As we reflect together on the subject of “spirituality beyond the boundaries of religion” there is nothing that can teach us as much as our own personal stories and those of others whose spiritual journeys provide the evidence of lived experience. But personal narratives are in need of interpretation. Without interpretation, stories can be multiplied indefinitely while our understanding of what is happening lags behind. The categories of interpretation for this workshop have been provided to us in the title itself: “spirituality,” “religion” and “boundaries.” I would like to consider these briefly before turning to some real stories and examples.

Let us take “religion” first. How can we identify something as a “religion”? Much ink has been spilled over this question and the definition of “religion” is a well-worn, not to say notorious, topic. The term is still contested, but a kind of consensus has emerged, so that a usefully general characterization might be: a world view or comprehensive set of beliefs providing answers to the most basic questions of existence, along with a value system and way of life embodying and expressing these beliefs. A religion’s beliefs and values derive from some sacred authority, whether personal or non-personal, beyond, underlying, or deeply implicit in ordinary reality. A “religion” constitutes an integral culture, which can form personal and social identity and can influence experience and conduct in concrete ways.i

“Spirituality” is a term used far less in academic discussion but very often in common speech. It has no precise or technical definition. If we pay attention to how the word “spirituality” is used every day by people we know ourselves or read about, it seems that it has two main senses, which overlap. First, “spirituality” is a matter of feeling, and not only of intellectual belief or external observance. Second, “spirituality” is often almost a synonym for contemplative practice, the life of prayer and meditation. I have heard it said that “spirituality” has to do with “inner” or even “the innermost” kinds of experience. (The metaphor of the “inner” is, I would guess, virtually universal in the world’s languages, cultures and religious traditions.) What, then, is the difference between “religion” and “spirituality”? First, from the definition of “religion” just given it looks as if “spirituality” is contained within the larger group of things collectively called a “religion.” Each religion has its own forms of spirituality, its own forms of worship, prayer and meditation and the inner experiences that are fostered by these.

What these definitions do not fully account for is the matter of “boundaries.” A boundary is a line that distinguishes between things and divides one thing from another. Interreligious dialogue and relations among our religions have everything to do with understanding religious boundaries and their implications. Boundaries are a very serious business. Boundaries between religious groups are held to derive from their sacred authorities and are part of the practices and relationships that the sacred authorities prescribe. Within a boundary is an identity, both a sense of belonging and officially recognized membership, and a jurisdiction. Outside the boundary is a different identity, one does not belong to the community, there is no official membership, and the laws of the community do not hold sway. How and when does spirituality carry us, or not carry us, beyond these boundaries of religion? Let me now turn to a few examples from my own life.

There is a synagogue in New York that I love. One Saturday morning I was there for the Shabbat service. It may have been during summer, because I remember that there were fewer people in the sanctuary than usual. A woman in the congregation helping with the liturgy approached me and asked me if I would like to come up to the bimah and hold one of the scrolls of the Torah. I said to her, “I’m not Jewish.” She looked at me as if to say, “What difference does that make?” but I still declined to do what she was asking. The synagogue welcomes all who wish to come and worship, Jews and non-Jews, but I chose to stay within the boundaries set by tradition for certain kinds of participation – in spite of my profound inner feelings for Jewish “spirituality.”

The same kinds of limits apply when, as a person who is not an American Indian, I visit an Indian reservation for a ceremony. At some ceremonies, non-Indians are simply not allowed to be present, and I do not go at all. At others, non-Indians are permitted to be present but not to participate or to take pictures; this is enforced by members of the community. An interest in Native American “spirituality” is not considered to be a qualification in any way for participation; one qualifies, if one does, in other ways. In some other exceptional cases, non-Indians may participate, even including on some reservations. I took part in a Sacred Pipe ceremony at the United Nations; most of the participants there were not Indians. Depending on the circumstances, Indigenous spiritual leaders who expand boundaries may at times be subject to criticism. They may even lose their teaching authority because they have allowed those who are not part of the people to have access to religious practices or knowledge in ways that are inappropriate or forbidden.

