Christmas Thoughts

by CKR

In contrast to the recent political smoke-blowing over religion, I’d like to suggest a meeting-ground within and between religions.

Spiritual/ethical/religious conviction is rooted in experiences that tell us yes, this is how the universe should be. The experience may be a lifetime in an established religion and family that provides an ongoing feeling of rightness, or it may be a revelation that utterly contradicts what has gone before.

Our religious texts document these varieties of enlightenment. The Old Testament prophets, Gautama, Muhammed, Jesus, and their followers, and many more. Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Cesar Chavez. The names that most of us recognize are those of people who saw that the social system needed change and did something about it. The quieter recognition that one’s own life needs changing doesn’t make the headlines but it is just as real.

But the experiences have much in common: the feeling that this is the way things are meant to be. That may mean that something is wrong, it must be changed, and somehow I will have the strength to make the change. Or it may mean that I must work harder to spread the good I have received. The feeling is so strong that it seems like it must be coming from outside the self.

But in order to share it, or even to explain it to oneself (because we humans do mull these things over and over), we must use words, and experience never fits completely into words.

Actions can supplement and reinforce the words, but even this combination is insufficient to explain or to convince. The experience may have been within a community, and the community may already have scriptures or stories that provide ways of talking about the experience.

Even though the words are not enough, repeating them reinforces that they feel right, and being in a community keeps some of that experience alive even as what doesn’t fit is sheared off, forgotten. It is not far to believing that my community only understands, and the others are mistaken.

If the people in the community need to feel that they are special, another of those feelings that we humans so easily fall into, they will see the pieces of experience they have sheared off in other communities and condemn them for emphasizing wrong experience, wrong words, heresy.

That is what we see today. Those who are content with the words and who must feel they are special find it easier to be vocal than those who recognize the insufficiency of words and the necessity of humility.

But we need more voices for the commonality of our experience, that we are related by our experience, and for the responsibility that flows from that experience.

“Do not be afraid. Listen, I bring you news of great joy, a joy to be shared by the whole people.” By the whole people, the angel said.

Some of today’s related thoughts:
E. J. Dionne

Michael Gerson

New York Times Editorial Page

Los Angeles Times Editorial Page

Comments

[parvati_roma]

Clap-clap, Cheryl: all profoundly true!