I took the parent comment's "contrast" as a bit of joke, but even if it wasn't intended that way, I think it expresses something very real about the way some of

I took the parent comment's "contrast" as a bit of joke, but even if it wasn't intended that way, I think it expresses something very real about the way some of us experience "spirituality" - i.e. that the rituals and "orderliness" of say, the Catholic church, seem to get in the way of spirituality more than they help it. Contrasting this with sacred music can help illuminate what I mean - music seems, in some way, to bypass much of the "logical" aspects of the ritual and hit us somewhere a little bit deeper. I'm not quite sure where I stand on this, as a lapsed Catholic and also as a lapsed "New Atheist" who's found himself somewhere in the middle (the dreaded and wishy-washy "spiritual but not religious" category). I share a general... mistrust of heavily ritualized / dogmatized religion. But at the same time, I recently attended a Catholic funeral for my grandma, and was very affected by some of the procedures. In particular, the final funeral blessing at the end of the mass, where the priests swung the censer over the casket, was quite beautiful - the smoke slowly ascending, lit by the stained glass, and the walk out with the casket with light streaming through those windows. These rituals stick around for a reason - it doesn't have to be a supernatural reason, but it certainly felt, during that service, that the whole mass had been very well designed to hit at some deep-seated and primal feelings within the attendees. So anyway, as seems to be my pattern on these matters, I find myself somewhere in the middle - able to appreciate both the ritualistic and naturalistic approaches to spirituality. (But never quite able to come down hard for one side or the other!)