In the gospels we get a couple of versions of a rabbinical discussion about what the greatest commandment is. In Luke, Jesus asks the questions and confirms the answer. In Matthew, it’s Jesus himself who provides the two-for-the-price-of-one answer: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the greatest commandment. And the second is like it: love your neighbor as yourself.”

A couple of observations to make right at the start: we followers of Christ tend to react to everything Jesus does by saying, “Oh, that Jesus… he’s so smart!” I can sense my Jewish friends rolling their eyes. After all, the “loving God” commandment is part of the Shema, the ritual prayer said each day. This is an answer that any observant Jewish child should be able to come up with (though I’ll admit that the “loving your neighbor” addition is a nice touch). The Luke version launches directly into the parable of the Good Samaritan as an elaboration on the follow-up question about who your “neighbor” is, and my experience in church is that we get a lot more attention to the Good Samaritan story than we get to the first part of that discussion, about loving God.

This emphasis on loving other people makes intuitive sense to me, since “loving your neighbor” is a human-to-human act. We can imagine what this looks like pretty easily, although it’s difficult to do. It’s much more difficult to picture what it would look like to love an invisible, all-powerful, all-knowing god. That’s so different from our human experience of loving family and partners. And yet we frequently skip past that “love God” commandment as if it’s obvious how to do that. When’s the last time you heard a sermon on how to love God? We are told that we should, but how? And yet it’s clear from both Old and New Testaments that this is Job One for those in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

The standard Christian explanation is that we love God because God first loved us. The more elaborated version goes something like this: God exists, and God loves us. As an act of love, a part of God came to earth and took on human form (Jesus). Although Jesus lived a sinless life, he gave himself as a sacrifice so that we might be reconciled to God. Jesus loved us so much that he died on the cross to take our sins upon himself.

As I’ve said before in this blog, this is not the simplest scenario to understand theologically. You have to recognize that your own sins were significant enough to require such a sacrifice, which is difficult for those who look at their life and think that their actions are not that immoral, comparatively speaking. You have to accept that the shedding of blood was the only way that omnipotent God could figure out how to atone for those sins. I can connect those theological dots, and I do so in a way that makes this theology emotionally and spiritually resonant for me, but if I step back outside of my Christian comfort zone, I recognize that this is thorny, complicated stuff.

It’s also a weird way to justify the commandment to love God. First of all, who loves because they are commanded to do so? Who has that kind of control over their heart? And who loves someone just because they give us something that we didn’t ask for and didn’t necessarily know we needed? This makes God sound like some sort of divorcee parent or stepparent trying to buy a child’s love. That typically doesn’t go so well.

I’m phrasing this blog post pretty aggressively so that those who are used to this kind of easy Christian gloss on “loving God” can see that it’s not so easy. Loving God is unlike any other kind of loving relationship. We spend very little time talking about how to do that, and I think we do so at our peril. If we spend too much time discussing our “beliefs” and not enough time establishing a living bond of love with God, then it’s all too easy for those beliefs to fall apart in spiritually challenging circumstances. If “loving God” is not a regular part of your life, if it remains an abstraction, then you remain spiritually vulnerable. Beliefs don’t sustain us, but love can if that love is real. Loving God is the primary call of following Christ; it also can be one of the most foreign aspects of religious experience.

So how does one learn to love God? I’ve been emphasizing the many ways that loving God is different from loving anyone else on earth, but there are some similarities. When you love someone, you want to share what’s going on in your life with them. When good things happen, you want to pick up the phone and tell them the news. During rough patches, it’s helpful to complain or bitch or get angry in unattractive ways that only a loved one can accept. The goal is to get into that kind of relationship with God, not an obligation to pray but a desire to share your thoughts and feelings about your daily experiences. That takes time and repetition, developing the habit of telling God the kinds of things you’d tell an intimate partner when you come home.

Little by little you build God into the structure of your everyday life. Eventually it can become just as unthinkable to withhold your anger and joy from God as it would be to keep information from your human life partner. Although the idea of a “relationship” with God is so overused that it’s hard to hear it with new ears, “relationship” is probably the best word. Relations are built through a thousand little interactions. Such intimate relations are resilient because they are emotionally real. They are not built on “belief” (that language feels entirely wrong — I never think about whether I “believe” in my wife). These shared experiences become part of who you are.

