Religion of the Heart, an article by Brother David Steindl-Rast

Religion does not start out with the notion of God. It starts with a personal experience, the overwhelming experience of ultimate belonging.

I’d like to invite you to give some thought to a particular problem. Why are our responses to the ethical problems of the present time so singularly ineffective and anemic? I’ve asked myself many times, why is this so? I think of one reason, at least, and I’d like to suggest that to you tonight.

Our ethical approaches are uprooted from their religious roots. They are cut off from their religious sources. A great task before us is, therefore, to reroot our ethics in religion.

What do I mean by that? I’m not talking about the religions, but about Religion. This Religion which underlies all the different religions — from which all the different religions spring — is the religion of the heart. But we must clarify what we mean by “heart.” Rightly understood, the heart stands for the whole human person, for the innermost center of our being, for our totality, not for any part of our selves. I am appealing here, and will be appealing all along, to your experience. Only if what I am saying is true in your experience, is it true for you. It might be true for me, but if it isn’t true in your experience, then it is irrelevant to you. Please, keep checking what I offer you against your own experience. I suppose that we all share the experience of moments on which Religion hinges. I speak of experience, not of teachings we have learned in church, at school, or at home. Religion hinges on experience.

The Religious key experience varies greatly from person to person. Yet, there is something that is always there: a sense of overwhelming belonging. Now, this is shorthand for something that needs to be developed and explored and explained. But I hope it will serve as a pointer towards the roots of your own innermost personal religiousness. Does your religiousness not somehow hinge on an experience that you have had? And was it not in some way or other the experience of belonging, an overwhelming sense of belonging? And I am not specifying it any further. For some profoundly religious persons, the term “God” has no meaning. Why push them to use that term? Religion does not start out with the notion of God. It starts with a personal experience, the overwhelming experience of ultimate belonging. Now, some of us feel comfortable, more or less, in calling that ultimate reality to which we belong God. Others have exactly the same experience, but do not feel comfortable calling it God. Personally, I’m never quite sure whether I do or do not feel comfortable with the term God. I think rather not, because it is too easily misunderstood. But I do belong to a tradition that gives the name God to that reality, and so speaking out of this tradition, I can conveniently also call it God.

Implicitly, religious belonging is a limitless belonging. It is not even restricted to humans. It is open to animals, to plants, to this planet, to the whole universe.

Now, what do we do with that experience? What do we do with that innermost religious experience of our heart, that awareness of ultimate belonging? Regardless of whether you belong to this or that religious tradition or whether you belong to none of them, you always do three things with that experience; you cannot help it. You do something with your emotions. Because the experience is of the heart, that is of the whole person, certainly the intellect, the will, and the emotions are involved in it. They can’t help doing something with that experience. The intellect interprets it. You cannot help that, even if you say, “In my personal religion that deepest religious experience cannot be interpreted.” That is an interpretation. By denying that it can be interpreted, you are interpreting it in a negative sense. That would be quite valid and sufficient, but most people and all religious traditions go further. And so we get doctrine. We must prevent it from becoming dogmatic. That is a different matter. But we do have doctrine, dogma, in the widest sense. We do have intellectual interpretation of our primal religious experience.

The second thing we do with it is to accept, in some form, our belonging. Our will does that. But, our intellect often imposes limits. We experience limitless belonging. But then we don’t allow ourselves to act upon it. We act, for instance, as if we belonged only to those who hold the same dogmas we hold. Implicitly, religious belonging is a limitless belonging. It is not even restricted to humans. It is open to animals, to plants, to this planet, to the whole universe. It is completely open, implicitly. This is now where ethics enter the picture. Our will does something with our experience of ultimate belonging, and that is where morality has its roots. If we belong, we must draw out the consequences. And so ethics is part of religion. An important one, but still only a relatively small one. We must remind ourselves of that because most of the religious traditions with which we are familiar here in the West are over-ethical, are moralistic. Morals sometimes seem to have swallowed up their religious matrix. Then, all that you hear in sermons is dos and don’ts. But nobody is particularly attracted to dos and don’ts. We may take them in stride, but only if we have reasons. And religious reasons are the only ones strong enough. If you are honest with yourself, you will admit that you are willing to accept your ethics as the moral implications of your religious experience of belonging.

There is a third aspect. Our emotions also do something with the experience of ultimate belonging. They celebrate it. We celebrate that experience in various ways, and that leads to ritual. Don’t think only of the rituals of the great religious traditions. Even in your own, personal religion you may have rituals about which you never told anybody. You’ve never shared them. They are your own. But they are genuine rituals. And if, as children, we refrained religiously from stepping on the cracks in the sidewalk, that had, quite possibly, something to do with our primordial religious experience. It may have been part of our ritual. Adults have sometimes complicated rituals, hardly distinguishable from miniature psychotic episodes. We all need rituals. Unless they are given to us by a religious tradition, we have to make them up for ourselves.

Thus, the primordial religious experience of ultimate belonging will find its expression in doctrine, in morals, and in ritual. We have to prevent dogma from becoming dogmatic. We have to prevent morals from becoming moralistic. And we have to prevent ritual from becoming ritualistic. How do we do that?

In healthy religion, morals, dogma, and ritual remain rooted in authority of the heart. And remember, the heart stands for the whole person. In doctrine the intellect deals with the religious experience. That is important, but there is more to us than our intellect. The heart alone encompasses the wholeness of our religious response. If you put doctrine always under the judgment of your heart, you will prevent your religion from becoming dogmatic in a negative sense. If you always refer your ethical convictions back to the heart, you will prevent your religion from becoming moralistic. If you refer your rituals constantly back to your heart and to its primordial experience of ultimate belonging, you will prevent your religion from becoming ritualistic. It always has to be the whole person that stands behind the religious response, not only your intellect, not only your will, not only your emotions.