Essay 10 - A Way of Life

Introduction

To say I am religious but not spiritual is to invite confusion. Some assume it is a contradiction; others think it means I have exchanged one form of superstition for another. In truth, it is neither. It is a way of living that grounds life in ritual, community, responsibility, and beauty without appealing to the supernatural. Where spirituality often seeks private experience, I look instead to shared practices and public forms. Where religion is often defined by belief, I emphasize discipline and belonging.

This essay is not another defense of naturalism or critique of doctrine. Those arguments have been made. What I want to offer here is a practical account: how to live religious but not spiritual in daily life, how to respond to those who may not understand it, and why such a way of life is not only coherent but also deeply fulfilling. My claim is simple: to live religiously without spirituality is to treat human practices as sacred, not because they transcend the world but because they bind us more deeply into it.

Ritual as Foundation

To live religious but not spiritual begins with ritual. This is often where people misunderstand. They hear “ritual” and imagine hollow repetition, meaningless superstition, or practices done only because a god demands them. Yet ritual is not about obedience to the supernatural; it is about shaping life with intention. It is the difference between drifting through a day and inhabiting it fully.

For me, rituals are small but deliberate. Brewing coffee in the quiet of morning. Feeding my cats before the workday begins. Standing before a classroom door, taking a breath, and choosing to welcome students with steadiness. None of these require divine command, but all of them ground me. They give the day rhythm, they provide continuity through change, and they remind me that even the most ordinary actions can be performed with care. To live religiously without being spiritual is, at its heart, to accept that the sacred is not elsewhere but here — in habits that make life livable.

When I describe this to others, they sometimes respond, “But isn’t that just routine?” I answer that routine becomes ritual when it is done with intention. A person can gulp down coffee absentmindedly or they can measure the grounds, wait for the water to pour, and treat the moment as a pause before the noise of the day. Both acts are “making coffee,” but only one acknowledges the power of repetition to center the self. Ritual is routine made deliberate.

Psychologists like William James and philosophers like Aristotle recognized long ago that habits shape character. We are, as Aristotle wrote, what we repeatedly do. To live religiously is to choose habits that align with meaning — not because the universe will bless them, but because they will bless the one who lives them. Others may not understand why I speak of brewing coffee or teaching a class as “religious,” but I explain that these rituals are my liturgy. They are the patterns through which I find grounding.

This is also why ritual provides fullness. Life without rhythm feels scattered; life without anchoring practices feels fragile. Ritual does not erase fragility, but it steadies it. It is how I carry both joy and grief, how I honor memory while embracing change. At my grandparents’ Sunday table, when my grandfather died, the ritual did not end. We rearranged the seats. I took his place. That simple act was ritual at its purest: continuity in the midst of loss. Others might call it tradition or habit, but for me, it was sacred because it bound me to my family and gave shape to grief.

To live religious but not spiritual, then, is to begin each day with ritual. It is to recognize that these practices — whether at a family table, in a classroom, or in a stadium — are not trivial repetitions but acts that anchor the self in time. They do not point beyond the world; they bind us to it. In ritual, life becomes not just something endured but something shaped.

Community Without Supernaturalism

If ritual provides the rhythm of individual life, community gives that rhythm its resonance. To live religious but not spiritual is to recognize that meaning is never mine alone; it is forged and sustained with others. Yet this is often where I meet the most resistance. People hear me describe myself as “religious” and assume I mean membership in a church or loyalty to a creed. When I clarify that I reject supernatural belief but embrace communal forms, they are puzzled. “Why stay religious at all?” they ask. My answer is simple: because community matters, and religion is one of humanity’s oldest tools for binding people together.

For me, institutions such as schools, museums, and councils are every bit as sacred as churches or monasteries. They preserve memory, cultivate belonging, and create spaces where individuals can serve something larger than themselves. The rhythm of a school day — bells, classes, conversations, closing reflections — functions like liturgy. The agenda of a city council — motions, votes, roll calls — has the patterned regularity of ritual. A museum exhibition, carefully curated, is a collective act of remembrance. None of these require divine authority, yet all of them shape communal life with the gravity that others might call sacred.

