The Gods We Give Our Lives To

On December 15, 1945, a military directive began dismantling Japan’s official relationship with the sacred. Government sponsorship of State Shinto was to end. Public schools could no longer teach its doctrines or organize its rites. No resident was to be penalized for refusing to participate. Among the directive’s stated purposes was a remarkably plain ambition: “to prevent misuse of religion for political ends.” The machinery of devotion had become visible enough to take apart. There were budgets to withdraw, textbooks to revise, symbols to remove from public buildings. An order could separate the state from the shrines. It could not settle the more intimate question of where people would give their lives once the old authority had fallen.

That question reaches well beyond Japan. We can lose faith in a religion without losing our appetite for belonging. We can stop revering a ruler and remain vulnerable to the promise of being needed, protected, or recognized by something larger than ourselves. Devotion survives the collapse of its recipient. Sometimes it simply finds another.

Japan’s history makes this movement unusually visible. In 1868, the Meiji government began forcibly separating Shinto and Buddhism after centuries in which their practices, priesthoods, and sacred places had become intertwined. Modern State Shinto subsequently carried emperor-centered allegiance through schools and national ceremonies. By describing its observances as national custom rather than religion, the state could demand participation across differences of belief. An outward act of reverence could now carry the requirements of political obedience. The state helped determine what devotion meant and where it should arrive. Sacred allegiance became available to human administration.

It would be comforting to confine that danger to a defeated political order. Yet an employer can acquire a similar authority without invoking a single god. Wherever the company becomes the final measure of a person’s worth, its demands begin to exceed the work for which that person was hired. Disappointing a superior can feel like a judgment upon one’s existence. Leaving can feel like the loss of a self.

We reveal our deepest loyalties in the things we cannot bear to disappoint.

Much of Japan’s spiritual life also resists the categories through which outsiders try to understand it. In a Pew survey conducted in 2023, 42 percent of Japanese adults identified with no religion, while 70 percent had offered food, water, or drinks to their ancestors during the previous year. A declaration of nonreligion can coexist with practices of reverence. The absence of an institutional label tells us surprisingly little about what a life holds sacred. The Godward Way begins with a further question. Even when we recognize devotion, have we understood its destination?

An orientation can enter the smallest movements of a day. It can shape the care given to a task, the way a guest is received, the attention paid to a place. Japanese traditions offer an important insight here: a way can be lived before it is explained. Belief need not remain a statement stored in the mind. It can become a manner of attending to the world.

But a life can be thoroughly directed toward something finite. Intensity does not make the destination divine. Someone may relinquish private ambition to serve a company or a nation and still remain within the demands of a collective ego. Being absorbed into something larger than oneself does not establish a relationship with the Source of life.

For the Godward Way, Kavanah names the intentional turning of the soul toward God the Father. Its destination cannot be supplied by an institution, a social consensus, or a feeling of belonging. These may accompany a life directed toward Him. They cannot receive the allegiance that belongs to Him.

Idolatry begins when a created reality is allowed to occupy that place. Often the reality is something we have good reason to love. Family, meaningful work, a religious community, even the desire for peace can become ultimate. The change may be almost imperceptible. We begin by receiving something valuable. Eventually, we require God to preserve it as the condition of our continuing faith.

The gift has become a rival to the Giver.

Religion is especially vulnerable because it speaks in God’s name. Its language can teach the soul to turn beyond its immediate desires. The same language can train a person to confuse institutional approval with divine approval. A community may become so invested in its own survival that every question sounds like disloyalty, every departure like betrayal. God remains in the vocabulary while the institution becomes the destination.

This is the danger within the demand for harmony, too. Wa, the Japanese ideal of harmony, can sustain consideration for others. Kuuki wo yomu, reading the air, can express an attentive understanding of a social situation. Trouble begins when the atmosphere in the room acquires an authority no one is permitted to examine. A person learns to sense what everyone expects while becoming less able to ask whether those expectations deserve obedience.

