The Real Meaning of Religion: A Binding Relationship, Reconnecting
The real reason non-believers don’t trust or believe in happily ever? They always need an escape hatch, ways to end, terminate relationships
Few know the true meaning of religion: the Latin root Ligare means “to bind.” Religare leads you to re-bind, re-connect, renew, and relationship.
“The word ‘religion’ means literally a binding relationship,” scholar Peter Kreeft explains in his new book, Food for the Soul. “Religion is a relationship. It is like a road on which two parties meet.”
True romantics consider a binding eternal relationship comforting, something certain they can count on and depend upon. Others always seek an escape hatch, easier ways to terminate relationships.
All relationships offer three possibilities
In all human relationships, there are three possibilities, Kreeft argues:
- First, if neither side has patience with the other, the relationship is doomed to get worse and worse.
- If only one of the people has patience, the relationship can persist, but it is not peaceful.
- If both have patience, the relationship can grow in intimacy and peace.
The five societies that lasted the longest elevated the family
Religion is about relationships, starting with society’s first and oldest institution: The Family. Your reaction to the word “family” says a lot about who or what you worship.
“The five societies that have had the most successful life span in human history have all had a high regard for the family: Jewish, Christian, Confucian, Islamic, and ancient Rome,” Kreeft writes.
Christianity teaches God is love and truth itself, the Author of the Universe who happens to be our Father (note how the Bible is all about families). Therefore, Jesus Christ always tries to unite people while Satan (the divider and the liar) always divides you.
Kreeft adds, “the more you invest your love in another person, the more that investment is returned with life’s deepest joys and life’s deepest sorrows. If you want to avoid a broken heart, you do not give your heart to anyone. There is a condition that fits that description. It is called hell.”
The most important institution on earth? The family
“The family is the single most important institution on earth,” Kreeft writes. “All the happiest, most peaceful, and most enduring societies in history have had a deep respect for the family. It is the first place where we learn life’s most important lesson: unselfish love, the love that consists in the gift of your very self and energy to others.”
Life starts “because two other persons did that: laid down their lives for us. The family is the pay it forward system. No one can possibly give their parents the gift their parents gave them — the gift of life. We cannot pay back that debt, so we pay it forward to our children. That is the rationale behind God’s invention of the family.”
“The family is the first school where we learn genuine, honest love and care for the good of others. Everywhere else you are loved for what you can do, for our performance, whether in the workplace or in the entertainment industry or in sports. But in the family, you are loved for yourself; you are loved simply because you belong to them and they belong to you.”
The Law of the Gift vs. the escape hatches (a way out)
Some religions see God as a master and humanity as slaves. Just as romantics believe in “the one,” Christians believe in the One, a Father who is the source of love and truth itself, who adopts us as children of God through Baptism.
Catholicism, teaching the Eucharist is the source and summit of that ultimate relationship, seeks something Father David Meconi calls, “giving God permission to dwell within us, thereby transforming us into another incarnate son or daughter.”
St. John Paul the Great described the Law of the Gift: “Man cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself.”
Christopher West, who studies John Paul’s Theology of the Body philosophy, shows John Paul understood the unique Plan of God: Keep growing through a Culture of Life: the words generations, generate, gender, and genitalia all come from that same “gen” root word: The need to create, be fruitful.
John Paul explained the Church and its Culture of Life was about encouraging the growth of life and people. But for the past half-century, we’ve debated ways to provide or protect escape hatches, exit ramps out of relationships.
“A stable family is now the exception rather than the rule,” Kreeft laments. “That has never, ever happened before in the history of the world. And therefore, you can do more for the world, more for the future of the human race, by being a good family member, by loving and respecting and honoring and working for the good of your family, than by anything else, by any other public, social, or political work you can possibly do. That applies to the three most important human relationships in the world: to your parents, your spouse, and your children.”
The Church, Kreeft stresses, is the only institution teaching “the fundamental and universal principles of sexual, marital and family fidelity. That is why she is scorned and sneered at by the secular media and hated and feared by the devil: because she dares to stand up to what St. John Paul the Great dared to call our ‘culture of death’ and what Pope Benedict XVI called the ‘dictatorship of relativism’ and stand for every single human and unalienable right to life from the moment of conception to the moment of natural death.”
How you become more like whatever you worship
Culture, similarly, means “the cult of what you worship,” so even the non-religious tend to find their own forms of religion (or anti-religion), worshipping (or holding sacred) whoever is №1 on their priority list.
So many of us, including those active in an established religion, at some point, wind up worshiping one or more of the four false idols of money, power, pleasure, or your honor, begetting:
- Materialists and hedonists. You undoubtedly know people entirely focused on wealth and pleasure.
- Me Generation. The ambitious similarly turn power or their pride into false idols. Do you question God’s Plan because you have a better idea?
- My baby. Have you noticed young parents (who aren’t very interested in religion) making a sort of religious devotion out of worshipping their baby?
- Dog parents. Pope Francis last week warned about young people choosing to adopt pets over babies? Others call cars “my baby.” We’re supposed to love people and use things, but often we do the opposite.
“The Church is not dying, only sleeping,” Kreeft writes. “The Lord of life promised her that the gates of hell would not prevail against her. If hell cannot defeat her, the fools who say in their hearts ‘there is no God’ won’t do it either. Human nature was not designed in Hollywood or Harvard but in heaven. And no human being can ever escape human nature any more than a triangle can escape its three sides.”
