I used to love the song: “loosing my religion”, I don’t know the words, I guess I never really heard the lyrics apart from the actual title. I like the idea though, I like the idea of loosing or giving up my religious views in search of what is real, what makes sense and what is true.
It is interesting to note that for this deconstructive phase to happen, you first need to have religion (as you cannot loose, what you do not have). Once you have it though, once you have been infected with religion, once you have ordered and boxed in your God experience, it seems that God and any genuine searching for God, works towards breaking the boxes of that organised religion.
Peter Rollins states that the Christian experience s found walking with Christ who in the garden of Getsemane gives up everything for God and then later on the cross Jesus gives up everything including God. In the moment Jesus shouts “My God, my God why have you forsaken me”. It is in that existential crisis, in that dark night of the soul (to borrow the expression from St John of the cross), that the christian experience is to be found. It is only on the other side of giving up once religion that Christ can ressurect and come to dwell in the midst of us. Not to be illuminated but to illuminate all of life by the glorious light that love gives.
It is in this position, when love is real and in the midst of us, that many of our former religious hangups become meaningless and very ordinary actions like sharing a meal or sharing an embrace becomes illuminated, sublime and transcendent.