Confucius himself questioned ritual performed without humaneness. His criticism matters because it comes from within a tradition too easily reduced to hierarchy. Correct conduct can lose its purpose. The form can remain impressive long after the relation it was meant to cultivate has withered. There is a cost to making any institution the final recipient of a life. Japan’s recognition of deaths and illnesses associated with overwork gives that cost an especially painful visibility. Yet the suffering of workers cannot be used to diagnose their souls. A person may endure unbearable conditions because a family depends on the income. The spiritual criticism belongs with the institution’s claim to total authority; it must not become another burden placed upon the person caught inside it. Nor does escaping such a system settle the question of direction. Ikigai, the Japanese sense of what makes life worth living, can be found in friendship, children, work, hobbies, and community. It offers room for meaning beyond an employer’s demands. But a purpose chosen freely can become as consuming as one imposed from outside. Discovering what matters to me leaves open the question of whether I have made it ultimate. Kavanah gives ordinary purposes a place within a relationship they do not have to sustain by themselves. A person can love a child, cultivate a garden, or build a business without asking that activity to answer for the whole of existence. The work can matter. Its outcome can matter. Neither must determine whether the soul remains turned toward the Father.

Religious traditions have long struggled to preserve this distinction. Judaism’s Pirkei Avot extends devotion into ordinary conduct by urging that one’s deeds be undertaken for the sake of Heaven. In John’s Gospel, Jesus, a Jewish teacher speaking with a Samaritan woman, moves a dispute about sacred geography toward worship of the Father “in spirit and truth.” The Qur’an refuses to reduce righteousness to facing east or west, while elsewhere dedicating prayer, sacrifice, life, and death to Allah. Each teaching asks something of the life that outward observance alone cannot supply. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna asks Arjuna to offer his actions, eating, giving, and austerities to him. Sikh scripture places seva, selfless service, within life in the world and in relation to the Lord. Work and devotion need not occupy separate hours. An ordinary action can carry an offering. Other traditions challenge the possessiveness that grows around a teaching. The Buddha compares the Dhamma to a raft: it must be used to make the crossing, then relinquished when its work is accomplished. The Dao De Jing distinguishes the enduring Dao from the way that can be stated and named. These traditions differ in their understanding of ultimate reality. Their warnings nevertheless reach anyone tempted to mistake possession of religious language for fulfillment of its purpose. The Godward Way is subject to the same danger. Its name can become an identity to protect. Its vocabulary can offer the pleasure of feeling spiritually discerning. Even this argument against idolatry can become a way of admiring ourselves for recognizing everyone else’s idols.

The Father cannot be secured inside an explanation. A picture of God is something the mind experiences; God does not become that picture. In the language of the Godward Way, the Father is the Will to Love, and the soul is the Will to Receive Love. Kavanah preserves that relationship without asking the Father to become an object we can perceive or possess. The soul remains distinct from its Source, free to receive and to offer.

Such a direction must be lived where our competing allegiances become most persuasive. The desire for approval arrives in a meeting. Fear rises at the possibility of disappointing someone. An achievement begins to feel indispensable. Through Catch and Offer, we recognize what is happening while remaining turned toward the Father. The feeling does not have to disappear. We can offer the fear along with the desire it is protecting.

“Father, I bring this toward You.”

The words can be brief because the work is in the intention. We still have to answer the question, complete the task, or decide whether to remain silent. Offering an impulse gives no automatic permission to enact it. Neither does the demand for obedience confer divine authority upon whoever makes it. Responsibility remains, along with the willingness to release our claim upon the outcome.

Sometimes that will disturb the harmony of a room. Sometimes the outward day will barely change. Godward direction cannot be measured by how peaceful we feel or how successfully we fit in. The Father remains the destination through uncertainty and rupture as well as through ease.

Japan offers no simple verdict about a people’s spiritual condition. No national description can reveal the direction of every heart. Its history does, however, make visible a vulnerability shared by religious and secular lives: our capacity for devotion can be recruited by whatever promises to make us belong.

Religion serves its Godward purpose when it helps us recognize that claim and turn toward the Father. It becomes an idol when it asks us to stop at the institution, the identity, or our own certainty about God.

The directive of 1945 could withdraw a state’s claim upon religious allegiance. The more intimate surrender remains ours: to receive what life gives without demanding that any gift become our God. We can honor the work and love the people entrusted to us. We can enter a place of worship and mean the prayer. The Father remains the destination.