The Apostles Creed proclaims `I believe in God the Father Almighty maker of heaven and earth'. But of course our understanding of the scope of the universe is dramatically larger than just the earth and the sky above it. Teilhard, the Christian cosmologist, believed that matter and spirit were present from the moment of creation. That way of stating our belief in the reality of the spirit(or God) works for me. The Genesis account celebrates the mysterious dance of chaos and spirit as the land and the plants and animals are formed.
As we think of a Creator present to reality 16 billion years ago or so, we face another perplexity. Overwhelmingly, the creation is emptiness--interrupted here and there by light, glorious light and with the tiniest speck of life. Within the natural world, there is to our awareness of the even smaller presence of consciousness. Within the small realm of consciousness, we experience the great power for better and for worse of human consciousness. Wow--isn't life glorious and isn't human life very lonely in a cold, empty universe.
What I want to talk about though is the friendly guy I met in Nicaragua who was of the Bahai faith. Briefly, Bahai's honor the major religions and their fairly few temples have multiple doors and are built in the round. Symbolically, they assert that the different major traditions are all valid ways to come to the one God--the one Creator. All major religions, say they, believe in the one Creator. So the Bahais honor the different traditions, read from the various Scriptures and seem as open to others as one could be. They have been persecuted throughout their 150 years history and currently face persecution in Iran. So we are called to admire their courage and love for others.
But something doesn't quite compute. I read a pamphlet on the Bahai's offered by my friendly, gently evangelising hotel mate. It comes down to the understanding that we all believe in One Creator and Baha'ullah, the founder of the Bahais is the best interpreter of how we are to live and worship. Isn't that the rub. that is the key quesiton is who is the most authoritative interpreter of the faith for you or for me.
In interfaith dialogue we often hear this nonsense that we all believe in the same God. Even if that were remotely true, the question would be how has that God revealed himself(or is it herself or is it a trinity of selves or is it as God and Satan and so on) to us. How do we experience the revelation and who is the prime interpreter of the revelation? We all believe in the same God as Creator and Moses will tell us what that God is like, no Buddha, no Jesus,no Krishna, no Paul, no Muhammad, no Joseph Smith(the founder of Mormonism),no Baha'ullah.
We must learn to speak the truth clearly to one another before we will ever really learn anything about one another's religious experience and traditions. We need to stop making nice, pretending that we agree, when we dont even understand what one another mean by the word God. Rodney King's plaintiff call rings out--Why can't we all just get along. Sure, we want to get along. The world is desperate for us to not get along and to stop killing each other in the name of God. But we must first learn to understand ourselves and our religious experience and traditions. Then we must find clear words and maybe not so clear, but powerful images to share our understandings with others in our community and then possibly in other communities. This is a very long and tortuous road. Telling the truth and acknowledging our deep differences in experience and expression is absolutely essential if we are going to journey along the way.
Don't make nice. Be who you are. Think, pray, journal,live deeply into your own religious experience. Learn your tradition and wrestle with it, like Jacob.Certainly,reject part of your tradition, mabye reject it all. Let your tradition wound you and bless you. Then share with others. Of course, listen and be respectful.
And I say that the only way forward is to turn our backs completely on this foolish and facile notion that we all believe in the same God, the same Creator.
2 comments:
One of the many things I found interesting in existentialist philosophy is the great "angst" of life, which I will modify: that we are alone, for all our reaching out, connecting, and wanting to know, our minds transcend time, our very awareness makes us alone.
We are alone.
So I wonder about the "lonliness" of God. Is the "empty space" reflective of a "lonely" God who seeks interaction with earth?
Also, on this idea of emptiness and life, a wonderful quote from James Baldwin:
"Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have…[One] ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life. It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as notably as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us." (A Fire Next Time, pp 91-92)
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