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85 8 “Relying Upon” or “Taking Refuge” as a Genuinely Human Activity A closer look at our religious traditions enables us to see more clearly massive assumptions uncritically held in our own cultural context. For example, individualism has become so pervasive in Europe and North America that affirming one’s reliance upon or finding refuge in transcendence is readily interpreted as some kind of weakness, of a lack of self-assertiveness, cowing in the face of uncertainty rather than what it has been seen to be by the great majority of persons who have graced our human history—a centering of oneself in one’s response to transcendence and in contributing to enduring community . We turn now to consider a religious orientation representative of one’s becoming authentically human. Religious people, in the course of our human history, have participated in community, that is, they have established cohesive social organizations based on shared commitments to one another, to one’s parents and to one’s children , as well as to the parents and children of others. Religious people live in space and time that are undergirded with meaning, a weighty fact the full ramifications of which are difficult to imagine. For a religious person, one’s own life is not like a solitary cipher tumbling in a chaotic eruption of disconnected events with no sense of inheritance from the past and no purpose for the future. Religious persons have found a point of orientation that provides insight into the meaning of life (which is more than merely a biological process), while simultaneously contributing to psychological stability by disclosing altruistic communal norms that enable one reliably to anticipate and consistently to evaluate human behavior both for the individual and society, and a sense of grounded acceptance that is not provisional, not conditional, not conventional, but unshakably established in reality. Happy is one who has this insight, discerns this psychological 86 I n t he C om p a ny of Fr ie nd s well-being, and gratefully acknowledges being accepted. Without an orientation, there is no sense of direction. And where there is no sense of direction a person has no recourse but to measure all things from the perspective of his or her own individual anchorage, where value is bestowed by an individual projecting private preferences rather than being discerned as both given and integrative, as is the experience of persons living in community. Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) drew attention to the significance of an immediate awareness of a feeling of absolute dependence in religious living and indicated that this kind of awareness and living represents humanity at its fullest . For Schleiermacher, “in the feeling of absolute dependence, God is actually experienced in the only way open to us, and to be conscious of being absolutely dependent is to be conscious of being in relation to God.”1 Schleiermacher’s notion of absolute dependence as being at the core of the religious life has come under criticism over the decades, but his contribution is still major. To the degree that I say that I am absolutely, ultimately dependent upon another who is alluringly above my capacity to manipulate conceptually, who is consistently behind my ability to think logically, who is supportively beneath my sequence of judgments about what is proper for my life, who is teleologically beyond the life span that is before me, who pervasively and compassionately informs human relationships at their noblest, to that degree am I grounded, established, settled, with insight, with psychological stability and with a realization of acceptance that brings liberation from indolence, freedom from loneliness, and profound gratitude. This orientation to transcendence that is discerned as absolute dependence provides a protection from distress, a shelter from the onslaughts of difficulties, provides confidence based on experience, which can be depended upon, relied upon when all else seems awry. There is more to it than this, which might suggest merely an orientation that provides protection. This fundamental orientation in one’s life also enables one to place the world into perspective, to have a point on which to stand that is more fundamental than the world itself, a point that gives one a foundation on the basis of which to put limits on the world, to define the world, a point from which to view the world, to find that the world has become salvificly intelligible. We could turn to several strands in the religious history of humankind to begin a consideration of what one...

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