Yes, it’s Mothering Sunday on the Ides of March - this week at 10.30 on the fifteenth. We hope to see a lot of families and to join in our annual rendition of ‘Mum, Mum, Mum’. We shall also be celebrating the work of all those embroiderers who have made new kneelers for the church.

A question that repeatedly crops up is, what does it mean to be religious? Is it a positive or negative thing to be religious? For many the answer is a sociological one: to be religious is to be an adherent of a religion such as Christianity or Hinduism or Islam, simple as that. It’s about belonging to a group and adhering to religious practices, or beliefs. So we might infer that religious people are likely to be pious and devout and that they will in all likelihood be morally scrupulous, following the ethical precepts of their religion’s teachings. The observance of Lent as a personal discipline would be an excellent example. But in a society where traditional Christian practice has markedly diminished in the past seventy years we also tend to use the word religious in contrast to notions of the secular - materialism, secular humanism and post-religious society. Those who use the word religious as a pejorative are often protesting against the kind of religious extremism used to validate political or social violence and abuse - whether Islamic, Jewish or Christian. If that is a first order objection to religion, then a second order one would be that religion tends to be hierarchical, dogmatic, and beyond belief.
If religion is so discredited in Western liberal democracy, how shall we describe our sense of awe and wonder, the other, the transcendent depth of being, and all those ‘emergent’ properties of the physical world, like love, honour and compassion (to name but few), which refuse to be pinned down and pigeonholed by even the most sophisticated neural and cognitive brain science? Does that old fashioned word religious come to our aid? Some atheists will answer yes to this.
But another word called into service is spiritual, as in ‘I’m spiritual but not religious’. On this I am completely divided. On the one hand I see pagan cults and all the quackish self-help stuff, on the other the meaning intended in phrases like ‘the spirit of the law’ or ‘a spirited performance’. My dilemma is exacerbated by another worry: is spiritual to include the supernatural, pre-scientific ideas represented by Paul’s ‘principalities and powers’ or Bunyan’s hobgoblins and foul fiends, or ghosts, or the spooky side of Halloween? Or are these images now to be read as entirely metaphorical?
I like the spirit of law, over against the letter of the law. It is what Jesus meant when he quoted the Rabbis with ‘the Sabbath was made for man not man for the Sabbath.’ So I think spirit can mean the inner meaning of a thing, the essence of a thing, the deep down importance of a thing. This is not the fond hope that ‘there must be something else’, but something repeatedly observed.
So, I think the divide between religion and society, or spiritual and ordinary life is not as great as it’s made out to be. It’s the Church that’s blocking the path a bit by being so obstinately counter cultural.