D. Ryan Foster- Searching for Religion as a Religion

April 21

Few people think they have all the answers when it comes to religion. I see so many people with so many views and I think to myself how can I know what is right and what isn't? I struggled with this for a long time until I found this conglomerative faith that is based in the teachings of Christ but hardly follows the perceived tenets of Christianity. I never had a name for what I truly longed to be, beyond the Ancient Greek definition of a natural man (which has very little to do with what people percieve as nature now.) The mention in class of the perpetual pilgrim interested me and spawned this idea in my head of a search for religion being a religion unto itself. It gave new definition to what I believed my personal religion might become.
Where a normal pilgrim may be searching for a definite place or a constant known, the pilgrim who searches for the sake of searching revels in what is unknown and inconstant. As such the idea of change and growth of knowledge is likely to correlate expanding perspectives and viewpoints. This lends this type of pilgrim to travel and expanding their physical boundaries in order to gain the perspective for their spiritual knowledge to expand as well. This inconsistency of place seems to fit nicely with the joy of having inconstant knowledge and to learn new beliefs in order to expand your own. When I apply this idea to myself, I ask that if I'm piecing together the beliefs of everything I travel and find and keep what speaks to me and leave the rest than am I not playing God in creating this patchwork religion? I think that would be egotistical on my part but also presumptuous on the part of anyone who would accuse that. I feel that a guiding hand shows you what you need to see, perhaps what Christians might define as The Holy Spirit, that emotions and an inexplicable (potentially divine) force drives individuals toward believing what they believe in order to better themselves. You begin to see religious leaders not as symbols of divinity but as guide posts to whatever else there is to learn about the human experience with the divine.
In the idea of travel, incongruity, and expansive knowledge lays the integral idea of wilderness. The concept that there is something that is beyond what mankind can teach in words and actions that can only be learned in the fleeting concept of untamed creatures and flora, perhaps even an idea of the communal spirit of a land that allows a better connection with whatever it is divine. However, a pilgrim of this type, while appreciating nature's abilities does not back seat the human and its culture to some chaotic sinful abyss while putting the natural world on a pedestal. This type of pilgrim reveres all facets of learning in order to expand and enhance themselves on three levels, mind, body and soul. And perhaps compare it body to earth mind to the heavens, and the soul to the axis mundi that binds it all. In this a whole person relates to their cosmos as a microcosm in and of to themselves with the borders of each ever expanding and ever changing to include as much of the whole. At this point in my life I feel that whatever that whole may be that it is love, in all its forms, given, received, observed; no matter how far I search I do not believe I'll ever find too much love or too many guises in which it lies.