"I Love Being Religious!"

It is a warm July evening in western New York state. I'm standing in the middle of a open field among the tents at a campground called the Brushwood Folklore Center. The field is marked around its edges by symbols of the classic four elements: a tall decorated pole to the east for air, the embers of a bonfire to the south for fire, a small man-made pond to the west for water, and a stone monolith to the north for earth.

About one hundred people have gathered here for the opening ritual of the twenty-seventh annual Starwood Festival, one of the largest "Pagan" and "Magical" gatherings in the country.

There are elders and children, men and women. Many are dressed in interesting regalia, some of the men in kilts or sarongs, a few people "skyclad" -- or, as it would be called in the outside world, stark naked.

Before the Festival is over, there will have been rituals in Wiccan, Druidic, and Voodoo traditions (plus a late-night ritual honoring Dionysus in the avatar of Jim Morrison); American Indian style sweat lodges; all-night bonfire drum circles; and workshops and lectures in topics ranging from music history and renewable energy to sex magic and how to arrange an ceremonial altar. The whole thing takes on some aspects of a "Be-in" from the 1960s, some of an old Celtic fire festival, and some of a Japanese Shinto matsuri.

But now, to start it all off, we invoke the spirits of the four directions, honor the ancestors and the gods and the spirits of the land, and visualize a umbrella of protective light over the whole site. Then the drummers start, and, laughing, we join hands in the spiral dance. Running and leaping together and swinging each other, we make sort of a giant game of "crack the whip", which will end with us all in a cluster in the center for a final chant.

In front of me is an old festival friend, a feisty redhead who introduced herself to me at my first festival as "Lady Sue". She looks back over her shoulder at me as we dance and, smiling, says "I love being religious!"

Obviously, this is a very different sense of the word "religious" than I learned as a Catholic boy in Baltimore.

In my teens I progressed through my childhood Catholicism to a sort of indistinct theism, and from there to agnosticism, to atheism, to end up with what I refer to as a sort of "Zen Paganism". Along the way I've spent a lot of time pondering the questions: what is religion? And, is it a useful thing?

Our society typically measures religiosity by reference to questions of dogma and by frequency of attendance at worship rituals. "Do you believe in God?" "How often do you go to church or synagogue or temple?" The answers to these determine if you're a "religious" person or not.

But this sort of "religion" doesn't seem to be helping us much. Religious dogmas keep colliding with our expanding scientific knowledge of the world, and -- almost as if in reaction to this collision -- it seems that often the focus of church-going becomes dividing the world into "us" and "those godless wicked heathens who disagree with our dogma".

As we commonly know and experience religion in our culture, there are a couple of things that get mixed up and make it all a mess. There's the desire for a certain experience: an experience of existence, of connection to the Universe, of the Godhead. There are ethical teachings, both the "Thou shall not..." prohibitions and the prescriptions that tell us "Blessed are..." or "The Sage..." There are myths and legends that give us role models. There are the superstitions born of fear, and the super-naturalism born out of ignorance. There's the preservation of the knowledge needed for the community to thrive, encoded into ritual. There's the deliberate hiding of knowledge that would threaten the power of a priesthood.

With all that mess going on, I suppose it's no wonder that more and more people identify with labels such as "spiritual but not religious".

Are other sorts of religion possible?

I think I've been part of a different sort for almost two decades now. And for much of that time I've been trying to formulate exactly what it's about.

I realized I needed to see more examples, more data points, than our American Christianity and the American Pagan movement, to be able to say what religion is. So in 2007, I spent three months investigating the question in Japan -- home of Zen (and several other forms of Buddhism), and of the nature-based (and thus "pagan", depending on our definitions) religion Shinto.

Most of the essays which follow had their genesis during that time.

Nanzen-ji, a large Zen temple complex in Kyoto. There's a great big old central temple, a painting of a dragon on the ceiling. Tourists like me can only see that from the outside, peering in between wooden bars.

Apparently there's some thing about sticking your hands through the bars and clapping to make an echo, an old Japanese man shows me how.

(Weeks later, on a return trip, I find in this temple a bunch of lay people involved in a rehearsal for some sort of ceremony -- I'd almost guess a wedding, if I didn't know that Japanese weddings are almost always Shinto or Christian. While a family rehearses hitting their marks, two young Zen monks goof off, one apparently teasing the other about his freshly-shaved scalp.)

There are lovely gardens outside the old abbot's quarters, a great painting of Bodhidharma (the semi-legendary founder of Zen) on one wall. Had real o-cha in their tea room looking out at a waterfall and garden, very nice.

But to go beyond the tourist view of Japanese religion, go up the hill behind the main temple. First there's a small old sub-temple, Saisho-in; not a tourist attraction but an active, day-to-day, actively used community Zen temple. As I stand there for a moment of meditation, a woman parks her car just outside the grounds, walks up quickly, bows to the Buddha, and hurries back out. Just stopped by to say "Hi" or "Thanks", I guess.

Behind Saisho-in, a beautiful small cemetery. I stand and watch the rain fall, see an offering of sake left on a grave. I think of the young man in the inner city pouring out a 40 for a fallen homie, consider that the Buddha was a prohibitionist, contemplate the adaptability of the dharma.

I continue on up the hill, now in the woods. Small Shinto shines now on the grounds of this Buddhist temple -- a tree, two rocks, girded with the braided rope the denotes objects thought to house kami spirits. As odd as it seems to the Western mind, this sort of openness, of syncretism, is fundamental to Japanese culture and to Eastern thought on religion in general. (Imagine finding a little Christian chapel inside of a synagogue!)