So my advice is to get into the habit of telling God what’s going on in your life, just as you do with a life partner. Like any habit, this takes some conscious effort up front. I suggest that this activity dovetails nicely with my previous suggestion about gratitude. As I said about gratitude, this takes fairly minimal “belief.” You can call this “prayer” if you like, or simply “talking.” (You can get awfully hung up on whether you’re doing “prayer” the right way) Such talk builds intimacy (though it’s admittedly weird to think about intimacy with an inanimate being). Although we don’t talk in much detail about how to love God, it’s Job One for a reason: loving God is life-sustaining.

From time to time in my blog, I’ll make a suggestion to those who practice Christianity about how to transform themselves by the renewing of their mind. This is one of those suggestions.

I’m taking a break from using the label “Christian” to refer to myself. I recommend “follower of Christ.”

“Are you ashamed of being a Christian?” some may ask. Nope (or, rather, no more than normal, given Christianity’s checkered history). After all, I am writing a public blog that focuses on my approach to Christianity. The statement “I am a Christian” encourages you to think of your religion as something you are, something you have as a characteristic of your being. I think it’s more useful to think of Christianity as something you do.

I can anticipate the standard theological reaction to that statement. “Wait a minute, bub. Salvation isn’t earned. You don’t get to heaven based on your own good work. Salvation is through grace by faith, not by works. Once saved, always saved.” Amen and thanks be to God, brothers and sisters. But I’m less concerned with the theology than I am with the all-too-human habits that this theology encourages. Treating Christianity as something you are doesn’t emphasize how important it is for you to pull up your big person pants in the morning (or take up your cross daily, depending on which metaphor you prefer) and do Christianity.

What I mean by “doing Christianity” is not necessarily or exclusively “doing good works.” As I noted in a previous blog entry, you don’t need religion to do good in the world.  In the everyday mundane/sacred world, Christianity is less theology and more practice. It’s a conscious reorientation of your place within your surroundings. It involves linking what you do with other followers of Christ in a mystic community for a higher purpose. The things you do to follow Christ are (at baseline) prayer, meditation, contemplation of sacred writings, reconnection to God.

And so I think “follower of Christ” has its definite advantages because it emphasizes that this is something you choose on a regular basis, not something that is a legacy of a past moment where you were “saved” (I prefer to think that God is still saving me) or something I own (even if it is unearned). Because I believe in grace and forgiveness, I can say “I’m a Christian” every day. It’s a different thing to say “I am following Christ” today. Some days I do that; some days I clearly am pursuing my own agenda. Following Christ (or not) is a conscious choice, not a property of who I am. On any given day, I can lose my status as a “follower of Christ” without losing my status as “Christian.” Re-committing myself to following Christ helps keep me from taking my spiritual birthright as a child of God for granted. It reminds me that Christianity is a discipline.

You may think this is just another example of an academic making a big deal out of words. But one of the central claims of this blog is that words matter (it’s also a central tenet of fundamentalist religion, by the way, which pours over the meanings of particular words). Your choice of words influences your habits of heart and mind. Choosing different words can be an important part of renewing your mind, of seeing the world in a new way.

So I recommend substituting “follower of Christ” for “Christian” as a devotional practice, as a way of reminding yourself how it is incumbent on all of us reconnect with our spiritual source. But I am increasingly aware of the dangers of treating “Christian” as another identity in a world that’s wrangling over competing identities. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about identity politics, and I wonder if Christianity has become first and foremost an identity in today’s society. I’ve seen a lot of Facebook postings along the lines of “I’m a Christian/Liberal/Conservative/Republican/Democrat, and I can’t wait to see who’s brave enough to share this,” and I’m struck by how similarly those identity proclamations function. “Are you or aren’t you? Which team are you on? If you’re not with me, you’re against me.”

