Religious, not spiritual.

Finished Walker Percy's Love in the Ruins yesterday, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. The Percy chapters in Peter Augustine Lawler's Postmodernism Rightly Understood made sense of everything, so I didn't feel slightly lost like I did with The Last Gentleman.

Down to business: this short passage gets at something I've been thinking about for a while now. Sometimes you will ask someone whether she is religious, and she will say, “I'm not religious, but I'm spiritual.” Which is fine, and probably true for many people these days. But I'm more the other way around: religious, not spiritual, for reasons something like these (in the context of taking communion in some small church miles away from the major road):

“What she didn't understand, she being spiritual and seeing religion as spirit, was that it took religion to save me from the spirit world, from orbiting the earth like Lucifer and the angels, that it took nothing less than touching the thread off the misty interstates and eating Christ himself to make me mortal man again and let me inhabit my own flesh and love her in the morning.”

Religion protects me from the kind of spirituality that my brain would process into abstract nothingness. The history and weight of the Presbyterian church and, more broadly and better, the Church universal—this is an anchor to people and places that keeps people like me from floating off into abstraction.