I became an agnostic but came back to a very alive and relevant relationship with Jesus not connected to any religion. I went back to the Catholic church as a missionary. But Vatican II had changed the church enough that I could celebrate the spiritual journey of Jesus and the Holy Spirit there as our own. Years later I left again, because I wanted to share my experiences of freeing love and women couldn’t preach there. The liberal Presbyterian USA gave me that freedom. Though they stress mostly feeding and housing the poor or broken, more than the transforming grace of a relationship with Jesus that helps us in following Jesus’s life pattern of expanding our understanding of whom God loves. I think every original creator of any religion “got it.” But by the third generation, religion becomes about power…. thanks in a large part to being controlled by men. Fear is the root of all evil. When religion becomes about safety or power it loses the point of being about love. To me we enter a journey from the need of a baby to the freedom to love our unfinished selves and like Jesus eventually to even love those that disagree with us, the friends that abandon us, the enemy, and ultimately even God in those times when we feel abandoned by God also. To me the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. God is ALL. We are part of God and the Spirit of God is part of us and can along the spiritual journey become a larger influence in us. We are ALL in this together, believe it or like it or not. It’s about love, not salvation or power.