Terry Paul Choyce
January 15, 2006 Brunswick Street United Church
This is World Religion Sunday. Each year, the third Sunday of January is designated as the day when churches come together to emphasize what they have in common, instead of what makes them different. This day was chosen in 1950 by the National Spiritual Assembly in the USA. Today at 3 pm, HRM will be celebrating the unity of faiths at St. John's United Church in Fall River. Included will be Buddhist youth dancers, a Jewish cantor, a Hindu chanter, readings from the Qu'ran, and several Christian youth choirs. Everyone is welcome and donations will be made to Feed Nova Scotia.
It is my personal believe that there are many paths to God. It is important for each of us to be on a path and to be heading in the right direction. But to say that my path is better than yours, feels very presumptuous and wrong to me. So I have good feelings about having a day when we foster interfaith understanding and harmony, by emphasizing the common denominators of all religions. Rev. Mark Sills from Greensboro, NC writes "On World Religion Day people acknowledge their mutual love for God and their common desire to work toward a world society that is equitable, just and merciful." He says that we have a "shared agreement that we have been created by a loving God and that the best way to show our love of God is through respectful acts of loving care for our neighbors."
A few years ago Bedford United Church put on a course which followed the book Essential Spirituality by Roger Walsh. This is an excellent book. He says we need to understand the terms spirituality and religion. He writes "the word religion has many meanings, in particular it implies a concern with the sacred and supreme values of life. The term spirituality refers to direct experience of the sacred." Religions tend to instruct us on how to live and how to worship God. Religions have dogmas, creeds, rituals, and rules. Usually religions are tied to cultural practices and beliefs. Religions are also big on controlling people. They often use fears of a punishing afterlife to convince people to live loving lives now. They all have sacred books and prophets, or founders. There are many differences between each religion, and even between different branches of each religion. For instance, many of the beliefs of Catholics are different than what we believe in the United Church, but we all believe in Jesus.
The root and basis of every religion is our search for our spiritual connection to God. Religions help us to directly experience a profound relationship with the Divine. So spirituality is the core of every religion. But, you do not need an organised religion to be spiritual. Some of the people who I consider to be the most "saintly" do not go to church. They connect with God through nature, through spiritual practices like meditation or yoga, through their service to others, through their care of animals, through their artistic expressions, or through their personal studies of spiritual material. Again, there are many paths to God.
Roger Walsh writes "within ourselves we find the most profound, the most meaningful, and the most important discovery any human being can make. Within ourselves we find our deepest self, our true self, and recognize that we are not only more than we imagined but more than we can imagine. We see that we are a creation of the sacred, intimately and eternally linked to the sacred, and forever graced and embraced by the sacred. This is the greatest of all discoveries, the secret of all secrets, the priceless gift that is both the source and the goal of the great religions. This is the central message at the heart of the great religions and the basis for their ecstatic cries."(p.5) I will read to you some verses from some major religions:
Christianity- The Kingdom of heaven is within you.
Islam- Those who know themselves know their Lord.
Judaism - He is in all, and all is in him.
Confucianism- Those who know completely their own nature, know heaven.
Buddhism- Look within you, you are the Buddha.
Though the words are different, the meaning is the same. We are sacred beings. We are a part of God. God is within us.
Most of you have heard this little story about a young fish who asks his mother what water is. His mother says water is everywhere, in him and around him, and that he cannot live with out water. That is how I feel about God. God is everywhere, but knowing that, and experiencing that, is where religion enters the picture. Roger Walsh says there are four crucial claims that are at the heart of all religions. First he says that there are "two realms of reality." One is the physical realm which we can study by science. The other is the realm of spirit, soul, or consciousness. He says "this realm creates and embraces the physical realm and is its source. This domain is not limited by space or time or physical laws...it is unbounded and infinite, timeless and eternal.(p7)
Next, human beings are part of both realms. We are physical and spiritual beings. "We have bodies, but we also have, at the core of our being, in the depths of our minds, a center of transcendent awareness." In other words, at our core, we are a part of God.
Thirdly, people have a drive to know this core of their being, this spiritual part that is God. But we cannot use any of our regular senses to know God. The only way to know God directly is by introspection. And this requires a spiritual practice, such as prayer or meditation. He says "when the mind is still and clear, we can have a direct experience of our divine self." People have described this direct experience of God connection to be the most powerful love that can possibly be felt. It is a life altering experience where you realise how much you are a part of all of life, how we are all connected by the divine, how powerful each of us is, and how insignificant each of us is. Rogers says, in his fourth claim, that realizing our spiritual nature is "the highest goal and greatest good of human existence...No other experience is so ecstatic, no other attainment so rewarding, no other goal so beneficial to oneself or others."
"This recognition is the goal of the great religions and it is known by names such as salvation, satori, enlightenment, liberation, nirvana, and awakening...Religions all exist to help us discover our true Self and our true relationship to the sacred. This discovery, they agree, is the supreme joy and greatest goal of human life." (P9)
Once we have gained this awareness, and even as we are striving for this awareness, we need to realise that we must love each other and treat each other with respect and understanding. Every religion emphasizes the need to be good to one another. So I will leave you with this creed which was written for World Religion Day by Dr. V.V. Ramen from South Africa:
In striving to recognize the primacy of Fire and Light. I feel kinship with my Zoroastrian brothers and sisters.
In striving to obey the Ten Commandments, I feel kinship with my Jewish brothers and sisters.
In striving to be kind to neighbor and the needy, I feel kinship with my Christian brothers and sisters.
In striving to be compassionate to creatures great and small, I feel kinship with my Buddhist - Jaina brothers and sisters.
In striving to surrender myself completely to God Almighty, I feel kinship with my Muslim brothers and sisters.
In the recognition that wisdom flows from enlightened masters, I feel kinship with my Sikh brothers and sisters.
In remembering that serving people should be the goal of religion, I feel kinship with my Bahai brothers and sisters.
In my respect and reverence for Nature that sustains us, I feel kinship with my Native American brothers and sisters.
In feeling that these and more are all paths to the same Divinity, I feel kinship with my Hindu brothers and sisters.
In my love and laughter, joy and pain, I feel kinship with all my fellow humans.
In my need for nourishment and instinct to live on, I feel kinship with all beings on the planet.
In my spiritual ecstasy with this wondrous world, I feel kinship with the Cosmic Whole.
Inspired by the Parliament of World Religions Composed by Dr. V. V. Raman: at The Cape of Good Hope, SA: 1999
©Terry Paul Choyce. Used with permission from the author.