Explaining this to others requires patience. Many equate sacredness with God, and when I say that classrooms or council chambers are my sanctuaries, they hear metaphor. But I mean it literally. Sacredness, to me, lies in practices that sustain belonging and responsibility. When we gather in ritual — whether around a family table or under stadium lights — we are enacting the same instinct that built temples and cathedrals. Religion, without the supernatural, is still the name for these patterned forms of life together.

Community without supernaturalism is not less meaningful; it is more practical. It does not depend on assent to doctrines or metaphysical claims. It depends only on participation, memory, and care. When I sit with colleagues to discuss how best to serve students, or when I vote in a council chamber to shape the life of a city, I am living religiously. The sacred is present in the very fact that people gather, deliberate, and decide how to live together.

This approach also brings fullness. To be religious but not spiritual is to resist the temptation of pure individualism — the idea that meaning can be built in isolation. Instead, it insists that life gains weight in shared practice. The rituals of a classroom, the traditions of a family table, the public liturgies of democracy: these are not mere procedures. They are the ways we affirm that we belong to one another.

Living this way sometimes requires explaining to others that rejecting supernaturalism does not mean rejecting community. In fact, it means cherishing community more urgently. Without illusions of divine guarantee, the responsibility to sustain our institutions and relationships falls squarely on us. That responsibility is not a burden but a gift. It is the recognition that the sacred is not bestowed from heaven but created in the fragile work of living together.

Morality Without Absolutes

One of the most common questions I hear when I describe myself as religious but not spiritual is, “Without God, where do your morals come from?” The assumption is that ethics must be anchored in divine command, and that without supernatural authority, life collapses into relativism. But I have found the opposite to be true. Morality without absolutes is not weaker; it is stronger, because it places responsibility squarely on human shoulders.

Living religious but not spiritual means accepting that good and evil are fragile human constructs, not eternal decrees. Nature itself is amoral: floods, viruses, and earthquakes are not punishments from the heavens but natural events. Suffering exists not because someone “allowed it” but because the world is complex and often cruel. In this framework, morality is not about appeasing a divine will but about creating conditions where people can live with dignity. The question is not “What does God require?” but “What kind of society do we want to build?”

Practically, this means ethics must be lived as a daily discipline. As a teacher, I cannot rely on commandments carved into stone to guide my classroom. Instead, I model fairness, cultivate compassion, and create space for honesty. When I sit with a struggling student, or when I choose to tell the truth even when it is costly, I am practicing morality without absolutes. It is fragile — one wrong decision can fray trust — but it is real.

Explaining this to others requires honesty. I often say: divine law has justified slavery, oppression, and exclusion in the past, but human beings revised those laws when they recognized the cruelty within them. What endures is not divine decree but human responsibility. We can see this in history: values such as fairness, reciprocity, and compassion reappear across cultures not because they descend from heaven, but because they “work.” They enable survival, cooperation, and flourishing.

This way of living is practical because it demands vigilance. Absolutism tempts us into complacency — if morality is fixed and eternal, then it cannot fail. But if morality is human, it must be renewed with every generation. Each choice matters, each injustice resisted, each act of compassion preserved. Living religious but not spiritual means treating morality as liturgy: a repeated practice that does not guarantee perfection but sustains the fragile fabric of justice.

Fullness emerges here too. Knowing that morality is ours to make does not diminish its power; it magnifies it. Every act of kindness is significant because it is not guaranteed. Every choice for justice matters because it could have gone otherwise. To live ethically without absolutes is to recognize that the moral arc does not bend on its own — we bend it. And in bending it, we take part in the sacred work of being human together.

Facing Mortality and Mystery

To live religious but not spiritual is also to live with death always near. Many traditions soften mortality with promises of heaven, reincarnation, or reunion beyond the grave. I do not share those beliefs. For me, death is final: the cessation of breath, the breaking down of the body, the end of consciousness. Yet far from emptying life of meaning, this recognition deepens it. Mortality is not an interruption but a frame, reminding me that each act, each word, each relationship must be tended now, while I still have time.

This perspective is not always easy to explain. When others ask, “But don’t you want to believe you’ll see loved ones again?” I tell them I honor my loved ones not by imagining their return, but by remembering them fully. When I visit a grave with my brother and leave coins on the stone, I am practicing a ritual that holds memory in place. It does not deny the finality of death, but it refuses to let the dead vanish into silence. Memory becomes the social afterlife — the way a life continues in story, in gesture, in the habits carried forward by those who remain.

