Can we be spiritual without God and a church that helps us know him and love him?

As I was trying to think of a topic to write about on Saturday, May 21, I saw a column in The Advocate entitled “Number of Buddhist chaplains on the rise in U.S.”  It was about Rev. Jo Laurence, a Buddhist hospice and palliative care chaplain.  The story reported that “rather than invoking God or a Christian prayer, she talked of meditation, chanting and other Eastern spiritual traditions.”  Our hospitals, no doubt, have more than a few Buddhist patients, and it is good that those patients have the services of chaplains of their faith.  

It doesn’t surprise me Rev. Laurence would not invoke God or Christian Scripture since Buddha, while teaching his followers much about meditation, does not explicitly teach a concept of God in his writings.  He did teach well about the spiritual dimension of human beings.  However, it is precisely our human spiritual dimension that begs for the redemption and salvation that Jesus Christ brings us through the church he founded on St. Peter and the other apostles.  It is what we have been celebrating in the Sunday Masses after Easter, on the feast of the Ascension and Pentecost this coming Sunday.

Our Catholicism teaches us we are body and soul, or body and spirit.  A friend of mine went to hear Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony recently at the Baton Rouge River Center Theatre for the Performing Arts.  He said the finale, the “Ode to Joy,” with full orchestra and choir, had everyone on their feet clapping at its overpowering beauty.  That is what a great work of art does.  It captures and communicates more than mere matter.  Through material things like sound and sight it stirs our hearts and our most profound motions.  Great art is like the sacraments that Christ left his church.  It makes present through material things that which transcends the purely physical. Likewise, the sacraments, through the words and actions of Jesus represented by the priest, give us forgiveness, spiritual healing, fidelity, acceptance into the community of Christ’s church and ultimately, the presence of our risen Lord in holy Communion.  These are spiritual realities but nonetheless real.  We experience them and know them.  

All human beings have some spiritual experiences.  All one has to do is get away from city lights and look up on a starry night.  That is what inspired Van Gogh to paint his famous painting by the same name.  That inspiration of being overwhelmed by nature’s beauty has happened to all of us.  We may not be able to convey it on canvas like Van Gogh but we feel it.  The most common spiritual experience, I would suppose, is falling in love. It can completely capture a couple.  They can’t think of anyone but the other.  They feel a new kind of energy.  They are exhilarated.  Life seems particularly beautiful. They feel more complete, more comfortable about having found what they are meant to do in life. 

In another way, surviving a life-threatening disease can change one’s perspective of life.  A feeling of gratitude and, at the same time, of obligation to help others facing the same danger, may give a person a new direction in life.  Breast cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, all have given a new direction to the energy, empathy and generosity of many.  These virtues are transcendent, more than physical.

These are all spiritual experiences that followed physical life events which we can recognize in ourselves and others whom we know.  They lead us to ask questions about the meaning and purpose of our lives, about why there is so much evil and suffering in the world and, ultimately, about God and a future life after death.  We all have experienced transcendent values, values that we want to hang on to because they give us more lasting satisfaction than merely material pleasures.  We cannot find the answer to these kind of questions under a microscope.  We must turn to religion for these kind of answers.  

We live in a culture that is becoming ever more individualistic.  We want to live as independent as possible of government, institutions and even of organized religion.  Many say that “It is enough to be spiritual.  I don’t need to belong to any particular religion.”  

However, along comes a pandemic and all of a sudden we are short of items in our stores, beds in our hospitals, workers for our factories,  businesses and schools.  We quickly and rudely are made to realize how socially and economically we are dependent on others.  The all-powerful individual can’t make it alone.  

Well, the same is true for religion.  God simply did not create us to be loners.  And this is true also in our quest for transcendental spiritual values.  Jesus prayed “that you all may be one, as I and the father are one.”  He said he was sent to build a church founded on St. Peter and the apostles, whom he sent to teach and baptize “all nations.”  

Never being truly self-sufficient, we humans are called to seek together true, lasting values with which we can construct and preserve a healthy society and the church that our Lord intended.  

We can’t stop at just being spiritual.  It is God who pursues us more than we pursue him.  As Jesus put it, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”  He established a spiritual family (his church) and left us the Spirit of himself and his father (which we celebrate on Pentecost) to guide the church through the centuries.  He left us his sacraments, including the Eucharist, so that we might respond, united in Christ, through the communal worship our God wanted (“Do this in memory of me”).  

COVID-19 will end – I do not know exactly when.  I truly hope that when it does, even more Catholics will attend the celebration of the sacraments and the Mass than did pre-COVID.  It is by the frequent communal use of the Mass and the sacraments that we are strengthened in our faith and our morality.  This is why the renewed liturgy approved by Vatican II switched from Latin only to the language of each national group.  That is why also those receiving Communion approach the altar in a procession as the “people of God.” (“I pray that you all may be one, as I and the father are one.”) God wants his people together with him, here and eternally hereafter.       

Father Carville is a retired priest in the Diocese of Baton Rouge and writes on current topics for The Catholic Commentator. He can be reached at johnny [email protected].