Once your religion becomes a badge you wear more than it is a thing you do, bad things tend to happen. Lines get drawn around “my people,” and once those lines are drawn, the tendency is to switch into battle metaphors, to protect your camp against “attacks” from “secular humanists/atheists/Muslims.” And so we need to fight back just like everyone else who is defending their turf these days to preserve “our way of life” from “them.”

Of course the history of Christianity is a history of divisions into “thems” and “us-es.” The Catholic Church broke into East and West; Protestants split off from Catholicism; the Protestant Reformation led to the splintering of denominations (Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists), and those split into separate denominational bodies (in the US, often around the issue of slavery or along liberal/conservative theological lines). At the local level, congregations can split over innumerable issues (my father helped start a new church when a group disagreed about deacon ordination, of all things). Fundamentalism actually depends on schisms, as one group seeks to return to their vision of what the “fundamentals” of their religion are, a vision that has seemingly been lost in the mainline religious community.

Face it: we are much better at dividing than we are at uniting. We are much better at holding onto our labels than we are recognizing the humanity and spirituality of those who worship differently than we do (or those who don’t worship at all). I’ve always been impressed with the Catholic Church’s ability to house liberation theology and charismatic Catholics under the same theological roof. I suspect that this has a lot to do with the centrality of ritual in Catholicism; regardless of whether your beliefs lean toward the progressive or the conservative, Catholics can still share the same mass together. Although there are many, many, many problems with Catholicism, Catholics do take their name seriously, attempting to provide a “universal” road to Christian experience through shared practice.

And so I believe an emphasis on the discipline of Christianity – on following Christ – can help us overcome the tendency to treat Christianity as an identity that needs to be protected. Christianity has simply fallen prey to this too many times. Whether it’s Protestants against Catholics in Ireland or in the U.S. Ku Klux Klan, Christians vs. Islam in medieval and contemporary times, or Christianity against modern secularism, we should loft fewer holy hand grenades at the other side, or rather stop identifying sides in favor of following Christ’s example. Any defense (or – heaven forbid – an offense) that might be necessary for “Christianity” needs to operate in a different way than other turf protections. It needs to look and feel counter to the defensive ways of the world, where identities need shielding often because they feel so vulnerable. Within Christianity, we aspire to hold to an unshakable (and unearned) sense of who we are; we are children of God. We need to reconnect to that mystic truth without using it as a justification for hostility and judgment that seem so much a part of today’s world.

In my blog I’ll try to avoid using “Christian” as a noun, though I may slip into that from time to time simply for linguistic ease. (I will admit that “follower of Christ” can get a little clunky, but that clunkiness is part of the point, encouraging us to think about how we describe ourselves.) Since I’m thinking more about identity, my next blog entry will deal with that from a political standpoint. In the meantime, try taking a break from “Christian” as an identity. Focus instead on recommitting regularly to the discipline of following Christ’s example.

If you want to move along a spiritual path, where do you start? Or where do you re-start if you’ve become disconnected from religious practice? Or where do you begin your day when you’re on your path? My advice is to begin with thanksgiving. Gratitude is the gateway emotion for spirituality. And for me, giving thanks begins with noticing the world around you.

Religion is often criticized for doing the opposite, for overemphasizing the promise of “pie in the sky bye and bye” rather than paying attention to the world that we are merely “passing through.” Religion for me is actually fed by attention to the world around me, and that is an endless source of fuel for the religious fire. My glimpses of heaven can wax and wane; my access to the miraculous and beautiful of the material world, however, is only limited by my perception. Religion for me is an encouragement to engage with the world and its splendors.

It’s all too easy to think of ourselves today as the provider of our own world and to think of that world as made up of functional objects for us to use and consume. After all, I earned my place in life; I worked hard and pulled myself up by my own bootstraps. I raised my kids to be good people. I bought and paid for stuff, and I own that stuff.  I, I, I, or as two-year-olds say, “Mine! Mine! Mine!” This way of being-in-the-world encourages you to think of yourself as fully deserving of what you have and to take the world for granted. Today you can sculpt a world in your own image.

