Philozed

If spirituality is about the essential nature of things and about what gives our lives energy, then how does it relate to religion. I like to think about religion as structured spirituality. It may be structured into a community or institution with a hierarchy and a variety of roles or structured into a system of beliefs and rituals.

Modern day people sometimes find those structures around religion restrictive on their person spirituality and indeed they sometimes can be. Most spiritual leaders have warned about rigid, restrictive religious practices and Jesus saved his harshest words for the most religious people of his day. Yet on the other hand there is no really escaping some structure to our spirituality – most of our beliefs, practices and ways of seeing the world have a history. As soon as we come together in groups to share or practice spirituality it begins to form structure.

Perhaps it is about finding the right relationship with the past and structures of religion, enough so we do not have to repeat all the mistakes of the past, can mine the riches of our tradition and can find healthy ways of living out our spirituality with others.

Too much structure can make something rigid and inflexible … too little can invite a lack of strength and eventually collapse. It can also blind us to where the ideas which shape our lives actually come from. Our spirituality is really a dialogue with the past and with others as well as something which uniquely defines us.

Celtic mother figurine

The figure of mother is an example of what psychologist Karl Jung called archetypes, that is first or basic types. They are figures to which we have strong emotional and intellectual attachment. Jung claimed that the ideas and instincts associated with these figures existed as a fundamental part of our minds. For something to qualify as an archetype it has to be universal – it has to have significance in every society at every time as we would expect something basic to human psychic structure to always make an appearance.

“My thesis, then is as follows: In addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche (even if we tack on the personal unconscious as an appendix), there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but it is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents.” ^{– Jung}

Some other archetypes that have been identified are father, priest, warrior, rogue, lover and husband and wife. When we turn to the world of religion we can notice that these same figures turn up again and again. The mother archetype is represented in ancient religions of Greece (Demeter), Egypt (Isis) and in the present day faith of Catholicism (Mary, Mother of God), Hinduism, (Kali) and in Judaism (Sophia). She is also undergoing a renewal in the New Age faiths as interest and devotion is centred around the figure of the “Goddess”. Other important archetypes to be found in the religious world are Father (Zeus, Thor, Yahweh), Lord, King, Monk, Priest, Mystic. The appearance of these archetypes in all religions is further evidence that they form a part of the structure of our minds.

Some archetypes within the world of religion are drawn from the family life or community structure eg. Father, Mother, Warrior, King, but others are more unique to the world of religion itself. For instance, the figure of the divine human is central to many religions. Christianity has Jesus, Buddhism has the Buddha, Islam has Mohammed, Hinduism has Krishna, the Greeks had Hermes and Psyche. Each of these figures represent a combination of God and humanity in the minds of the devotees of that religion. They represent a link between the world of humanity and the world of God. They also mirror the aspiration within each of us to reach toward our divinity – the early church fathers said of Jesus that he became human in order that we might become divine. The myths and stories around these figures explain this divine and human nature; for instance the myths of Krishna and Jesus and Hermes all emphasize how these figures had one divine parent and one human one.