I found both of your responses so enlightening, and helpful, in broadening the contours of self-reflection on my religious and spiritual identity. Toma, like Meagan, I really liked your delineation of how the trajectory of our relationships with our religious institutions mirrors the trajectory of the parent-child relationship. I found the analogy comforting in that it acknowledges the imperfections inherent in these "flawless fortresses of morality and prudence", but it reframes those imperfections as opportunities for more honest examination of and introspection on these organizations. While such examination might be painful - I know it was for me, as I grew disillusioned with my Church in middle school and tried to reconcile my adherence to the institution with my fundamental disbelief in some of its shaping ideals - I now see that perhaps this process is actually imperative to shaping a 'custom-fit' religious and spiritual experience, an experience that's a personally meaningful reflection of one's most deeply held beliefs.

And Meagan, I really appreciate your point that subscribing to only some of the stances espoused by a particular religious institution isn't indicative of or synonymous with cognitive dissonance or splitting, but rather an illustration of individuality, an inherently beautiful incoherence that's unique to each of us. Both points, I found, were instructive in recasting my thoughts on Alix's essay and our conversation earlier today regarding the value we derive from our respective religious institutions in spite of our distaste for some of the fundamental tenets of those very institutions. And I'd also like to thank you both for sharing your thoughts because I found them really helpful in beginning to facilitate a more self-accepting way to think about my own faith and spiritual identity.

-- CourtneyDoak - 18 Apr 2012

Ladies,

Your essay and responses really resonated with me as well. I always find it enlightening to listen to/read unique individual experiences with religion and spiritual identity, as each time I gain new insights that serve to catalyze further self-reflection and growth in my own spiritual journey. I was raised Catholic and attended a Catholic school for 12 years. I particularly liked Toma's parent-child analogy for individual relationships with religious institutions. I started to feel disillusioned with the Catholic Church in sixth grade. I struggled with reconciling the social and spiritual value I derived from the community I grew up in with my visceral distaste for some of the political and moral positions espoused by the Church and my school. Through my personal conflict and through interaction and discussion with those from a variety of faiths, I have come to believe that religion – for me at least – is what I make of it. In general, I’m not a big fan of labels, which I find to be often reductionist and stifling. I don’t ascribe to a particular organized religion, but instead consider myself a ‘spiritual’ person. At one time, not too long ago, I was concerned about the implications of practicing ‘buffet style’ spirituality. I felt, as Alix and Courtney have stated, slightly guilty for ‘using’ religion, because I didn’t fit the ‘prototype’ of ‘the good Catholic’ I was raised to aspire to be. But I genuinely don’t think it upsets my God - or at least any God I would want to believe in - that I can both love the teachings of Jesus and take issue with religious institutional disdain for homosexuals and abortion rights. I don’t think my God would see this as cognitive dissonance or splitting or failing some spiritual unity test. In fact, I would like to believe that my God would respect and cherish my free thought, my emotional reaction to injustice, and my individuality. That’s why I feel I can, to borrow Alix’s words, “believe in God and go to church and have premarital sex and use contraception”…and support abortion rights and gay marriage. Because my God sees the inherent beauty in my unique ‘incoherence’ and discord, and loves me even more for it.

Ultimately, choice of spirituality and religious identification is a very personal decision, one that may constantly evolve throughout a life span and one that each individual must reach on their own. While some may derive great personal value from following the sermons of their priest to the letter, others, like myself, prefer to commune with God and practice spirituality in a different way. I don’t think either method is less worthy of respect than the other. It is often difficult however, being raised in a community focused on the former approach, to redefine yourself without feeling as though you are betraying your family, friends or community and isolating yourself from them. I definitely think Alix, as Eben said, that your new experience with meditation may prove to be very valuable. In addition to enabling you to dismiss distraction and subdue hectic consciousness, it may also help you to build upon the keen sense of self-awareness and introspection already emanating from your words, assisting you to reconcile seemingly conflicting emotions and define your own spirituality throughout your life.

-- MeaganBurrows - 17 Apr 2012

Thank you so much for sharing this experience. This essay was really thought-provoking and honest. Your paper explores a topic that is so uncomfortable that most of the world does not engage with it at all. Many people, nervous to indulge the doubts you identify here, suppress them and continue on blindly while still others withdraw altogether.

