Why spirituality won’t carry what religion and discipleship to Jesus carry
There’s a moment in Faith, Hope and Carnage where Nick Cave describes a candle in a church. He’s been wrecked by the deaths of his sons Arthur and Jethro. The act is simple. He lights a candle, kneels, sits among strangers who’ve done this for two thousand years. He says it does something. The wax, the smoke, the cold stone, the shape of the place, the company of people whose grief came before his and will come after.
A wellness app cannot give him this. Neither can a manifestation journal, an ayahuasca retreat, a curated playlist of Tibetan singing bowls, or the bookstore section labeled spirituality. The question Cave keeps returning to in the Red Hand Files is why. Why does the church hold him when the alternatives don’t.
His answer, gathered across years of letters and interviews, is the same answer Marilynne Robinson gives in her essays, that Tara Isabella Burton gives in Strange Rites, that Jonathan Sacks gave in book after book before he died, that Charles Taylor gives in A Secular Age, that David Bentley Hart gives with his usual baroque ferocity. It’s also the answer the Church Fathers and Mothers gave, and the answer Jesus gave on a hillside outside Jerusalem when he told the rich young man to sell everything. The answer takes many forms but holds a single shape.
Religion costs you something. Spirituality, in its contemporary therapeutic form, costs you $19.99 plus shipping.
The Wellness Aisle
Walk into any large bookstore. The spirituality section is now bigger than the religion section. The books have soft covers in muted colors. They have one-word titles: Breathe. Glow. Bloom. They promise integration, alignment, awakening, your highest self. They’re written by people who’ve figured something out and would like to share it for $26.
There’s a logic to this market. People want meaning. They want practices. They want to feel that something larger holds them. They’ve, mostly, lost the inherited furniture of belief that their grandparents took for granted. So they buy what’s on offer.
What’s on offer is a customizable, low-friction, self-affirming experience of the sacred. You select the parts that resonate. You skip the parts that don’t. You retain veto power. The teacher is always you. The doctrine is whatever you’d already prefer to believe, with new vocabulary attached. There’s no congregation to disagree with you, no scripture older than your preferences, no priest to tell you the prayer you’ve been saying is wrong.
This is what Tara Isabella Burton calls bespoke religion in Strange Rites. The unbundling of religious life into atomized practices, each chosen for its therapeutic yield, with the consumer as final arbiter. Burton describes how the American religious imagination has migrated into SoulCycle, astrology apps, witchcraft TikTok, and the wellness-industrial complex. These provide some of what religion once provided: ritual, identity, community, transcendence-flavored experience. They do so on the consumer’s terms.
Charles Taylor, in A Secular Age, calls this condition the immanent frame. The horizon of meaning has closed. The transcendent still presses against the glass, and people still feel its pull. So they build little chapels inside the frame, lit by their own preferences. The shape of the longing remains. The object the longing pointed toward has been replaced by an experience of longing-as-such, marketed back to you with essential oils.
What Spirituality Hands You in a Crisis
This is where Cave’s argument lands hardest, because Cave has been in the crisis.
When Arthur died, what did he have. A community that knew the rituals. A church where people had been singing the same words over caskets for centuries. A faith he wasn’t sure about, with a vocabulary for the unbearable. A God who, on Christian terms, had himself watched a son die.
The alternative would’ve been a meditation app reminding him to breathe, an Instagram therapist on the importance of self-care, a stack of books on grief work, and a wellness retreat where someone would tell him his son’s spirit lives on in the trees.
Jonathan Sacks, the late Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, used to make this point about the Jewish practice of shiva. After a death, the community comes to you. They sit on low chairs. They speak only when you speak. They cover the mirrors. They bring food. They stay for seven days. The structure carries the grief that the bereaved alone could not carry. Sacks’s argument was that a society that has lost these structures has not freed people. It has stranded them.
Marilynne Robinson, in Gilead and across her essays, keeps returning to a similar point about Calvinist tradition. The Reformed theology she inherited has a category for human depravity, for grace, for vocation, for the dignity of ordinary work done for God. These are sturdy categories. They can hold a life. The spiritual-but-not-religious replacements tend to be thinner. They affirm without anchoring.
David Bentley Hart, with the polemical voltage he’s known for, has argued in The Experience of God and elsewhere that contemporary spirituality is theologically illiterate. People reject a god the Christian tradition also rejects: the celestial old man, the deistic clockmaker, the genie who answers prayer requests. Having rejected this caricature, they imagine they’ve rejected God. What they’ve rejected is a fourth-grade picture book. Real theology, Hart insists, is older, stranger, and more demanding. It outlasts the wellness aisle and everything that comes after.
The Jesus Way
Here is where the argument turns from critique into something constructive.
Eugene Peterson, the pastor and translator who gave us The Message, spent a late book working out a phrase: the Jesus Way. His argument was that Jesus said he is the Way. The thing you follow is a person walking somewhere, and following means walking where he walked, eating what he ate, praying as he prayed, loving as he loved.
This phrase points to the integration that the wellness aisle and the dead church both miss.
Look at what Jesus actually did. He went into the wilderness alone for forty days. He climbed mountains before dawn to pray by himself. He taught in parables that worked like Zen koans, splitting the listener open. He spoke about being one with the Father in language so intimate it scandalized the religious authorities of his day. By any honest reckoning, Jesus was a mystic.
He was also a rabbi. He attended synagogue every Sabbath. He quoted Torah and the Prophets constantly. He kept Passover. He sent his disciples to prepare meals according to the inherited rituals. He told the cleansed leper to go show himself to the priest and make the required offering. He affirmed the Law down to its smallest letters. By any honest reckoning, Jesus was a religious Jew.
The two were one practice. The mystic was the rabbi was the mystic.
