Organized Religion Is Not For Me
Why I choose “personal spirituality” instead.
I was born in Poland in 1991, right after the Soviet Union collapsed and we became a sovereign, democratic country. In the history of the Polish fight against communism, the Catholic Church has played an ever-important role. It helped the people unite against the oppressors under the common emblem of Christian values.
Although the Polish state is theoretically separated from the Church, the Catholic flavours leak into our culture and everyday conduct from all sides. Many Poles wouldn’t eat meat on a Friday or party during the Lent period. Until recently, we had “Religion” (as in, catholic religion) as a default subject at school.
Preparing for the First Communion was a part of my school curriculum when I was 8 years old. I think it was around that time that I realised how sinful of a life I had been living. My parents didn’t take me to church every Sunday. It often happened to me to be lazy, or talk about other people behind their backs. When preparing for the First Communion, I was made aware that these were all sins.
I also learned that God forgives most of the human sins — even such as murder or betraying one’s husband. But there were also some eternal sins that could never be forgiven. Once you commit them, you’re doomed. You never get another chance for salvation and go straight to hell. Forever.
Bear in mind that I was 8 when I learned all those things.
In the years that followed, I became a little obsessed with being a “good Catholic.” I would piously cross myself whenever I passed by a cross or a chapel by the road. I would pray for up to an hour in the morning and evening, repeating the prayer over and over again, to make sure that I focused on the words hard enough. I started seeing myself as sinful by nature. I became uneasy whenever someone asked me a question — because I was afraid that while answering, I may accidentally lie, i.e. commit a sin.
When I write about that now, I feel a little sick and very resentful. How could the adults who looked after me at the time see this religious narrative as beneficial to a young child? How could they put some arbitrary dogma over my mental and emotional well-being?
My guess is: because they were too afraid to question the dogmas. Because the Catholic religion builds on fear. If you don’t believe in the stories, you most likely go to hell. If this kind of narrative accompanies you from the first days of your life, it is very hard to break out of it even when you grow up. Not very sophisticated, huh? But it works.
As Shannon Ashley wrote in her story about how strictly religious upbringing screwed her sex life:
“Purity culture allowed the fears of religious adults to wound and impair their kids.”
This sounds very familiar to my experience — and it was not just my approach to sex that got messed up. It took years to recover from the guilt, shame and self-belittlement that organised religion planted in me. But I still consider myself super lucky that I managed to break out from that dead-end cycle at all.
Organised religion versus “personal spirituality”
It’s not that I consider Christian teachings to be “bad” at the core. My guess is that Jesus might indeed have been an enlightened being — or at least a man who definitely had a lot of wisdom to share. However, Jesus did not start Christianity — and definitely didn’t build the narrative that I was fed at school.
The Church has built it over centuries.
But this narrative doesn’t meet the current needs of many people who seek spiritual experiences. I see more and more folks exploring the reality beyond the material — but less and less of them turning to organised religion for that. These are the “spiritual-but-not-religious” seekers — and I am one of them.
As I see it, the trend is the increase in what I call “personal spirituality.” Personal spirituality focuses on exploring one’s inner landscape, rather than reproducing dogmas. And it is not even always framed as a “spiritual” pursuit.
Some people call it “personal growth” and work on themselves simply for the sake of improving themselves. Others meditate, enter breathwork and explore other self-discovery modalities out of curiosity. Some may even be interested in achieving enlightenment.
Although motivations differ, I think there is common ground for all kinds of personal spirituality. People who pursue it, usually want to grow through experiencing something authentic. They want to see for themselves how their minds and emotions operate or, say, test whether the law of attraction is really a thing. They are willing to observe what changes on the material level when they engage in inner work.
This is dramatically different from most of what organised religion offers –which is to blindly follow the rules established by somebody else. For me, the latter is definitely no prospective way to grow as a spiritual being. So I choose to engage in personal spirituality by meditating, questioning and observing what is — rather than arguing about what should be.
Personal spirituality relates to everyday life
I think that organised religion such as Catholicism seems alien to many people because it is often distant from the realities of everyday life. As spiritual leaders — such as Catholic priests — were given special status in the society, they became detached from how an average person who listens to their teachings lives their life.
When the guru you are trying to follow doesn’t deal with the same adversities of life as you do, it becomes hard to relate to his teachings. For a Catholic priest, who doesn’t have a family and never had to compete for a job, these experiences are a mystery. He has never lived them. And if he has never lived them, chances are he cannot spark empathy for the people who struggle precisely in those areas of life.
Which is… many people.
Spiritual teachings don’t exist in a void. They have to engage with the reality of a particular person’s life.
A few months ago, a priest visited my parents’ house. It is a part of the tradition that shortly after Christmas, priests come to people’s houses to give them blessing and ask for donations to the church.
