by Dr. Val Webb

This presentation was given at the Annual Meeting of Eremos Australia www.eremos.org.au

© Copyright belongs to author Val Webb. This cannot be reproduced/published without author’s permission.

            Ever since humans began to take notice of things around them, they have pondered the bigger picture.  The yearning to encounter Something ticking away beyond our ken, or an explanation for everything, has always driven the human spirit.  Even those scientists, who publically decry any search for meaning that has a spiritual spell, spend their lives full of wonder, trying to understand their place in the mysterious universe. 

            Philosopher Sam Keen calls “wonder” the source and principle of all philosophy, science, art, and religion — “the fact that something exists rather than nothing.” [i]  This  wonder, in both its meanings – wonder as sheer awe before the mysterious universe and wondering about what and how things might be — is something that actually links science and religion today, even though we use different metaphors and ways of arriving at our conclusions. 

             A few years ago, I was on a panel at the Adelaide Festival of Ideas with some scientists who called themselves non-religious.  I couldn’t help noticing how many times they resorted to words shared with religion, such as ”serendipity,” ”mystery,” ”creativity,” ”wonder,” to describe what they did not, or could not, know.  We all struggle with language to describe our experiences of wonder.  Nikos Kazantzakis, author of Zorba the Greek wrote: ”We suffocate inside every word.  Seeing a blossoming tree, a hero, a woman, the morning star, we cry, Ah!  Nothing else is able to accommodate our joy.  When, analysing this Ah! we wish to turn it into thought and art in order to impart it to [humankind] … it cheapens into brazen, mascara-ed words full of air and fancy!  But alas, there is no other way for us to impart this Ah!”  [ii]

            The author Richard Elliott describes a vivid childhood experience of finding a cow lying on the ground.  He thought she was sick, but then realized she was giving birth. Elliott says, “Until that time I was quite innocent about such things and I was not convinced that calves were born in such a seemingly impossible way, but now all of that doubt vanished away.”  He watched the calf emerge, take a breath and begin to move.  The mother licked her new creation and the calf stood and started to drink.  Elliott writes, “I was absolutely blown away! I was overwhelmed by awe. The mystery of life was as real and powerful in that moment as it has ever been for me. That is to say, I had a real life encounter with God … Then,” Elliott says, “I returned to my normal religious training.” [iii]  This last sentence jolts us back into reality.  While wonder and wondering has caused trillions of people to ask that fundamental question — “‘how can we be in touch with the ultimately real, the source from which we derive life and meaning?” — their answers have, in time, been formalized into belief systems, often creating an ambivalent dualism between what we experience and what we must believe.

            Western thought has been structured around dualisms – sacred/secular, black/white, rich/poor, male/female, gay/straight, God/humanity. And these dualisms have been graded — right/wrong, good/bad, normal/abnormal, superior/inferior. Christianity adopted many of these dualisms into its story, not least God and humanity, forever etched on our minds by Michelangelo’s painting of the fingers of God and Adam eternally never quite touching.  But things are changing and such dualities are being challenged as ways to describe our world.  Rather than talking about humans, animals, plants and stars as independent objects in our universe, we are talking about the universe as an interconnected living organism in which all parts affect and are affected by everything else.  Rather than perpetuating the great gulf between God and humanity, we are more and more imagining God as the Life or Mind of the universe, within everything and everyone.  Rather than insisting that things are simply black or white, good or bad, we are opening ourselves to a fluid continuum of shades of grey, depending on light and shadow interacting with them and other influencing factors.  BY the way, I use the three letter symbol GOD for however we describe the sacred, without specific theological or gender baggage.

