Wednesday, October 27, 2004
WHAT IF . . . . ?
What if people believe there is only one God, and therefore anyone who believes in God must ultimately believe in the same God even though they describe Him differently...
What if all religions began in the same place with the same two people who believed in God and fathered humanity...
What if, lacking a written record, this God in whom they believe revealed Himself to
them, moment to moment, in the material surroundings they confronted each day,
because the materiality they comprehend with their five senses was constructed for them specifically so that it would lead them to God...
What if a beautiful sunset tells the man one thing about God that he articulates to his children, while the wild lilies tell the woman a different thing about God that she articulates to these same children...
What if one child forgets what his father said about the sunset but remembers what his mother said about the lilies until he has children of his own to whom he tells the story of the lilies that his mother told to him; and they, in turn tell it to his grandchildren...
What if another child remembers what his father said about the sunset but forgets what his mother said about the lilies, and he passes his knowledge of the sunset to his children and grandchildren...
If all of this happens, do the great grandchildren of the original couple believe in
different Gods? Is one a false God while the other a true God, or is there really only one God who has revealed different aspects of Himself to different people in accordance with their capacity and circumstances?
Has God written the story of Himself with the “words” of all that our senses comprehend so that at any given moment we can look at our surroundings and recognize that He is near us?
When we behold beauty in a rainbow or the face of our newborn child, are we close to
the transcendent reality of the God who created them?
In this life we can never know all that there is to be known of God. He is infinitely and incomprehensively beyond our wildest imaginings. His biography is written in all that we survey around us, yet even if we could see the entire content of creation in one glance, there would still be an infinity of God left to discover.
Yet He is there. In any given moment we are called to address ourselves to Him. He has planted in each of us a seed of knowledge of Him that we nourish by instinct or trample into dust as our free will directs us. He allows us to reject Him though very few of us do.
Ultimately our goal is eternal unity with Him.
As we nourish this seed of the transcendent reality of God, we must do it with our own limitations. Not only do we fail to comprehend His total reality, we also fail to comprehend all that He has revealed. I do not know the story God has written in the Grand Canyon because I’ve never seen it. None of you know the story He has written in my backyard where you have never been.
Each child reveals a different message of God to his parents. Each birthday we
celebrate--in fact each morning--brings new understanding as we view our surroundings
from a new perspective. None of us who open ourselves to Him know exactly the same
God, and none of us know all that there is to know.
Yet even though we each know a God who is different in some way, we each know a God
who is the same in His totality. Unless we believe that, we become polytheists.
As I understand it, Sufism reduces all religions to the very core doctrines revolving
around Creator and created. The love relationship it fosters is an abandonment to the will of God.
Up to this point Sufism and Catholicism are compatible. Beyond this they diverge.
Guenonian Sufism, which is also called Traditionalism, teaches that each must accept a particular doctrine or Tradition to approach God, and stay within that Tradition. This can be seen as a kind of unity in diversity which is especially obvious in monotheistic religions, but which can also be extended to Oriental religions that are polytheistic. No religion is superior to any other. All religions are traveling a path toward the only God there is, the Creator of the universe. Any Tradition is worthwhile and acceptable to a Sufi, and a Sufi may be at home within any Tradition, though he is not likely to entirely embrace whatever Tradition he takes up to the exclusion of all others.