It is also supposed to be an occasion for them to reconnect with the faithful in person, and talk to them about their problems or worries.
That day it was me and my Mom who welcomed the priest. Mom tried to use the chance and asked the priest about her health issues that prevent her from going to church every Sunday. She talked about the chronic pain and the anxiety attacks she sometimes experiences when forced to stay still in a confined, badly-ventilated space. As much as she thinks she should be in church, she just cannot make it happen because of her health.
The priest treated her concerns as if she was obviously making excuses for not following the rules. He interrupted her story numerous times and barely allowed her to finish her point. Then, he said that she should just start attending masses on a regular basis, pray and trust in God — and that will make all her health problems go away. In the end, he put his hand on her head and prayed for a minute or so. Then, I guess, he assumed the issue was resolved.
He seemed to completely have missed the point my Mom was trying to make. He basically offered the same kind of “advice” that people with depression infamously hear: “Just get your shit together.” In my opinion, this is as far from genuine spirituality as it can get — because it lacks basic human empathy in the first place.
Personal ways of approaching spiritual growth are different in this respect. Meditation and other techniques based on self-discovery not only treat personal life circumstances as valid — they build on those circumstances. This is how an individual progresses on their path. She or he uses the most mundane and challenging experiences to grow from them.
There is no need for too much talk about the concepts of salvation, enlightenment and so on — except for inspirational purposes. All you have to do is learn from your experience: be it on a meditation cushion, during a retreat or in everyday life situations.
Personal spirituality is not about big words and pretty concepts — but about how you approach your everyday challenges. It doesn’t concern itself with the glamorous facade — but rather, with the treasures you can find in the dark and shady corners. As Jeff Foster put it:
“Please, don’t talk to me about ‘Pure Awareness’ or ‘Dwelling in the Absolute.’ I want to see how you treat your partner, your kids, your parents, your precious body.
Please, don’t lecture me about ‘the illusion of the separate self’ or how you achieved permanent bliss in just seven days. I want to feel a genuine warmth radiating from your heart. I want to hear how well you listen, take in information that doesn’t fit your personal philosophy. I want to see how you deal with people who disagree with you.
(…)
Don’t talk to me about your spirituality, friend. I’m really not that interested.”
Specific, experiential practices are what I need
Meditation and other person-oriented techniques allow you to touch upon the spiritual through direct experience — not just by repeating beautiful words. Moreover, they give you practical ways in which you may do that.
Institutional religion is, for the large part, impractical. It pretends to offer a way, but in reality, it just wants you to obey the rules. How do I know? Because I tried it for many years.
I went to confession on a regular basis and told my sins to the priest. It always stressed the hell out of me — but I did it anyway because I thought this was what one is supposed to do.
I listened to the sermons during masses in church every Sunday. Then I beat myself up each time I didn’t pay attention. But it was hard to pay attention to words that sounded too abstract to bring any value into my life. Even worse, they usually belittled, rather than inspired me.
I prayed every day by repeating the memorised formulas, in the hope that this would grant me a pass to heaven. But each day, I grew frustrated and bored, rather than joyful from the prayers.
All of the “practices” that Catholicism has ever offered me were repetitive patterns of behaviour that were supposedly going to earn me extra points from God. But on an inner level, they didn’t give rise to anything constructive. The Catholic methods didn’t encourage me to actually search and question — which I now consider the foundations of spirituality.
Only when I discovered meditation, I felt that I was on to something. I finally had the means of observing what was actually going on inside of me. I could grow through being honest with myself — rather than pretending to be some sort of a “saint.”
I think that the practicality of the various self-discovery techniques is what makes them successful today. People who want to grow spiritually need to have practices, rather than dogmas at their disposal. There is only so much you can do with dogmas. They don’t allow you to move forward by bursting your consecutive bubbles of perception.
Only by diligently practising something, you can transcend the previous version of yourself. You adopt perspectives that were unavailable to your before. And this is what I consider to be the foundation of genuine spirituality.
Reinforcing the positive, rather than the miserable
A few days ago, I was riding my bike back home. It was already getting dark. As I entered the residential area and got further away from the main street, I heard a group of people moaning a miserable song in the darkness.
As I approached the next junction, I saw a crowd with torches and crosses emerging from around the corner, singing how sad they are because Jesus died on a cross 2,000 years ago.
As we are in the middle of the Lent, events like this are common. Churches organise group marches around neighbourhoods to commemorate the Way of the Cross that Jesus went through before his death. These days, Catholics go through it, too, as a religious ritual and group prayer.
Over the years of considering myself a Catholic, I always had an impression that this religion is mostly about feeling sad and guilty. Hitting yourself in the chest and saying: “Forgive me, Lord, for I am sinful an unworthy.” Turning the other cheek. Ennobling and poetising the suffering as proof that you are living a rightful life.
