DeConick A.D

21
THE MATRIX OF ANCIENT SPIRITUALITY
sacred, then what is religion? Religion is the communal or collective expression
of this metaphysical orientation through symbol, language, and
behavior. Religion is the organized community of worship, the fellowship
of the faithful.
Spirituality and religion are intimately linked. It is the spirituality of
a people, their orientation toward the existential, transcendent, and sacred,
that generates an organized religion in which the people can come
together in community. The religion serves as the institutional platform,
reinforcing the spirituality that originally generated the religion.
But what happens when a new way of perceiving reality forms in a
community, when the traditional spiritual orientation that has maintained
a religion goes offline? There is a software shift, so to speak, or as in Neo’s
case, a matrix rift, when he takes the red pill and experiences another
reality altogether. It is a rift that causes religious dissociation. To deal
with this matrix rift, some people attempt to realign their religion’s older
spirituality with their new perspective by reforming the religion. If this
fails, they turn away and become “unchurched,” as in the spiritual-butnot-religious
New Age mindset today (Fuller 2001).
This type of rift between an old spirituality that grounds a traditional
organized religion and a newly developed spirituality is not novel to the
contemporary American religious scene. It is something that ancient people
in the Mediterranean experienced at the beginning of the first century
CE when Gnostic spirituality came online and challenged the very foundations
of the religions of the time. It is a spirituality that revolutionized
religion so that it could focus on the quest of the individual human for
wholeness rather than on the perpetual quest, motivated by fear, to satisfy
the gods and their desires through submission and obedience. It is
a radical orientation that remains in play in modern American religion,
where its once heretical message about the power of the divine human
has become mainstream. Its therapeutic message of self-transfiguration
has become America’s favored form of spirituality, successfully confronting
older models of spirituality that have been in play since antiquity.
What types of spirituality were common in antiquity before the emergence
of this Gnostic orientation? What worldviews were the Gnostics
overturning? There were three main types of spirituality that dominated
the religious scene before the emergence of the Gnostic orientation: servant,
covenant, and ecstatic spirituality. These types of spirituality generated
the religions around the Mediterranean and, like the turning of