Telling the Truth?

I think very young children children know much more of Truth in a much more immediate way than adults can fathom. They can't tell us about it, of course, but not because their vocabulary or linguistic development are lacking. It's because there are no words with which to tell such a thing. Even those rare souls who have glimpsed Truth as grown men and women are ultimately at a loss to convey what they've seen, though many have tried and I'm grateful for their efforts. The Truth as seen by children and mystics cannot be described fully; it can only be experienced fully. So say those who have had the experience, anyway. I wouldn't know. What a child knows intuitively, the youth slowly forgets, and the adult must work tirelessly for the rest of his life to have even a faint hope of recovering it.

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The Heart of Religion

Yesterday I read a short reflection in Plough magazine about a woman who, according to the author, "was a neighbor...to every person who crossed her path." This woman's example impressed on me the idea that the sources of one's devotion--religious doctrine, methods of prayer and meditation, forms of worship, theological convictions--are peripheral to the work of love to which all human beings are called. One implication of this idea is that if my particular form of devotion is not making me a better neighbor (or parent or partner or friend or community member), then it is not worth pursuing. I am reminded of Jesus's Parable of the Good Samaritan , narrated in the Gospel of Luke. Part of the point of that parable is that the good Samaritan was a Samaritan , and not a Jew. The source of his devotion, his religious milieu, differed greatly from that of Jesus and his listeners. Yet Jesus insisted that this religious outsider grasped the heart of religion more clearly...

Cultural vs. Divine Love

I heard a short sermon once in which the preacher said something to the effect that eternal life was equivalent to knowing God. It brought to mind what John says in his first epistle to the early Christian church: the proof that we know God is that we love, and love of God is best demonstrated in love for others (I John 4:7-12; 19-21). My takeaway from all this was: eternal life = knowing God = loving God = loving others. I wrote the preacher after the service to share my thoughts. He agreed with my equation and added an important caveat. Since we are all of us creatures of our culture, he said, we tend to understand love the way our culture presents it, which doesn’t necessarily jibe with the reality of the divine love that Jesus--or, I would add, the Buddha, or Sri Ramakrishna, or Swami Ramdas, or Peace Pilgrim--embodied. Because of these competing and often contradictory concepts of love, it is essential that we maintain a healthy self-criticism and not blithely assume that what w...

Like Following the Wind

Jesus is as inscrutable as any enlightened sage. Indeed, he is as inscrutable as God himself. As he says in John’s gospel, “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit” (3:8). The Buddha says something remarkably similar in the Dhammapada: “Like the flight of birds in the sky, the path of the selfless is hard to follow” (7:92). And the Hebrew prophet Isaiah says plainly, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts" (55:8-9). Any attempt to explain the whole of Jesus, as unavoidable as such explanations may seem to the religiously minded (among whom I count myself), is doomed from the start. You might as well try to explain a squirrel, or a beech tree, or a raindrop. And yet the difference between Jesu...

The Mundane Way

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