Religion is a house with a door that has a sign on it that says “Come in.” Beyond that door is a different world — of rules wrapped in doctrine that shouts “freedom” from shuttered mouths. A world that offers answers on one condition — that you pay the ultimate price of abnegation in return for peace and happiness. Oftentimes it will threaten you subtly with condemnation … but it never says this at the door.
At the door, Religion will offer you a new robe and tell you to shed your old self. It will offer you faith in return for your brain, launder it and return it to you wholly effaced. When you attempt to question, it will offer you a vacuous rejoinder that reminds you that to question is to doubt, and that doubt is the cardinal sin. As you walk through its corridors, you will see others like you, samefully robed, welcomed into the fold with pomp and the promise of finality to life’s woes and worries. Only if you could look deep into the eyes of the cheering crowd and see … but in your new robes, with your blank mind you’d never be able to see. As you thread the labyrinth, you will come across many others, searching for meaning like you, and you will soon discover that you are the crowd. You will also discover that the house of religion, though small from the outside, is a yawning insatiable chasm. The ones that came before you will offer you chains of a different kind — the same ones they are bound with; the one you will also bind yourself with. They will teach you a new language with new words and new meanings.
In the crowd, you will slowly disappear and in your place, a pseudo-being will emerge — one who ceases to see; huddled with the masses in a cave of Stygian darkness, pierced ever so often with light from outside that struggles to break through its fault lines. Those whose bias laid the cornerstone for the house you choose, will offer you a blindfold and offer their hands to you for the leading. They will tell you to follow them because they see the light. You will struggle to ask them why you can’t see the light too because you will remember their words, seared upon your heart, that Doubt is the cardinal sin.
Day on day your covered eyes will adjust to its own darkness. You will believe the unchallenged truths bellowed into your consciousness, and the world in the depths of this house will become your universe. The multitude around you will become your circle and in the passing moments, you will forget that before you walked in through those doors, there was light, there was air and you walked free. If you continue to cast your thoughts back to the outside, the crowd will question you.
“Why do you want to go back to the darkness?”
But only you will know what you feel. If you find the courage to stand up from the crowd, their eyes will wrap you in a garment of thorns. The holders of the keys to the doors of the house you chose will cajole you with words spoken in the depth of cloistered enclosures. If it fails, they may show you the hell that awaits you on the outside. They may hate you, and your yearning to break away might come at great cost. For some, it was death in a chalice offered as a passage to eternal life. If you make it out alive, your unaccustomed eyes will be temporarily blinded by the marvelous light of life and your sallow skin may burn from the light. But what you will soon discover is that the warmth of that light is not the heat of hell that was promised, nor its streets the broad and wide road. You will see that the creator of endless boundaries knew better to hide the truth you seek in plain sight — not in a house built by human hands. You will find the truth you seek in the world you walked before finding that door that said “Come in.” And you will come to own that truth because it found you. You will reflect on the many things you heard and said in the darkness of the house of Religion, and you will understand it better as things said and done because human minds chose to interpret divine truth and built a house around it to protect it.
“But can Truth be bound?”
In the light of your new life, you will see other houses like the one you survived. You will see others at the doors in line waiting to go in, searching for the same things you once searched for — the same things brought out in the open for all to see, the same things sewn into our very beginnings, always alive on the inside of us. And it will hit you that the creator of this boundless universe had set the path of many through these same doors just like you. You will become humble in your realization that before every man is a path that leads differently, but within all of us is the beacon of truth that leads to the meaning we seek if we surrender to its leading.
For those who desire to walk free