I’ve often wondered whether we all must diligently travel along the same path, desperately seeking God. Is the only truth our truth, the legacy that was recorded in the Old and New Testaments? The Jewish brothers and sisters I’ve met, still awaiting their Messiah, are usually peaceful, loving and compassionate. So are millions of those who find their ultimate truth through the teachings of Muhammad, the Buddha, Confucius, Gitche Manitou, or the philosophers and poets of the Greek Golden Age. I even know peaceful, loving and compassionate agnostics and atheists. The loving God I struggle to meet each Sunday in the sanctuary and in my prayers surely does not flinch when confronted by someone reaching out to Him in a temple, mosque or sweat lodge.
What is a Christian to do with those who share our short time on this blessed planet but don’t share in the good news of our Lord Jesus Christ? Evangelize they tell us, preach the gospel as Paul did in Athens where the philosophers he met puzzled over “this babbler.” But they listened to him, and some mocked when they heard about the resurrection of the dead, but others “joined him and believed.”
The key? The Epicureans and Stoics listened.
One of my favourite writers about things religious is one-time nun Karen Armstrong. She may not be “religious” any more, but she has the amazing ability to listen to the history of our search for God. In The Great Transformation, she traces the tumultuous growth of civilizations in China, the Indo-Pakistan peninsula, Israel and, surprisingly, Greece, home to the philosophers of rationality. Through centuries filled with wars and political intrigues that sound painfully familiar to contemporary ears, she arrives at a moment around 700 BC when, simultaneously and almost miraculously, they all moved beyond religious ritual and animal sacrifice to coalesce around the same ethical principal that was echoed, centuries later, by Jesus Christ. In this, she echoes German philosopher Karl Jaspers who called the period an Axial Age.
“They still value ritual,” Armstrong writes, “but gave it a new ethical significance and put morality at the heart of the spiritual life. The only way you could encounter what they called ‘God,’ ‘Nirvana,’ “Brahman,’ or the ‘Way,’ was to live a compassionate life. Indeed, religion was compassion.”
“Faith, hope and love,” said Paul. “But the greatest of these is love.”
So… evidently we all profess to believe that. Nevertheless, we have emerged from the most violent century in human history and seem hellbent to maintain that tragic course. But as Karen Armstrong points out, all those folks 3,000 years ago were pretty much the same as we are today, except that we have more powerful weapons, and they all managed to independently figure it out. Maybe beyond the fundamentalist this and the militant that who fill our TV screens with their hatred there are others who yearn to return to the spiritual, to compassion, to love. I find it hard to believe that God in His bountiful grace would find the little rituals and formulas of our worship, the very things ecumenism stumbles over, to be of overriding importance. To attempt a parallel, if I set out on a long journey with no idea what route I should follow I’ll probably fall in with travellers who wish to take a different path to find their way Home.
Maybe we all have to take a lesson from the Stoics and Epicureans face-to-face with the stranger from Tarsus, and just listen to those who have chosen different paths. Maybe we’ll all get Home together.
