Like a Sunday Morning

Are we in agreement that the best, purest, most innocent iteration of a religion is the initial one?  Not your initial one, but the religion's founding moment, when a person feels themselves blindsided by what feels like a completely new revelation, feels themselves drawn up in a mystical experience that seems to clarify everything, and sets about trying to articulate all the ways in which the world is now different?  Before institutionalization and power and dogmatism have pounded out all the innocence and excitement, dulling its freshness, drawing all the wrong conclusions, harnessing its energy to frighten the youth and control the adults?

Because if so, it seems important to note that the conditions that allow such revelations to happen are quite different and often in direct conflict with just about every religious tradition as it eventually comes to be practiced.  The foundation of a religion and the practice of a religion are dramatically different, even though practitioners often go to great pains to mimic the lives of their faith's founders, not realizing that this drive to mimic is precisely the problem.  What needs to be mimicked is not this or that action or belief, forever pulling one into the past, but an orientation towards the Ultimate, here in the present, an openness to being ever corrected by it, a willingness to diligently and humbly learn from your own tradition, but to respectfully and boldly disagree when the Ultimate points beyond. Which it always will, since no tradition can ever capture it.

It is endlessly puzzling to me how far a religion, or an idea, can stray from its initial intention, once it cools and swirls into a tradition.  and how impossible it is to bottle up and preserve for future generations that thing the initial person wanted to convey, the thing they believe we must know in order to live well.  No matter how many principles one embeds in the foundations to prevent this from happening, it never stops happening.

This orientation, this openness and seeking of the Ultimate - that is holiness.  It can't be taught by any single tradition, is often actively opposed by so many traditions, and yet it grows out of all of them, in spite of them. 

If you want, I could also write a rebuttal of this post, affirming the beauty and creative power of tradition, pointing out how American and 21st century I am for worshiping newness and excitement over tradition and commitment, contrasting the arrogance of believing one has found the only truth with the humility of listening to those who have gone before.  But lately, I am trying to articulate my thoughts as one coherent picture, no matter how much yes and no I am feeling inside, because the thoughts seem to disintegrate as soon as I try and weave the yes and no together.  Because in the end, while I do respect and often find comfort in tradition, I am one who is taken by that initial moment, who wants to find it for herself, not so that I can start something new, but so that I can truly understand what those founders understood.  I have a suspicion that what they knew can never be transmitted with words, but can only be seen with one's own eyes, immediately.  But this is just a suspicion.