Religion shapes and animates our great steps from birth to death, as well as the little steps of everyday life. We then spontaneously fit our daily experience into that spiritual order. The word religion derives from the same Latin root as the word ligament, which means "to bind." Religion binds us to each other.
The contemporary culture, by putting less and less faith in tradition, thrusts us back upon our own resources. The individual is left bereft and can rely only on him- or herself. In his study of existential philosophy, William Barrett has described the plight of "irrational man":
Thus with the modern period, man...has entered upon a secular phase of his history. He entered it with exuberance over the prospect of increased power he would have over the world around him,...found himself homeless....Religion, before this phase set in, had been a structure that encompassed man's life, providing him with a system of images and symbols by which he could express his own aspirations toward psychic wholeness. With the loss of this containing framework man became not only a dispossessed but a fragmentary being.
For such a fragmented person, "I" experiences everything as external. As Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance describes, he is here but he's not here. He rejects the here, is unhappy with it, and wants to be farther up the trail. When he gets there, however, he will be just as unhappy because then it will be "here." What he's looking for, what he wants, is all around him, but he doesn't want that simply because it is all around him. Every step is an effort, both physically and spiritually, because he imagines his goal to be external and distant. For wholeness, the goal is internal and effortless; it is being home with one's homegrown myths and rituals-not merely experiencing I in relation to it, but being it.
Faith is an experience of being gripped by meaning that becomes a paradigm for one's way of life. Religion provides such a ready-made paradigm, for it is difficult for an individual to formulate personal one. A shared worldview is much more likely to facilitate an identity of a Being, embodying the spiritual power belonging to the group. The individual, only thus transformed, is capable of differentiating himself from the group in order to redefine his self and his faith.
As communities restructured their authority through secular systems, religious congregations performed the role of communal glue-a shared belief system serving to offer cohesiveness of relationships. In the wise words of Rabbi Harold Kushner, "One goes to a religious service, one recites the traditional prayers, not in order to find God (there are plenty of other places where He can be found), but to find a congregation, to find people with whom you can share that which means the most to you."
Kushner says that storyteller Harry Golden makes this point in one of his stories. When he was young, he asked his father, "If you don't believe in God, why do you go to synagogue so regularly?" His father answered, "Jews go to synagogue for all sorts of reasons. My friend Garfinkle, who is Orthodox, goes to talk to God. I go to talk to Garfinkle." The Tree of Kabbala portrays its growth having roots in heaven. Therefore, only by growing down can one grow up.
T. Byram Karasu, MD is the author of The Art of Serenity
