The New Religion

The new religion will connect you with the life that is yours to live, and help you live it.

The new religion has no interest in separating you from your money, or getting you to sing in its choirs, or teach its Sunday schools, or recruit people to the new religion.

The new religion is not going to tell you to smile because God loves you, or tell you that it loves you just as you are.

The new religion will tell you it needs you to join it in the work of transforming the culture and the world for the sake of both.

The new religion will tell you that we are here to make ourselves more like we ought to be than we are, and, in so doing, make the culture and the world more like they ought to be than they are.

The new religion will tell you that being more like we ought to be than we are means living in sync with ourselves, and in accord with our life—living at one with who, and where, we are.

The new religion understands that we need a culture that connects us with ourselves, and enables us to live in accord with our life—to be at one with who, and where, we are.

The new religion understands that it all has to work together: religion, culture, world, to produce individuals who can be true to themselves, and live the life that fits them.

The new religion will tell you that we all have a life that fits us the way our shoes fit us, or our dentures.

The new religion will help us find the life that fits us, and help us live it, in being, and becoming, who we are within the context and circumstances of our life.

The new religion will tell us we cannot have what we want without changing what we want. Our life goals have to be commensurate with our life.

The new religion will put itself between the life we are living, and the life that is ours to live, and help us live with a foot in each world—this is called walking two paths at the same time.

The new religion will help you find a new collection of symbols, metaphors and rituals to ground you in the sacred, and center you in your life—the life that is your life to live.

The new religion will tell you that you can’t be responsible for other people’s craziness. Or for their moods. Or for their behavior. You can only be responsible for yourself, and live in ways appropriate to the occasion in relationship with others, and let them do with it what they will.

The new religion will require you to decide for yourself what is important in each situation as it arises, and live there in ways that honor and reflect that.

The new religion will require you to recognize what is the central, highest/deepest, value in your life, and to live in ways which honor and reflect it.

One of the tenets of the new religion is: No Lip Service Allowed! We do not say something is true for us that is not true for us.

Another of the tenets of the new religion is: No Talk! Do! We do not talk religion in the new religion. We live it. Everything we say is so has to be validated in the way we live our life.

In the new religion, we can’t say, “We don’t hate gay people or black people,” when the gay people and black people can’t tell the difference. We live in ways that make plain how we feel, where we stand.

There is no Bible, as such, in the new religion, but people read the hallowed literature of all ages–prose and poetry, fiction and nonfiction–led to what resonates with them by what resonates with them, reflecting on their experience and the experience of others, in forming new realizations and growing in their understanding of themselves and all things.

In the new religion, we do not talk about what we believe. We talk about what we have experienced, and about what we are doing in response to what we have experienced, and about what we need to do in further response to it.

In the new religion, there is no theology, and no doctrine. We believe in our life, in our work, in our gifts, in what needs us to do it, and in doing it.

In the new religion, we believe in seeing, hearing, and understanding. We believe in silence. In inquiry and imagination. In play and laughter.

In the new religion, we believe in health and wholeness. In bearing the pain of our contradictions, and integrating our polarities.

In the new religion, we believe in reconciling our conflicts, and living on the boundary between yin and yang.

The new religion will demand that we honor our bodies, and listen to them, giving them things they need, and not giving them things they don’t need.

The new religion will not be concerned with abundant life for all eternity, but with abundant life for here and now.