Some thoughts on religion and spirituality

From my very first days in the program I have been aware that there is a difference between religion and spirituality.  I accepted the slogan that says that "religion is for those who are afraid of going to hell; spirituality is for those who have been there."  I pretty much thought of religion as organized and ritualized spirituality.  I certainly saw it as essentially dogmatic and restrictive.  This was certainly colored by my having been raised Catholic in the time when Catholic kids were supposed to go to Catholic schools and never associate with Protestants, doubtless for fear of some form of contamination.  While I never actually thought of it in these terms, I think I viewed spirituality as dancing about like a kid at Woodstock and religion as that kid in a straight jacket and tied to a chair.  Hey, I never said it was a rational or fair view of things, just that it was mine.


However, my morning spiritual reading today included Thomas Keating's Divine Therapy and Addiction, Centering Prayer and the Twelve Steps.   I have long been a fan of Keating's, a Trappist monk who is one of the founders of Centering Prayer, a program for teaching the Christian contemplative practice found in texts like the 14th century The Cloud of Unknowing.
Keating presents religion as one of many paths to spirituality.  He begins with a very useful distinction between faith and belief systems:


A distinction might be helpful at this point between  faith and belief systems. Faith is a surrender to the Higher 

Power before it is broken down into particular belief systems.  People with belief systems also have faith, but it is expressed  through the particular tenets or cultural backgrounds from  which these people interpret their experience of God. Basically,   faith is an experience of God that calls for a response of  trust and self-surrender. It is not an image or concept of God  in whatever form that might take in one's particular religion.  Faith is prior to any belief system.

He goes on later to say:
God is present in everything that is happening and  draws people not only through religion, but through nature,  art, spiritual friendship, generous service of others, science  and the search for the unknown, especially in such disciplines  as physics, astronomy, and biology. Some people have been so  turned off by religion that they will never go to God through  ritual. That does not mean they are excluded from a healthy  dependence on the Higher Power that leads to freedom,  since God may be drawing them through another attraction  or path.
I love this concept of religion as one path to spirituality.  It seems to clarify a lot for me and it certainly makes me more tolerant of organized religion.