A Religion of One’s Own: An interview with Thomas Moore

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I find many people with whom I am in connection embrace the label of being spiritual, but it is often nothing more than a surface level adornment that they are presenting to the world about themselves. Do you find that is the case — and is it because people are so distracted that they don’t go deeper?
TM:
Yes, I think it is true that what people today call spirituality can be very superficial. It isn’t always that, but I think it can be, and it very easily can be because people don’t have much of a background. We don’t teach religion and spirituality. We don’t teach our children that.

It is interesting to me that one response to this new book of mine has come from parents of children of various ages, adult children or very little children, and they are saying that they are so concerned about their kids, that they want them to have a spiritual life. They want them to have something of religion that they, themselves, had when they were young, and they don’t know what to do because the kids have no interest and they don’t see any point in it.

I think that my work here offers a path for parents, because what they can do is see that the children have their own natural spirituality — and they can foster it and they could even teach them and show them different religious traditions. The reason we have had a superficial approach to spirituality is because people haven’t studied it. We study math and science and social matters and languages, but we don’t study religion. In America especially, people are afraid that if someone teaches religion that they will impose their own points of view on children. That could be, but it is not a good idea to ignore religion study altogether.

I have a Ph.D. in Religion, I have thought about religion all my life. What I’m trying to do is present religion in a very serious way in a way that can be adapted and adopted by each individual person in a serious way so that it’s not dismissed as something superficial. I think a lot of people had only had a childhood education in religion, and when they become adults they are just not happy with what they have learned. Religion could be studied much more profoundly than that.

For somebody who is part of a formal religious tradition — part of a church, a temple, a mosque — why should they consider redefining religion for themselves?
TM:
Mainly because many people up to now have gone to the religion, let’s say to a church or a synagogue, and they have put themselves there and they have just said, “Okay, what you’re doing makes sense to me or it’s my family’s tradition, so I can participate in this, and that means that I will accept whatever you tell me I have to accept, like ideas or practices and moral positions, things like that.”

That’s a very passive approach, and it’s not been very mature and not very adult. Unfortunately, our churches have not really fostered the spiritual development of the people under their care. Rather they have, it seems to me, been more interested in making sure everyone believes properly and correctly and that they attend church and that they are practicing members, but they don’t really guide the person in their own spirituality as part of their religion. That’s a huge mistake, as far as I’m concerned.

People are bored with churches, and as a result they go through the motions, but it doesn’t really affect how they live. Today people are realizing that this world is becoming more secular and it’s a dangerous thing, but they don’t know what to do about it, as I said at the beginning. So, I think that it’s important that they can be part of a tradition if they want, but they also have to foster their own understanding of it. I’ve been quoting Emerson who said, “Every church has a membership of one.” I think what he’s getting at there is a number of things: one is that everyone in a religion, every member, is going to understand it in his or her own way; and that each person should understand it individually, so that it’s alive and something very meaningful to them, and not just something that they surrender to.

One quote that I wrote down in reading your book was, “The one ingredient missing in much of modern spirituality is intelligence.” I thought that was pretty bold and accurate.
TM:
Well, I’m afraid so. It’s just that we do not teach religion and spirituality. How can you expect people to be intelligent about it, because they don’t even know what to read. A lot of contemporary spiritual literature, it seems to me, does not have much depth to it. Everyone says the same thing: live in the present, be here now, love everybody, be in the light. What do these things mean? You know, they’re slogans that really don’t mean anything and they are quoted over and over again. They are meaningless and they tend to be sentimental.

There is a lot of work to be done in deepening the spiritual life. The traditions have great literature. Look at the theology in Christianity, there is so much greatness there, and it’s not all just wooden. Many theologians of the past were very brilliant and had very important things to say. The mystics have a lot to teach us, and that’s true of all the religions. Buddhists have had one book after another from the past written with a great deal of intelligence about what it is to be a spiritual person.

The other thing that I’m always quoting are the monks. It was the Irish monks who saved civilization by developing their libraries and translating texts and writing their own theology, their own commentaries on what they received. We don’t do that anymore. How many people major in Theology? I don’t think contemporary theologians should study just their own tradition. It would be wonderful if we had theologians who could study the mysteries, birth and death and sickness and marriage and understand how profound these experiences are. They are not just psychological, they are spiritual and we need theological reflection on them.

Many conversations presented in modern spirituality focus on the light. What role do darkness and negativity have on the religious path?
TM:
I think anyone with any spiritual and psychological sophistication these days understands that life is full of wonderful experiences and a lot of tragic ones — and all of us have to deal with death constantly. Illness is a huge thing in people’s lives, and every time we get sick it’s an indication of our mortality. Many of us have to face very serious illness and so there’s a lot of darkness. There are many endings that people have to go through. One of the most painful things people go through is divorce. There is crime on our streets. People are afraid in our society. But, what’s going on with so much crime? How can people treat each other that way?

It’s a grand illusion to pretend that life is all light. It isn’t, and it’s also an illusion to think there are only some people out there who are dark. Everyone has a dark aspect to them. I’m not just inventing that. Many spiritual and psychological writers have said that. We have to acknowledge that and develop a spirituality that is sophisticated — beyond what I would call sentimental spirituality, meaning that it does not acknowledge the dark.
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Tim Miejan
Tim Miejan is a writer who served as former editor and publisher of The Edge for twenty-five years. Contact him at t.miejan.25@gmail.com.

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