INSTITUTIONALIZED FAITH

--- What is a church, a religious congregation, a cult, a sect?

In many cases, it is a funeral procession that carries the dead faith to the tomb. Faith can only live and thrive in an environment of spontaneous freedom and unimpeded expansion. Spirit of institutionalized faith ceased to be spirit. Faith institutionalized by any official bureaucratic body is at best a corpse of faith, but not a lively and dynamic faith. The written bureaucratization of faith is the death of the spirit of that faith.

Man has the faith he can have, according to the state of his spiritual evolution; but he does not have the faith he must have, according to the articles and paragraphs of his church. No one can persuade me to have this or that faith, because faith is the expression of my inner conviction and this conviction is the result of my personal experience with God, of my direct and intimate encounter with the Infinite, the Absolute, the Eternal.

All the so-called institutions bearing the emblem of some church and claiming to be religious, which impose an obligatory faith or a standardized creed, are mummy factories, the nursery of hypocrites, practising in the minds of their followers, spiritual rape.

It is possible that, for some time, faith tolerates the bureaucratic infirmity of these institutions, but if this kind of behaviour continues for a long time and becomes chronic, faith itself will eventually, fall ill and die, because it has identified with the dogmatic, political, police, social, and financial interests of its ecclesiastical society*.

--- So, should there be no visible church?

There will never cease to exist a visible church for evolving humans, wherever there is a group of men with spiritual intent - as there will never cease to exist plant seeds where there is a powerful principle of life. However, it is not the body of a man that creates the soul, but it is the soul that creates the body.

Wherever there exist two or three spiritual men, sooner or later the affinity of spirit, the identity of ideas, the symphony of ideals will reveal among them - and there will arise among them the "communion of the saints," growing spontaneously from the inside out. The intimate nature of spirituality is to be social, communicative since the spirit is love and love is not isolating but associative.

The spiritual man will never, for long, be a solitary, antisocial, centrifugal man, opposed to the assembly or religious congregation. But he avoids the common error of wanting to derive effects from the cause rather than deriving the cause from the effects. Whenever the dead letter - in this case, the simple ecclesiastical bureaucracy - tries to create the life-giving spirit, it will eventually succumb fatally asphyxiated by this ecclesiastical bureaucracy - but if the spirit, alive and life-giving can guide the dead letter, even this one will no longer be dead, because it will participate in the divine life of the spirit.

The true church is not like a Christmas tree, without an inner life, though with many external embellishments - the true church is like a living plant which, from its intrinsic vitality, produces its effects. It is better the more humble and little plant full of life of its own than the most dazzling tree adorned with fictitious sequins, without real life.

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* This identification, this blind, uncompromising obedience, with a certain faith, where the practitioner considers itself the possessor of all religious truths, this so-called clerical selfishness - defended in the name of holiness - is what has led, from many centuries until today, to the fanaticism, clerical selfishness, wars between religions, terrorism and consequently the disrepute that all churches face - in front of the truly spiritual man - for the intransigence, dogmatism, ignorance and the reluctance of their leaders.