We are all well acquainted with the complications of being allowed or not allowed to receive Communion in churches other than our own. And there are some situations, past and present, in which crossing a religious boundary – either to go in or to go out – can be punishable by death. Finally, we are aware that for some, boundaries and questions of membership are an ultimate question of the attainment of “salvation,” although we do not agree on what “salvation” is.

I have begun with these examples in order to dramatize that going beyond boundaries is not a trivial matter, yet even for those who are adherents of a single religion, such as Christianity, membership and therefore boundaries also are complex. If I am a Christian, I belong to God in Jesus Christ. I therefore “belong” to all other Christians as well in some way. Yet I also belong especially to my own church.ii I belong to my church as a “denomination” and I also belong to my local church. I may have changed my affiliation from one denomination to another (which has no adverse consequences in the United States) and from one local congregation to another. I may belong now to one church and attend services at another. In my family individuals may belong to different congregations and denominations. So even within one “religion” there are multiple memberships and boundaries. Different churches and Christian traditions have different “spiritualities” so that in my own person, formed by various experiences over time, I can have a plural “identity” as distinct from my current formal “membership.”

Let us return to the synagogues of New York. It is well known that among Western-born practitioners of Buddhism, a high percentage are Jews. In New York, you can meet any number of Jewish Buddhists, many of whom are active members of their Jewish communities. What drew them to Buddhist practice? Many will say, a search for a contemplative practice which is taught systematically, accessibly and to an advanced level. They could not find the contemplative practices of Judaism clearly explained in any book, nor could they find a teacher. Today it seems strange to say this, but twenty-odd years ago that is the way it was. Some said authentic teachers of Jewish mysticism had almost all been killed in the Holocaust, while others in those days would say, in effect, that the practices were not accessible because they were too embedded in Orthodox Judaism. All this led to the burgeoning of the Jewish Renewal movement, to classes, workshops and conferences on Jewish meditation, to the emergence of important teachers of Jewish spirituality and also to the current popular craze for Kabbalah. It also led to many, many Jewish Buddhists – including important and well-known Jewish teachers of Buddhism iii – as well as Jewish Sufis, Jewish practitioners of yoga or Vedantic spirituality, Jewish followers of the Yoruba religion, and so on. Jewish Buddhist practitioners may or may not practice Judaism fully (however that is interpreted), but that is true of many Jews. They may explicitly identify themselves as Buddhists or may not, even when their involvement in Buddhist practice is extensive. Then there are those who will indeed say that they consider themselves to be Jews in a full religious sense, and also to be Buddhists in a full sense.

There are two reasons frequently given by people who join religious movements or communities other than those they had belonged to originally. One is, “I was worshipping in my church/synagogue/temple and doing all the observances, but I didn’t know what anything meant.” This would seem to be a failure of religious education and of formation in the home as well as in the congregation. The second reason for looking elsewhere is, “I was worshipping in my church/ synagogue/temple iv …but I didn’t feel anything.” With this second reason we come close to the realm of “spirituality.” It is not the realm of contentment with one’s family and ethnic affiliation, or of intellectual assent to religious belief as sufficient, or of acceptance of required practice and ethical commitment as all that is needed. The late Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg once said, deploring the longing for “spirituality,” “If you want to have an experience of God, do a mitzvah – any mitzvah.” But once the longing to feel something takes hold, no amount of normative pronouncements by eminent authorities is likely to make any difference to the person who wants to appropriate the sacred reality our religions speak of. This person wants to realize religious truth sensibly, emotionally, cognitively and at last intuitively in the ways called “mystical.” If such a person lives where religious freedom is recognized as a human right and there is religious plurality, there is nothing to stop him or her from exploring the practices and experiences that are available. He or she can do this wherever boundaries have not been put up to keep away this person, whom we now can call “a spiritual seeker.”

