Choosing Authenticity
Religion Is Not Enough
by Richard N. Southworth, M.A.
Religion is not enough. The religious imperatives of belief, ritual, experience, community, service, and values are not enough. Culture is not enough. The cultural imperatives of acceptance, success, power, wealth, and pleasure are not enough. Both religion and culture are important, even crucial to living a full life, but they are not enough.
Choosing authenticity is the only thing that is enough. Choosing to live our lives in a way that integrates the cultural and religious imperatives and moves us toward wholeness and holiness is the only thing that is enough. We long for a No BS Spirituality that changes the way we actually experience and live our lives. We need spiritual practice that facilitates that growth and transformation, and conversion of heart. Our deepest desire is for our active lives to actually become more and more an authentic expression of who we are and who we are called to be by that Mysterious Other we call God. We long for spiritual practice that actually moves us forward on our own unique Journey Toward Spiritual Maturity.
It is my prayer that these reflections will respond to that longing. Read, reflect, and enjoy!
Click here to view the front matter from the book including the table of contents.
Richard Southworth
Richard N. Southworth, M.A.
Author
Richard Southworth lives in Mechanicsville, Virginia with his wife Winnie and his son Mark. His oldest daughter, Teresa Parr, lives a few blocks away with her husband Julian and their three children, Nathan, Daniel, and Rachel. His youngest daughter, Michelle Evans, also lives nearby.
Richard received a Bachelor's degree in General Studies with concentrations in Religious Studies, Psychology, and the Administration of Justice and Public Safety from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. He also has a Master of Art's degree in Formative Spirituality from the Institute of Formative Spirituality at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He has considerable teaching experience including college courses, church seminars, retreats, Marriage Encounter weekends, and presentations at training academies and professional conferences.
His experience includes being a Trooper, Sergeant, and Special Agent with the Virginia State Police, Administrator of a non-denominational retreat center, Investigator with the Virginia Office of the Public Defender, Criminal Investigator with the Virginia Office of the Attorney General, and Investigator and Special Investigations Manager for a national health insurance company. This broad based education and experience finds its way into his writing and teaching. It leads him to focus on those foundational spiritual truths that cut across both religious and secular traditions. It provides a crucial balance between spirituality and the real world of people, events, and things. He is currently retired and writing and teaching about the spiritual life.
Fr. J. Patrick Foley, Ph.D.
Parish Mission and Retreat Leader
Sacramento, California
The search for meaning, purpose, and direction in life has been the object of thinkers great and small, well known and obscure, throughout the history of human thought. Why? Because there seems to be an intrinsic awareness that there is more to our lives than simple existence, more than the tasks that fill our days or the goals that guide our ambitions.
However this sense of the "more than", what some writers call "transcendence", may become confused with the search for power, prestige, position, possessions, and pride that dominates so much of contemporary western culture. Perhaps it is only when the emptiness of those pursuits becomes apparent that the hunger for authentic transcendence can re-emerge and re-direct one's life.
For some people, it is a time of natural disaster or human catastrophe that brings them to the realization of the lack of ultimate meaning in their lives. For others, the process may be more subtle: an inner restlessness, a chronic dis-ease, an inability to satisfy transcendent hunger by any of the more typically chosen methods.
Richard Southworth is such a man: restless, searching, unsatisfied. His hunger for transcendence - which, for the believer, is ultimately a hunger for God - has driven him into, and out of, churches, various religious organizations and activities, leaving him frustrated but still searching. Having been his friend, occasional fellow-traveler, and frequent sounding board for almost thirty years, I have often thought that this search possesses him more than he possesses it - and that very quality is proof enough of its authenticity. "The hound of heaven", to borrow Francis Thompson's image, pursues us all, whether we recognize it or not. Wisdom is found in that recognition, and in the desire and willingness to remove whatever obstacles stand in the way of such a pursuit.
This book represents what wisdom Richard has found - so far - in his determination to persevere in his search. The journey is uniquely his, but at the same time contains many foundational elements that other searchers will recognize as being necessary and grace-filled for themselves.
If you are such a person - restless, searching, unsatisfied - you have found a worthy companion. Wherever you are now in your search, this book will not leave you there. Prepare to be challenged.
Patrick Foley
R. Drexel Rayford, Ph.D.
Senior Pastor, Walnut Grove Baptist Church
Mechanicsville, Virginia
I was asked once by a church member to run a 10k race with him. He knew I was a cyclist, so when I told him I hadn't trained to run a 10k race, he pointed out that while my leg muscles might be strained, I at least had the aerobics for the challenge. I demurred and he challenged and we went through this cycle about three times until my macho ego finally won out and I agreed to run. Besides, my friend was about 10 years older than I which gave me a smug expectation that I would at least beat his time.
I finished the race - barely. It was pure torture, and my friend, despite my advantage of relative youth, finished well ahead of me. He awaited my stumbling arrival at the finish line clapping his hands and laughing that "the old guy" had finally made it. My bicycle riding muscles had simply not been sufficient to the demands of running. Those muscles were still rather weak and unaccustomed to the stress suddenly imposed on them. They quickly gave up what strength they had. This shouldn't surprise anyone, really. Quite obviously, I had not trained for the event.
