Have you heard about the "nones" (as in "none of the above") - the growing numbers of Americans without any formal religious affiliation? Most of them say organized religion has lost the ability to speak about what really matters.
 
The phenomenon of the "nones" may feel new, but we're by no means the first wave of human beings to have trouble with traditional or conventional religion. Back in 1799, in Germany, a young minister named Friedrich Schleiermacher (what a wonderful name - literally it means "maker of veils," or even "maker of mysteriousness," if you take a little poetic license!) was in a situation not so different from ours today. Most of his friends thought religion was old-fashioned, outdated, useless for smart, educated people like them. They embraced philosophy, science, the arts. But religion seemed irrelevant to their lives.
 
Schleiermacher's friends, like the poet Schiller, were used to thinking of clergy as stodgy, limited in their thinking. Schleiermacher wasn't that way at all. He was super-smart, creative, a lover of modern thought and arts just as they were
 ... but he loved religion too. They didn't get it. So they convinced him to write a book. "Explain it to us," they asked. "Explain why we should care about this thing that seems hopelessly old-fashioned." The book Schleiermacher wrote in response has this juicy title: On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers. (What do you think - do you know any "cultured despisers" of religion in our own day?)
 
And what he said was juicier still. To these educated, cosmopolitan folks, he said: "You have succeeded in making your earthly lives so rich and many-sided that you no longer need the eternal." You think you have no use for religion, he said - but that's only because you misunderstand what religion is all about. At its heart, religion is not about rules and doctrines and creeds. At its heart, he said, religion is the human response to our absolute dependence.
 
What's that? Absolute dependence? Schleiermacher says, look, there is no such thing as an independent, self-sustaining person. We are dependent on so many things beyond us - we didn't give birth to ourselves and we can't sustain ourselves in isolation. We depend on the earth and the forces of life for air and water and food and relationships, everything that keeps us alive in every moment. We are absolutely dependent on a million things beyond ourselves. (Doesn't this tie into this month's worship theme of vulnerability?) And, ultimately, we are absolutely dependent on whatever it is that has brought forth life in this world. You might call it God or the creative force or any of a million other names for that which gives us life. But that's what Schleiermacher said religion is all about - our human response to the mystery behind everything. And that kind of religion is never irrelevant. I'm grateful to be part of a religious tradition with boundless curiosity about the mystery and gratitude for the gift of life.
 
Warmly,
Laura