All of this applies equally to Christians who engage in the practice of Buddhism, Sufism, of yoga and meditation in the Hindu traditions, and also of Indigenous traditions or even of Judaism. They seek out practices and experiences they could not find, or thought they could not find, in their church settings. They may remain affiliated to their churches in a normal way at the same time that they also engage more or less intensively in a practice that is part of another religious tradition. Often reading and study about other religions has played some role in their quest. Also, at present instruction in all kinds of non-Christian practices is readily found, which was not the case a generation or two ago. Meanwhile new developments of Christian contemp-lative practices, such as the Centering Prayer movement, have arisen as a reaction to the adoption of non-Christian meditation by Christians.

All of this raises the question of belief. How can one person practice in multiple contexts in which there are apparently incompatible beliefs or worldviews? Most spiritual seekers have almost instinctively concluded that there is only one sacred Reality or God that our different religions envision and connect us to – or at least they have made this their working assumption, and on that basis they proceed. Needless to say, elaborate reflections on this question are the stuff of theologies of religious pluralism, where we now may find recommended a kind of constructive agnosticism. God is said to be infinite and beyond our knowing to such an extent that every religion has only a partial or perspectival understanding of God. To put it another way, if God has disclosed God’s self to us through revelation, this revelation itself is not fully understood by us. I am reminded of a story told by Bill Clinton. An evangelical Christian leader asked to see him and they had breakfast together. The visitor said, “I have just one simple question. Answer yes or no. Do you believe the Bible is literally true?” President Clinton replied, “I believe it’s completely true. And neither you nor I is smart enough to understand it completely.” So it is, too, with spiritual seekers among the religions. If one does not have this “don’t-know mind” (as it is called in Zen) as well as a conviction, however informal, that Sacred Reality is ultimately one, spirituality is not, in fact, likely to take us beyond the boundaries of religion. This is because without the “don’t-know mind” exploring diverse practices and traditions can create a tension in the domain of belief – a “cognitive dissonance” – that for many is intolerable. For those, on the other hand, who can leave some questions of belief unresolved, boundaries are indeed crossable, both theologically and in practice.

This brings us to a phenomenon already referred to that is more and more the object of attention, variously called “double belonging,” “multiple participation” and “practicing across boundaries.” We have already seen that boundaries may be a way of saying who is inside and who is out, and what identity I may claim, at least publicly. If someone has crossed boundaries in a spiritual journey, to what community does this person belong? It depends both on the person and on the religious communities involved and how they look at the meanings of their boundaries. As Sir Paul Reeves, an Anglican bishop and a Maori, has said, “Identity must be both offered and claimed.” Many observe that in Asia, religious belonging is not expected to be exclusive, and moving across boundaries and having plural affiliations are not a problem. But is it really possible to be both a Buddhist and a Christian, for example, as some say they are? Or should I rather say that I am a Christian with a Buddhist “spirituality” or a Buddhist who reveres Jesus? Is “spirituality” becoming a way of side-stepping the complications of religious “membership”?

There is another possibility in people’s self-identification. This is to say that one is “spiritual but not religious,” an increasing trend social scientists have recognized. The phrase taken by itself appears to indicate that people are rejecting “religion” but remaining “spiritual.” This would seem to mean that they stress the “inner,” experiential and contemplative aspect of what is generally called “religion,” while they reject its other aspects. They may be “rejecting” institutionally organized religion for reasons already mentioned: they “didn’t know what it meant” or “didn’t feel anything,” or they found it authoritarian and punitive, or the members of their congregation were hypocritical, or religious authority was restrictive of their personal lives or spiritual search. The phrase might also seem to mean that some people are rejecting any religious affiliation and identification in order to be “spiritual” and thus they are somehow pursuing a “spirituality” that does not belong to any particular religion or is even outside all religion. Does such a non-religious spirituality exist? What is actually going on?

