me to worship you and not my idea of you. So be it.