The End of Religion is God

 “The end of religion is God.” I don’t mean the denial of God, but the dissolution of every scaffold that pretends to contain the One. If Hashem is One and His Name One, if reality in its marrow is seamless, then the forms that tutor us—creeds, rites, hierarchies—are not the destination. They are gates, useful precisely because they are not the garden. They keep the unready from trifling with fire; they steady the ones who must take careful steps; they check the presumption of a mind that mistakes curiosity for wisdom. But the gate that never opens has failed its only task. The point is not more gate; the point is the open field.

The ancient East intuited this with a clarity the West rarely permitted itself. Tao is not a throne; it is the way of things, the current that moves without needing to be obeyed. Dharma is not an imperial decree; it is the pattern by which reality becomes intelligible when ego loosens its grip. Brahman needs no worship because what would the ocean do with a pail of water? To ask the Whole to hunger is to project the small self onto the sky. In this register, practice is medicine, not tribute. The posture is alignment, not appeasement. What we call “worship” disciplines attention and pares down the self until perception is simple again. The sparrow never needed a synagogue to be honest; it is already the psalm it sings.

The West, under the spell of empire, hardened its metaphors. “God as King” began as pedagogy, a human image for reverence and judgment in a world of courts and covenants. But then a man was enthroned as God, and the metaphor clothed itself in flesh. The deification of Jesus—whatever one’s affection for the teacher from Galilee—ratified monarchy as metaphysics. Heaven became a court of law, salvation a transaction, conscience an external sovereign who must be satisfied. A human life that could have been imitated became an image to adore. The more the image grew, the smaller the human task became. A guilt economy replaced a path of transformation; an imperial church mirrored a celestial empire. The West learned to look up at a singular face instead of through all things to the faceless One.

I am not arguing for a different religion so much as a different stance toward the Real. The stance begins with this: God has no need; we do. If worship exists, it is a discipline for the creature, not a meal for the Creator. The Infinite does not require praise; the finite requires the cure that praise provides. The rites, the candles, the fasts, the words—all necessary, all merciful—trim the appetites and clear the glass so light can pass. But there comes a time when the glass is clean enough that the light is simply seen. Then devotion ceases to be an appointment and becomes an atmosphere. You breathe without reminding yourself to inhale; you remember God by forgetting yourself.

Religion at its noblest knows this and blushes. It whispers the truth it cannot loudly confess: I am only the raft. Cross the river and set me down. Our tragedy is not that religion exists; our tragedy is when the raft becomes a relic and the river is never crossed. The East’s nerve is to say openly what other traditions reserve for their mystics—that the essence is unity, the forms are expedients, and the true obedience is to what-is. The moral life is not servility to a monarch but cooperation with reality’s grain. “As above, so below” is not a diagram of celestial bureaucracy; it is an invitation to recognize that the above is not above at all, but within, and that the lines we draw between sacred and ordinary, temple and market, prayer and breath are artifacts of an anxious ego trying to earn a belonging it already has.

If unity is the essence, order is only the choreography by which the essence becomes visible to limited minds. That choreography matters—chaos is not freedom—but order is a servant, not a sovereign. The trouble begins when a teaching image is mistaken for ontology. “King” becomes God rather than a garment that helps a certain kind of mind learn awe. “Judge” becomes God rather than a way to talk about accountability to reality. “Name” becomes God rather than the medium by which the Ineffable allows itself to be known. When the garment forgets the body within it, idolatry has occurred—even if the idol is made of doctrines rather than wood.

This is why the end of religion is not irreligion but clarity. When devotion matures, the finger that points to the moon is no longer confused with the moon. The schedule of prayer has done its work when the day itself prays. The calendar has succeeded when time reveals itself as already holy. The law has fulfilled itself when justice is loved because it is the taste of how things are, not because it is commanded by an other whom we fear. One can keep the forms from love or let them fall away from necessity; in either case, their meaning has been interiorized. It is not antinomianism; it is ripeness.

There is a danger here, and the danger is counterfeit transcendence. To leap over practice because one admires enlightenment is only vanity in a subtler key. The ego loves to declare itself beyond ladders it never climbed. This is why traditions—again, at their best—hold both truths: outward forms that train the many, inward freedom that blossoms in the few; scaffolding for the building while it is going up, and open windows when the building finally stands. The test is fruit: if what you call “beyond religion” makes you kinder, freer, quieter in your judgments and more exacting in your responsibilities, then perhaps you have crossed. If it makes you proud, evasive, and allergic to accountability, you have only traded one costume for another.

What, then, of the seeker? Here the last illusion falls. The surprise awaiting the earnest pilgrim is that the One was never absent, and so the search was always a kind of play. We are not protagonists chasing a reluctant God; we are apertures through which the One beholds itself. The Tao does not need to be found; we loosen and it flows. Brahman does not need to be convinced; we quiet and it shines. If the Holy pursues, it pursues by being the breath with which you pronounce the word “Holy.” The chase ends when you realize the distance was imagined. The gate opens when you see that the gatekeeper and the guest and the host are one life.

From here the criticisms of the West are not an exercise in bitterness but an attempt to unfreeze a metaphor. Let Jesus be a teacher again and he can be imitated; let conscience return to the heart and responsibility will grow up; let kingship return to the status of parable and power will lose its halo. We do not need a smaller God; we need a God vast enough to be everything without demanding anything. A God whose sovereignty is not a throne above us but the intimacy of the Real within us. A God who is not flattered by our ceremonies but revealed by our honesty.

If we must name a practice, let it be attention. Not the strained attention of suspicion, but the soft, exact attention that sees the world as it is: neighbors as ends, work as offering, rest as trust. Let joy be evidence, not argument. Let mercy be how truth tastes when it is spoken without vanity. Let justice be how love behaves when it learns to count. And let prayer be what it always wanted to be: not speech to an elsewhere, but wakefulness to a presence that had already arrived.

In this light, “the end of religion is God” is not a slogan against communities or texts or teachers. It is a mercy for them. It frees them from pretending to be what only the Real can be. It restores their role as guides and companions—beautiful, necessary, provisional. It allows us to bless the ladder as we climb and to bless it again when we no longer need to hold it. We will still sing, of course; human beings sing. We will still mark time; human beings make meaning. But the song will not be a bargain, and the calendar will not be a leash. The gate will stand, dignified in its humility, and the field beyond it will be our common life.

And there, at last, unity is no longer a concept. It is the unforced rhythm of ordinary days. The holy and the plain trade places until the distinction grows embarrassed and slips away. We discover that what we sought is the One who had been seeking through us from the beginning, God experiencing God by way of these brief and tender lives. Religion bows, work begins, and the world—unresisting at last—becomes transparent.