Molded Into Orbit

Religion for the nonreligious spiritual person

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A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about an essay I recently had published in Issue 6 of Wayfare Magazine.

Well, I’ve been thinking a lot about another essay in that same issue, written by Zachary Davis, Wayfare’s Editor in Chief and a former classmate of mine from Harvard.

Zach’s essay is about “re-enchantment,” a collective trend toward widespread reconnection with religion and spirituality. Re-enchantment is not about turning back the clock, but rather moving forward and opening up/stepping into new modes of religiosity. It doesn’t necessarily mean the emergence of new traditions (although that can be a part of it); it can also be about existing traditions evolving to better meet the modern needs of the people they wish to serve.

The essay is wonderfully written, and the overall re-enchantment project, which is also at the center of Zach’s Faith Matters organization, is one I’m highly sympathetic to.

However, there was one bit toward the end of the essay I disagreed with: essentially, that having some kind of formal or close affiliation to a religious tradition, whatever tradition that might be, is key to one’s own re-enchantment, as opposed to floating out in space in alternative spirituality world, where you attempt to go at the whole thing on your own.

I initially disagreed with this. It was a knee-jerk kind of disagreement, and recognizing it as such made me think more deeply about why I had that reaction.

“Well, I feel pretty spiritually fulfilled, and I don’t belong to a specific religious tradition,” was the crux of that “why.”

“But is this really true?” I asked myself.

Looked at from one direction, of course it’s true: I don’t pray to any deities, I don’t go to formal communal religious services at houses of worship like churches or mosques or synagogues.

But for the sake of thoroughness, I decided to look at it from the other direction, playing devil’s advocate with myself.

“Well, how did you get re-enchanted in your late teens? What made you so re-enchanted that you decided to study religion for six years across college and graduate school?”

It was a good point (if I do say so myself).

Because there was one particular religious tradition that re-enchanted me—not my native Judaism that had ceased to enchant me long ago, but Daoism.

So, yes, I’m very much still floating in space, happy not to anchor myself to any specific religious tradition because I simply find it more spiritually fulfilling to take advantage of the unprecedented access we have today to numerous translations of countless religious and theological texts and absorb bits of wisdom from all religious traditions.

But how did I get here?

Enter metaphor #1 of the day.

A moon is born

The title of my aforementioned essay in Wayfare’s Issue 6 is “Where is the Moon?” So, perhaps that has something to do with why this particular image came to mind. But it also came to mind from a set of memories that stretch back to my pre-re-enchantment days.

If you’re an OG Chill Theology subscriber, or in the roughly 50% of my subscribers who know me personally, you might know that I was a bit of a science nerd in grade school, all the way through the end of high school.

I was fascinated by many mysteries of the natural world, old and new, solved and unsolved. And one such mystery, which, at the time, straddled the boundary between solved and unsolved, was this:

How did our moon form?

When I was in middle school, there were several competing theories, some of which had more widespread support than others (I’ll let you guess where the “God, the great cheesemaker in the sky” theory fell on that spectrum).

But still, there was no single consensus theory. At the time.

Now, there, more or less, is.

Some comedically, unfathomably long amount of time ago, when our wittle Earth was still crawling around in diapers, saying “goo goo, ga ga,” it fell victim to a very traumatic event: being struck by a large asteroid—but hey, no one said parenting a little space baby would be easy, no matter how galactically renowned you are as a cheesemaker.

So, now there’s little baby Earth blood and guts everywhere. It’s super gross. Especially since there’s no cosmic cleanup crew to sweep it all away. It just sits there, floating around in space.

But, as we know, time heals all wounds. Baby Earth’s soft squishy baby bones grew back stronger and all the wittle baby Earth stem cells managed to massage around what was left and reform themselves into a nice, smooth sphere.

Yay, Earth.

But that little mass of dispersed terrestrial gore had a recovery story of its own. All the little bloody bits began to clot together and solidify into some horrifying mutant blood baby. Baby Earth now had a baby of its own!…directed by David Cronenberg.

But seriously…

Okay, now that I’ve got that out of my system, let me de-sillify the most pertinent part of all that. All the loose debris that got ejected from Earth during the impact and coalesced over time into what we now know as the moon would’ve been scattered and lost in space if not for the Earth being there as an orbital anchor.

I think there’s some truth to this with regard to spirituality as well. Your little personal moon of alternative individualized spirituality can exist and thrive quite well on its own, but it still helps to have a religious hub to orbit around. It may not be a strictly necessary part of re-enchantment (which I suppose is one of a few places where the metaphor starts breaking down a bit), but it helps.

However, crucially, that hub doesn’t have to be the religion you grew up with.

Many people who pursue their own form of alternative spirituality—spiritual but not religious, new age, etc.—have taken such a path because they became disillusioned with organized religion from the inside, having some kind of (often traumatic) break with their native tradition…ya know, like a spiritual asteroid strike.

They get ejected from the “Earth,” and go on to do their own thing. But the new Earth isn’t the same as the old Earth. It, too, transforms. There is a new religious hub. Maybe it’s a slight alteration, like jumping to a different denomination or theological view of Christianity, or maybe it’s something more drastic like jumping to Buddhism.

