"If I had a dollar for every time I heard someone say, “I am spiritual but not religious,” then I might not be any wiser about what that means—but I would be richer.....
In that context, people are usually trying to tell me that they have a sense of the divine depths of things but they are not churchgoers. They want to grow closer to God, but not at the cost of creeds, confessions, and religious wars large or small. Some of them have resigned from religions they once belonged to, taking what was helpful with them while leaving the rest behind......
Plenty of them are ‘satisfied, too, even as they confess that they are sometimes lonely.
I think I know what they mean by "religious". It is the "spiritual" part that is harder to grasp. My guess is they do not use that word in reference to a formal set of beliefs, since that belongs on the religion side of the page. It may be the name for a longing—for more meaning, more feeling, more connection, more life.
When I hear people talk about spirituality, that seems to be what they are describing. They know there is more to life than what meets the eye.... They would be happy for someone to teach them how to spend more time in the presence of this deeper reality, but when they visit the places where such knowledge is supposed to be found, they often find the rituals hollow and the language antique.
Even religious people are vulnerable to this longing. Those who belong to communities of Faith have acquired a certain patients with what is sometimes called organized religion. They have learned to forgive its shortcomings as they have learned to forgive themselves. They do not expect their institutions to stand in for God, and they are happy to use inherited maps for some of life's journey. They do not need to walk off every Cliff all by themselves. Yet they too can Harbor the sense that there is more to life than they are being shown."
- Barbara Brown Taylor
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