I was recently watching the Holy Father’s trip to Indonesia. He commented, “all religions are a path to God.” Many were upset by this comment because of the plurality and inclusive nature of the remark. If we only see our religion and its structure, rules and regulations, and not the inclusive understanding, I can understand the obstacle it presents. However, I think many are missing the larger picture. God is love, and confining love to just one path is problematic. God’s love is expansive, merciful and beyond our small world of time.

Religion is a path we travel that helps us live this life. Religion helps us to live in community, have peace in our lives, and guide us away from the evil that can destroy our human selves and families. It is not about just rules for the sake of regulations. The object of religion is to help us develop our soul’s being. Our spiritual life is as essential as our mental health and physical well-being. Our spiritual dimension is the motherboard of our lives.

Recently, I had two patients in hospice. Both were very accomplished people. They had written books, been outstanding in their receptive fields and achieved great honors in their education. I, as the chaplain, had to deal with them. It was not only difficult but, to be honest, depressing. Two great persons, but in one case, religion was a place where this individual could advance. He took his religion as a career path to success. He was a dutiful member of his religious group, but as he aged, the rules and regulations became all he knew about his religion. He had missed the teachings and love that was to give him hope. He found he was now blind and dying. He had never given his heart to what he had lived on the outside of his life. miserable, in pain, and angry, he hated religion and God as a hollow and pernicious set of words and teachings that had never penetrated his soul.

The other person I had to deal with was a person of science; he had never been drawn to religion. His life was all about the facts; the physical world was all that was real. He was diagnosed with inoperable cancer. He was depressed and almost combative when I met him. Despairing and beside himself, saying, “This is all there is.” He lamented that all his education, study and honors were going to the grave with him. He repeated that over and over. He would not look at me directly and writhed on the bed, hopeless. My prayers and compassion could not reach his anxiety and terror.

Both of these individuals had not found their spiritual lives necessary. For one, was using religion to achieve his goals. The second person thought that religion was a waste of time since the world was made of facts, not “pie in the sky,” as he told me several times. Your soul is part of you. The God part of us some have called consciousness. Humans are part of the animal kingdom, but our soul makes us conscious of living in reality. We can communicate ideas, and we can hold memories. We are not under the rules of nature as animals, like instinct; we are a higher state. What makes us so is our ability to love, serve the community, and sacrifice for the betterment of others. Love, sacrifice and caring for others are serious parts of who and what we are.

Returning to Pope Francis’ comment, “all religions are a path to God.” The pope said that human beings seek the spiritual in their lives. Religion, by definition, is how human beings deal with the powers that be. Historically, the primitive peoples sensed this dimension in their lives. They began to find powers outside themselves, but the powers they felt were often natural phenomena: thunder, the sun and the power of animals they admired. The stars held a fascination for some people. The native American early societies organized their ancient cities in line with the sun’s path. The ancient Greeks made their gods look like themselves. The Buddha elevated from natural Gods to the dynamics of thought. The Jewish Father Abraham made a covenant with God, and God demanded to be the only and abstract God; he spoke in scripture, but he had no image. Jesus comes as a human person to show us what sacrificial love is.

All religions are the quest for who and what we are in this earthly reality and to help us explain why we are only here for a limited time. The reason is to learn to love, and God is love. All religions are the quest of the human spirit to answer these difficult but profound questions of human existence: Who am I, why am I alive and why must I die? God is love, and those who seek love, seek God.

“But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair;  persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed” (2 Corinthians 4:7-9).

Amen.

Kathleen Carlton Johnson, Ph.D., is a hospice chaplain.