Do You Feel Like You are Losing Your Religion?

Somewhere along the way, the religion or faith you once held dear slipped away. So, what happened? What do I mean by losing my religion? I am referring to the phenomena where many people are leaving their traditional forms of religious teachings and practices, and not knowing where to turn, turn away from religion and spirituality altogether, becoming agnostic, atheist or a nota (none of the above on the survey option). Although I have rarely met a true atheist, more likely people become agnostic or just plain fed up with what they’ve been taught. Does this sound familiar?

So what characterizes the person who has lost his or her religion? Several things really:
Traditional practices and teachings don’t serve your needs or growth
You don’t feel fulfilled
You are actively questioning, seeking a spiritual connection
Your questions are not taken seriously by your religious leaders, leaving you feeling frustrated and unfulfilled

Let's just look at one of these:
The first one I mentioned: Traditional practices and teachings that don’t serve your needs or growth. In this case these traditions have actually become obstacles to faith and religion. One of the strongest obstacles can be one’s conception of God.

So here, let us distinguish between God, our God image and our God concept. Sometimes this exercise helps to free us up enough to find our faith and religion again.

First, there is God, in God’s own essence, being, totality, and that is something that most of us don’t really have access to in our human form. Although perhaps it is attainable along the mystic path as enlightenment or Christ consciousness. But for the most part, the vast majority of us are not experiencing God in this most pure form. What I like to call God straight, no chaser.

That leads us to the second point, our God image. This is us creating God in our image. It is the God formed by the characteristics of parents, authority figures and religious teachings. This might mean that the image we have of God is harsh, critical, judgmental, punitive, hard to please, & constantly needing to be appeased. Well, when this kind of God image does not mature and get replaced by a healthier image, we continue to think of God in these terms, just like when we formed the image as a child. The Freudians say this happens between the ages of 2-3 and because it is so clearly a reflection of parents, it leads them to the conclusion that this is all that God is – a projection. Obviously, as people of faith that is not our conclusion, but we can learn about our God image from Freudian psychology, yet believing that there is some reality beyond that image.

Lastly, is our God concept. The God concept is the relationship we form with the God image, not with God straight up, but God through the lens we created. This is the stuff that creates religious baggage. If this relationship is not a positive one, then typically we either suffer our religion with dread, fear and guilt or we walk away from it all together. We lose our religion.

The good news is that we can regain our religion and spirituality by realizing that our God image is something we created out of the characteristics of parents and authority figures. We can reshape our God image. We must reshape our God image, because we really only work with an image. We are hard pressed to get to God itself within institutional religion. So, how do you regain your religion and spirituality? Look within for the God presence, meditate. Follow the paths of mystics who experienced God and wrote about what it was like to meet God, “face to face.” One thing they have in common, they teach that God is within, and one never finds God outside of oneself.