Rocky Relationship

My relationship with God, and organized religion, has been a bit checkered. As a child I was a good Lutheran, attending Sunday school, and proudly plunking my sacrificial dime in the collection plate every week. Some of my fondest childhood memories are of vacation bible school where we colored and sang and praised the Lord. I, of course, didn’t have a clue as to what it was all about, but it was pleasant, I had friends and I was particularly fond of the large picture of Jesus sitting with children on his lap. He looked like a nice man and I was a child in need of a nice man in my life.

When I was about 12 we became Episcopalians. Bad timing. I didn’t know anyone at the new church, didn’t like the building, hated the unfamiliar folderol in their service. They were forever standing up and kneeling and who knows what, or when your were supposed to do that. We Lutherans sat still and behaved ourselves. And, I was at that special age where being my own person was important and being dragged to my parent's new church just didn’t fit with "my own person." Yeah I went, but I decided these Episcopalians, and by association, God, his son and that ghost (whatever that was all about) were suspect.

By the time I reached college I had morphed into a fundamentalism atheist. You know the type - if you don’t see it my way you are an idiot and would be damned, if I believed in such a thing. That’s the trouble with atheism. We don’t have any horrendous threats to frighten people into buying in with us. So we roll our eyes a lot.

Somewhere in my thirties a brave soul persuaded to read the Sermon on the Mount, Mathew’s interpretation. It sobered me, amazed me. Really. This short dissertation was remarkably simple and yet breathtakingly poignant. It occurred to me that if we all, or even just some of us, actually took that discourse to heart, it we would have a very different world.

This guy, Jesus, did not abide excuses. If you have a problem with somebody else – swallow your pride, engage whatever courage you have and go make it right. And don’t go genuflecting to God until you have.

That one hit home.

Devotions are not for show - drop the hypocrisy. It is what you do, not what you say that matters.

Ok, been there, done that.

And of course that bit about checking out the 2x4 in your own eye before you get all self-righteousey about the sawdust in someone else’s . . . he’s on to us, with a sense of humor to boot.

No doubt I had heard these same words as a child. But reading them as an adult was a whole new kettle of fish. That seemingly unremarkable little phrase (Matthew whatever) “Eliminate all hate” to a 9-year-old was pretty easy to deal with. The only person I figured I really hated was my big brother; since Jesus had no brothers, or so I thought, he could have no comprehension of just what I was dealing with. Clearly this admonition could be dismissed. As an adult I realized that these three words carried a challenge that could consume a lifetime and demand unprecedented humility and courage. This phrase had the power to change the world.

Maybe, just maybe, there was something in this religion stuff I had missed. Maybe worth another peek.

From that time to the present I’ve been interested in religion as a phenomenon – where does it come from, what purpose does it serve? How is it relevant? Where is it not? I have read the basic texts of a lot of religions, the bible, the Koran, the Drammadapada, some of the Upanishads, Tao Te Ch’ing, and the writings of Confucius as well as various interpretations and ancient and modern analyses of these documents. The similarity and universality of the teachings is mind-blowing.

W.S. Merwin, the U.S. poet Laureate, and a Buddhist, recently said “Take them away, names like Buddhism. I’m impatient with them. There’s something beyond all that, beneath all that that they all share, that they all come from. They are branches from a single root.”

That root, I believe has something to do with deep spiritual sense of interconnectedness within all of us and the reality that we live in.

And yet, we still find ways to fight, and fight viciously about the truths common to all of us. Why, despite the eloquence, wisdom, and similarities of the basic teachings of all the major religions, do we stumble so often? The, not uncommon, dreadful interpretations and distortions that all religions have put on the wisdom passed onto us and on the concept of “God” over time has been discouraging. But wisdom is still there if we will look.

So, the insights in my little garden were not particularly original; nothing much that I had not read or heard elsewhere. Rather the experience was more like that of the aging minister who has an epiphany one Saturday evening and excitedly begins his sermon the next morning shouting “Its true, its all true!”