            Another dualism being challenged today is “us and them.”   I don’t know if anyone watched a recent TV series on Australian immigration and the strident attempts after Federation to produce a “white Australia.”  Political speeches at the time argued for homogeneity, first all British stock but later European stock, revealing the underlying fear, not just of skin colour, but of any “difference,” including religious difference.  People still talk of Australia as a Christian country with a Christian heritage, often saying it quickly and loudly as if it were undisputable truth.  Recently, my Rotary club’s Board recommended that we abolish the formal prayer at the beginning of our meeting as no longer appropriate for a secular organization in a multifaith, but largely agnostic, Australia.  Before I could finish, as President, announcing this recommendation, one member disagreed loudly and indignantly, claiming we were simply ”bowing to vocal minorities.”   When I tried to explain further, he replied, ”We are a Christian country with Christian roots.”  I suggested that, if we were to talk heritage, an indigenous smoking ceremony or recognition of country might be more to the point.  This man was not arguing simply from religious conviction but from a fear of difference — ”them,” the ”others” that might ”take over”. Our attitudes to the “other” are never completely visible, even to ourselves.  There are deep currents in each of us that trigger an unspoken fear of difference, whether religious, social, ideological or physical.  It’s all very well to say, “I embrace people of all faiths and cultures and countries without reserve,” but even as we say it, submerged prejudices percolate rebelliously up in us however hard we try to squelch them.

            Today’s world has become what is commonly called a global village.  We are interconnected through media, industry and politics, sharing (or sometimes not sharing) educational methods, medical breakthroughs, trade, disasters, wars, and the quest for peace.  Immigration has produced multi-faith communities where our doctor may be Muslim and our IT teacher Hindu, forcing interfaith dialogue upon even those resistant to such things.  We have not been very good at this in the past, because we have met each other carrying our little boxes labelled “our religion” and have insisted that others put their boxes down and take up ours.  It’s been a long road for many of us from that exclusivist language of “Jesus is the only way,” engraved on our psyche from childhood with Sunday School stories of lost ”pagans” in ”dark countries” across the world.  I remember teaching a World Religion class in the American Midwest where “other religions” to my Lutheran students meant Catholic! Anything beyond that was simply off their radar.  In order to lead gently into Eastern religions, I began with the familiar Judaism and Christianity.  The day I introduced Hinduism and mentioned many Hindu incarnations of the Divine, a hand shot up.  “That can’t be true because Jesus Christ is the only Way, Truth and Life.” “Who says?” I asked the student. With a hurt look, he replied, “The Bible, of course.”  “Do you think Hindus have sacred texts that say otherwise?” I asked.  He had no idea, but wasn’t perturbed, “The Bible is the only word of God,” he replied.  “And what,” I asked, “do you think Hindus would say about that, given what their sacred texts told them long before Jesus?”

            Many people are more comfortable today accepting truth in many religions. There is also a wider recognition that different religions are, in fact, humanly-constructed descriptions of the common universal search for Something More.  As such, they have many things to teach us about our own search if we are open to listen and learn.  The Buddha tells a story of a man whose village was attacked and burned. When he returned home, he saw a burnt body near his house and assumed it was his son.  He carried the ashes around his neck from then on.  When his son finally escaped his kidnappers and knocked on the door, the father sent him away because he already had the truth about his son in the bag around his neck.  What bags do we have around our necks?

            Interestingly, when we talk with many Eastern and indigenous religious traditions, we find an absence of dualism.  For indigenous people, rather than the Sacred being removed or separated from the profane, It is encountered everywhere and demonstrated, not through extraneous or supernatural occurrences, but as part of the everyday.  This understanding gives new meaning to the traditional dualistic understanding of the Divine as transcendent.  A transcendent Divinity has usually been described as an external, supernatural, separate Being beyond the world.  The outdated cosmology of heaven above, earth below and hell under the earth supported this idea with God and Jesus enthroned on high.  Today, however, we need to imagine the Divine in ways that fit with our knowledge of an ever-expanding and complex universe where 100 to 400 million stars reside in just one galaxy alone, our Milky Way.  Thus we can think of Divine Transcendence, not as separate from, or above the world, but rather as unlimited freedom everywhere, including near and within us – transcendent immanence — removing that eternal separation between us and the Divine.  In fact, if we think about it, the Divine within us and the universe means we share in Divinity.  