As I said in my previous post, religion for me is an awareness of and a participation in the workings of a larger, transcendent universe. Religion involves seeing the world as a gift, not simply something you earned because of our own efforts. Yes, I did buy and pay for my house, but that way of thinking doesn’t acknowledge the limits of my actions and my knowledge. I have so little real knowledge about how electricity or internet signals come into my house or about where sewage goes or the physics of how joists support the frame of my house. I paid for those things, but that doesn’t negate their wondrousness. Owning something and having it in your everyday world doesn’t necessarily domesticate its marvelous qualities.

A religious perspective involves acknowledging your own limits. Sure, I’ve worked hard, but many of the opportunities I have been given have depended on others. I am not a totally self-made man. So many of the universe’s gifts come to me through forces that are beyond my own efforts and knowledge.  Religion involves altering your perspective toward a continuing awareness of the beauties and blessings that surround us. It asks us to repeatedly perform a mental transformation of the mundane into the transcendent.

When people talk about such reenchantment of the world around you, they usually focus on seeing God’s hand in nature: clouds, starlight, the smell of honeysuckle. Such talk typically has a “the best things in life are free” bent to it. But as a film and television scholar, the best things in my life include streaming video and downloadable music (as well as hot showers, good coffee, and, oh yes, clouds, starlight, and the smell of honeysuckle).

I cultivate an attitude that these things made by human hands are miraculous and beautiful and that I can see God’s hand in them as well. These well-made objects are part of my material existence in this world. Yes, I have spent rapturous moments hiking, but religion for me is not a call to see the sacred in nature and to ignore it in the rest of my world. It is a call to transform my whole world (human-made and natural) by a renewing of the habits of my perception. We can talk another time about Christianity’s radical preference for the poor and what that may mean about our place in the material world. For now, I’ll just note that this shift in outlook and response is available to all.

Once you begin to be aware of the miraculousness of the world and to consider how little you have done to deserve it, I believe that prompts an obvious, honest, emotional response: gratitude. I like to begin with gratitude for things I can see, touch, smell; that keeps me grounded in the world. Christianity has a tendency to get fuzzy, to move toward abstractions such as “grace” and “salvation.” Those are enormously important aspects to the practice of Christianity, but it’s hard to start there, particularly if you don’t have that firm a grasp on these theological concepts.

There’s an awful lot of stuff that you have to believe before you can get to a statement like “Christ died for my sins.” I prefer to start small and work my way up toward expressing gratitude for the big theological gifts. Otherwise, it’s very tempting to construct your faith out of churchy language, and I don’t believe that tends to hold up well in trying circumstances.

So you start your day (or your path) by being grateful for the blessings (physical and spiritual) around you. This raises an obvious question: thankful to whom? You have admitted that you are not the measure and source of all things. Where do these gifts come from? One could say “natural science” or “the economy,” and religion doesn’t deny those explanations, but it says that they lack something. Different religions propose different versions of the divine, but they all point to a numinous world that exists beyond what you can see.

Gratitude is a grounded entrance toward experience of the spiritual. It connects what you perceive to the forces that provide these gifts, whether you call that “God,” a “higher power,” whatever. It is a source of connection that never ends, regardless of your life circumstances. You can always transform some aspect of your day into a consolation. Developing this habit builds a firm relationship between you and the source of the miraculous, much firmer than abstract theological beliefs. The connection you forge between what you experience and the transcendent becomes a real part of your everyday life.

(For those of you who are in particularly contemporary Christian churches, you may want to put forward “praise” as the best starting place for connecting to God. Praising God certainly does a lot of what I’m saying: it acknowledges your rightful place in the universe in relation to an omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent divinity. And as a church musician, I am very aware of the power of corporate praise. Praise is definitely a better way to start a communal worship experience than how most traditional churches services begin: listing announcements for the community. Beginning with praise makes the right statement about a church (God comes first here), and it can be a powerful way to link your life with the life experiences of others. My problem with starting with praise is because there’s so much belief that is implicitly folded into praise. Singing the praises of an omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent God is in many ways stepping to the head of the theological line (doing so in emotionally powerful ways, I’ll admit). Gratitude involves many fewer steps: I acknowledge the beauty of the world around me; I recognize the limits of my contribution to those wonders; and I am thankful for the forces that provide them. And so for me thanksgiving has advantages in renewing your spiritual perspective.)

