Reflection
The very attitude most essential to the spiritual search is: God is greater than religion. God is the spirit within us that calls us to the deep, conscious living of a spiritual life. God is the question that drives us beyond facile answers. God is the invisible vision that drives us to the immersion of the self in God.
Religion is the mooring of the soul. Spirituality is its lodestone. Religion is, at best, external. Spirituality is the internal distillation of this externalized witness to the divine. Spirituality is what galvanizes us to do more than go through the motions. It spurs us to fill up the lack we feel within us. It is the desire for wholeness that evades us. It is the burning need to find the more.
Joan Chittister
Prayer
Your word is a lamp for my feet, a light on my path.
Psalm 119
Action
Consider the difference between religion and God. Do you make your religion God and lose the true concept of God? Does your religion divide you from others? If so, is this of God?
Suggested Reading
God is spirit, and those who worship God must worship in spirit and truth.
John 4:24
And he said to them, “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition!
Mark 7:9
No one should be afraid that God has allowed there to be different religions in the world. But we should be frightened if we are not doing the work of fraternity, of walking together in life as brothers and sisters of one human family.
Pope Francis
There is a difference between God and religion. God is universal, religions are particular. Religion is the translation of God into a particular language and thus into the life of a group, a nation, a community of faith.
Rabbi Sacks
Religion is one of the safest places to hide from God.
Richard Rohr
The very purpose of religion is to enable us to step off into the uncharted emptiness that is the spiritual life, freely but not untethered.
Joan Chittister
Do you need to be religious to be a good person and develop your connection to the divine? Probably not.
Stefan Tomasi
Religions are many but God is one; The same and only in all religions that preach peace, charity and love for us and for all human kind. We are all spiritual brothers and sisters. In the Cosmic Christ we are all one.
Ronald Sanson
Religion is the reaction of human nature to its search for God.
Alfred North Whitehead
God has no religion.
Mahatma Gandhi
I really believe that God and religion are two different things,
Sinead O’Connor
Many souls fail to find God because they want a religion which will remake society without remaking themselves.
Fulton J. Sheen