If the adjective ‘religious’ is taken to mean possessed of certain virtues such as faithfulness, compassion, humility, self-understanding, self-discipline, and integrity, you cannot teach people to be religious.
If the noun ‘religion’ is taken to denote that area of human experience in which people encounter the Reality beneath reality as a Love which both judges and transforms them, you cannot teach religion.
To the extent that God is One whom we can never make the object of our speculation without to one degree or another reducing God to a god fashioned in our own image; to the extent that God can never become an ‘It’ which we reach at the end of a logical demonstration of divine existence, but remains always an ‘I’ confronting us with divine grace and imperatives at times and in ways which we cannot control; to the extent that the most profound and subtle words we use to describe God are at best the crude metaphors that a blind man must resort to when speaking of the appearance of the sun which he knows only by feeling its warmth upon him, you can never teach God as an academic subject; to the extent that the deep and crucial questions with which religion is concerned involve people in every phase and area of their lives — to speak of a philosophy of teaching people religion is a kind of absurdity.
What then is left after all these resounding negations? What is it that I’m doing preaching the Gospel and celebrating the Sacraments? Only this, I think, and it is plenty: I’m trying to help people to see — even the high schooler who already looks upon religion as a cumbersome and implausible irrelevance (which much of the time it is) — that it is not religion in itself that matters but the Reality to which true religion points.
And I bear witness that this Reality is Jesus Christ in at least a double sense. First, in the life of Jesus as a human being is made manifest human life as it was created to be, a life where all our tragic estrangement from ourselves, from others, and from God as the true center of our being is overcome in sacrificial love. Second, in the event of Jesus as the Christ — his life, death, and resurrection — a power is released among us which brings us to the One who hung the stars in the heavens and calls us all by name.
27 February 2020
George Herbert, Priest and Poet, (1593 – 1633)