In the modern world, slowing down is a vital part of finding this perspective (called by some an “attitude of gratitude”). Whether through meditation, walking, or other practices, slowing down helps us focus our attention; it alters our perception so that we can cultivate wonder (one of the great purposes of religion. See my previous post). At some point I’ll pass along tips for the discipline of focused, contemplative prayer, but in the meantime I’ll leave you with the possibility that the simple repeated act of thanksgiving can open up a gateway between the world around you and a larger world where you can experience the presence of God.

Let’s start with what should be an obvious point: you can lead a good, moral life and make the world a better place without having any connection to religion whatsoever (there are plenty of examples). One can certainly argue that organized religion…well… ORGANIZES people pretty well to do good, but so do lots of secular groups. If that’s all you need religion to do, you can join one of those groups and still sleep in on Sunday morning. If you don’t have a need that religion can fill (and lots of people seem to get along fairly well without religious experience), then I suggest you move on to the other parts of my blog. I’m not going to try to convince you.

I’ll avoid some of the standard discussions about why you need religion — forgiveness of sins, admission into the afterlife. If those are resonant for you, there are lots of other places to look for those appeals. I’m also not going to try to argue logically for religion. There is precedent for that being successful (C.S. Lewis being the most prominent case), but that’s rare. Pascal argued that you might as well wager on the existence of God, but I think that’s not a particularly compelling motivation to stick to religion, which is damn hard work.

Religion is not necessarily illogical, but it is grounded in experience, not pure rationality. And so I will talk in this post about needs (not arguments) that religion is particularly well suited to address. Why religion? Because it can fill certain basic needs in ways that are difficult (but not impossible) to do in the modern era.

One thing to get out of the way first: “religion” to me means “an awareness of and a connection to a world that exists outside the direct perception of our senses.” You’ll notice that I didn’t put the word “belief” in that definition. I’ll return to this a good bit in this blog, but I think that Christianity in particular gets way too caught up in what you “believe” (a fraught and complicated word. More about that another time). And so my definition emphasizes an awareness (ongoing, renewed) that there are forces that exist beyond what we can see.

Mere acknowledgment that there is a God doesn’t quite meet my definition, either. There needs to be (ongoing, renewed) access to or connection with this (literally) super-natural world or else you’re not actively practicing that religion (then it’s more of a passive “belief”). That practice can take multiple forms, depending on your religion: prayer, ritual sacrifice, meditating on sacred texts, devotional music, building a shrine to ancestors, sacred dance, creating iconography, and so on. (“Morality,” if you’re looking for definitions, involves conduct guided by principles. You can have that without a recognition of the divine, as in Confucianism, conservatism, or liberalism.)

Religion can provide a sense of awe and wonder. That may not sound like a particularly strong need, but I think it actually is. We are creatures of habit. Habit helps us be efficient, but it also necessarily dampens our engagement with the world. Phenomena that are pretty astonishing when you think about them (thunderstorms! Highway tunnels under bodies of water! GPS navigation!) become mundane, and then they either become part of the background or they become tiresome sources of frustration. Why do people always have to slow down when they drive through this tunnel? Why does my map app get confused when I’m driving on an overpass where one interstate crosses another? Why doesn’t this software (or hardware or interaction with a service worker) proceed more efficiently? We grind the world more finely, becoming more and more critical, increasingly aware of how less than optimal our existence is. It’s easy for the modern world to become populated with such annoyances; such a world quickly can turn angry, dark, and cynical.

Not everyone needs religion as an antidote to the soul-killing tendencies of modern life. Some scientists, for instance, can get this sense of wonder from their work by understanding in detail the marvelous interworkings of the world. Most of the rest of us have to accept that someone knows the physics to keep a bridge erect or that someone understands the specifics of how cell division and evolution work. For us, the universe can look like an arrangement of poorly understood but (thankfully) dependable, mechanistic processes. Religion for me is not a denial of science, but it is a reframing of the world. Because I don’t have the scientific training necessary to have a deep sense of wonder produced by my knowledge of the universe’s intricacies, religion helps.

