by John Robbins

Just a thought

Let’s make peace our religion
Unity our god
Let prayers flow in form of love
Harmony being a sacred hymn.

Bibek Bhandari, Nepal

Recently, Common Ground attended a book launch and interfaith peace dialogue at the Vancouver Public Library co-hosted by Banyen Books and Mark Tompkins, one of the editors of Illuminations. The book is a compilation of interviews and contributions, representing a diverse range of cultures, traditions and faiths, including a collection of art and photos. The event featured speakers from myriad faiths with the aim of promoting empathy for people of different spiritual paths, inspiring Common Ground to offer these moving excerpts in our first issue of the New Year.

If I claim
Michael Hooven

If I claim to be a man of God, let me dwell on that which is good and noble in all people. And if one man raises his hand to strike the other, let God show them a greater tolerance as I step between them. But you say to me, what of this wicked doer or that wicked doer? Let me proclaim my righteousness in God by refusing to hate another simply because I was told to. Let me forgive them and set myself free because hate can only be learned. And if you ask where hate comes from, I say only from the past. And if you say that hate separates, I say that separation hates.
I can seek to celebrate the diversity in all of nature, and all of humanity. I can seek to celebrate the diversity in all cultures and in all ways of believing. I can remember words like cohabitation and cooperation and cocreation. I can remember that the sun shines equally on all people. I can remember that the fig tree shares its fruit with all people, regardless of their history, place of origin, or destination. I can observe springtime as a never-ending wave of new growth sweeping around the planet. I can observe winter as the necessary preparation for the new growth to follow.

The river
Patricia Hill

The soul has found its body – and puzzles out the confluence of ligament and bone, the lattice of possibility and intent. Move the hand, so, and ponder the mind behind it. Like water leaving its high mountain, the body rushes to its own salt sea in endless conversation with itself.
Where is the soul in all this? Is it the white birch leaning dangerously over the gorge, tenacious and beautiful? Is it the white birch fallen, caught, and rushing under the watchful presence of rock and sky? To stand apart and see oneself drowned, to drown and see oneself standing apart, can the soul do all this? Leave it. You cannot dissect the river, no matter how much you want to know. The luminous sand beneath your feet will not tell you. The flat rock will not tell you. Neither will the sequined trout, the flies jigging at the water’s skin, filament of spider flung at your face. For all the noise and congregation here, you are left as dumb as you ever were. The river proceeds without you, without the part of you ankle-deep in mud, mouth agape, eye squinting from too much light.

A struggle for faith and freedom
Z. Foo, South Africa

How do we know that what we know is true? For me this question is a lifelong search. I was born and raised Muslim in South Africa during apartheid. The government determined what we would believe, what our values would be, how we would live, what questions to ask and what answers to receive.
My soul yearned for freedom, longed to feel its essence. If you had asked me what a Muslim was, I would have answered that it is one who prays, gives alms, believes in one god, and fasts. But a religion cannot be classified according to its constitution nor a believer identified through her practices. Faith for me is about what the heart feels, not what the mind says or the body does. So the suffocating restrictions of the state made me long for an inner freedom, a more loving authority, a just way of life, and a peace that transcends human limitations.
Is this world capable of giving peace? How can love and comfort be found in nature or human relationships that are finite? Or is it possible only in another world, a spiritual world that transcends time, space and earthly restrictions? Can peace be attained only when one has a connection to a higher being? Is prayer the means of achieving this communion? Connection with god is when I feel god’s presence in everything I do, when I know that he is with me, watching me every minute of every day. Peace with god, for me, is when I please him, worship him, obey his commandments and live for him, because it is due to him that I am alive.
It is not an easy process, nor is it complete. Every moment we make decisions that either take us closer to god or farther from him.

The moment of knowing
Marie S. Abaya

Up until that point, I did not believe, spent thirty-five years on earth, estranged from living. I often felt dismayed that this was my body, this was my life, and I had to move it.
My name, Abaya, represents the Hindu mudra, palm up facing out, “fearlessness.” I loved that confirmation to continue without fear in this life that was not mine.
I found something one day. The alternate meaning of that mudra: Renunciation. Pema Chodron often spoke of it. But now it was mine. My responsibility. Why wasn’t it there before? I was holding myself back, resisting life. I had to renounce that disbelief.
The early morning air was sharp as always, but a mist like fog gently draped over the Douglas-fir hillsides laced with young aspen stands. I had never been this route and relished the mountain scenery with an air of melancholy. I thought of the night before, at the brewpub, saying good-byes. I felt a tightening in my chest, a sadness of leaving, bringing a flow of blurry tears. The early fall sun was breaking through the cold mist in a scattering across the mountains to the west. Then I looked at the pain clearly, and saw it was the pain of being connected, of living and loving. Not the pain I was so familiar with. I was not alone on this earth anymore, in this madness, with this beauty. The pain turned to joy as I physically felt the tightness lift and my heart open and fill my chest with golden warmth. I felt it, the world, the belief, the bond, the grounding, the union, the release.
I cannot explain why it took me so long to get here, why all my study, meditation, art and vision had not brought me the solace to overcome. This fleeting moment had magic. It gave me lightness and clarity and maturity. Maybe I earned this light, at last ready to give up the struggle. I carry it with me as a talisman of all the energies of the universe connecting together to call me back and claim me and bind me and remind me of the deep significance of my life.

Everyday grace
Marianne Williamson

I have always wondered about God. I wondered about God as a child and I wonder about God now. For me, spiritual questioning is a lifelong process and the deeper our questioning, the deeper the answers when they are revealed.
I think everybody has spiritual questions, it’s just that most people do not know it. I do not see spiritual questions as divorced from any other questioning about the nature of reality and how we, as human beings, fit into it. I try not to see the spiritual quest as something precious, above or even separate from the quest to simply live a deeper and more meaningful life.
I think all of us are trying to find answers for ourselves. The act of breathing is immersion in God. Every moment is a challenge to live more fully who we really are. That is the spiritual path.
I am a student of A Course in Miracles, not because the course tells me it is the only path, but simply because that’s a path that spoke to me. The course is not a religion; it is psychological training in universal spiritual themes. Those universal spiritual themes are at the mystical core of all the great religious systems.
There is a story about a Buddhist monk pointing to the moon, and how some people mistakenly think the pointed finger is more important than the moon. The moon is what is important. Who points out the moon, which religion or spiritual path is pointing out the moon to us, is not the issue.
In A Course in Miracles it says that the world we live in is dominated by a thought system based on fear, and has been, literally, for ages. So if you simply allow your mind to be trained by the status quo thinking of the world, you get lost in a miasma of illusion and fear. The word religion comes from the Latin root religio, which means to bind back. True religion is a process of binding your mind back to truth while living in a world that lures you away from it. What path we walk to seek escape from the spiritual ignorance of the world is not the issue; the issue is that we come to realize the power of prayer, meditation, forgiveness, charity and love in order to find the true light within us.
I am a Jew, and when you are born a Jew, you die a Jew. My Judaism informs my relationship to God very deeply, and it informs my philosophical, social and political views of the world as well. Judaism calls us to repair the world, or Tikun Olam, as part of our mission, part of our responsibility to God and our community.

Adapted from an interview.

All excerpts reprinted with permission from Illuminations: Expressions of the Personal Spiritual Experience by Mark L. Tompkins and Jennifer McMahon. Copyright © 2006 Celestial Arts, Berkeley, CA. (www.celestialarts.com).