From JMSmith in a comment:
Faith formation should obviously be of the second sort. It should not be just a haircut. As one of our hymns puts it, we acquire a “new heart.” And heart here means soul. The new heart we acquire is not just one replacement part in our system, but a new control that transforms every part in the system. If we liken ourself to that block of wood, we are not being carved. We are being burned.
Some people, especially in popular media and academia, like to refer obliquely to religion by discussing “Transcendence”. Transcendence is this idea of “moving beyond” or “rising above”. The phrase I commonly see is “Belief in the transcendent” to refer ambiguously to all religions. What they mean by this is “Belief in things beyond ourselves”. Occasionally there is condescension or even derision in this phrase, as if belief in things we cannot see is foolish and naive.
Lowercase r-religion is a healthy part of human existence. I refer to what I like to call “Scoots Hierarchy of Faith”: I would much rather you have any faith than no faith; I would much rather your faith be Christian than non Christian; I would much rather your kind of Christianity be Catholic than non-Catholic. In evidence, in one job of mine, we were divided into “teams” and I shared an office with my teammate, and two offices of teams made a department, under one manager. My teammate was a devoutly muslim woman. Our manager was irreligious. One office interloper was more of the humanist sort though not as aggressively atheist as many atheists are today. Because of this “belief in the transcendent” I was able to relate more to my muslim teammate, and share common values insofar as we believed in some kind of value system which is external to our own cognition. Our irreligious manager was a petty and cruel person. Our office interloper cannot be said to have any moral misgivings at all other than a quixotic and very internal sense of “what is right”, whatever that means.
Transcendence primes the brain to acknowledge spiritual reality. If you are closed to this reality, the world will seem scary and oppressive. Despair can take some, nihilism others, and the rest vacillate between the two depending on the day. Transcendence allows us to see the bigger picture. That our lives have meaning. That suffering has meaning. That no prayer is wasted. That virtue builds up treasure in heaven. That God has told us what we need to do and that not doing it has consequences. That the universe was created, at some level, ex nihilo.
Religion, properly conceived, contains within it the notion that this world is not all that there is. Transcendence, then, is less about believing in something outside of ourselves, than it is about getting outside of ourselves and seeing our reality from the perspective of God. Faith Formation means changing ourselves to conform to God, means transforming ourselves into something perfect.
A block of wood can be changed by carving an image into it, but it can be transformed into something transcendent by being burned. What remains of the block of wood is nothing: it has transcended it’s physical form to transform into heat and light. We can change ourselves by doing or saying different things. But we are transformed by worshiping God. When the bright flame of this earthly life flickers out, what will be left behind is nothing. What will come from it is our Soul in it’s final form. Your inheritance on Earth will be nothing. You will have gained through God, everything.
AMDG
Times-Dispatch of Vichy Earth 