            Hinduism has a similar idea in that the search for what is real leads people to discover that their individual selves, atman, is also the Self, Brahman, one and the same. That wonderful Indian greeting “Namaste” with hands together and a slight bow means that the Divine in me greets the Divine in you.   This unlimited freedom everywhere is also expressed in Sikh doctrine where the formless Presence is visible to enlightened believers as immanent in all creation. [iv]    The Divine One in the Hindu Bhagavad Gita says, “By me all this world is pervaded … As the mighty air everywhere moving is rooted in the ether, so all beings rest rooted in me.”  [v]  In Shinto thought, “There is not a single place in all the corners of the world where God is absent.” [vi]  Surely this reminds us of Psalm 139 — “Where can I go from your spirit?  Or where can I flee from your presence?”  If I ascend to heaven, you are there; If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.  If I take the wings of the morning and settle in the farthest limits of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast” (7-10).  Or from John’s Gospel where the Spirit is spoken of as within us and everywhere – “The wind/spirit blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.  So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” (John 3:8)

            The problem for Christianity has been that the wild, free Hebrew Divine Spirit that brooded over the waters in the creation story and appeared in burning bushes and temple visions was domesticated early within the Trinity, becoming the messenger dove between God and Christ installed up in heaven and their representatives down on earth, Pope or Church, who then mediated God for the masses.  The Church became suspicious of its mystics who claimed to have direct encounters with God without the aid of priestly intermediaries.  It later became suspicious of the world and nature as a place to encounter the imminent Divine, since Jesus was claimed to be the only incarnation whose message was mediated only through the Church.  Sam Keen calls this denial of nature as a receptacle of the Sacred the great “desacralization of nature” and the “destruction of the presence of the holy at the heart of the everyday.” American naturalist Henry David Thoreau is an example of this attitude.  He lived alone for two years in a Massachusetts wood and later wrote an amazing piece of literature called ”Walden” describing this experience of being one with nature.  When asked on his deathbed by a priest if he had made his peace with God, Thoreau said,  “I didn’t know we had quarrelled.” [vii]

            We are in a good place today.  We are able to stand up to the nonsense within institutional churches that draw the wagons around unchanging truth and tradition and expect us to leave our minds and experiences at the door.  The world-wide ecological movement’s concern for the planet has forced us to focus on the earth and see it as Sacred space.  Imagining the Sacred as somehow part of  the universe, rather than an external God intervening to change natural laws to reward some and not others, has allowed us to talk with science rather than forever setting up our lemon-aid stand on the opposite corner.  We can also educate ourselves in new ways of thinking about God through serious theological books now appearing in the public marketplace, giving us permission to do our own theologizing using our reason and experience.  Theology, theologian Sallie McFague says, rather than being a ”pretentious, abstract, and obscure enterprise,” is simply the “attempt by human beings to speak of God from their own experience.”  We all need to do our own theology with the goal that it be functional; that it actually works in our lives. [viii]  A few days ago, I had a visit from someone who heard me speak in Adelaide three years ago.  The thing he took away from that presentation was a comment I made during questions time – ”Go and do your own theology.” Since then, he has been reading everything he can get his hands on that allows him to think for himself.  He declares that he is in a comfortable place on his journey for the first time in his life.

            Most importantly for our topic today, our global village has allowed us to talk across faiths, finding that what we thought superior and unique in our tradition is in many religions, often in forms more attractive and evocative than our own.  In the article I wrote for the recent Eremos magazine leading up to this talk, I pointed out that the call for compassion — do to others what you wish they would do to you — is in every religious tradition, Zoroastrian, Confucianism, Judaism, indigenous traditions, Buddhism, Hinduism and in Greek philosophy, to name a few.  Christianity is the late-comer to this with Jesus’ words in Matthew’s Gospel.  As theologian Ursula King says, “All religions have caught visions of a transformed society,” yet call it by different names. “Hindus call it dharmaraj, the reign of righteousness: Christians the basileia or [Reign] of God; Muslims speak of ummah as the community of all believers and the Quran sees this community encompassing all humans.  Spiritual needs are basic to humans,” King says,  Everyone has such needs, even when not clearly articulated.” [ix]

