Waking Up
Religion, at its best, helps people to bring this foundational divine love into
ever-increasing consciousness. In other words, it’s more about waking up than
about cleaning up. Early-stage religion tends to focus on cleaning up, which is
to say, determining who meets the requirements for moral behavior and
religious belief. But Jesus threw a wrench into this whole machinery by refusing
to enforce or even bother with what he considered secondary issues like the
Sabbath, ritual laws, purity codes, membership requirements, debt codes, on and
on. He saw they were only “human commandments,” which far too often took
the place of love. (See especially Matthew 15:3, 6–9.) Or as he puts it in another
place, “You hypocrites, you pay your tithes...and neglect the weightier matters
of the law: justice, mercy, and good faith” (Matthew 23:23). Cleaning up is a
result of waking up, but most of us put the cart before the horse.
It’s no wonder his fellow Jews had to kill Jesus, just as many Catholics would
love to eliminate Pope Francis today. Once you wake up, as Jesus and Pope
Francis have, you know that cleaning up is a constant process that comes on
different timetables for different people, around many different issues, and for
very different motivations. This is why love and growth demand discernment,
not enforcement. When it comes to actual soul work, most attempts at policing
and conforming are largely useless. It took me most of my life as a confessor,
counselor, and spiritual director to be honest and truly helpful with people
about this.*2 Mere obedience is far too often a detour around actual love.
Obedience is usually about cleaning up, love is about waking up.
At this point, at least in the United States, it appears that our cultural
meaning has pretty much shrunk down to this: It is all about winning. Then,
once you win, it becomes all about consuming. I can discern no other
underlying philosophy in the practical order of American life today. Of itself,
such a worldview cannot feed the soul very well or very long, much less provide
meaning and encouragement, or engender love or community.
For insight into a more life-giving worldview, we can look to scripture and
wise saints such as Julian of Norwich (1342–1416), whose statement that “love is
its meaning” opens this chapter. After years of counseling both religious and
nonreligious people, it seems to me that most humans need a love object (which