Innervisions: Practice What You Preach
Setting out on the quest for a spiritual home
2008-04-10
By Meri Nana-Ama Danquah

Every year, I take on a pet project, one activity that pushes me a little outside of my comfort zone.  It’s usually something I’m either afraid of doing, or that I’ve always wanted to do but for whatever reason—a shortage of time or money, or both—have never tried.  Two years ago, I learned to swim (I know, I know, but better late than never).  Last year, I learned to sew.  This year, I decided that what I needed to finally do was fine-tune my faith.  I use the term “fine-tune” because any other word, like “recapture” or “discover” would imply that I’d either lost my faith, or I am/have been without faith.  None of those is accurate.

What’s true is that for almost as long as I can remember, I’ve had an extreme aversion to any sort of organized religion.  I do believe in a higher, divine power.  It’s the rest of it—the strict doctrines which require complete and unquestioning adherence, the self-congratulatory notions that insist favor and mercy are granted only to those who worship in a certain way, to name but a couple of things—that I had a problem with.  I felt these ideas were oppressive and divisive. 

Still, I have to confess there have always been certain aspects of formal religion which appeal to me.  I am drawn, for instance, to the rituals, the iconography, the basic idea of fellowship.  Don’t bother to remind me that those things I admire are the byproducts of the very things I abhor; I am well aware. And this seeming contradiction has caused me a whole lot of confusion. 

For a while, though, after I stumbled upon the “spirituality movement,” I thought I had things figured out.  Whenever I was confronted with the topic of religion, I’d respond: “I’m not religious; I’m spiritual.”  I spent many, many years standing under the umbrella of spirituality, grateful for the shelter it provided. 

When divorced from religion, spirituality is a pretty vague concept, one that I would have been (and still am) hard-pressed to accurately define, but that’s why I loved it so.  Spirituality quieted all of those needling questions and concerns I had about organized religion; it gave me the permission I so desperately needed to just be, and to just believe.  Or, at least, I convinced myself that it did.

“You know,” a friend of mine, another self-proclaimed spiritual person, told me, “religion is for people who are afraid of going to hell.  Spirituality is for those who have already been there.”  I laughed and immediately agreed; yet as the weeks and months passed, I kept thinking about that statement.  Something about it wasn’t quite sitting well with me but I didn’t know what.  Then one day last year in early December while I was at a shopping mall, walking by store windows with menorahs and statuettes depicting the nativity scene, it dawned on me. 

The reason, as expressed in that statement my friend made, for some people’s dedication to religion was actually the same as my reason for embracing spirituality.  I was afraid of the sort of vulnerability that is so publicly exposed by organized religion, a vulnerability that can be so easily exploited; afraid of further narrowing the world’s characterization of me by adding one more inflexible label; and yes, I was also afraid of going to hell. Call me an overly permissive pushover but fire, brimstone and eternal damnation with the devil has never seemed like a just punishment for those who have led imperfectly human lives or subscribed to a theology that does not accept Jesus as the Messiah.

Once I’d admitted all of this to myself, I was also able to admit that as unrestrictive and all-inclusive as that umbrella of spirituality had once appeared to be, it too was not without its dogma or, as evidenced by the comparison my friend made, a mentality of “us” versus “them.”  In fact, I’d been so eager to step away from any involvement in or investigation of more traditional religions, I’d happily excused or overlooked things about spirituality that I didn’t really care for, like some of the New Age stuff, namely crystals, psychics, ghost whisperers, numerology and astrology. Truth be told, a lot of that frightens me, too. And I’m not talking about faux, commercialized Feng Shui, Ouija boards or those cheesy horoscopes in the backs of magazines.  I mean the real deal—planets in retrograde, houses of birth, the Age of Aquarius, Satori, Koshen.  Not my thing.  But then, what do I know about any of that?  Evidently, not enough, which is the point of this exercise, this project I’ve committed myself to doing—and writing about—this year.  

Fear often, though not always, stems from ignorance.  What has always disturbed me the most about some so-called religious people is how ignorant and, as a result, fearful they are about forms of worship that differ from theirs. I’ve discovered that I’m guilty of that as well.  So this year, I hope to change that by facing my fears.  I’m taking a break from the self-help titles to focus my reading on religious texts.  I also plan to visit different places of worship, regardless of faith or denomination.

Other than information and education, the sort that erases prejudice and promotes understanding, I also suppose I’m searching for a spiritual home. You know, a Reverend once told me that if you pay close enough attention to your life, you’ll realize that God often gives you the opportunity, in a huge way, to practice what you preach.  By seizing that opportunity, you make room in your life for miracles to happen—and I could always use a few more of those in my life!

Meri Nana-Ama Danquah is a freelance writer living in Los Angeles. Innervisions is her new column for Ebonyjet.com on her path to finding religion.