K. and I were out walking early this morning and ran into a friend who was on her way to feed the cats of some friends of hers who are out of town. She asked if we’d like to see their garden…we’d heard that it was quite something to see, so we agreed to meet her there; it was only a few extra blocks out of our regular way on our morning walk. The couple who have the cats and tend the garden are artists, so everywhere you looked there was something of eye-catching interest….lovely ponds with fountains (that actually work), star anise, gingers, hydrangeas, ferns….a labyrinthine pathway that leads you to a secret niche behind the art studio and storage shed….and there in the shady niche surrounded by gingers was a quite handsome statue of the Buddha.
As some of you may remember, my sermon this past Sunday was based on the prologue of the Gospel of John which avers audaciously that the Christ is the Logos, and that the two, Christ and Logos, are the same as God….and stunningly that the Christ, Logos and God are the same as the “light of humankind”….the Logos, according to Greek philosophy, being the ordering principle of the world, the permeating mystery that created and continues to create the world, the guiding reason of creation….The Buddha spoke of such things in his teachings, that there is a high order that enlightens the world for the good of the whole. A high order in which we humans participate intimately. It struck me right there in the garden, that perhaps this notion of Logos came to us via trade routes from the East, ancient knowledge traveled far from the source. Buddha taught some six hundred years before the writing of John’s Gospel. Buddha taught that it was the human community who were stewards of this world ordering knowledge….John called that stewardship the light of humankind.
The irony for me is that it is this very Gospel, the Gospel of John, from which many so-called Christian sects lift out short passages to prove the exclusivity of the Christian faith, as if the other great faiths of the world stand in opposition to the teachings and practice of Jesus and those who follow Jesus. If anything, the Gospel of John is making a profound statement of the universality of God and salvation, and that that universality is dependant upon and contingent to the human community bearing this knowledge, this archetypal principle of goodness to the world…To put it simply, this sacred order, this mysterious beauty of the universe is to love sacrificially…. to give our lives for the good of the whole, the way God gives God’s life for the good of the whole….the Logos principle…the means by which the spheres of heaven are moved and the ways of earth formed thereby…A universal principle of the good standing against the dark….Many post modern scholars argue that in post modernity there is no universal, no absolute….But for me that is merely a cultural and linguistic issue….It is within the matrix of culture that the spiritual consciousness is engendered and expressed…therefore we have differing expressions of God because language and culture differ…In short, God has many names, and the Logos, the Christ principle is manifest in many ways among many varying understandings and customs.
The sooner we recognize the vast commonality we share with all peoples of conscience, all people of faith around the world, the sooner we will see the divine order of God’s gracious commonweal taking shape, taking on flesh around us. Our vocation is to be about the logistics of the Logos….midwives of God’s passionate love for our world….Our way we call the Way of Jesus…the Way of compassion and self giving, the way of dignifying our neighbor and bringing about a just and nonviolent world….and there are other ways by other names in earth…called by other names but in intimate solidarity with us…because the Logos is amove…and let us continually pray for what we already know….that the darkness does not overcome it.
Or, as Walt put it so long ago:
I am he bringing help for the sick as they pant on their backs,
And for strong upright men I bring yet more needed help.
I heard what was said of the universe,
Heard it and heard it of several thousand years;
It is middling well as far as it goes–but is that all?
Magnifying and applying come I,
Outbidding at the start the old cautious hucksters,
Taking myself the exact dimensions of Jehovah,
Lithographing Kronos, Zeus his son, and Hercules his grandson,
Buying drafts of Osiris, Isis, Belus, Brahma, Buddha,
In my portfolio placing Manito loose, Allah on a leaf, the crucifix engraved,
With Odin and the hideous-faced Mexitli and every idol and image,
Taking them all for what they are worth and not a cent more,
Admitting they were alive and did the work of their days,
(They bore mites as for unfledg’d birds who have now to rise and fly and sing for themselves,)
Accepting the rough deific sketches to fill out better in myself,
bestowing them freely on each man and woman I see,
Discovering as much or more in a framer framing a house,
Putting higher claims for him there with his roll’d-up sleeves driving the mallet and chisel,
Not objecting to special revelations, considering a curl of smoke or
a hair on the back of my hand just as curious as any revelation,
Lads ahold of fire-engines and hook-and-ladder ropes no less to me than the gods of the antique wars,
Minding their voices peal through the crash of destruction,
Their brawny limbs passing safe over charr’d laths, their white foreheads whole and unhurt out of the flames;
By the mechanic’s wife with her babe at her nipple interceding for every person born,
Three scythes at harvest whizzing in a row from three lusty angels with shirts bagg’d out at their waists,
The snag-tooth’d hostler with red hair redeeming sins past and to come,
Selling all he possesses, traveling on foot to fee lawyers for his brother and sit by him while he is tried for forgery;
What was strewn in the amplest strewing the square rod about me, and not filling the square rod then,
The bull and the bug never worshipp’d half enough,
Dung and dirt more admirable than was dream’d,
The supernatural of no account, myself waiting my time to be one of the supremes,
The day getting ready for me when I shall do as much good as the best, and be as prodigious;
By my life-lumps! becoming already a creator,
Putting myself here and now to the ambush’d womb of the shadows.
Song of Myself, Section 41, 1855
I had a similar experience to yours, Jim, last summer when I went on the Scavi Tour in the Vatican Necropolis below St. Peter’s. The object of the tour is to view St. Peter’s bones, or what are alleged to be St. Peter’s bones. But you also see all these tombs and mausolea belonging to Roman Christians from the 3rd-4th centuries, around the time of Emperor Constantine. I remember vividly one mausoleum of a Roman dignitary and there was a fresco of Jesus painted on the outside. Except this didn’t look like any Jesus I had seen elsewhere in Rome or in all of Italy or anywhere else for that matter. It was a Jesus modeled clearly on Apollo. There are other such paintings and mosaics that depict Jesus as a pagan deity. Now I knew from history that Christianity is a syncretic religion borrowing from Hebrew, Greek, Roman, and other pagan cultures. But actually seeing this fresco in this religious space, several feet below the High Altar at St. Peter’s Basilica, the capital of Western Christendom as it were, brought it home like nothing else. I have since thought about alot of things. Why do some religions die out and others don’t? How has Christianity evolved, and does what often passes for Christianity today actually measure up to the tenets of the faith? What does it mean that religions are and always have been syncretic? What steps have to be taken, what higher levels of consciousness reached, for religious syncretism to occur? In your sermon about the Logos, you talked about the syncretism between Greek philosophy and Christian teaching via John, or perhaps more correctly, the Johannine community. I’m beginning to think that religions are really archetypal expressions of deeper truths. Because ancient peoples didn’t have information about the workings of the mind (psychology) or about the natural laws or any of the other sciences and social sciences, they created myths and sacred scriptures to express the deepest truths of their experience. And as different religions came into contact through trade, travel, and conquest, people appropriated myths, archetypes, and stories and, in the process, created new religions. Well, anyway, it’s all very interesting.