Recently, I attended a meeting of the Dallas area Interfaith Alliance. Our group consists of individuals from a variety of faiths and religious/spiritual traditions who are committed to understanding our various perspectives with loving kindness and repect. During our meetings, we share from our native perspectives whatever thoughts and experiences we may have regarding issues of inner and worldly spiritual development, faith and tradition.
Our over-riding goal is to come together in dialogue that reveals the common ground between all traditions, thereby enhancing world peace.
During our meeting, the image of the Tower of Babel from the Bible came to me. It occurred to me that this is a potent metaphor for what so much of humanity experiences today.
All across our beloved Planet, we have myriads of religions and traditions, each with their own manual for being, each with their own protocol for relating with God and our fellow human beings. Some of these religions declare outright that their way of relating to God; their training manual or reference book, etc. is the only way to find salvation or enlightenment and one-ment with God.
Through this attitude of "we are the only way"/"God chose us as his people", etc., much conflict continues to erupt across our Planet, as it has gone on for centuries. We continue to not hear or understand one another -and thereby live in a virtual "Tower of Babel".
WIth this image in mind, I asked the group to refresh me about the story of the Tower. The group responded that the Tower was built as an attempt to reach God who was thought to exist in the heavenly realms. The builders thought that the higher they could build the structure, the closer they would get to God.
The story goes that God was dissatisfied with their attempts to find "Him" there, and thus God forced everyone to speak in a different tongue, thereby derailing any hope of communication and understanding between the builders. The end result is that the Tower project was abandoned.. and of course the question remains "did the builders ever find God?". Given the times that the builders lived in, I suspect that for most of them the answer was "no".
Next, a powerful insight occurred to me. God does not exist only "out there", but God, that Divine spark of magnificent light also exists deep within each of us. In addition, that wonderful spark has the potential to unite us in loving kindness and peace - within ourselves and between one another.
The lesson of the Tower of Babel is quite simple. If we took all the energy that fuels our attempts to find God only "out there", up in the heavens, or our Tradition's instruction manual and also channelled it to finding God within us, we could break through the current walls of mis-understanding that exists between our various Faiths, and increasingly see the common ground that exists between us.
Through this, we could increasingly awaken peace on both a deeply personal level and between us as peoples, regardless of how we relate to God in our rituals and customs.
So I invite you to inquire as to the ways that God expresses through you to other people and to sentient beings in your world. I believe that each of us is an individuated expression of God's magnificence and as such offers a special gift to others.
I also believe that when we discover and bring forth our life dreams, we are sharing the magnificence of Creator through our dreams expression.
By following our life dream as it glows within each of us, we become a potential agent of peace in the world.
I agree with you completely on this. I think that if we look for the God in all of us we will find it and be able to love our fellow man as we do ourselves. Then we will find peace and hopefully spread it around the world.
Love and Blessings,
AngelBaby
Posted by: AngelBaby | October 25, 2009 at 09:58 PM