Having thought about some of these questions with regards to my own faith (Judaism), I wanted to share a piece of advice I received a few years ago. A colleague told me that oftentimes our experiences with the organizations/institutions which we respect can be compared to the trajectory of relationships between children and their parents. We are raised to believe they are flawless fortresses of morality and prudence. When the veneer of this image cracks and a duller reality is exposed, we feel rebellious and sometimes resentful. Why aren't our parents perfect? Why aren't our religions free of questions? This period of disenchantment can be really painful; it erodes at the foundations of our "truths" and leaves us feeling unstable. But, it is natural that these organizations will exhibit anthropomorphic discord; after all, they are made up of humans. Once we grapple with these questions, we can begin to really think about these organizations in a critical and productive way.

Like our parents, these institutions are not perfect, but we glean value from them and so they are important. Unlike your parents, you can tailor your own spirituality and religious experience so that it is a custom-fit. You can continue to be part of a community and a faith without subscribing yourself to all of its stances. At the same time, as a member of the congregation, you can steer that congregation's direction. Avoiding complacency doesn't necessarily mean leaving the religion (unless you want to), it can mean trying to change the particular Church to which you belong or, if that is not possible, allowing yourself to extract what is valuable to you from the faith while keeping some questions in the back of your mind. Some of the Church's actions which you take issue with seem to reflect a decision made by a person or groups of people, rather than natural extensions of the tenets of Catholicism. This is out of my depth, but I wonder, and maybe your paper can examine, if there is a difference between those elements of the Church which are actually fundamental from those that are traditional. Indeed there are a few Catholic congregations which have taken different positions from the one which you have described. Sorry if I made any of this sound easy. I know that it is not. You are brave to engage with these questions. Again, thank you for sharing.

-- TomaLivshiz - 17 Apr 2012

Alix, as we talked about today, I think these are really difficult and thought-provoking questions. For me, reflecting on the inquiries you pose elicited a lot of thought but few answers. Like you, I struggle with the idea that I’ve chosen to remain (at least to the extent that I attend Church a handful of times per year) within a religious system which is shaped at least in part by beliefs with which I don’t agree and operating principles to which I don’t necessarily adhere in my own life. And so I recognize that the ritual of going to church – which I enjoy for similar reasons to the ones you express – perhaps carries far different meaning for me than for any other individual with whom I am sitting in the pews. While I do derive what I perceive to be real value from my experiences on those Sundays, I would characterize that value as, in Eben’s words, “the subduing of hectic consciousness”. Sometimes I leave musing over something that resonated with me, sometimes I leave thinking I fundamentally disagree with something that was said. Maybe the fact that my feelings after any given Mass have no actual impact on my behavior – I continue to go back regardless – means I’m struggling with cognitive dissonance and that I’m splitting to deal with it.

But even if that’s true, maybe (hopefully) there’s value in the very fact that we recognize this potential split in ourselves; that we have identified the discord inherent in the organizations to which we ostensibly belong. We are self-aware in the sense that we know we derive a particular kind of value (meditative, comfort of habit) from attending church, but that we don’t adhere to all of these organizations’ shaping ideals. Maybe that’s a reflection of an adherence instead to our personal beliefs of right and wrong, our individual notions of morality. Admittedly these personal ethical belief systems are perhaps influenced by or somewhat inextricable from the teachings of our respective religious upbringings, I don’t really know. However, even if our views on morality aren’t entirely independent of such shaping forces, maybe there’s value in the fact that we have self-defined benchmarks by which we measure what it means to be a ‘good person’.

We don’t blindly or automatically internalize the ideals espoused by a given religion and call them our own, or worse, define ourselves as “good Christians/Catholics” and use that self-identity to justify behavior we’d otherwise consider morally wrong. Like we talked about, we have had encounters with people who have the capacity to ignore and/or justify their moral transgressions by leaning on their self-definition as ‘good Catholics’ (going to Church regularly, getting ashes on Ash Wednesday, giving something up for Lent) and conflating that with being ‘good people’. I guess this is the paradigm I had in mind in response to your query on how one ‘uses religion’ to create a personal belief system and whether that equates to complacency. You obviously don’t use religion in this manner. You also don’t tell others that you do or do not believe in something simply “because you are Catholic” while knowing internally that you disagree with many other ideals the Church espouses. So in that sense I don’t think you’re complacent in perpetuating the shaping principles of Catholicism.

The bigger question, that I don’t know the answer to, is whether you and I are, by definition, complacent anyway, for choosing to ‘use’ religion the way we do, for deriving personal value from that use, and ultimately for choosing to remain within our respective religious organizations as a result.

-- CourtneyDoak - 17 Apr 2012