The path keeps going up to a small waterfall, where (if I read my guidebook rightly) people will sometimes sit in the falls and meditate. A little above and to the side of that, a small cave, an altar within...someplace where, hundreds of years ago (maybe just decades) I feel some seeker lived in the mountain for a while.

I touch the rock; convince myself I feel the power, the connection to the Earth.

I have the place to myself for ten on fifteen minutes. I take some photos, stand contemplating the waterfall. I hear the clapping hands of someone praying Shinto-style, he comes up to the waterfall shine. We nod at each other; I step away a bit to free him from uncouth barbarian eyes as he prays, lights a candles and a stick of incense. As he continues up the hill, a younger man comes up, also has his little ritual at the waterfall.

A cave, a waterfall, here for thousands of years perhaps; used as a shire for hundreds at least; still active today.

And yet...Japanese people will often tell you that they're not religious. Many don't seem to be aware of the difference between a Shinto shine and a Buddhist temple. But there are small shrines all over the place, by the sides of roads,in the middle of shopping malls. The sumo tournament can't be held without the ritual that consecrates the dohyo, the raised platform on which the bouts take place. The Buddhist temples don't seem short of visitors at all. Images of Bodhidharma, the founder of Zen, abound.

There's no question that they're doing something. Is it religion? It seems to be a question of semantics.

So beside making professions of faith and visiting a church on a weekly basis, what else might qualify as "religious"?

When in doubt, we can turn to the essayist's cheap trick of consulting the dictionary and checking a word's etymology. "Religion" comes from the Latin "religere", meaning "bind again". It seems to me that a more meaningful rendering into English might be "to reconnect".

But to reconnect what to what? Clearly it's concerned with reconnecting human beings to something, but as to what that something is, opinions have varied -- sometimes violently.

Broadly speaking, societies have offered two main answers. In traditions where religion is used as a path of individual liberation, the goal is to reconnect us to the world in which we live -- often (but not always) personified as gods, spirits, or the like.

But religion can also be used as a tool promoting social cohesion, reconnecting the individual to the community. And though there is much talk of a "relationship with God", organized religion as we have known it always tends more toward enforcement of social norms than toward creating religious experiences.

The tension between these two answers drives a lot of the history of religion. In the earliest human cultures, it seems that the target of shamanistic practices was the connection between the individual and the world; but as society grew more complex, religion became a tool to resolve the tensions created by specialization of labor and hierarchical power structures.

And so it's no coincidence that religion and politics get mixed up so often. If one sort of religion is meant to connect the individual to the community, to resolve human beings to the specific economic, political, and social roles they must fill in a complex society, then it becomes easy to reuse those exact same forms in a secular context, to let pledges and anthems to replace prayers and hymns. Is there a significant difference between a groups of Sunday school kids reciting the Lord's Prayer, and the same kids in elementary school on Monday morning reciting the Pledge of Allegiance?

Human societies can be far divorced from the larger cosmos. So we are often left to choose between a good and harmonious relationship with our neighbors, or with the Universe. These sorts of conflicts can become violent -- crucifixions, witch-trials, and the like. Even the Buddha had assassination attempts made against him.

But still, I will advocate that in case of conflict, the relationship with the Universe take priority -- it is much larger and longer-lived that your local town or nation, and less likely to screw you over for its own benefit.

Whether the goal is connection to the Universe or to the community, the tools used are those that can change human consciousness -- ritual, meditation, trance through the deliberate repetition of words, actions, or ideas (prayers, gathas, creeds, dance, invocations), and biochemical change (either consuming psychoactives, or promoting the release of endorphins and similar chemicals by physical ordeal). Most of these tools can be used to build either sort of connection.

In our culture's usual notions of religion, questions of belief take a primary role. Shared beliefs are certainly one way to connect a community of people together. But this almost inevitably shades off into parroting of dogma; and so such connection of is a limiting one, forcing minds into a mold -- the connection shared by pieces of mass-production.

An alternative to believing together is doing together. Shared ritual, if well-designed, at least allows for differing interpretations. Obviously if the ritual or service involves chanting a declaration of dogma, a creed of some sort, it tends in the limit to indoctrination. But a well-designed ritual can accommodate widely varying beliefs.

In large Pagan gatherings, I have shared rituals with people who identified as several sorts of Wiccan, Druid, Jewish, Buddhist, Atheist, Agnostic, Taoist, Discordian, Subgenius, even Christian. (Some of us identify with many of these labels.) Widely differing ideas, but we all found meaning and use in the same practice. (We might then break off into smaller groups, sharing ritual that was closer and more limited in scope, but we had still all drunk once from the same well.)

Another way to make this connection is through the stories that we tell ourselves. The mind functions largely as a story-telling machine, assembling events into a narrative. But through any finite set of event-points, an infinite number of story-curves can be drawn. What events do we give priority, and which do we explain away as rare exceptions? Do we tell stories of connection or isolation? Do we tell stories of paranoia, whether everything that happens is meant to thwart us, or stories of pronoia, where everything that happens is for our benefit?

Through the practice of meditation and mindfulness, we can learn to observe and eventually control the mental process of storytelling that is consciousness.

This blend of mindfulness and ritual is what I have come to call "Zen Paganism": a set of practices and attitudes meant to transform the practitioner's relationship to themself and to the rest of the universe. A heterodox, individualistic path of liberation.