            All this suggests an entry point for “Seeking the Sacred together in multifaith Australia.”  Rather than beginning with religious doctrines and arguing about whose truth is true, we can start with what we have in common and what we all know best — being human and the search for what it means to be fully human.  Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh says, “Religious experience is, above all, human experience.  If religions are authentic, they contain the same elements of stability, joy, peace, understanding, and love.” [x] Anyone who has travelled around the world knows this common humanness to be true.  Despite religious, linguistic and cultural differences, every-day people want to be safe and secure; to care for, feed and protect their families; make sense of their lives and live in peace if possible. Religion scholar Huston Smith says, ”It is possible to climb life’s mountain from any side, but when the top is reached the pathways merge.  As long as religions remain in the foothills of theology, ritual and church organization, they may be far apart.” [xi]

             Prof. Norman Habel, one of Australia’s longest serving advocates for eco-theology, begs us in his new book An inconvenient text: is a green reading of the Bible possible? to “get real” and recognize what we really are — children of Earth. “It is time,” he says, “[that]we read [the Bible] as Earth beings in solidarity with Earth, not as God-like beings who happen to be sojourners on Earth,” [xii]  This plea goes further than ecology and care of the planet — it means celebrating what we really are — human beings. We have been hoodwinked for centuries into believing that the whole point of our earthly existence is a trial run for entry into heaven.  Even though the Hebrew story did not include an afterlife until a few centuries before Jesus, and was still debated in Jesus’ time, Christianity adopted the Greek dualistic idea of the soul travelling separately from the body, arriving on earth for a short stay and returning to its true home in the skies.  In this dualism, soul/spirit was much superior to matter/bodiliness, thus our humanness, encumbered with the idea of original sin, was downgraded, even despised.  As Fourteenth Century monk Thomas à Kempis wrote in his classic, The Imitation of Christ,  “… to eat, and to drink, to sleep and to watch, to labour and to rest, and to be subject  to other necessities of nature, is doubtless a great misery and affliction to a religious man who would gladly be released and free from all sin.”

            In a church class recently, I suggested that the goal of life was to be ”fully human” — embracing all it means to be human.  One woman had great difficulty with this, because for so long she had been taught that we needed to move beyond our sinful bodiliness to embrace our spirituality – becoming fully human for her meant moving in the wrong direction!  Given such theology, it is not surprizing that Jesus’ invitation – “I have come that you may have abundant life” — has been interpreted, not as a way of being in the world, but a promise about heaven.

            Theologian Sallie McFague describes two ways of being in the world – as a landscape or a maze. [xiii]  We can stand on a hill as spectators, capturing the view as painters capture the scene on canvas.  A maze, on the other hand, puts us in the middle of it all.  We are no longer controlling our view of the world, but are a part of the multidimensional experience and organized by it.  Rather than analysing nature as other than us, we are one of its details, scurrying around to find our way.  And we are not the centre of this maze.  Each tree is the centre of its own universe, its roots drawing nutrient from earth and its leaves absorbing carbon dioxide, regardless of my presence.  The bushes around me hide a myriad of small animals I cannot see but know are there, organizing their own world and sharing my oxygen.  There are people I will never meet, yet their activities impact mine, often changing my life, even though they are unaware of me.  Within this maze is the Sacred, God, the Mind or Heart of the Universe, however we define it. 

