Spiritual AND Religious

   “I am a very spiritual person, but I am not religious”.

     One hears this increasingly. The word religion derives from the Latin word religare, meaning ‘to bind’. Although this particular meaning has been challenged, it certainly expresses a phenomenon that is manifested in diverse ages and cultures – the sense that somehow man’s good relationship with his Creator has been undone and needs to be re-connected. A tie that has been broken needs to be ‘re-bound’.

     Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ has given to us a very definite religion. On Holy Thursday, we saw how He instituted the Sacrifice and the Sacrament of the Mass, commanding the Apostles whom he ordained to the priesthood on that same occasion to: “Do this is memory of me.”

     The devil is spiritual but not religious. As an angel he is pure spirit. According to tradition he set out on life as one of the most splendid angels, the name Lucifer denoting his office as ‘bearer of the light’. And he is distinctly anti-religious. It was an irreligious act of rebellion against the Creator that occasioned his fall from grace. Many have speculated that this calamity occurred after the angels had been given a preview of the creation of man. The devil was distinctly unimpressed by the idea of glorious spirit being ‘contaminated’ by contact with matter in a lesser creature. When it was further revealed that God would unite Himself with human flesh in the Incarnation, and that the angels would have to bow down and worship the Word made flesh, the thought of such an ‘indignity’ was too much for his pride to bear. The cry “Non serviam!” (I will not serve) that issued from the fallen angels as they were expelled from Heaven has echoed throughout history whenever sin has been committed ever since.

     Through the Incarnation, places and objects take on a role in our sanctification. Whenever someone says: “I can pray to God on a mountain or in the bath, I don’t need to go to church,” one has to explain as patiently as possible that, while praying in the bath is indisputably a laudable habit, you will not very often find the Mystical Body of Christ united around the re-presentation of the Sacrifice of Calvary taking place in a bathroom. We can and should pray to God in all places, but there is something unique and irreplaceable about worshipping Him at Mass, especially on a Sunday.

     Let us not be ashamed to be both spiritual and religious.  

                                                                          ~ Fr. Paul Dobson