"Spiritual But Not Religious"

As part of an ongoing conversation about the SBNR phenomenon, I came across this article by Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick.  While it is written from a traditional Orthodox perspective, I think it raises some valid points and questions:

At its heart, I believe that the SBNR person simply does not want to worship. At least, he doesn’t want to worship anything other than himself. (This sounds really bad, and it is. But we all do it, SBNR or not, in various ways.) Worship is fundamentally about giving oneself over in complete union to the Other, which involves sacrifice and risk. It is love, but it is a much higher order love than the “love” which is spoken of in the idolatrous language of popular eros. Worship requires submission, freely offered, and that is something the SBNR person is, by definition, simply not going to do. Once there’s a divine Thou to go with my I, then that means there’s religion, for religion is the reconnecting of what was separated (re+ligio). When there’s connection going on, then that means there must also be some sort of arrangement between those being connected, and that is, once again, religion.

Fundamentally, the SBNR person is cheating himself out of the real transcendence he is probably longing for. After all, transcendence means ecstasy (ek+stasis), standing outside yourself, and that means that your own ideas about what’s true don’t matter in the face of what really is the truth. There cannot be “your truth” and “my truth” in transcendence. There is only the Truth. After all, if we are transcending to a somewhere, then it’s certainly not a somewhere that we make up for ourselves. Nor is it a place that can be navigated by our opinions. One does not step into outer space without a spacesuit.

the full post is here

Self-knowledge

An important distinction between psychologizing and traditional self-knowledge:

To us, the phrase “self-knowledge” means little more than “psychologizing” about ourselves; that is, obtaining emotionally stimulating opinions about ourselves, against the background of the view of human nature insinuated into us by our own abnormal social order.

Or it means conceptual analysis, which cannot penetrate into our emotions and body because the faculty of thinking itself is encapsulated within us.  Thoughts about myself have no penetrating action upon the emotions and instincts.

Socratic self-knowledge is self-attention, which is a force that can exist and act with tremendous power within ourselves. For Socrates, it develops and grows in relationship to the various functions of the whole human structure, in the midst of the “citizens of Athens,” in “the marketplace.”

- Jacob Needleman, The Heart of Philosophy