Spiritual but Not Religious: The Search for Meaning in a Material World by John Bartunek

Author:John Bartunek [Bartunek, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: TAN Books
Published: 2019-07-15T05:00:00+00:00

Entertainment and Religion

Here we see an interesting variation on the relationship between entertainment and religion. On the one hand, the inspiration provided by a powerful story can move us to accept values and adopt behaviors in harmony with particular religious beliefs, with a particular ethos or worldview. Those behaviors and values in turn promise to increase a believer’s communion with divinity, the source of meaning and fulfillment. On the other hand, music and other ritual practices involving the body (like dance or yoga) are offered in some religious contexts as a stimulus to an ecstatic experience redolent of that same communion with the divine. Both cases exemplify the spirituality of entertainment, but they actually indicate contrasting approaches to experiencing the transcendent.

The ritual-as-stimulus approach implies that authentic religious experience can be manufactured. This comes close to superstition in that it offers the human person a technique for touching the divine. But if divinity is reachable merely by a technique—a form of meditation or ritual, for example, focusing on bodily and emotional experience while minimizing the role of the intellect—then the relationship between the human heart and the divine reality is one-directional. There is nothing interpersonal about it. In fact, in some types of transcendental meditation, the very goal of the ritual prayer is to escape from one’s personhood and dissolve into a kind of divine ether.

The story-as-inspiration type approach, on the other hand, highlights the human capacity for knowing and choosing. The proper exercise of our personal freedom becomes the avenue to interpersonal communion with the divine. The emotional experience flowing from that communion is a kind of bonus, but the meaning that comes from the relationship goes deeper than a bodily and emotional ecstatic experience. Just as human friendships are built on a substratum of knowledge and goodwill that can weather seasons of emotional dryness as well as seasons of emotional intensity, the interpersonal approach to communion with the divine can endure and inform one’s daily life independently of emotional states. Prayer in this context is not a technique for manufacturing an ecstatic experience but a true dialogue between persons. Thus, once again, we see that different religions propose different paths and different destinies.

In both cases, however, the gratifying emotional experience we associate with entertainment naturally opens us up to the spiritual realm, the realm of transcendence, even though not every piece of entertainment is explicitly transcendent in its form or content. And so the question about meaning and fulfillment must grapple with entertainment, and entertainers must learn to be aware of the impact made by the utilization of their gifts.

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