            I recently sat through a lecture where the Sacred was thus presented as in everything and working within the laws of nature.  While Jesus was the human face of Divine Love at one moment in history, the Divine was not absent from the world before or after, but present in everything and always mediated through secondary causes within the universe.  Because I knew that some present would find the speaker’s words a challenge to their exclusive Christian claims, I was listening as they might hear it and it struck me all over again that seeing the Divine only in Jesus is not possible or plausible if we imagine the Divine infusing everything.  We cannot say that a God-presence within the world is only in us and that all Hindu, Sikh, Jain and Muslim experiences of the Sacred are false.  We can’t argue that God only acts for those who “have faith,” pray, or say the right religious words if nothing in the universe is separated from the Sacred.  Even the dualistic language of Sacred and secular becomes meaningless if the Sacred is incarnate in everything.  Talking about our spiritual life or spiritual journey also plays into old dualisms — life encompasses it all.  God within everything also displaces many traditional doctrines, such as sin first entering the world through two humans created rather late in the universe’s billions of years’ of existence.  Diana Eck, Professor of Comparative Religion and Indian Studies at Harvard and a United Methodist layperson says, “Uniqueness, to me, does not mean that the “Jesus story is the only story of God’s dealings with humanity, nor the only true and complete story.  The language of only is the language of faith, not of statistics. [xiv]

            About 18 months ago, Maurice and I attended the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Melbourne.   Some 7,000 human beings listened to how others sought and engaged the Sacred.  People squashed together before the opening session introduced themselves and were abuzz with anticipation.  Sikh turbans mingled with Buddhist saffron robes.  Muslim women in hijab chatted with Hindu women in magnificent saris.  We wondered about the faith tradition of a man at the front of the queue wearing a tall white hat, until he turned around and it was the catering chef!  Once in the hall, Australian Aboriginal elder Professor Joy Murphy Wandin welcomed the crowd.  “We celebrate your belief,” she said, “We celebrate your right to be who you are” — generous words from one whose mob was decimated by those who refused them such a right.  Various blessings were offered – Zoroastrian, Hindu, Jain, Buddhist, Sikh, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Baha’i, Aboriginal and Shinto.  The keynote speaker, His Holiness Sri Sri Ravi Shanker, having watched the orchestra perform with precision, in sync with choir and soloists, offered this as a metaphor for the Parliament.  Each religion plays its own instrument and we don’t argue about which is the best.  The key to harmony is to “play our instrument, don’t fight, and focus on the one conductor – the One some name God.”  I marvelled at the clouds of wisdom represented, not just in these people but in their ancient traditions, all seeking human transformation. In seven days of sessions, not once did I hear anyone advocating that their religion was superior or that they had the absolute or only truth – wait, except for the Christian protestors outside the building with their sign “Jesus Christ is the only way, truth and life” and the atheist protesters beside them with a sign “We will give $10,000 to anyone who can prove there is a God.”  It is possible to talk together without such claims and furthermore, it is exciting to see our God appears in different venues.

            Seeking the Sacred together is neither about conversion nor about creating a generic religious community.  It is about sharing our unique stories, about “passing over” from our faith to another and coming back to experience ours in a new light.  It is a type of globalization where we realize we need to share meaning, experiences, practices and ethics in order to live together, rather than be divided by religious exclusivity.  Theologian Ursula King advocates for more “world believers” — people who, like world citizens who live in more than one country yet retain a sense of “home,” can have deep roots in one faith but relate to and enjoy faiths other than their own — spiritually multi-lingual and multi-focused people. [xv]  Gandhi is a good example — he followed the teachings of Jesus more closely than most Christians, yet he saw no need to become Christian and forsake his rich Hindu heritage.  Why have we made such a passion of either/or, as if we have studied all the religions in depth and come to this conclusion, erecting fences, conducting heresy trials, murdering unbelievers and pronouncing others delusional. Sri Ramakrishna (1836-1886) said, ”The devotee who has seen God in one aspect only, knows [God] in that particular aspect alone.  But he who has seen [God] in manifold aspects is alone in a position to say, ”All these forms are of one God and God is multiform … and many are [God's] forms which no one knows.” [xvi]  The last phrase grabs my attention and urges humility – many are the Divine forms which no one knows. 

