Spiritual Athlete

It is both inspiring and refreshing to confront in religious writings a simple, unaffected faith in God. All too often our tendency is to weigh down religion with a cloak of learning,forgetting that saints are rarely doctors of theology. If, indeed, the ultimate nature of Truth is unity, then complexity and diversity are of the nature of the world, not spirit.

EVEN A CURSORY study of the religions of the world will reveal that among them there exist certain differences in dogma, ritual, and creed. But looking further, we discover a connecting unity, a common thread of truth, running through all faiths.

A STRANGELY NEGLECTED FIGURE of the 18th century is William Law (1686-1761), Anglican divine, writer, and mystic. Strange that he should be neglected, because he is not only a master of English prose, but a deep and original thinker- insofar as the discovery of truth can be called original- and a great saint.

A NUMBER OF MYSTERIES and surprises surround the figure of Meister Eckhart, thirteenth-century monk and mystic. One of these is the fact that although so many of his teachings have come down to us, we know very little about his life. He seems to have lived between the years 1260 and 1328.

EVERY SPIRITUAL ASPIRANT comes to know the saints as his best friends. In his pain, their words bring him loving comfort. In his joy, they carry him upward on the wings of their ecstatic songs. He grows avid for saints. And when he has exhausted the words of all the saints of the West, he is drawn inevitably to that inexhaustible mine of saints, India.

THOMAS HAMMERKEN, born in 1380 at Kempen, Germany, lived his long life, from age twelve to age ninety-one, in a monastery. It was there, isolated from the business of the world, that Thomas grew in wisdom and spirit – exploding once and for all the notion that man must perform actions in the world in order to live a full and successful life.

THE QUEST FOR solitude, whether it be for the space of an hour or a lifetime, has been a part of nearly every­ one’s experience. And although few are drawn to it as a permanent way of life, there has been a sufficient number to attract the interest of the historian as well as the serious student of religion.

BROTHER LAWRENCE LIVES for us in one slim little volume of fifty pages called The Practice of the Presence of God. Opening this book is like opening the window to a fresh spring morning. His simple prose reflects the purity and directness of his approach to God. “You need not cry very loud,” he says in words of unadorned beauty.

A TRULY ALL-AMERICAN Sannyasini. That is the best way to describe this remarkable woman called Peace Pilgrim. In the traditional sense a sannyasini is a wandering nun, consumed with an eagerness to merge herself with the divine force, travelling the length and breadth of India, begging her food, sleeping where chance may bring her, sharing her spiritual thoughts with others, and just accepting what the Lord may dole out to her.

ONE OF THE deep-rooted Hindu ideas most alien to Western minds is the idea of worshipping God as Mother, worship known as Shakti, whose logic, nevertheless, is inescapable. For it is based on the following dualistic principal: Brahman is impersonal, inactive; Divine Mother is creative, sustaining, and destructive. God has to be beyond change and activity.

THE ORIGINAL ATTITUDE of the American Indian toward the Eternal, the “Great Mystery” that surrounds and embraces us, was as simple as it was exalted. To him it was the supreme conception, bringing with it the fullest measure of joy and satisfaction possible in this life.

ONE OF THE greatest bhaktas (lovers of God) the Christian faith has ever known was that luminous Spanish mystic of the sixteenth century, St. John of the Cross. He was first and always a lover, and God his Beloved. But these are pale words. He was a living ember blown upon by the breath of God, an ember glowing ever brighter on account of that breath.

IT is A PLEASANT legend. Lao Tan, affectionately nicknamed Laotse, the “Old Boy”, full of years and wisdom and service to his Emperor, was leaving by water buffalo for the far mountains to spend the remainder of his life in contemplation. At the gate to the Pass of Han-Ku, he was stopped by the gatekeeper, Yin Hsi, himself a philosopher, who engaged him in conversation and persuaded him finally to pause long enough to write down the essence of his lifetime of thinking.

WHEN the spirit of the divine chooses to manifest itself in a person, it does not take into account the position of that person in society. In the continual unfoldment of spiritual genius, men and women of enormous spiritual stature have risen from the most abject conditions, and they have gone on to inspire the lives of many. Let us take a look at one called Sojourner Truth, who overcame the cruelest and most unpleasant outward circumstances to live a life that was filled with spiritual experience and faith in God – an all-consuming faith, that, coupled with her overpowering personality, helped her carve out a remarkable life of service and leadership to all people in difficult and troubling times.

FOR OVER FOUR CENTURIES there has survived in India a group of religious men and women called the Kabirpanthis – followers of the path of Kabir. They are quiet, truth-loving, nonviolent, unobtrusive house­holders, somewhat like Quakers, refusing to recognize caste, seeing God in all men, seeing the same God behind all names of God. They are aspiring devotees of their great master, the fruit of his teaching. They are the molds into which the white-hot mystical love of Kabir was poured.

JEWISH HISTORY ENCOMPASSES more than forty centuries of a people’s experience. During that span there were – not counting current life – eight important eras, each lasting about five hundred years. What is remarkably significant is that in each of these distinctive periods there was at least one towering religious figure who specially endowed it with its cultural or spiritual character. Those illuminating personalities, for the successive epochs they represented, were: Abraham (for the Patriarchal stage), Moses (for the Foundation­ setting), Isaiah (for the Prophetic era), Mattattias (for the Priestly), Akiba (for the Rabbinic), Saadia (for the Gaonic), Maimonides (for the Philosophic), and Baal Shem Tov (for the Kabalist-Hasidic).

GERHART TERSTEEGEN (1697-1769), a ribbon weaver living during the eighteenth century in the middle of a remote woods outside of Mulheim, Germany, was chosen by God. He talked with God and he talked of God, and people came from as far away as England to hear him. They came by the hundreds to his cottage in the woods, and when they could not all crowd in, they used to bring ladders and boxes and sit on the tops of them to look in at him and listen through the windows.

THERE WAS A FIRE in the desert at Basra in the eighth century. This fire burned with a cool blue flame piercing everyone it touched. This fire was a woman, Rabi'a al-'Adawiyya. Of all things in that world- a woman who had burst into flame. A woman whose burning...

IN THE SUMMER of 1837, after his graduation from Harvard, Henry D. Thoreau, like many another bright young college graduate, was thinking about what he should do for a living. There were no corporation recruiters in those days, and no seductive baits offered by business and the professions. Thoreau would certainly have rejected them in any case, for he had already decided that he was going to live his life in his own way. But how? “How,” he asked himself, “shall I get my living and still have time to live?”

BEFORE WE CAN understand Swami Vivekananda – or any other great spiritual leader or prophet- we must understand the true spirit of religion. And by religion I do not mean any particular faith, such as Hinduism, or Christianity, or Mohammedanism, or Buddhism, but what in India we call Sanatana dharma, the eternal religion. In this eternal religion there is no dogma, no creed, no doctrine, no theology. Three truths are pre­ served at the core of the eternal religion, and these may be very simply expressed.

This recognition of the many-sidedness of religious insight and experience was part of Sri Ramakrishna’s message.