Ask just about anybody you meet in a Starbucks
or at the corner health food store if they have a spiritual practice
or religious affiliation and they'll say "Sorry, really I am spiritual,
just not religious." If you press a little and ask, "Spiritual
in what way?" You are as likely to be answered with a bewildered
stare as a relevant response. The sad fact is that most of us
don't really know very much about what words like "spirit" and
"religion" actually refer to. This is especially true when talking
about specific, historical religious and spiritual traditions.
Starting in mid-July people at Christ the Healer
will be exploring the essence of spirit as it shows up among world
religions and in their holy books. Christ the Healer is an all-embracing
spiritual community that holds Christ at its center, yet reaches
out to enfold every one Christian and non-Christian alike.
World scriptures like the Torah, the Vedas,
the New Testament, the Tao Te Ching, the Koran
and Bhagavad-Gita, are often regarded as complex, abstruse
and requiring the study of a lifetime to truly understand. In
this extended exploration we will be using the lifetime study
of first class experts to help us cut through this complexity
and clarify what might otherwise be hard to appreciate. We will
start with Houston Smith's acclaimed classic, World's Religions,
to get an overview of the field and then move on to such books
as the series published by Harper Collins, including the Essential
Koran, the Essential Tao, the Essential Confucius,
the Essential Kabbalah, etc, as well as the International
Religious Foundation's World Scripture, A Comparative Anthology
of Sacred Texts.
So why are we going to so much trouble? For centuries,
aggressive believers and practitioners of our various religious
and spiritual traditions have called each other names and spilled
each other's blood over issues of precedence and truth. Over the
last hundred years, dialog between rival traditions has become
fashionable. Perhaps in this century, non-competitive understanding
and spiritual partnership will become the essential way. At Christ
the Healer we make the dream of this essential way our ongoing
endeavor, by including scripture, prayers and spiritual practices
of all the religions contributed by our diverse gathering. After
all, if Jesus the Christ and Siddhartha, the Buddha were to meet
unexpectedly on some far off celestial pathway, would they fight
it out for possession of the road? Certainly not! Each would bow
to the other saying, "Lord, how may I serve you?"
Thomas Chavez is an evangelist
for Christ the Healer UCC, which meets every Monday night at 7
pm at 5150 SW Watson in Beaverton for drumming, prayer, healing,
and spiritual exploration. 503-259-3315.