This is the integration. The inner life had infrastructure. The infrastructure had inner life. He prayed alone and then went and ate with sinners. He fasted and then attended weddings. He taught the crowds and then withdrew to the hills. He kept the festivals and broke open their meaning. He honored the temple and predicted its fall and called his own body the new temple.
What he asked of his followers had the same shape. Take up your cross. Pray in your closet where no one sees. And: gather. Break bread. Wash feet. Forgive one another. Bear with one another. Confess your faults to one another. The contemplative belonged inseparably with the communal. You needed both to stay on the Way.
Acts 2 describes what the first followers did once Jesus was gone. “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.” Four things. Teaching, which is tradition and scripture. Fellowship, which is community. Breaking of bread, which is sacrament. Prayer, which is inner life with God. The earliest church had no membrane between spirituality and religion. They were the same word.
The contemplative tradition kept this integration alive when the official church forgot it. The Desert Mothers and Fathers prayed alone in caves, and they also obeyed an abba or amma, and they gathered for Eucharist, and they served pilgrims who arrived hungry. Benedict’s Rule arranges the monk’s whole day around the integration: hours of communal prayer, hours of solitary work, hours of reading scripture, hours of hospitality. Teresa of Avila wrote some of the most exalted mystical theology in human history while founding seventeen reformed convents and dealing with the politics of the Spanish Inquisition. Her ecstasies happened inside an order with rules.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who knew the dead-religion temptation from inside the German state church, wrote Life Togetherabout a small community of seminarians at Finkenwalde. The rhythm he proposed: silent meditation on scripture in the morning, communal prayer, shared meals, individual work, communal Eucharist, evening confession. He insisted that solitude and community needed each other to remain healthy. “Let him who cannot be alone beware of community. Let him who is not in community beware of being alone.” A person who avoided his own company in prayer would poison the group. A person who avoided the group would shrivel in solitude. The Jesus Way required both.
Howard Thurman, the African American mystic and theologian whose book Jesus and the Disinherited shaped Martin Luther King Jr., wrote about Jesus as both an inward practice and a political reality. The man on the inner hill talking to his Father was the same man who got himself crucified for siding with the poor. Inner transformation produced public courage. Public courage required inner ground. King prayed, meditated, sang gospel hymns at 3 AM in a Montgomery kitchen alone with God, and then he marched. The integration produced the movement.
This is what Cave keeps reaching for in his Sunday morning visits to small parish churches. The original thing, before the split. A person walking a Way that needs both a heart cracked open and feet that show up to the same building every week. A faith that has room for his doubt and a structure that holds him while he doubts. The candle and the company. The silence and the singing. The bread broken and the body broken and the long memory of a tradition that has loved both.
The wellness aisle sells one half of this. It sells the inner life with no people, no obligations, no shared meal, no buried saints whose prayers continue. The dead church sells the other half. Pews and hymns and committees and no expectation of meeting God in any of it. The Jesus Way is what happens when those two halves recover each other.
You see it in any healthy Christian community where it actually exists. People go to morning prayer at 7 AM and then to the soup kitchen at 10 AM. They read the church fathers and they argue with each other at coffee hour. They take communion every week from the same chipped chalice and they have weeping conversations in the parking lot afterward. They make the sign of the cross and they vote and they bake casseroles for the dying. The mystical and the mundane are the same act. The inner candle and the outer table are the same fire.
This is the case for religion against its spiritual replacements. The replacements give you the candle without the table, or the table without the candle. The Jesus Way gives you both, because that’s what Jesus himself was. A man with God on his lips and bread in his hands and dust on his feet, walking somewhere, asking you to come.
The Hardness Is the Point
Pull this thread together and you get something close to a thesis. Spirituality, as it currently exists in the wellness market, offers the consolations of religion while removing the conditions that made those consolations actual. It offers community without obligation to people you didn’t choose. Ritual without the inconvenience of the calendar. Transcendence without submission. Grace without judgment. Meaning without truth claims. A god without teeth.
For ordinary good weather, this might be sufficient. The trouble comes when the weather turns.
When a child dies, when the diagnosis arrives, when the marriage ends, when the failure is total and public, when the years stretch into a dark night of the soul, the customer-facing version of the sacred offers only consolations that curdle into insult. Telling a grieving father that the universe has a plan, that everything happens for a reason, that he should focus on his own healing, that his son’s soul is now part of the cosmic energy, is no consolation. It’s a small private cruelty dressed in pastel.
What Cave finds in the church, what the Desert Mothers found in their cells, what Julian found in her anchorhold, what Thérèse found in her laundry, is a tradition that has been to the bottom and reports back. It walks into the dark with you, holding a thin candle whose light is older than your grief.
The candle has been burning, by relay, for two thousand years.
It’s a small light. It pretends to be exactly what it is. The flame has held people through plagues, wars, famines, the deaths of countless children, the slow accumulated betrayals of ordinary life. It outlasts the meditation app. It outlasts the bookstore section. It outlasts the algorithm.
This is what religion holds that spirituality drops. Something firmer than a feeling. A claim. That the universe is in the hands of a love that has bled. That the demand made on you, hard as it is, is the demand of that love. That when you walk into the cold stone church and light your candle and say the old words you don’t quite believe, you’re joining something real.
Cave doesn’t say he believes all this with certainty. He says he keeps showing up. He says the showing up has done something to him that nothing else has done. He says the candle does something the app cannot do.
The argument, in the end, comes to that. To the candle, and the cold stone, and the company of the dead, and the small flame that has not gone out.
Graham Joseph Hill is the Mission Catalyst – Church Planting and Missional Renewal for Uniting Mission and Education. This post is an edited version of a post from his his Substack here.
Photo by Marcos Paulo Prado on Unsplash