Religion encourages me to see the world as a miraculous set of consolations when times are difficult.  One of my favorite quotes says, “There is no life so hard that it is without consolation.” On difficult days, the consolation may be as impersonal and clichéd and brief as a sunset, but that doesn’t mean that these consolations aren’t real. You just have to look for them (as Alice Walker said, the color purple demands our attention and reverence); to remove the filters that prevent you from experiencing wonder (the thought that sunsets are clichés, for instance); and to connect what you see to forces bigger than yourself. If you’re a scientist, you probably don’t need religion to give you a sense of awe. For the rest of us, religion helps to rekindle wonder, which is a marvelous inoculation against anger, cynicism, and despair. If any of these are a problem for you, may I suggest that religion might help.

Religion can also provide purpose (I promise I’ll be less longwinded about this one). Through religion we find a continuing motivation to participate in the great good work of repairing the world through prayer, education, helping the poor and oppressed, working for social justice, and providing solace. As I said at the beginning of this post, many secular organizations do similar work, but I do think that religious purpose does provide some advantages.

Religion allows us to connect our individual efforts through the larger network of forces that operate behind the visible world; this magnifies and sustains our labor. It provides crucial encouragement when we inevitably encounter frustrations and obstacles in trying to change the world around you for the better (particularly when working within volunteer organizations of other humans). Religious purpose expands what you do, putting it in context of something larger than yourself. Again, if you have a strong sense of mission (through your vocation, your political action, whatever), then this may not be a compelling need for you. But if your life lacks purpose and meaning, religion can provide this.

Religion can be an enormous source of comfort. We all need comfort at some point in our lives (maybe the opposite of the quote above might be “There is no life so easy that it is without suffering”). If you have built a network of supportive friends, family, and/or mental health professionals that can sustain you through hard times, good for you. You may not need religion to serve that role. If you haven’t developed that support, religion can help.

It can bring your individual suffering into a larger context, and conversations with God can provide consolation in the quiet moments when no one is around. (And just to be clear, by “conversation” I also include bitching, moaning, complaining, and other unattractive but all too human forms of communication) There’s a danger of thinking of religion as something you activate only in moments of crisis, and there it can fail badly if you haven’t previously built a strong foundation of interaction with God. In fact, one powerful justification for continuing to work on your relationship with God during good times is that it prepares that bond to sustain you during tragedy. Again, religion is more about experience than belief for me, and people have found sustenance in religion for millennia. You might try that, too.

Lastly, religion can provide community. Yes, I do believe that you can practice religion on your own without connection to an organized body (there is a tradition of the hermit monastic, after all). Yes, I do recognize that much violence and oppression has been done in the name of organized religion. But I do believe that the solo practice of religion is difficult. It’s all too easy for religion to warp into a justification of your own preferences and interests if you don’t weigh it against the experiences and revelations of others. I am enormously grateful for the way that worshiping with others provides a regular challenge to my understanding of God. Plus the communal worship magnifies your experience in a way that individual meditation simply can’t duplicate.

I’ve always liked the comparison between a church and a gym. You can develop your body by working out on your home exercise equipment, but many of the most devoted athletes haul their butts to the gym. You participate in a community that way; the community supports you when you don’t feel like exercising, they spur you on toward better discipline. If you’re interested in physical development, the gym is an obvious place to find others who are interested in similar pursuits. You’ll find people who are further along the path, and you can learn from them. You’ll also find people who you can mentor through some of the struggle you have overcome. Throughout this blog I will come back to the notion that I think Christianity is a practice, a discipline. A good spiritual gym is a good place to work on that.

(You’ll note that a lot of the needs I talk about in this post are interrelated. Comfort frequently comes from community, which also can provide purpose, and so on. )

So: if you experience wonder on a regular basis; if you have strong purpose in life; if you’ve got comfort and consolation taken care of; and if you have a community, then I really don’t have much to say to you about the advantages of religion. If any of those are missing, then may I humbly suggest that religion can help. In this blog I’ll lay out what I see as fundamental principles of Christianity (my own religion). I hope that this discussion will usefully clarify certain ways toward experiencing the divine.

Next time: where do you start on a religious/spiritual path?