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Yet both Islam and Christianity originated around the concept of peace and peacemaking. Christ’s call to "love your enemies" is a revolutionary challenge for human evolution. Islam’s "surrender" and remembrance of God the Compassionate should lead to a similar quality of being. These wisdom teachings from revealers of the Divine Will are so powerful that humanity surrounded them with all the trappings of what we name "religion." In the process, their original purpose was lost sight of, leading human beings out of their sub-animal tendencies for brutal violence toward a capacity for goodness and compassion. No one can deny that little has changed from the barbarism of the ancient world to the headlines of today’s news. Men, in particular, continue to be as ferocious and savage as they were in the days of Attila the Hun. Our modern advancements have done nothing to transform the human potential for bestial behavior. And after two thousand years, religion has yet to fulfill its purpose of guiding people toward inner and outer peace. Consider the words of Father Alphonse Goettmann, a French Orthodox priest and author of several books on the transforming purpose of Christianity: "With regard to Christianity, its history is indeed filled with conflicts: judgments, exclusions, inquisitions, prisons, wars, crusades ... There is only one problem: it is to believe that Christianity is a religion, a system in the midst of others, which inevitably results in inclusion or exclusion, which distorts all relationships and has strictly nothing to make with the Gospel! It is religion and its representatives who killed Christ ... Christ came to abolish religion, this is His ‘Great Work.’ Religion is necessary when there is a wall which separates God from human beings. We are here, God is elsewhere, so it is necessary then to have a religion to connect us to God. But the Christ, who is at the same time human and divine, reversed the wall which separated us. He brought a new life, not a new religion ... That is really the center of the Christian Faith." It is this faith, this knowing, that gives birth to inner freedom, confident joy, indomitable hope, and radiant love for all other beings. This is what the man from Nazareth came to tell us, and it is the very simplicity of his cosmic message that got him nailed to a cross. In the light of that pure, unadulterated, and overwhelming experience of the goodness of God, all of the complexity, arrogance, and thirst for power found in human history down through the ages is revealed for the tragic and shameful emptiness that it is. In this age of global interrelatedness and hunger for meaning, it is incumbent upon persons driven by a need to find and manifest peace to find that which is universal and practical at the core of all spiritual teachings. A Tibetan Buddhist can be enriched by the wisdom of the Christ just as a Christian can develop a deeper inner practice through a study of Islamic mysticism. Our epoch can no longer accept the artificial walls that have stood for centuries between peoples and cultures. This is a new century, and there is no going back. The validity of religion is now measured by its value to human development, not by a rigid belief system that is so often used as a battering ram against other groups. The criteria for identifying the worth of religious teachings beneath the crust of history and institutions are found in their potential for transforming a self-centered nature into one that is radiant with unbounded compassion. Each of us is meant to come face to face with the depths of our being and awaken to our greatest fulfillment: becoming conscious children of the universe, incarnating the unconditional love that created us all. All religion is a roadmap. History, human error, and institutional structures have turned the map into the treasure, thereby forgetting its true intent. The violence in our world will never be changed until individuals have changed, and individuals will never change until religion as inner transformation has penetrated to the hearts of their beings and made them into new persons. Change happens one human being at a time. It is your transformation, my transformation, that will make a difference in this wondrous but troubled world of ours, as we become who we truly are beyond the mundane limitations of the narrow realities in which we function. Theodore J. Nottingham is the new senior pastor of First Christian Church in Kent, Washington. The church is located at 11715 SE 240th Street; phone (253) 852-1930 or visit <http://firstkent.tripod.com/> for more information. You can reach Ted at <tednottingham@hotmail.com>. |
Everyone knows that
many of the worst horrors of human history have taken place in
the name of religion. To this day, people kill, maim, and hate
in the name of their version of God. America’s new war is
dangerously close to a conflict between two religions that have
faced off in the past and shed oceans of blood and gore. Even
if this is not the case in actual fact, the propaganda war has
already been lost in the streets and back alleys of Muslim nations
the world over. Our president did not help matters with his misguided
use of the word "crusade" at the beginning of "Operation
Enduring Freedom." There could be no word more packed with
rage and agony for people of the Middle East, whose memories
span centuries.