I’m wondering...how religion, faith, and spirituality are unique, even as they also overlap or inter-relate.
I probably used to assume that these were all just different words for a fairly common thing. Now I'm not so sure.
I think I can see each distinctly now, each with the possibility of contributing to the other, but not necessarily doing so.
While the theory involved may be captivating (it is to me, at least), I suspect my experience with each is more personal (as most things are).
Faith for me has probably been more religion than I had realized. But, once I saw the religion of it, I wanted to distance myself from it. Spirituality, then, became the outlet, the alternative...the way for me to retain something deeply embedded within me about faith. But, it too began to feel like, though a necessary reality-check, something that in and of itself was not enough.
To be honest, I am still exploring some of the range of spirituality, as awareness seems to strike much closer to the center of what all this is about.
But, faith stills feels like it, in some ways, stands alone. There is likely a partnership in all three, but there is also a center and that center has something to do with the deepest sense of trust that we have (or need to have). It is, in that way, a faith that there is something to be trusted. Something that I need to trust; something that is greater than even my capacity to do it.
So, the question emerges for me is, what is it that I have faith in? Especially, if it is no longer a given that it is something represented (at least exclusively) by religion. If faith is the substance of what is, spirituality is perhaps the means of accessing that it — the substance of what I trust in.
At the end of day, it comes down to what I believe, not because of what someone says I should believe in, but because of what the spirit of existence, and my own existence, leaves me with. And that is a sense of what is true about reality and my particular co-existence with it. Essentially, we believe what we're trusting in. That, to me, feels like what faith is — what my faith is and how that faith is compatible with the faith of others, who trust something bigger than what may be believed at any given moment.
Religion, it seems to me, is what brought me to my faith. And, I suspect that as my faith continues to evolve and grow, through my experience with the spiritual nature of all things, I will in some unexpected way contribute to a better and more wholistic kind of religion.
