Some of us remember R.E.M.’s hit, “Losing My Religion.” Unless you were raised in the south you might think the song was about a loss of faith. The melancholy melody would point you in that direction. Actually, it is not nearly profound as it sounds, as I learned in an interview with the composer.

“Losing one’s religion” means losing one’s temper, and likely saying some rather unreligious words in the process. As in, “If you keep that up, I’m likely to lose my religion.” And we can imagine what that might mean!

But quite a few people do in fact lose their religion in the other sense. That is how they would describe their walk away from the religious tradition in which they were raised.

Some walk away from “religion” but want to remain “spiritual.” Some just want to be done with the whole thing.

But that is not as easy as it seems. Something tends to become “religious” in our lives, even atheism, science, or our would-be pure spirituality. We find ourselves developing dogmas and creeds, rituals, liturgies, and a “worshipping” community, often online. We find there are heretics out there who disagree with us.

Some religions currently doing business as Christianity need to be lost or rejected. N.T. Wright would ask young self-identified atheists at Oxford to tell him about the God they don’t believe in. Invariably the rejected deity bore little resemblance to the God revealed in Jesus Christ. He affirmed their rejection of these critters.

Sometimes rejection of a caricature can be a step toward finding the real. But often the road is long and hard. And some never find Him, even though He never gives up trying to find them.

Paul Tillich, in his little classic, Dynamics of Faith, defined faith as “ultimate concern.” That about which we are ultimately concerned is the object of our faith. Which means that no one is without a faith and a religion of some kind, since all have concerns and among them there is an ultimate. It is part of being human.

The object of our faith is profoundly significant. As Tillich says, “Ultimate concern can destroy us as it can heal us. But we never can be without it.” If you want to dig deeper, here is a helpful article.

There is tremendous spiritual hunger these days. Unlike the quest for broader horizons that we saw in the 1960s, and delight in possibilities yet unconsidered in psychedelics, sex, and the East, today it is a quest for certainties. This adds a harder, darker, more serious, less creative, less tolerant dimension.

Certainties don’t welcome other hypotheses or the uncertainties of agnosticism for dialogue; rather they require the errors of contradictory dogmas for energy and validation.

Creating a religion of your own has become very serious business indeed. It can take you into the courts, and into the streets. It divides churches and families. It can lead to bloodshed.

We want our religion customized to our minutest personal preferences and grievances. Then, paradoxically, we use all the means at our disposal to bring everyone else into compliance, or at the least to subject the uncompliant to ridicule. Our religion must be ours and it must be right. And you better agree and affirm. Live and let live doesn’t work anymore.

I believe that the impulse to customize a religion of our own is part of a larger drive to customize everything, and that this dynamic is itself our true “ultimate concern.”

In the midst of all this I am grateful for the option of receiving a religion not of my own making within a tradition that allows only minimal customization. And, unlike Rome or Orthodoxy, the Anglican way is unencumbered with the burden of being “the one true church.” In these two dimensions we are out of step with the times.

May we hold happily steady and calm and grateful.

“How is that working out for you?” People often ask this sarcastically when the obvious answer should be, “Not too well.”  It is an invitation to reconsider and perhaps to try something else.

But sometimes the answer is, “Just great!”

We’ve all heard the old saw: “Your current program is perfectly designed to deliver the results you are getting.”  That’s good news if you are very happy with your “results,” the life you are experiencing. There is no need to look for anything else. Your program is perfect!  Just keep doing what you are doing.

But nothing is static. Even if you change nothing on your side of the equation, the world around you is changing, more rapidly than ever. What worked well today is unlikely to deliver the same results next year.

Was there a season in your life when your wardrobe was perfectly in style? If you are still wearing the same clothes now (and they still fit!), they may be lovely, they may be “classic”, but they are not in style. What would it take to stay in style? At some point even “classic” threads become a “costume”.

Sometimes we just don’t know how something is working out for us. The feedback loops are too long or confusing, as when the gains (or pleasures) are immediate, though temporary, while the losses (or pains) are hidden, though lasting. This is far more the rule than the exception.

Christendom has been sustained by belief in the long-term (eternal) benefits of living the Christian life. These are so great as to outweigh short-term losses. “For the joy set before him” (long-term), Jesus endured the (short-term) agony of the cross.

In this week’s Epistle lesson St. Paul says, “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us” (Rom 8:18). If someone were to ask him: “How’s that Christ-follower thing working out for you?” I think he would honestly say, “Painful at times, in the short-run, but glorious in the long-run. And strangely there is something glorious about that even now.”

How we can expect people today to follow Christ, captive as we are in the pursuit of short-term gains and pleasures and immersed in a rapidly changing, fickle, ruthless world? How, especially if His followers are just as caught up in the sad madness as everyone else? Do we have a viable alternative, a counter-culture, that makes Romans 8:18 plausible and even attractive?