            Reading the wisdom teachers of the ages gives us new language, metaphors, rituals and mentors for our own search.  I have found affirmation for experiences that my own tradition has downplayed, condemned or ignored.  For example, Christianity has not been a great champion of sensual delights in the way that Hindu poet Tagore writes of the Divine, “Thou ever pourest for me the fresh draft of thy wine of various colours and fragrances, filling this earthen vessel to the brim … I will never shut the doors of my senses.  The delights of sight and hearing and touch will bear thy delight.” [xvii] With Christianity’s pathological negativity to sex through history and its reticence to acknowledge it in sermons even today,  it is refreshing to view a Hindu temple positively vibrating with the multi-positioned sexual activities of its Divine incarnations, or discover carved female figures from indigenous traditions that celebrated reproduction and birth as associated with the Sacred.  No wonder the Christian story of a God who “birthed” a universe without a female partner and impregnated a woman declared virginal even after childbirth spawned a cult of celibacy and suspicion of sex.  Bertrand Russell tells a story of nuns wearing bathrobes when taking a bath.  When asked why, they said that God was watching.  Russell said, “they apparently conceive of a Deity who is a Peeping Tom, whose omnipotence enables Him to see through bathroom walls but who is foiled by bathrobes.” 

            Engaging with religions other than our own has become even more important with religion’s overt or subtle role in political debate and global conflict today.  Whether we like it or not, politicians make decisions about ethical and moral issues under pressure from religious lobbies, whether it be stem cell research, abortion laws, euthanasia, or same sex couples’ legislation. While global tribal aggression today is more about ethnicity, economics and ingrained hatreds than about religion, its roots are in religious ideologies and it is played out with mandates snipped from sacred texts.  Just as political leaders are trying to understand nations with different religious perspectives, because we need allies, suppliers, or places of refuge, ordinary people are talking across the religious divides because we need friends, sympathetic workmates and empathetic professionals.  This is happening around kitchen tables and cups of tea, between mums and dads as they watch their children at play-group; and between office workers at lunch breaks.  As we share our human experiences, frustrations and dreams, religious ideas inevitably surface as to how they help or hinder.  And, if the natural course of our lives does not involve us in these multifaith situations, we may need to reset our GPSs.   If we are not interested in how our fellow human beings encounter the Sacred we call ours, aren’t we still subtly holding onto our own exclusivity? 

            I am not advocating a blurred merge, a generic faith or a religious soup, neither am I personally advocating interfaith churches.  Our religious traditions have been formed around different founders in different places and times, seeking different solutions.  As such, they are all unique expressions that reflect cultural as much as religious views.  Our particular religious tradition has shaped us as a human being, especially if it has been important in our lives.  Even if we ditch our inherited belief system, the cultural realities of living within that system are part of our DNA.  The Dalai Lama is famous for saying, when people want to become Buddhists, ”Stay in your familiar tradition and simply practice compassion.”  However, the cultural and religious heritage in which most of us were shaped if we grew up in Australia has changed –  contemporary Australia is very different today. To be Australian is no longer to be of British stock and Christian heritage, but the product of a multicultural context and worldview.  It is to live, work, play and meditate within a milieu of different backgrounds whose food, language, dance and religious ritual are part of our shared space.  Taking my granddaughter out for her favourite meal — sushi — is very different from the sausage roll treat of my childhood.  Most of us grew up staunchly Catholic or Protestant, seeing the other as the enemy, yet these hatreds have dissolved and Protestants happily burn candles while Catholics don’t go to Mass every day.  Most Australians are developing strong bonds with people across broader religious divides today and our government strives to remove any favouring of a religion, although some political comments thrown around of late make one wonder.  How does this multifaith, multicultural context, where Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha and Confucius are all founders of importance, change any Australian theologizing within it?  How should we describe Australia to counter the old exclusive argument, “But we are a Christian country with a Christian heritage?”   

