Religion

"Then, it appears to me, one gradually formulates one's religion, be it what it may. A person has no religion who has not slowly and painfully gathered one together, adding to it, shaping it; and one's religion is never complete and final, it seems, but must always be undergoing modification."

-D.H. Lawrence

"Blind obedience in the name of patriotism or religion ultimately takes our lives."  Terry Tempest Williams

Experience

Historian Michael Quinn was asked, "As a historian, what can we as members and future members learn from church history?  His answer, "Compassion.  Humility.  Diversity, are the things I think you can learn from the past.   It's more difficult to be arrogant and to be intolerant of diversity and to be intolerant of people's errors when you look at the past.  Try to look at it and see well-intentioned people whether they're presidents and congresses or whether their a church leader or whether it's your grandmother, who made decisions and did things with the best of intent and had consequenceshat  that are sometimes negative and sometimes even horrifying that were unintended.  I think that when you look at that in the past and see that, it creates a sense of compassion.  It's not as easy to be unforgiving of  mistakes other people make when you say, "Well certainly they should have seen that" or "how could they be so stupid?" when you realize that good intentioned people sometimes do stupid things.  But very often by their best lights they make decisions that they hope will have good consequences and sometimes it doesn't turn out that way.

  Diversity: it's so easy to see the world only through our own lenses, only through our own experience, whether that experience is male or female, Mormon or Utahn or American or whatever it may be.  When we look at the past, and the more broadly we look at the past, it helps us to see that there are many experiences out there that are alien to our own.   People who have experienced a very different world than we have experienced.  That will help us to understand that there are people in our own families that are experiencing the world very differently than we are experiencing it, and we may never be able to really understand how they experience the world, but communication is a great way to begin.  

The past is not the only way, but it is one way to get past that "I-centered" experience and expectation.  To avoid, "Well, this wasn't a problem for me.  Why should it be a problem for them?" or "Why can't they do what I did?" or "This experience did not hurt me and I got over it.  Why are they continuing to whine about it?" 

When we look at the past and other people in the past and we realize that there were so many experiences that they had that were different from ours it helps us to gain a great deal of compassion as well as a great sense of respect for diversity.  

Arrogance is a terrible thing and very often it's most terrible when you don't realize you are arrogant.  Looking at the past is one way to indirectly start cutting away at what I see as a prison of being limited by your own experience and therefore judging people in terms of your own experience and I see that as of great value."

What if our religion was each other


If our practice was our life

If prayer, our words.

What if the temple was the earth

If forests were our church......

If holy water - the rivers, lakes, and oceans

What if meditation was our relationships

If the Teacher was life

If wisdom was self-knowledge

If love was the center of our being



~ Ganga White

Prayer for Dialouge with Greater Religions

I bow to the one who signs the cross.
I bow to the one who sits with the Buddha.
I bow to the one who wails at the wall.
I bow to the OM flowing in the Ganges.
I bow to the one who faces Mecca,
whose forehead touches holy ground.
I bow to dervishes whirling in mystical wind.
I bow to the north,
to the south,
to the east,
to the west.
I bow to the God within each heart.
I bow to epiphany,
to God’s face revealed.
I bow. I bow. I bow.

 

Prayer for Dialogue with Greater Religions
by Sister Mary Lou Kownacki

Christian?

“When the imitation of Christ does not mean to live a life like Christ, but to live as authentically as Christ lived, then there are many ways and forms in which a man can be a Christian.”

~Henri J. M. Nouwen from "The Wounded Healer"

Freedom

From this hour, Freeedom!
From this hour I ordain myself loos'd of limits and imaginary lines
Going where I list, my own master, total and absolute,
Listening to others, and considering well what they say
Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating

Gently, but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that would hold me.

I am larger, better than I thought;
I did not know I held so much goodness.

-Walt Whitman, Song of the Open Road

Enlightenment

"Make no mistake about it - enlightenment is a destructive process.   It has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier.  Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth.  It's seeing through the facade of pretense.  It's the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true."  Adyashanti

Religion

"Religion is merely a community of people who gather together on a regular basis to reassure each other that it's ok to continue subscribing to absurdities. As for me it is far better to see the world the way it really exists, rather than persist in delusion, no matter how comforting or reassuring that may seem." Carl Sagan

Authenticity and Listening

"If I don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god
home, we may miss our star."