Mystery plays its part here as well. To reject supernatural claims is not to claim mastery over all knowledge. Quite the opposite: it is to live with reverence for what I cannot know. The future is a mystery, as is much of the past. Even my own mind — the unconscious, the surge of emotion, the spark of creativity — remains a frontier. To live religious but not spiritual is to honor mystery not by projecting gods into it, but by treating it as a horizon. I do not need certainty to feel reverence; I need humility.

This approach is practical because it resists both denial and despair. Denial pretends that death is not real, while despair insists that death renders life meaningless. The middle path — the religious but not spiritual path — accepts death as part of life’s rhythm. This acceptance sharpens gratitude. It makes the morning coffee more precious, the family table more sacred, the classroom conversation more urgent. Each of these moments carries weight because it cannot be repeated forever.

Fullness arises precisely from this fragility. To know that my time is short is to savor what is given. To recognize mystery as permanent is to stay open, curious, and humble. I may not solve the riddle of consciousness or the universe, but I can live in awe of it. As the Stoics reminded their students, to remember death is to live better. To live religious but not spiritual is to turn mortality and mystery into companions — not enemies to be defeated, but teachers that keep me attentive to the life I have.

The Sacred Ordinary

To live religious but not spiritual is finally to see beauty as sacred, even when it arises from human hands alone. For centuries, cathedrals, icons, and sacred music have been treated as proof of divine inspiration. I see them differently: not as evidence of God, but as evidence of us — our capacity to lift ordinary materials into forms that inspire reverence. Stone, glass, paint, song: these are human elements transformed by human imagination into something that transcends mere utility.

This same impulse is not confined to churches. I have stood in the Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis, where mosaics glitter like galaxies, and I have stood in the Guardian Building in Detroit, a skyscraper built for finance, where color and form create the same awe. One is sacred, the other secular, but both testify to the human instinct to make beauty a vessel of meaning. When I explain this to others, I tell them: beauty is religion’s greatest proof, not of God’s existence, but of humanity’s longing to live in a world worthy of reverence.

The sacred ordinary extends far beyond architecture. Bread and wine at a table, water poured for a child, light slanting through a window — these are ordinary things that religion has taught us to see differently. To be religious but not spiritual is to continue that work without claiming the supernatural. Bread is still communion when shared with gratitude; water is still renewal when received with intention. Even the smallest rituals — pouring coffee, lighting a candle, gathering at a stadium — can take on sacred character when treated with attention.

Art carries this further by transforming suffering into beauty. The crucifix, painted and sculpted in endless variations, is not beautiful because a god ordained it, but because humans refused to let suffering be meaningless. Buddhist mandalas, Jewish psalms, African American spirituals — each is a cultural act of taking pain, hope, or longing and turning it into form. When I look at Rembrandt’s Head of Christ or hear the swell of a gospel choir, I do not ask whether divinity has touched them. I see, instead, humanity lifting its own fragility into vision.

Living this way is practical because it provides fullness without illusion. Awe does not depend on miracles; it depends on perception. To walk into a museum, to hear a symphony, to watch light shift across the floor of a classroom — all of these can be sacred encounters if entered with care. Others may insist that sacredness requires belief in the supernatural, but I answer that sacredness is what happens when humans treat something as worthy of reverence. And that can happen anywhere: in a basilica, in a skyscraper, at a family table, or in the quiet act of making coffee.

To be religious but not spiritual, then, is to live with eyes open to the sacred ordinary. It is to let art, ritual, and beauty remind me that life, though fragile and finite, is rich beyond measure. The fullness of this way of life lies not in promises of eternity but in the recognition that here and now, in the very human world we share, there is more than enough to revere.

In Closing

To live religious but not spiritual is not to withdraw from life but to enter it more fully. It is to let ritual anchor the day, to let community shape responsibility, to let morality be practiced without illusions, to face death with honesty, and to find beauty in the ordinary. This way of life does not offer escape from fragility; it insists that fragility itself is what makes meaning possible.

For those who wonder how such a life can provide fullness, my answer is this: it asks nothing impossible of us. It asks only that we attend to what is already here — the tables where we gather, the institutions we sustain, the art we create, the relationships we honor. These are enough. To be religious without being spiritual is to see that life does not require otherworldly guarantees to be sacred. It requires only our willingness to treat the ordinary with reverence and to carry one another with care.

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