For the sake of not…completely floating off into space, I’m not going to go into detail about why I became enamored with Daoism, or how/why I stopped short of attempting to fully inhabit that planet.

Suffice it to say, I grew up on Judaism Earth, from which I was ejected by an asteroid that was some composite of my love for the natural sciences, the New Atheism milieu making me believe that this love was at odds with religion, and my parents’ disillusionment with our religious community.

The Judaism Earth became the Daoism Earth, and my debris coalesced into something new, all its own…but it never completely left the orbit of Daoism-Earth, which, for what it’s worth, still surely maintained its own traces of Judaism Earth.

Astronomically speaking, the moon owes its existence as a solid, stable mass to the Earth. Analogously speaking, I think my own little individualized spirituality moon also owes much of its shape and cohesion to Daoism.

Enter metaphor #2.

My Rosetta Stone

You don’t have to know anything about Daoism to follow the rest of this, although I will point out that I wrote a couple of posts about the religious tradition many moons ago, which are still available here.

Discovering and being drawn toward Daoism when I was 18-19ish didn’t make me want to study Daoism; it made me want to study religion. Why?

Well, technically speaking, Daoism as a field of study is extremely underdeveloped in higher ed compared to other Eastern traditions like Buddhism and Hinduism.

So this wasn’t really a viable option anyway.

Even if it was, though, I don’t think I would’ve taken it. I wanted to study the scriptures and theological ideas of all major world religions. Why?

Because Daoism wasn’t just some fancy little jewel I dug up from the ground. It was more valuable than that. It was more like an archaeological gem; it was more like the Rosetta Stone, like a master key that allowed me to decipher other non-Daoisty things that never made sense to me before.

I’ve mentioned in previous posts that I once spent four years researching and ghostwriting a book on common themes across religions. The work that went into that project only reinforced and cemented something I had intuitively felt and been academically exposed to in college, which is that the core teachings of the world’s major religious traditions do bear a lot of similarities.

They are similar. They are not the same. Big difference. Let’s be clear about that.

Even in instances when different religious traditions are saying virtually the same thing, they are often saying it in ways that sound completely different, so different that it can be hard to see the underlying similarities in the teachings.

They are speaking in different languages.

As people, we all speak in different languages as well: not just literal languages, but different accents, different tones, different speeds and cadences, variances in the amount of slang we use, and so forth. In extreme cases, it can be hard even for people who speak the same literal language to understand each other (ever been to Louisiana?).

But we all have to start somewhere.

Spiritually speaking, I was goo goo ga ga-ing when I was exposed to Daoism.

Religion didn’t make sense to me. It just didn’t. I wasn’t bitter about it, I didn’t despise or look down on other people for being religious. I just didn’t get it. It wasn’t just that I was speaking a different language from them; I hadn’t learned to speak at all.

I mean, I had been exposed to whatever this strange thing called language was on planet Judaism, but I wouldn’t say I ever really learned the language; I heard lots of sounds, but I never learned what they really meant.

I learned to understand speech from planet Daoism. That was the first religious “language” I learned. I say it was like a Rosetta Stone because, from there, I was able to start understanding other languages that were completely unintelligible previously. First, it was languages in the same family, like Zen. Then, I started to understand other closely related languages like Buddhism and Hinduism. And from there, Christianity, Islam, and even Judaism started to make a lot more sense to me.

I found that they all indeed were saying similar things. But for some reason, one of those languages was just easier for me to understand than the others. And even though I was able to learn the others decently well, I don’t feel like a native speaker in any of them except for Daoism. It remains the one system of religious thought that just feels intuitively right to me. Not “right” in an objectively factual sense, but just “right” in a personal feels right, fits right kind of sense.

But it’s not perfect. It doesn’t fit perfectly right. None of them do. That’s why I’m out here orbiting around it as a moon, and not nestled deep in its molten core.

But I am orbiting it. And whatever my own individual alternative sense of spirituality might be, I believe part of why it feels cohesive is because I had and still have that orbital anchor. I had one fully formed language system that gave me the proper footing to start working on my own language.

Comparatively speaking, there is (for now) no fully formed “spiritual but not religious” language. And so, it on its own is not a great way to learn the language that is spirituality itself. Without really learning a (any) fully formed systematic language first, it’s much harder to put together your own language. Does that make sense?

I’ll stop there because I don’t want to sound too prescriptive here. I’m not writing all of this to tell anyone what they should do.

What I do want to impress upon you, though, if you’re still reading, is that there is some wisdom in having a traditional religious “home planet” or “native language,” even if you yourself do not wish to be religious in the traditional sense.

And if you do feel spiritually scattered and adrift in space, there might very well be an Earth out there for you—it might not be the Earth you grew up with, it might not be an Earth you wish to inhabit, but it may have something important to offer you all the same.

Don’t stop giving planetary bodies a chance just because you haven’t found the right one yet. Sometimes they do gross stuff like drool or blow snot everywhere; sometimes they’re loud and obnoxious and throw temper tantrums; but every now and then they stare deep into your soul, smiling and giggling enough to make you wonder if they’re seeing something real that you’re not, even if that reality by nature must remain shrouded in mystery.

Thank you for reading! You are the chillest!
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