As I go about my pastoral ministry, I often see the spiritual equivalent of my attempt to run a 10k race without training. Not long ago, I visited a woman facing her last days. She has struggled with a cruel disease since she was a little girl and now that she has grown older, complications from that disease will end her life. A profound feeling of injustice permeates her reflections and as we discussed how to come to terms with her situation she said, "My Sunday School faith is unequal to this spiritual challenge". She finds herself required to "run a race" for which she professes she has had little training.
In this book that Richard Southworth has crafted for us, you will find the kind of training which will help you develop deeper spiritual strength and take you beyond your Sunday School faith. In fact, it's my firm belief that when the Apostle Paul wrote to the Corinthian Christians and said that becoming an adult required him to put childish ways behind, and when he urged the Roman Christians to "be transformed by the renewing of their minds," he was talking about the ancient methodology Richard makes available to the reader of these pages.
If you are someone who wants more than hearsay religion, or who has questions which "churchianity" has never even addressed, or feels a thirst that no doctrine or confessions could quench, undertake the process described here. I think a discovery of your True Self awaits. And, in the words of Thomas Merton, "when you find your True Self, you find God."
Drexel Rayford
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Reflection III:
The Quest for Authenticity
Rediscovering Our Sacred Inner Being
The Right of Legitimate Self-Expression
The Source of Our Anger, Rage, Violence, Obsessions, and Addictions
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Look for your own. Do not do what someone else could do as well as you. Do not say or write what someone else could say or write as well as you. Care for nothing in yourself but what you feel exists nowhere else and out of yourself create impatiently, or patiently the most irreplaceable of beings. |
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Unknown Author |
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My business is not to remake myself, but make the absolute best of what God has made. |
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Robert Browning |
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As far back as I can remember there has been this powerful sense of being called to something profoundly different. At times that sense of restlessness is so pervasive it seems as if I have built much of my life on a lie, on a series of false assumptions about who I am as a person and what I need to be and do in this life. I have found myself seeking to discover who I am in the deepest part of myself. Yet, maybe even more significant has been a deep sense of calling to become that person in the reality of my active life. In a very real sense, this search does not seem to be just a religious calling. It seems to be a basic human calling. It is the quest for authenticity—the deep desire to live an authentic life. This quest for authenticity is the very essence of the whole religious vocation.
| ...while this denial of legitimate self expression came partially from family expectations, cultural demands, and religious dogma, most of it came from the turmoil within myself. |
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This search has taken me in a thousand different directions. It has led me to explore several different religious traditions. While each of them spoke to this calling in different ways, I have not felt at home in any of them. None of them addressed this deep longing in a satisfactory manner.
I have studied psychology, religion, and spirituality in undergraduate school, graduate school, and through self-study. Again, while my studies were both fascinating and helpful, there was still that same sense of not being at home with any of them. Again, none of my studies really spoke to my deepest longings. I spent sixteen years as a police officer, three years as the administrator of a retreat center, and thirteen years as a fraud investigator and manager for a health insurance company. In the process, I have learned much about who I am, but there has always been this powerful underlying restlessness—this sense of playing a role—this sense of not being authentic—of not being myself in any of these positions.
I have also been plagued with anger. That anger has at times seemed to pervade my life. It has spilled over onto my wife and my children in ways that I cannot begin to describe or even fully understand. For years I never understood where the anger came from, but I did sense that it was somehow connected to this pervasive restlessness and sense of not being at home, of playing a role.
Then one day I was sitting in a college class and the professor made the following statement:
When a person is denied the right of legitimate self-expression, a deep incessant rage develops in them that permeates their entire life.
I remember that statement as if it were yesterday. It all came together. The quest for authenticity and the anger - the two things that seemed to dominate my life were, in reality, two sides of the same thing. I was angry because I knew on a preconscious level that I was not being the person I was called to be. I was, in the most basic sense, "denied the right of legitimate self-expression". As I have reflected on this insight I have come to understand that while this denial of legitimate self-expression came partially from family expectations, cultural demands, and religious dogma, most of it came from the turmoil within myself.
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This insight gave my life a very different focus. While I did not know how to figure out what this meant for me, the problem was now defined. I began a quest for authenticity in earnest. I began to focus less on the people, events, and things in my life that frustrate and anger me. I was now asking the right questions. Who I am as a unique spiritual person? How can I become that person in the way I live my life? How can I be authentic in this particular event?
Questions for Reflection:
Do you sometimes feel restless? Do you sometimes long for your life to be different without quite understanding what that means?
Reflect on your deepest longings. In what ways is your life an authentic expression of your deepest longings? In what ways do those longings call you to live your life differently?
In what ways do you sense that you are "denied the right of legitimate self-expression"? Are you sometimes sad, frustrated, or angry about that?
What external and internal blocks deny you "the right of legitimate self-expression"?
What do you need to do to begin to remove those blocks?
