I’ll tell you how I see religion. Religions are, for the most part, imperfect human-made trellises. Ideally, they provide social support up which the vine of spiritual life can grow. The fruits can then flourish in the sun, and as a Pink Floyd lyric had it, “Love is the shadow that ripens the wine.” This is a life-long journey.

Mind you, some shadow it can be! It is one thing for the vine of life to grow wild along the ground, but then it stays within its own shadows. Up to a point, we can all “do” our own spirituality at that ground level. The only reason why we need religions, is if we decide we want to do it with others, and hopefully, with the support of their experience. Furthermore, if love is the basis of our spirituality, then it’s got to be all about others. That arguably makes religions inevitable.

Why? Because if we’re going to get it together with others about anything, we need to agree on what we’re sharing and with what ground rules. Such as: will we have rituals and ceremonies, or will we (like us Quakers,) just “do it quietly”? And then if (let’s say) we’re going to have rituals and ceremonies, shall we (let’s say) celebrate the ripened fruit of the vine with wine? “This is my body,” said Jesus – the matter of the universe. “This is my blood” – the spiritual wine, that animates the whole shebang. I’m talking about that kind of social expression of things. Is that kind of ritualised experience helpful, or not? Either way, we need to agree if we’re doing things together. 

Others might argue that we can bypass all that baggage, and get our spiritual acts together with one another out in the woods. I’m very partial to a bit of paganism. At least, I was back in my misspent youth – until a certain summer’s Solstice party in Ireland, where the high point was that we were all to dance skyclad round the fire. Our hosts hadn’t reckoned on the midges coming out! But seriously, if we’re going to have ceremonies where we re-envision Eden in the woods, what should we or shouldn’t we wear (apart from midge cream), and by the way, is it or is it not OK to lace the brew with mushrooms?

These are very real questions about doing spirituality in a social context. You’ve got to agree on what the score is if people are not to get hurt, or jumped into spaces they had not consented to, and that’s why I think we can’t write religion off entirely, no matter how tempting that might be, especially if we have been subjected to spiritual abuse by – Pink Floyd again – “the cold and religious”.

So much for religion as part of the weird and the wonderful, but all of this is based on the assumption that we might want to have a “spiritual” life. Furthermore, that there’s validity in such a way of understanding what it might mean to become fully a human being.