The Sacred Quest:

Reclaiming Spirituality from Religion's Modern Prison

Around Eloheh. Picture Credit: Jim Sequeira

Like many folks who've wrestled with the divine, I find myself in a complicated relationship with religion. When that word comes up in conversation, my mind immediately conjures images that are both familiar and troubling: formal structures, rigid hierarchies, established orthodoxies, methodical practices, and belief systems so deeply entrenched they've forgotten how to breathe. Please don't misunderstand me—I'm not throwing stones at religion itself. These characteristics aren't inherently evil; they're simply what happens when human beings organize the sacred, when we try to capture the wind of the Spirit in institutional containers.

But here's what I've learned through decades of walking between worlds, between Indigenous wisdom and Western theology, between the academy and my experience: human beings are spiritual creatures by our very DNA. We are meaning-seekers, purpose-hunters, always searching for something that transcends our individual existence. Even the so-called "new atheists" admit that humans have developed internal mechanisms—they might call them "delusions," but I call them sacred longings—that people use to find happiness and wholeness. Whether this spiritual hunger is genetic, cultural, or divinely implanted doesn't matter as much as recognizing its universal presence.

We organize the data from our spiritual searching, and we call that religion. Here's my own working definition, one I've refined through years of teaching and living: "A journey seeking that which is both outside ourselves (the quest for the Ultimate) and that which is inside ourselves (the quest for the Intimate) that results in the practice of our collective discoveries through our behavior, ritual, symbol, story, and ceremony."

Notice that I said spirituality may contain religion, but the reverse isn't necessarily true. Any religion can become spiritually bankrupt, a hollow shell echoing with ancient words that have lost their power to transform. Most religions exist as strange mixtures of truth claims and pragmatism—they must answer the soul's deepest questions while also functioning in the real world. They need to provide inner peace while addressing social concerns, give meaning to life's mysteries while remaining accessible to ordinary people seeking extraordinary truth.

The foundation matters. Most religions claim to be rooted in some particular revelation in history, though ironically, the histories of the world's major religions tend to be rather murky when you start digging. But here's the thing about truth claims in religion: the stories work not because we can prove them in a laboratory, but because they reflect ways that particular spiritual path actually functions for real people. Does this religion give its followers a sense of inner peace? Does it compel them toward justice? Does it provide meaning when life doesn't make sense? Everything beyond verifiable experience, we typically call "faith."

Here's where we run into our current crisis. Most religions, as I've described them, have become thoroughly modern phenomena. Even the ancient traditions that predate modernity have largely succumbed to modernism's cold, mechanistic, production-oriented, dualistically driven forms. And frankly, that's exactly why people are walking away from organized religion in droves.

Those of us whose spirituality still matters—and I'm talking about people across all age groups, not just young folks—want nothing to do with modernity's neat packages. We're hungry for a spirituality that doesn't fit into Enlightenment boxes, that can't be reduced to propositions and systematic theologies. We're seeking fulfillment that actually addresses life's ultimate and intimate questions without forcing us to check our brains or our hearts at the door.

The trend is toward either postmodern or pre-modern solutions. Traditional religions that have maintained their pre-modern principles and values—like Buddhism and Hinduism—appear more stable and attractive to spiritual seekers. Unfortunately, much of postmodernity has simply accelerated down the same Enlightenment trajectory, leading us into advanced forms of secular materialism that leave the soul just as hungry as before.

Now, I don't think religion is disappearing. In fact, the most fundamentalist expressions of religions—particularly MAGA-type Christianity, seem to be experiencing a resurgence or at least given an amplifier. But here's what troubles me about this fundamentalist response to postmodernity: it tries to silence all new questions with increasingly loud, increasingly harsh old answers. When religious leaders feel threatened by cultural change, they often respond by building higher walls and shouting their certainties more aggressively.

Yet religion clearly isn't going away. The war between competing religious philosophies will likely continue as long as humans exist, and religions do change, whether their adherents acknowledge it or not. Part of why people are rejecting modern religion is their pursuit of more options, more diversity, more room to breathe spiritually. Any religion that limits basic forms of diversity—whether cultural, intellectual, or experiential—is probably destined to decline in our interconnected world.

But here's something beautiful that's emerging from our globalized reality: we're developing genuine awareness of "the cultural other." In this context, "the cultural other" includes all those people who think, act, dress, eat, talk, and worship differently than we do. What's fascinating is that as we actually encounter these cultural others in our daily lives—and most of us do—it becomes impossible to maintain the two-dimensional stereotypes that might have sufficed in our more isolated past.

Most of us now have regular contact with people whose spiritual and cultural backgrounds differ significantly from our own. And here's the surprising part: most of us actually enjoy these interactions. We're discovering that diversity isn't just politically correct rhetoric—it's genuinely necessary and genuinely interesting. We're beginning to understand that the Creator's palette includes far more colors than any single tradition has been willing to acknowledge.

This is where my own heritage offers wisdom that I believe applies far beyond Native communities. In Indigenous thinking, we don't separate the spiritual realm from the material world. Everything is connected; everything is alive; everything teaches us if we're humble enough to listen. We don't ask whether a story is "factual" in some narrow, scientific sense—we ask what truth the story carries, what wisdom it offers for living in right relationship with Creator, creation, and community.

From an Indigenous perspective, the problem with much of Western religion isn't that it claims too much, but that it claims too little. It has settled for a domesticated god who fits comfortably within human institutions rather than encountering the wild, mysterious, transformative Spirit who calls us beyond ourselves into deeper relationships with all our relatives—human and more-than-human, the whole community of creation.

I believe we're at a spiritual crossroads. We can continue down the path of religious tribalism, building walls between communities and traditions, insisting that our particular understanding of the sacred is the only valid one. Or we can embrace what I call the Harmony Way—a recognition that Creator's truth is larger than any single tradition can contain, that spirituality at its best always calls us toward justice, healing, and right relationship with the whole community of creation.

The choice, as I see it, isn't between religion and spirituality, but between spirituality that is life-giving and religion that has forgotten how to nurture life. The sacred quest continues, but it's calling us beyond the narrow confines of modernity's boxes toward something more ancient and more revolutionary than most of our institutions have been willing to embrace.

Perhaps it's time to remember that the Spirit, like the wind, blows where it will—and our job isn't to control it, but to learn how to dance with it.