In the name of religion I pillage… my very own connection

I grew up in a town in northern Greece, which by virtue of having a large proportion of Turkish Muslims residing in town, and the perceived threat of an invasion from the nearby Turkish border, every Greek household had to own a gun. It was law. Dad’s gun was in the wardrobe, hiding amongst a plethora of coats and suits, and one day my sister and I managed to find it. We were intrigued and fascinated.

But as my Dad ushered us away from the gun and all that it represented, it was the look on his face that I remember still to this day.

It was a look filled with sadness and the want to protect his children from a world gone crazy with religious factions, the staunch stance of right and wrong and the ethnic hatred synonymous with one religious group charged up over another.

Walking to school every day I would go past the Turkish neighbourhoods and the children would look at me, vacantly, defensively, with a mixture of fear and aggression in their young faces. Their eyes were wide but without the childhood innocence that should have been there at that age.

This was the legacy of institutionalised religion, and the pledge for God’s name to be written and sealed in one statute book over another.

My story is not unusual; God’s name has been defended, uttered and used as an excuse to slain millions over the centuries, and it continues to this day.

Shutting the door on God and religion would seem like the sensible thing to do. But — in doing so, we’re actually shutting the door on ourselves and all that religion, in its pure untainted meaning, is here to remind us of.

The pillaging and raping throughout the centuries in the name of religion is symbolic of another heinous crime we don’t often consider.

It is not just the lives that are lost, the families that are torn apart, and the tremendous suffering that ensues. Something else is also lost, just as devastating if not more.

It is the pillaging of our very own connection with ourselves, with our inner most being.

In slandering the name of religion, there has been an institutionalised orchestration to annihilate something very sacred within each and every one of us. And this stands at the core of the brutality we have witnessed in the past and in the present. Remove a man, woman or child from their connection and they are no longer themselves. Hurts pile up. Resentment builds. Blame is expected. There is anger, aggression — and whether on a macro scale or a micro scale, we have a world gone crazy with conflict occurring somewhere, everywhere every single day.

The tragic irony is that it is religion, un-bastardised, untainted, which offers the ticket back to the connection lost. For if we do away with all the concepts, interpretations, ideas and perceptions that we have about religion, we might just see that being religious can be the most natural and normal thing in the world to be. It is the ceremony, the ritual, the devotion to what is at the deepest core of our being in the realisation that this connection within, is in union with so much more than this plane of life on its own can reveal. It’s in this devotion to deepening our connection with ourselves that we know another is of the same pristine essence, regardless of what they portray and what they do and say.

By being deeply religious with ourselves, we open the doors to humanity at large, and there is no way that we can go into conflict or aggression. We are in deep communion, we know God is within us, not separate, not better and certainly not judgmental.

In times past, we knew this.

We knew the stars above were not separate to the magnitude we could feel inside of us. We knew the entire universe was held within the particles of our own bodies. Somewhere in our cellular memory we know this still, and perhaps if we were to sift through the assault of images, memories and interpretations of institutionalised religion that we’ve have taken on, this inner-most knowing can be ignited once again.