Religion as Resonance

There’s a clip from an interview with the musician and author Nick Cave about the contrast he sees between religion and spirituality.

Cave is asked the question: “You talk about a very definite difference between being spiritual and being religious.”

Cave’s response: “You know, I think religion asks something of us, it asks something of us. And spirituality is a little bit more amorphous. And we can all be spiritual, and we are all spiritual, and like, well, of course, we are all spiritual. But religion...it’s spirituality with rigor... it requires something of us and that action, I think, is what it’s probably all about.”

“So what does being religious require of you?”

Cave replies, “For me, I’m more inclined to do religious things, like go to church, pray, read Scripture.”

Cave goes on to talk about his lingering doubts and difficulties with religious belief, but I want to highlight his contrast between religion and spirituality. Specifically, that religion “requires something of us.”

This aspect of religion is something I highlight in Hunting Magic Eels, how an embrace of spirituality tends to default to a curated, bespoke, and self-indulgent pursuit of enchantment. And what’s so delightful about this approach is how it makes no demands upon us, especially moral demands, duties, and obligations. I can cleanse my spaces with sage. Do yoga. Surround myself with crystals. Practice mindfulness. Set up a shrine to a god or goodness. Manifest abundance. None of it presses back upon me with an ethical obligation. And this is precisely the allure. A feature, not a bug. More, I can skip all of this, forget to do any of it, and that apathy and indifference is perfectly fine. There is no ongoing commitment to care about any of it. All the woo is wholly optional.

Like I said, I’ve made these points before. But what I want to do here is make a connection between Cave’s description of religion and Hartmut Rosa’s work on what he calls “resonance.”

According to Rosa, a resonant experience with life involves the following:

• We can be addressed, reached, and touched by the experience.

• We can respond to the experience and call.

• We can be changed by the experience.

• We cannot control the experience.

The key theme here is that a resonant experience is reciprocal. Two distinct realities are encountering each other, mine and another, and that encounter has consequences for me. I expect you can see the connection between Rosa’s description of resonance and Cave’s description of religion. Religion, Cave says, asks something of us. Religion requires something of us.

Borrowing from Rosa and Cave, therefore, we might arrive at this definition of religion: Religion is a resonant relationship with existence. Our life is addressed by Being, an address we cannot control, an address that asks and requires something of us. And in responding to this address, we are changed and transformed.