Devotion without Religion

Devotion to God has been at the figurative heart of man’s religious and spiritual quest for millennia. Saints and texts alike have spoken of man’s love for God, God’s love for man, and the ecstasy that comes from realizing that love within oneself. But we live in a rational and secular age, and the path of devotion has been de-emphasized. When we admit to having spiritual urges at all, we often speak of the search for peace, with its main route being through meditation. When the emotions are engaged in the spiritual search, they are directed towards aims like self-actualization and healing. Actual devotion—the practice of love, worship, and prayer—is viewed as misguided at best, and dangerous at worst.

It is not at all clear how to reconcile the path of devotion with the independent spiritual path. This is because the way of devotion is associated with the worst aspects of religion, such as irrationalism and fanaticism. The argument goes that only a force like religious devotion is able to lead otherwise intelligent people to embrace the irrational aspects of religion, such as beliefs that contradict mainstream science, or partisanship that rejects or persecutes those who hold differing religious opinions. Therefore, for the modern reformer of spiritual seeking, devotion with its irrational emotional intensity is the force that must be excised when we go to recover what is good about spirituality.

But it’s unfair to blame religious devotion for all the problems that the emotions bring to man. On one hand, emotional attachments can lead to fanaticism even without a religious component, as we see in the case of nationalist passion. And on the other hand, as we learn more about man’s psychology, we see increasingly that emotional attachments are a key factor that keeps human life and society running. In his treatise The Origins of Political Order, Francis Fukuyama points to research that shows that man was always involved in social and political groupings held together by emotional ties and was never in a solitary state of nature. Modern psychology emphasizes the fact that human relationships are essential for mental health. Even in the hard-nosed field of business management, ever since the publication of In Search of Excellence by Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman, it has been acknowledged that emotional factors like pride in one’s work and the joy of serving the customer, as opposed to the rational pursuit of wealth alone, are crucial for success in business.

Therefore, we can’t rule out the engagement of the emotions in spirituality solely on the basis of the negative aspects of religion. And while it may seem easier to leave the emotions to the adjacent fields of mental health or business success coaching, the essential connection between engaging the emotions and the search for the Divine cannot be neglected indefinitely. Most people would never be able to undertake an endeavor as difficult as the search for the Divine, not even on the austere path of formless meditation, without a strong emotional connection to the path. And once we admit the possibility of engaging the emotions, we must also admit that deepening that emotional connection to God is one of the most accessible and powerful paths to God.

Devotion to Forms, Abstract and Concrete

The contemporary understanding of God does not allow us to easily see how to do this. Because of the aversion to the religious approach to God, which is caricatured as propitiating a stern old man in the sky, the contemporary tendencies are to either view God as a pure abstraction, a powerful deity but one who is ultimately unknowable in a human way, or otherwise to deny that there is a God in the sense of a conscious being, imagining only an abstract energy. If those two conceptions of God exhausted the reality of God, that still wouldn’t necessarily mean that the path of devotion is impossible—after all, such abstractions as a flag, nation, or business organization are all able to command sustained emotional commitment and sacrifice. But it remains true that devotion to tangible forms is a powerful practice—the practice which gives religious devotion its power and which makes the modern spiritual reformer wary.

One interesting thing to note is that just because we find the approach of devotion to concrete forms problematic doesn’t make those forms of God any less real. The modern reformer takes God to be an abstract energy because it would be distasteful to worship God in the specific form of Krishna or Christ; but if God really does take the form of Krishna or Christ, the opinions of the modern reformer wouldn’t matter. Of course, the modern reformer would hold that there is no specific evidence for God having the form of Krishna or Christ either. Still, if we are open to the idea of devotion at all, we must hold out the possibility of the validity of the recognized forms of God; after all, any argument that discounts the God of specific religious forms could easily be modified to discount the formless and abstract God as well.

But whether we admit traditional forms of God or only abstract forms, the problem for those on the independent spiritual path remains as to how we are to pursue a path of devotion that avoids the trap of the religious approach of exclusivity, irrationalism, and fanaticism. It’s hard to see what the options are, but if we are clear eyed we can see that there are only so many possibilities. One is to preserve the old gods of the religions, but to try our best not to get stuck in the religious traps. This approach would acknowledge that there is an unknowable mystique around the forms of God that have been handed down, and that it is not possibly to synthetically come up with a new form or abstraction which can command the same reverence or devotion. In this approach, the heart would be devoted to Christ or Krishna without participating in the other social and institutional structures of organized religion. The danger of this option is that it will slide too far to the faults of the old religious mentality. After all, if the revered forms of God are worth preserving because of their irreplaceable essence, why shouldn’t the associated religious practices and social forms be viewed as similarly meritorious? It may not be clear how to extract devotion to these forms of God from concrete religious practice.