William Stafford

Institutions

"What happens when our institutions no longer serve us, no longer reflect the truth of our own experience? We sit on pews and feel a soul-stirring disconnect as we are preached sermons spoken from the dead. What we know is not what we hear. We mistake our confusion for guilt. Our hearts close. Our minds wander and we walk away. Inspiration returns when another voice is heard, one that recognizes that the past and the future are contemporary. How can we learn to speak in a language that is authentic,faithful to our hearts? The ceiling is raised by our imagination. Authentic acts reform.

-Terry Tempest Williams.
"Leap"

Troublemakers

"Since no one really knows anything about God,
those who think they do are just
troublemakers."  

Rabia

Art of Living

"The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence in whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he is always doing both."     Zen Buddhist text

Religiousness

What

Do sad people have in common?

It seems

They have all built a shrine 

To the past.

And often go there

And do a strange wail and

Worship

What is the beginning of 

Happiness?

It is to stop being so religious

Like

That.

Hafiz

Taught So Much

I

Learned

So much from God

That I can no longer

Call

Myself

A Christian, a Hindu, a Muslim

A Buddhist, a Jew.

The truth has shared so much of Itself 

With me.

That I can no longer call myself

A man, a woman, an angel

Ore even pure

Soul

Love has

Befriended Hafiz so completely

It has turned to ash

And freed

Me

Of every concept and image

My mind has ever known.

Lamps Unto Yourselvers

“Therefore, be ye lamps unto yourselves, be a refuge to yourselves.  Hold fast to Truth as a lamp; hold fast to the truth as a refuge.  Look not for a refuge in anyone beside yourselves.  And those, who shall be a lamp unto themselves, shall betake themselves to no external refuge, but holding fast to the truth as their refuge, they shall reach the topmost height.”   Buddha

Dogma

"A man or woman who clings to the words of others can become a slave to dogma.  Many religions spoon feed their flocks descriptions of the afterlife and strict instructions on how to get there.  They lead followers around the fear and darkness into the promised safety of the light.   This is a mistake.  People who blindly accept the teachings, who hold on the wings of someone else's angels, miss out on the peace gained from experience."  Montaigne

Religion

"I am neither Christian, nor Jewish, nor Muslim.
Doing away with duality, I saw the two worlds as one.
I seek One, I know One, I see One, and I call One."
~Rumi

"Like the women of Liberia, we broke the barriers of religion, race, ethnicity, status and we stepped out and redeemed out time.  We broke all the barriers that patriarchy has set in front of us and we said "War is nonsense.  Peace is what we want.  We will take it if you don't give it to us."  We can never, ever redeem our time if we continue to wait for the men to give it to us.  Is it in your home?  Is it in your community?  It is time for us to break the barriers that separate us.  It's time for us to bind together.  Hold on to that thing that binds us, even though patriarchy wants us to ignore it. If you don't know what I'm talking about when you go to take a bath, find another woman to stand  by you.  The thing that unites us is our Womanhood.  It moves beyond child, it moves beyond tribe, it moves beyond culture, it moves beyond everything.  As women, we need to hold together.  As women, we need to redeem our time.  As women we need to take it back.  As in the 60's and 70's.  As women, we need to be more radical.  There is nothing wrong with stepping out there and saying we are claiming our space.  Why are there still issues of discrimination?  You need to take it!  The men will not give it because it is shifting the status quo.  You need to take it. "  Lehmay  Gbowee

Becoming Human

"It took me a long time to decide to become a human being, and look within my own flawed nature for salvation.   It took mistakes, dark nights of the soul, hard work and help from teachers and friends to fashion a spirituality that respected both my divinity and my humanity, my radiance and my shadow.   It took my own combination of religion and psychology, meditation and physical healing, mysticism and science to forge a path that felt genuine and effective."   Elizabeth Lesser