For the most part of practising this faith, I felt uneasy whenever I was too happy for too long. It almost seemed like I was doing something wrong if I had it too easy. It probably meant I wasn’t focusing enough on the right (“spiritual”) things — but on worldly pleasures.
It felt as if spirituality was, by definition, misery.
No, I came to the conclusion that human life already contains enough suffering. Most of us deal with our restless minds, endless commitments and conflicting roles day in and day out. We work, we take care of our families, we worry about tomorrow. Do we really need our spiritual practice to bring us even more distress?
Of course we don’t. Many people already begin to give themselves permission to feel good as the default state. We learn to let go of worrying about things beyond our control. We try to forgive ourselves no matter how big of a mistake we make — because, as Niklas Göke wrote, the only way to find success is to relentlessly forgive yourself. These, to me, are true spiritual lessons — because they focus on bringing out the best, rather than the worst in us.
Personal spirituality often uses meditation, self-reflection, journaling and other such tools to help us activate our fullest potential. This can only be done by inducing positive feelings and cultivating our strengths. Belittling ourselves as “sinful” or “unworthy” doesn’t take us anywhere.
No “right” and “wrong”
When we are on a spiritual path that is personal to us, we don’t concern ourselves with what is ultimately “right” and “wrong.” This doesn’t mean that we don’t build a solid moral backbone. We do. And it is ever-stronger from the one we could ever build on dogmatic religion — because it stems from experiential wisdom, rather than externally imposed rules.
When you follow the Catholic religion, you navigate your life with a list of rules — such as the Ten Commandments. Although they are not unreasonable, they will only serve you to a limited extent. That’s because you are externally, not internally motivated to follow them.
When rules such as “be honest” or “don’t lie” are followed blindly (just because the priest told you so) you don’t really know why you are following them. You don’t have the possibility to learn the value of honesty from your own trial-and-error experience.
As a child, you may not see any valid reason for telling your parents the truth about who ate the whole bag of candy. You know that if you do, they punish you. Conversely, if you chose to lie and say that the dog ate it, you might get away with it.
But you don’t lie — because you’ve been told that this is sinful and wrong.
You may grow frustrated looking at your sibling, who lies frequently and gets away with much more serious faults. An inner conflict obviously arises, as you see that what religion commands seems to put you at a disadvantage in everyday life. And for as long as you blindly follow the commandments, you will never discover for yourself why — and if — honesty actually pays off in the long run.
In order to discover it, you would have to risk lying first — but that would mean questioning the rules. And that’s not an option for a “religious person.”
This is how organised religion prevents people from discovering what’s beneficial (and what isn’t) in their unique circumstances. Instead, they are told what’s objectively “right” and “wrong” — and so the investigation ends there.
Only when you embrace a more personal approach to spirituality, you can allow yourself to make mistakes and learn from them. You decide what’s “right” and “wrong” for you — rather than what’s right and wrong objectively.
For example, in Buddhism (which I don’t consider a religion — at least not in its original shape), which relies on experiential practices, the concepts of “right” and “wrong” don’t even exist as external points of reference. That’s because there is no instance higher than your own experience in advising you on how to behave.
Instead of “right” and “wrong”, the terms “wholesome” (kusala) and “unwholesome” (akusala) are used for classifying one’s behaviour. Rather than being moral judgments, they simply divide human actions into those that either diminish the total amount of suffering in the world (wholesome) or increase it (unwholesome). This way, a person can experientially verify why certain actions are more beneficial than others, by simply observing the consequences.
This characteristic of personal spirituality that allows me to individually decide about my “rights” and “wrongs” is possibly the most important for me. It doesn’t cause me to fall for “unwholesome” actions more frequently because of laziness or convenience. Conversely, it empowers me to pay close attention to my everyday decisions and their consequences. As a result, I choose the “wholesome” more naturally than if the decisions were imposed on me.
I also think that personal discernment of “right” and “wrong” is much more aligned with the world we currently live in. The world that is so diverse and nuanced, that it is hard to formulate any one-size-fits-all rules for existing in it. Most of the questions and issues we are facing today are ambiguous and have more than one “correct” answer.
That’s why it should be important for anyone to develop their critical thinking and learn to embrace more than one point of view. Because over the course of our lifetimes, we will likely be forced to adopt dramatically different perspectives. As Yuval Noah Harari wrote:
“To keep up with the world of 2050, you will need to do more than merely invent new ideas and products, but above all, reinvent yourself again and again.”
Personal spirituality empowers us to continuously reinvent ourselves — as well as our ways of looking at the world. Institutionalized religion, for the most part, doesn’t.