Building a raft

In the last couple of days, I was able to get in a bit more reading in Karen Armstrong's, The Great Transformation. I have to admit that I had been "looking forward" to her discussion of Buddhism, and I was not disappointed. Of the "great religions" as they exist today, Buddhism, of all the non-Christian religions, honestly has the greatest attraction to me. Although I cannot be strongly interested in a "cosmology" of "rebirth," the "here and now" orientation and the strong emphasis on compassion just makes so much sense. It just seems so right. Although I have been writing to help myself work out a "new" Christianity, it would seem foolish to try to "do it all myself" and limit myself to "only Christian" resources.

Where we stand today is clearly "on the shoulders" of our human past. This is not to say that we are dwarfs on the shoulders of titans, but simply that, as I have opined before, each human has a cultural and societal heritage and does not need to start purely from scratch. Frankly, I would doubt that anyone would do much at all if we each had to rediscover language, writing, religious thought, philosophy, mathematics, et cetera. If our search for meaning is to have the highest chance of fulfillment, then it would be profoundly foolish to ignore any source, no matter from which religious tradition, that gets us further along the way.

I do think that it is possible that Chritianity has some meaningful things to say, and I have begun, for example, to look again at the "sayings" of Jesus outside of the gospel narratives along with the "best" of the Pauline corpus as a reasonable place to start. What makes Christianity more problematic, however, is our long devotion to theism. It is hard to find any source that is not "contaminated" by this, and I find that as I sift these sources for meaning, I end up leaving a lot of "theistic ellipses." At times this is so bad I wonder if just taking a "paper punch" to the text would be less drastic. Sensibly, we may very reasonably draw on other nontheistic sources that speak to our needs. Getting too caught up on the "authority" or "validity" of any source is simply misguided.

In this sense, a new Christianity is going to have to be more than we usually mean when we talk about being ecumenical. In the biggest and most generous conception admitted by most so far, "ecumenism" seems to boil down to "We've got a really great tradition that works for us. You've got one too. Isn't that nice?" What I believe that the "new" Christianity has to admit is that the tradition is not working for us, and that we need help. If I can find that help in "Christian" sources, then great, but that should not be the limits of our search. One does not have to go very far, for example to find in Mo-ist thought a very reasonable statement of the "love" as the center of behavior view and a conception of how that works out at a personal, local and even international/global level. If, for example, one state, filled with people who always are compassionate towards one another conceives as another state as similarly filled with people equally deserving of our highest level of compassion, then could we ever conceive of starting a war? If we all could form this compassionate attitude, then war and conflict would evaporate. Isn't the best solution for us to work hard at cultivating a spirit of compassion and encouraging others to do the same? This is, of course, just a simplistic example, but it is a clearer statement in terms of "politics" at least than the Christian version the Golden rule.

I think we need a page from Buddhism about not getting too tied up on "how we get there" but concentrating on the journey and its goals. Karen Armstrong re-tells a Buddhist parable that talks about the man who wishes to cross a river, but there is no bridge or boat or other means already available. He cobbles together a raft from whatever he can find and floats across the river to the other side. Once he gets there, what does he do? Does he pick up the raft that helped him across and carry it forever on his back because it helped him across the river, or does he leave it moored on the bank and carry on the journey ahead? I think that the lesson is clear, we need to cobble together our raft from whatever resources we can assemble, and we should not be as obsessed with turning it into some object of devotion or setting it up as an idol to worship.

To conclude, then, a new Christianity, to me, will acknowledge a heritage of religious thought from the ancient middle east and its descendants through the "Christian West (including eastern Christianity of course)," but it needs to do more than an "I'm OK and You're OK" with the sea of non-Christian religious thought. If it is to be "true" in the broadest sense, it must be inclusive in the broadest terms possible. Does it sound like I'm turning into a "Universalist?" I suppose that was inevitable.

Jeffrey Shy
(How do you use a raft in the desert?)
Mesa, Arizona