January 5, 2025
The Epiphany: Matthew 2: 1-12
They were overjoyed when they saw the star. (2:10)
I’ve always resisted the idea that we can be “spiritual but not religious,” it’s always seemed too easy to me, but after reading The Afternoon of Christianity, by the Czech priest and theologian, Tomas Halik, I’m starting to change my mind.
I think I’m spiritual but not religious, too, and always have been.
Everyone seems to be spiritual but not religious now—everyone seems to be saying this—it’s a meme—and Halik agrees that it’s often superficial, just an excuse for not doing the hard work that every spiritual practice demands. But it’s not only that. It reflects something deep in our culture, he believes, something we have to take seriously, as many people are. Many, many of the people who have left the Church or never joined are doing the hard work, they are thoughtful and sincere, and they’re facing in their own way the problems we all have to face in the Church as an institution. They’re following their consciences. They’re trying to go where they believe the Spirit is leading them.
God isn’t dead anymore. There’s a deep, spiritual longing in the world, and the traditional religions are not meeting that need, and what Halik argues is that the Spirit is trying to speak to all of us through this crisis, calling the whole Church to be spiritual but not religious, too.
A few weeks ago I did a memorial in a small town up the valley for the family of an old man who had died. A friend asked me to help them. There were just a few people there, working class people, hardworking people, none of them practicing Christians or with any religious background at all, and I had to be careful to adapt the prayers to respect that. I wore a dress shirt and my good jeans. I couldn’t fall back on the usual things. It was tricky.
One young man was in his early thirties maybe, well over six feet tall, with a big bushy black beard, and he really intimidated me at first. But he sat down next to his grandmother, and he held her hand, the whole time, and after a while the tears began to flow. His voice broke as he talked about the kindness of the man who had died. Everyone there was emotional, they were all good, loving people, you could feel it in the air of that funeral home, and I thought, God, you are here. Whatever name they call you, you are here. Whether I wear a collar or not, whatever words I say, you are here.
It was a humbling moment. A gift.
“Religion” in the sense of institution and of organization isn’t bad. We need it. It just has to come later, in second place, and as a way of helping us enter more deeply into the mystery. The Church has to focus first on the experience of God, focus first on prayer, not on dogma and institutional practice.
This what I was being taught that day in that little town, and what I’ve been taught every day I’ve served as a deacon: “divine love meets us in the real world and nowhere else,” as Ruth Burrows says: “in this moment, in this person.”
What Halik argues is that the Church must “transcend” itself–and not just the Catholic Church but all the churches, and not just Christianity but all the major world religions. The call is for the great traditions to come together, and with mutual respect, each in its own way, offer the world the spiritual resources it desperately needs, teaching us how to separate the valid and good from the kooky and crackpot, how not to read literally, how not to oversimplify, how not to fear the darkness and the complexity of things but to face it.
This is what Jesus does: he teaches us how to pray: Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name . . . This is what Jesus does: he teaches us how to be: Blessed are the poor in spirit . . . blessed are the meek. . . This is the great treasure of the Catholic Church. Its great gift is the gift of prayer, of the long practice of being in the presence of God–or of recognizing that we’re not, that we are all in constant need of grace.
And since a church like this won’t come into being anytime soon, or ever—since there has never been a perfect church, free of human distortions—we have to make peace with the way things are, if we can, or if we can’t, find spiritual strength in other ways, in alternate communities, often on the margins and in the cracks.
“If Christianity wants to help foster a global society,” Halik says: “it will have to be a ‘kenotic’ Christianity, free of any claims to power and free of clerical narrow-mindedness.” It will have to be “a Christianity that is ecumenically open and ready to serve all those in need.”
Self-emptying: kenosis. Have in you the “same mind” as Christ Jesus, St. Paul says in Philippians, “who, though he was in the form of God, did not deem equality with God something be grasped, but rather emptied himself.”
The Church is being called to grow up, in short, to enter into what Halik, borrowing a term from Carl Jung, calls the “afternoon” or the maturity of faith: “if the Church today can attest to this trust in a God who is greater than all our ideas, definitions and institutions, something new and significant happens: we enter the afternoon of faith.”
In many ways Halik is simply saying that the Church needs to fulfill the promise of Vatican II.
The Wise Men didn’t belong to the established community, they came from somewhere else, and they didn’t follow an idea. They followed a star.
When they found the child, they didn’t stop to debate. They didn’t try to capture him and take him away. They knelt. They gave him all they had, all their gifts.
They weren’t angry and they weren’t afraid.
They were overjoyed.