             I believe this is our next challenge — how to develop an Australian worldview in which all Australians, regardless of their particular religious allegiances, feel “at home.”  Liberation, feminist and constructive theologies began when people began talking about the Sacred, not from doctrinal truths dropped from above, but from the oppressive or alienating circumstances in which they found themselves.  As long as we simply appropriate truth claims formed in medieval monasteries, Victorian England, God’s own country of America, or even “white Australia,” we are standing in a “foreign” place.  Australians are slowly including our indigenous heritage into its religious worldview, but we also need to include our blossoming multifaith heritage.  Just as we each come from a unique family, yet share the commonality of being Australian, we can remain in our religious traditions yet pursue our search for the Sacred within this wider context.  Today, many of us are finding the language and concepts of our own religious tradition outdated and the tendency within progressive groups has been to either avoid awkward doctrines or texts, or else reinterpret them to cover up the problem.  This can result in there being little left to say except vague words that could be said in any self-help group.  On the other hand, we could address the limitations of our culturally bound or time-warped religious ideas by incorporating within the language of our particular tradition a variety of  religious imagery from across Australia’s multifaith heritage in order to acknowledge that all religious language is metaphorical and limited in our search for the Sacred.  As Sara Maitland says, ” Since God is necessarily infinitely larger than any human definition, we need all the          stories, all the words, images, patterns and forms we can get, even if only to show up       their shallowness in the face of the infinite God we say we can believe in.” [xviii] 

            Since different religions have emerged from the common human urge for compassion and justice for all human beings, we can legitimately claim our particular titles according to our founders — Christian as Australian followers of the Christos or Messiah, Buddhist as followers of the Buddha, and so on — yet still be open to other Australian religious experiences to enhance our search and form bonds across religious boundaries.  I’m still working on this – it’s a theology-in-process — but I hope my challenge to intentionally evolve a theological worldview from our uniquely Australian multi-faith context will inspire us to leave something constructive for the new generation of Australians.  Muslim scholar Reza Aslan says, “Religion … is not faith.  It is the story of faith.  It is a system of symbols and metaphors that provides a common language with which a community of faith can share with each other their numinous encounter with the Divine Presence.” [xix]

            There is so much to say on this theme — you’ll have to read my book Stepping out with the Sacred: human attempts to engage the Divine.   Let me suggest an action plan of “stop, look and listen.” 

            Stop.  Don’t be like the person on a galloping horse who, when asked where he was going, called back, “I don’t know – ask the horse.”  Seeking the Sacred is our journey and we need to stop and consider whether we are simply being carried along by a galloping horse of religious dogma that do not make sense in our experience or that demands we stay on for the ride.  We each need a theology that fits our time, place and experience.

             Look.  Life is not just a passing through on the way to heaven, but living to the full now; not about longing for an elsewhere God, but finding the Sacred here in this moment.  This life is what we know, so let’s do it well.  “Do not pursue the past,” the Buddha said. “Do not lose yourself in the future. The past no longer is. The future has not yet come. Looking deeply at life as it is in the very here and now, the practitioner dwells in stability and freedom.” [xx]  To see ourselves within this magnificent universe with the Sacred a part of this cosmic dance, opens us up to “religious” wonder in the full sense of the word – the Latin religio to “bind together,” binding us to everything in the universe including the Sacred.  Such imagery does not ask us to define the Sacred or separate out what is Divine or not, like separating the egg from an already baked cake.  When we are absorbed in a beautiful piece of music, we don’t have to see the conductor to know she is central to the harmony, nor identify each instrument to enjoy the music — we participate in the experience as hearers, conductor, trombonists or soloists. 

            Thirdly, listen.  Listen to all the Voices of the Universe – nature, science, Hinduism, literature, Buddhism, indigenous peoples, women, children, art, music and silence.  Bask in the wonder of being in the whole, rather than hung up on separating out the little drop that is us from the ocean.  What matters is our ability to absorb these experiences so they transform us.  We can make this “return” to wonder if we see the world as sacred, not in tired religious meanings past their use-by-date, but as a living, glorious whole of which we are a tiny, interconnected part.  We can be filled with wonder through science, walking in the wilderness, hearing another’s story, the eyes of a child, and experiencing a Presence.  These are not either/or options, although we have long made them so.  We can choose our own language and imagery for what we call Sacred, whether the intimate language of the mystics, the imagery of nature, or the experience simply of Life, Presence, Ground of Being or Heart of the Universe. 