A consumerist food metaphor is habitually used for this trend: “the spiritual supermarket” or “smorgasbord,” or “the divine deli.”v It implies that a person with free choice will just pick whatever he or she finds appealing from the array of offerings. To some extent this is true, and it seems that today young people especially look upon this choosing among options, and mixing and matching without regard to tradition, as something normal and as their entitlement. At the same time, the stereotype is not necessarily accurate that “spiritual but not religious” seekers are usually lone individuals, without rooted community, following a path of shallow, eclectic “me-ism.” Inquiries show that they by no means always sever their connections with traditional communities entirely, however individualistic they may be. The “spiritual but not religious” person is, rather, likely to have a home base in one particular place of practice, which may be a church, and then also attend one or more other venues that offer other experiences.vi Or the “spiritual but not religious” person may stick almost entirely to the traditional community, nevertheless saying that this is “on my own terms,” prioritizing “spiritual” fulfillment as the reason for affiliation and having a loose attitude towards doctrine and other norms.

I hope that all that I have said adds up to show that “spirituality beyond the boundaries of religion” is not a matter of rejecting religion. Rather, those seeking “spirituality” in other religions other than their own original traditions almost invariably advocate respect for different traditions and “honoring our differences,” differences from which we can “learn.” The same statements are also made by those who engage in interreligious dialogue. The search for the concrete apprehension of religious truth through spiritual practices, wherever these practices can be found, is thus a matter of accepting more of religion and not of accepting less or rejecting. Some have even begun to speak of an “integral” or “inclusive” spirituality in which one attempts deliberately and conscientiously to live by, and experience the practices of, more than one tradition.

Charles Burack, who says he has met hundreds of such practitioners, notes the difficulties they face of finding where to belong, and also their need for teaching authority to avoid simply following one’s own ego along the easiest rather than the most authentic path.vii Those belonging to interfaith families or living in religiously diverse local communities may have been engaged in something like an “integral spirituality” for a long time. Others are now taking on the personal and theological challenges of multiple belonging and practice because they feel called to do so, and even because they believe that this is the way spirituality will take shape in the coming century.

In conclusion, I want to point out one defect in the account I have given, and to correct it. Up to now I have spoken in the language of agency, as if our spiritual searches are something we do ourselves, and as if our belonging is up to us to choose. This makes it sound as if God, the One whom we are seeking, does not know we are looking for and longing to experience Her or Him. But those of us who believe in God must believe also that God does know about our search – how could God not know? As we seek for God, God is ever with us in our seeking, wherever we are. God answers us, and indeed, it is God who is the creator of our search. As Francis Clooney says, “God remains sovereign over all possibilities of encounter.”viii And perhaps all along it was part of God’s plan that this is the way it would be.

Dr Kusumita Pedersen was the “observer” for the Council for a Parliament of World’s Religions (CPWR). She is Chair of the Department of Religious Studies of St. Francis College in New York, and a member of the Board of Trustees of the Council for a Parliament of the World's Religions and of the Interfaith Center of New York.

FOOTNOTES

i. Here I summarize the definition of ‘religion’ written by editors Sumner B. Twiss and John Kelsay, with David Little and myself for the volume Religion and Human Rights, edited by John Kelsay and Sumner B. Twiss (New York: Project on Religion and Human Rights), 1994.
ii. Werner G. Jeanrond, in Catherine Cornille, ed., Many Mansions? Multiple Religious Belonging and Christian Identity. (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books), 2002, page 106.
iii. See Rodger Kamenetz, The Jew in the Lotus (New York: HarperCollins), 1994.
iv. These reasons are also given by followers of Asian religions.
v. See John Berthrong. The Divine Deli: Religion in the North American Cultural Mosaic (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books), 1999.
vi. See Robert C. Fuller, Spiritual But Not Religious: Understanding Unchurched America (New York: Oxford University Press), 2001.
vii. See Charles Burack, “Facing the Challenge of Integral Spirituality.” Interreligious Insight 3/1 (January 2005): 55-61.
viii. Clooney, Francis X., S. J., “God for Us: Multiple Religious identities as a Human and Divine Prospect,” in Catherine Cornille, ed., Many Mansions? Multiple Religious Belonging and Christian Identity (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books), 2002, p. 58.

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