Matthew 23:3

"For they practice but do not preach."

Reflection by Donna Schaper

The "Spiritual but not Religious" crowd practices without preaching, prays without sourcing: they soul without body.  The "Religious but not Spiritual" preaches without practicing. In what was formerly called mainstream religion, we spend our time keeping our budgets from drowning and our roofs from leaking: we material more than we spiritual.  The SBNR crowd wants to find calm in the chaos and has already seen too many spreadsheets at the office.  The RBNS crowd is afraid to find singable hymns because we are still playing to dwindling home constituencies who "never did it that way."  (Some of us also get a lot out of a good hymn.)  If you fear that never the twain shall meet, join me.

I rue the loss of institutional shelter to people who are desperate for soul, and I rue the exhaustion of those weighed down by affiliation and institution.  They enter by different doors to divinity. Social activists fear worship because "it does nothing," while forgetting what Rabbi Heschel meant about the source of action being awe and wonder.  Seekers pray first and act later, much later, after the yoga class and the tour of the labyrinth.   Both find "God in nature" or "God in the ordinary" or "God in the community" and very few can get through the first chapter of any book on biblical criticism.  The religious types fight over the baptismal formula: Is it Trinitarian enough to bind us to all of Christendom?  The spiritual types just want the water and the experience.

The insults fly.  "They can't organize their way out of a paper bag."  If the seekers keep up their disembodied unaffiliated soul seeking, soon "the poor will have nothing left to eat but the rich."  Some distance makers are subtler.  "We'd love to have those kinds of people here but they won't like the way we refuse to clap."  "I hate praise songs."  "I went to church and they asked me to join a committee."

Consider this.  Become both spiritual and religious.  Do each at 100%.  Awe and wonder will be the cause and the consequence.

Prayer

God, you who are spiritual and religious, religious and spiritual, draw near and bless us with freedom from our excuse making dichotomies.  Let us come towards you.  Amen.

About the Author Donna Schaper is the Senior Minister of Judson Memorial Church in New York City. Her latest work is 20 Ways to Keep Sabbath, from The Pilgrim Press. Check out her work at www.judson.org.

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