            Seeking the Sacred is not about having all the answers right now. Even if we got them all catalogued, they would change before we filed the last one.  My daughter emailed me once to describe her afternoon with two toddlers. “We have spent the last hour on a picnic rug in the garden watching a sign-writer in the sky trying to write ‘Jesus Lives,’ but every time he gets the ‘L’ finished, ‘Jesus’ has blown away and has to be redone.”  Sometimes our lives are like that sign-writer, but we can’t wait until we cross all the T’s.  Buddha said, “If a [person] were to postpone … searching and practicing for Enlightenment until such questions were solved, [she] would die before [she] found the path.” [xxi]  To be alive is to be constantly challenged with new information, doubting the old, throwing some out, retaining some and restructuring our collection before a new challenge arrives.  We don’t “arrive” at faith – we live it in all its splendour, tragedy and messiness.  If we insist on defining unchanging truth, we will have to choose between the dualism of certainty and agnosticism, rather than flowing along the evolving continuum between the two.  Certainty cannot accept grey, but the beauty about grey is that it is the only area where movement and change can happen and, if you add a little light to grey, you get silver.   Matthew Fox said, ”A lifestyle is an art form.  It brings life and wonder, joy and hope to persons otherwise condemned to superficial living.  Our times call for the creation of lifestyles of spiritual substance.” [xxii] 

[ii] Nikos Kazantzakis. Report to Greco (London: Faber and Faber, 1973), 481-2

[iii] Richard F. Elliott, Jr., Falling in Love with Mystery: we don’t have to pretend anymore. Electronic publication www.fallinginlovewithmystery.com, 1

[iv] John R. Hinnells, ed., Dictionary of Religions (London: Penguin Books, 1997), 15

[v] Bhagavad Gita, quoted in Robert O. Ballou, The Portable World Bible: a comprehensive selection from the eight great sacred scriptures of the world (New York: Viking Press, 1944), 65

[vi] Anand Krishna, One Earth, One Sky, One Humankind: celebration of unity in diversity (Jakata: PT Gramedia Pustaka Utama, 2009), 7

[vii] Val Webb, Stepping out with the Sacred: human attempts to engage the Divine (New York $ London: Continuum, 2010), 35

[viii] Sally McFague, Life Abundant: rethinking theology and economy for a planet in peril (Minneapolis: Fortress Press 2001), 15, 17

[ix] Ursula King, The Search for Spirituality: our global quest for a spiritual life (New York: BlueBridge, 2008), 41

[x] Webb, Stepping out with the Sacred, 163

[xi] Huston Smith, The Religions of Man (New York: Harper & Row, 1958, 1965), 6

[xii] Norman Habel, An Inconvenient Text: Is a Green Reading of the Bible Possible? (Adelaide: Australian Theological Forum Press, 2009), 58 

[xiii] Sallie McFague, Super, Natural Christians: how we should love nature (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), 67

[xiv] Diana L. Eck, Encountering God: a spiritual journey from Bozeman to Benares (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), 89

[xv] Ursula King, The Search for Spirituality, 62

[xvi] Smith, The Religions of Man, 86-7

[xvii] Webb, Stepping out with the Sacred, 162

[xviii] Sara Maitland, “Children of the book come of age,” in Books and Religion: A Quarterly Review (New York: Trinity Church, 1990), 40 

[xix] Webb, Stepping out with the Sacred, 241

[xx] Bhaddekaratta Sutta, Thich Nhat Hanh, trans., quoted in Jack Kornfield ed., Teachings of the Buddha (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1998), 11

[xxi] Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai (Buddhist Promoting Foundation), The Teachings of Buddha (Tokyo, Japan: Toppan Printing Co., 1987), 296

[xxii] Matthew Fox, quoted in Lucinda Vardey, ed., God in all Worlds: an anthology of contemporary spiritual writing (London: Chatto & Windus, 1995), 508