The following is an excerpt from Rediscovering Reverence: The Meaning of Faith in a Secular World by Ralph Heintzman. Rediscovering Reverence offers a new look at the place of religion in the modern age.
In the Eastern traditions, as you have seen, the “way” leads normally to some degree of extinction of the individual in an identity with being whereas the Western journey leads normally to some kind of loving relationship. But for the purposes of this chapter, the differences are less important than the similarities. Almost all of the world’s great spiritual traditions conceive of a life of religious practice as a journey in search of something. And almost all of them assume that, except perhaps for a handful of exceptional individuals such as the Buddhas, the journey is one whose object can never be fully achieved. For this reason, the journey itself becomes the point. The journey is, in a sense, its own arrival. As the Sufi poet Jelaluddin Rumi (1207–1273) expressed it, “when you look for God, God is in the look of your eyes, in the thought of looking, nearer to you than yourself.” One of the key sayings of the Soto Zen tradition of Buddhism is that “the practice is enlightenment.” Being, or truth, or eternal life, or ultimate reality, or nirvana, or whatever is the object of the quest, are not to be found only at the end of the journey, but in and through the journey itself.
If faith is something you do, this “doing” takes the form, primarily, of a journey or a pilgrimage; a spiritual quest which not only spawns the religious “habits” that give shape to a religious life, but is also the purpose of such a life. It is the life. “[T]he good life for man,” as the British/American philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre (b. 1929) observes, paraphrasing Aristotle, “is the life spent in seeking for the good life for man.”
But if the religious life is a search for something, it would be a contradiction to think that the thing sought must first be found for such a life to begin. This is where so many conventional ideas about “religion” prove to be utterly mistaken. They assume that to lead a religious life, a life of religious practice, one must first have found something called “faith.” But this is backward. As Wilfred Cantwell Smith remarks, “it is seriously misleading to suppose that the way to get religious faith is to find out what it is and then go in pursuit of it. Rather, faith is the name we give to the fact that one is in pursuit of something (or Someone) else.”
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