A second approach would be to channel devotion to human gurus. There are obvious problems are here as well, and they may even seem to be worse than the problems with the previous option. Namely, this option could lead to personality cults, which are regarded as the worse and more extreme than even religious institutions. If an individual human is loved and regarded as God, they may feel as though they are granted absolute power, which no human being should have. Further, it is not clear whether anyone currently existing on earth is worthy of being placed in this position. What makes this opportunity worth considering, though, is that the human guru provides a target for the devotional impulse that is tangible without relying only on the classical forms of the religions. And in an ideal world, there might be enough spiritual masters and gurus that would make this a legitimate outlet for the devotional impulses of the spiritual seekers.

A third approach would be to reserve the devotional impulse for the forms and institutions of human life as they are: the family, the nation, various secular and religious institutions. This approach would powerfully ground spiritual seeking in the structures of everyday life. The problem with this approach is that even though the human affections can work effectively through these human organizations, it is not clear if the highest form of religious devotion could flow through these mundane channels. A fourth option would be not to try to send the religious devotional impulse towards any forms or structures at all, and instead to focus on revering the abstract forms of God instead. This approach would seem to at least avoid the problems of the earlier methods in principle, though in practice one may wonder if the human heart could really love an abstraction. The modern reformer or critic may hold that any effectiveness of the concrete forms for devotion is still too big of a risk, and that man will have to learn to love the abstract. But it must be noted that even movements with aniconic policies or tendencies have had trouble with fanaticism.

It may seem like there are no good options for how to safely direct the devotional impulse: either there is the option of a cold abstraction that doesn’t inspire devotion, or otherwise the problems that come with emotional attachments to people, forms, or institutions that are not fit to bear the pressure of being loved as God. But there is a subtle shift of framing we can use to open another option. In options one through four, we assumed that we were disconnected from God and needed to find the right way to connect with him; if we didn’t find it, we might be disconnected forever. In this way of thinking, the old religions may have had a channel through their various forms, and if we can’t use their channel as it was initially set up, we could lose access to God completely.

But we don’t need to make that assumption. We can assume instead that we already have a relationship with God, and from there assume that we will be guided to the right devotional channels when the time is right. This is a fifth, all-encompassing option that gives us not a simple answer for how we should direct our devotional impulse but rather a way of living that will dynamically channel our devotion. The specific devotional forms may be different at different times; and they may include some of the options from above that may seem “dangerous” for their proximity to religious methods, such as the use of older religious forms of God, devotion to human spiritual teachers or institutions, or the sanctification of human relationships like the family, romantic love, or friendship. But as long as we keep in mind that our relationship with God is prior to any given form of him that we are devoted to, we will be relatively safe as we negotiate the shifting tendencies of devotional spiritual practice.

A Devotional Relationship to God

The possibility of a devotional practice in the contemporary era requires that we have a relationship with God that is prior to any specific form of God, and use that as a basis for devotional relationship to various forms of God. But what is this relationship with God? This may seem like an impossible query. How can a human have a relationship with God, the creator of the entire universe? We are used to relationships with our fellow humans; these relationships are characterized by mutual support, or antagonism, or indifference. Assuming God is a real being, we have a relationship with Him, just as we have relationships with our fellow humans on Earth; if it doesn’t seem like we have a relationship with Him, that just means that our relationship is characterized by ignorance, or perhaps worse, indifference, just as so many of our relationships with humans are.

The first step to improving this relationship is to acknowledge that God exists and try to be more open to Him. The first step in improving a human relationship is to listen more, to be more attentive; so it is with God. We do this by being quiet and listening for what God has to say to us. But what if God says nothing? In that case, we might feel that our relationship with Him is characterized by abandonment—as with a child whose father or mother has left. In an adult relationship with God, though, there can be no question of abandonment; we must realize that the issue is not with us or with God but with the limits of our human finitude, our ability to hear. So if God seems quiet, we must trust and wait for His voice to be heard more clearly, whether that takes a day, or a week, or even many years. A relationship with God must take into account the type of being that God is, which means understanding God as a being that works on timescales that are vaster than ours are; we cannot be upset if he doesn’t immediately answer us as we might expect a human relationship partner to return our texts and calls on the same day. The relationship with God is not a relationship between humans but rather a relationship between a human and the all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving creator of the universe. We must trust his timing, and we must trust that the circumstances he arranges for us are the best ones for us to be in.

We must be present in our relationship with God just as we stay present in a relationship with a human, being open and listening and staying connected; only then does the possibility of insight and trust open up. We don’t need to start with trust—we simply need to start with staying connected. As we communicate and listen, the forms that we need to interact with God will be suggested, whether these are human relationships in our life that are symbols of the Divine, or are ancient forms of the Divine that have been revered through the ages and find a renewed relevance for us, or are the beloved forms of spiritual teachers that come into our lives. By following the path that opens up, we find the forms that are needed to practice the path of devotion. Even in this modern era that has identified the problems with religion without providing a replacement, if we trust the spiritual path that unfolds, the heart will still be able to fulfill its desire for the Love of the Divine.