Seeing as it is Sunday, I am allowing myself to continue with the posts I have been writing that describe my spiritual journey, that winding road that has lead my in and out and all about, so to speak.
I had mentioned that when I started working, I met a colleague who was a Bahai. Because he was very easy to talk to and because religion was such a very big part of his life, I asked him a lot of questions and in essence became his student. I wanted to know about the Bahai faith and everything I learned made me respect it more and more. For example, Bahais believe that all religions are valid. They believe that all the religious figures of the different religions (like Moses, Krishna, Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad), were messengers of God, each arriving on earth when and where they were needed. The Bahais believe that the latest of these messengers was Baha'u'llah, who lived in the early 1800's, making the Bahai faith the youngest of the world's religions. I think it is true that all religions are valid and I really like the fact that there is a religion that actually forwards this idea. The Bahai religion teaches tolerance, not prejudice. It also teaches equality between men and women. Bahais wish to educate, to eliminate extremes between the rich and the poor, and they preach harmony between nations (and between religion and science!) as a way to world peace.
My friend also lent me a very interesting book called Baha'u'llah and The New Era that had some very interesting ideas in it, which I had suspected or intuned before, but had never been able to put into words.
The reason I was able to access this information with an open mind was thanks to the university courses I had taken a couple of years previous, which opened my eyes to the fact that although some people, like my grandmother, interpreted the Bible literally, others read it more pragmatically, to learn its lessons, while not taking everything at face value, or on faith, if you will. Knowing this, I was more at ease with the way of speaking about God that I had imagined to be "blind faith," for lack of a better expression. It helped me understand that if someone said that God wanted us to love each other, I could agree because I recognized that the good in all of us was God, and I recognize the need of humanity to love and to live in peace. Maybe we weren't both talking about exactly the same thing, but our jargon was similar enough that I think we were able to converse on the same wave length.
There was something that happened in university that opened my mind to the fact that there existed two kinds of religious beliefs in the world, so I will leave off talking about the Bahai faith for a moment and tell you what happened to me when my university class visited a Buddhist pagoda in Ottawa.
We were guided through our visit of the pagoda by a man, perhaps in his forties, who told us a bit about his religion, which, he specified, was Buddhism, but not the same Buddhism as his mother practiced. He illustrated this with a comical example:
When he was young, the man's mother would take him to the temple and he had to pray for good grades. The way he did this was that he had to pray while shaking a small cup that had many sticks in it, and each stick had a poem written on it. He had to pray and shake the cup, and when a stick fell out of the cup, the poem that was written on the stick would be meaningful and could be interpreted as a sign that his prayer would be answered, (or not.) The man recounted laughingly that while he was praying, his mother would gossip with the other ladies in the temple, and that, while she wasn't looking, he would shake the cup, quickly read the stick that fell out of it and, if the poem did not presage a good outcome, he would quickly stick it back in the cup and keep praying before his mother could see. In this way, he eventually stopped praying when he got a poem that essentially told him that he would get good results in school. He would then show his mother and she would be satisfied that his prayers would be answered.
The man went on to explain that when he was young, he didn't really believe in any of this, which is why he felt justified in manipulating the poems in the cup. But, as he grew up and read the teachings of Buddha, he saw that there was a lot of wisdom to be learned from Buddha's teachings. Although he didn't consider, as his mother did, that Buddha became a deity when he died, the man DID see that it was good to study Buddha's teaching to see what he could learn from them in order to live a good life. He would say that his is a pragmatic Buddhism, whereas his mother's is a superstitious Buddhism. In the end, though, it all amounts to the same thing because they both learned Buddha's wisdom and live by what they learned.
I recognize that talking about pragmatic and superstitious religion paints religion in a very black and white scheme. But I had to be able to differentiate the two before I could go on to understand that the world is not black and white, and neither is religion. This is how I was able to broach the idea of faith and of the mystery of religion. Still, whereas pragmatic religion made it easy for me to interpret that, for example, when Jesus cured a blind man, he had in essence opened the blind man's eyes to religion and to God, I still had a huge leap to make in order to really accept God's existence and to be able to talk about Jesus' miracles as true miracles instead of just stories whose meaning I was meant to search for. That, for me, would have been true faith, but I was not there yet. But, as I said, it was a step in that direction.
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