An Easy Journey?

     "[An old woman looking out the window at life going on says] — 'Was soll das Alles?' These four words were the most powerful expression for theological search that I have ever heard: 'What is the meaning of all this?' There she stood, astounded, bewildered by the miraculousness, the immenseness, the unexplainableness of it all, standing there and asking that. And knowing at the same time that it is a 'stupid' question, for clearly she was aware she was pointing to something which cannot be answered but must be asked and lived time and time again.... Early in my academic career I made as a motto for my life a quotation from Goethe: 'Bewilderment about the fact that there is anything at all, and curiousity about meeting that fact as a wonder, is the best part of man.'"
— Sam Keen, Hymns to an Unknown God, pp. 19-20.

     A man or woman on a spiritual quest makes a virtue of what religion considers a vice (and vice versa). The quester cultivates the discipline of doubt, affirms agnosticism as a badge of courage, delights in the darkness, finds freedom in unknowing, seeks dis-illusionment, descends voluntarily into the land of shadows, probes the unconscious, explores the profane, and prefers ordinary to sacramental places.
     In summary, the contrast is:
The Religious Life [vs.] The Spiritual Quest
In the beginning is the word, the revelation, the known God. [vs.] In the beginning is the question, doubt, the Unknown God.
The path of life is well mapped. [vs.] The adventure is uncharted.
Chief virtue is obedience to the will of God.[vs.] Chief virtue is openness, waiting, listening.
Repeat the sacred ways. [vs.] Choose, create, invent.
Religious life centers on sacred objects and places: churches, shrines, texts, sacrements. [vs.] Spiritual life centers on profane experience, existential questions, ordinary moments.
Ascent [vs.] Descent
Revelation [vs.] Awareness
Based on miracle, mystery, authority, a revealed scripture. [vs.] Based on searching for evidence of sacred in events of my life.
Institutional, corporate. [vs.] Individual, communal.
The Gothic urge to rise above it all. [vs.] The incarnational thrust to get to the depth of things.
     Every culture, nation, tribe, family casts a spell over individual members. Our identity, our values, our worldviews, and our stories are assigned to us unconsciously by an accident of birth. Our geographical destiny makes us Christians, Muslims, or Buddhists. We are all condemned by birth to be indoctrinated, mystified, and shaped by authorities we do not choose. And each of us must review this personal history to set ourselves free.
     It is time to follow the twisted path that wends its way through the mountains of the mind.
— Sam Keen, Ibid., pp. 78-79.

     That evening my mind opened wider, and I understood how I had been held by chains of love in a prison that did violence to my mind and spirit. Because I had been raised by gentle and kindly Christians, I had never seen clearly the hidden cruelty implicit in dogmatic religion. Dr. Barnhouse showed me the unloving logic of fundamentalism that allows true believers to love and respect only those neighbors who believe in their version of the revealed Truth. The multitudes who call God by another name, who worship in "strange" ways, are dehumanized by being called "pagans" or "unbelievers." In the name of God, they are consigned to error, to outer darkness and the fires of hell, unless they convert to the true religion.
     When I ventured beyond the familiar territory in which I had lived as a child and young man, the first guide who appeared to help me identify the raw phenomenon of the experience of the holy for which I was searching was Rudolf Otto.
     In his classic book The Idea of the Holy, Otto sets out to resolve the seeming contradictions between various religions. If we concentrate on the exterior — the rituals, creeds, dogmas, and symbols — the world's religions present such diverse claims that no reasonable person could take any of them seriously. Moses, Jesus, Buddha, Confucius, Mohammed, and Lao Tzu all seem to make contradictory claims about God. But if we concentrate on the experience of the holy, we find there is near-universal agreement. According to Otto, all encounters with the holy — an Aborigine dreaming in the Australian outback, a Jew at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, a Christian having a vision of Christ at the cathedral at Chartres — contain three elements. The holy is always experienced as a mystery that is at one and the same time awesome-majestic-overpowering and fascinating-promising-desirable....
— Sam Keen, Ibid., pp. 82-83.