AS BROAD AS ALL OF LIFE

A recently published Spirit Quest set in motion a discussion/debate/dialogue, you name it, with a highly respected friend of mine. He challenged some of my religious  beliefs/assumption that I expressed in that story. Our letters have crisscrossed and may continue to do so for some time.

What this controversy has revealed to me is the breadth of faith understandings among religious denominations. There are of  course a variety of opinions in almost all faiths. Certainly that is the case in the three monotheistic  religions. In Judaism there are all sorts of gradations and shades of understanding or misunderstandings among the Hassidim and the Reformed and everyone in between.  It may seem less so in Islam, but that is probably  because the fundamentalists have stolen the headlines while there are other such as Irshad Manji, a woman, an outspoken Canadian author, professor, and advocate of a reform and progressive interpretation of Islam.

In the Christian faith there is a vast difference of opinion from those of the Unitarian faith, some of whom prefer not to be called Christian and those who inhabit the Bible Belt of our neighbour to the south. Within the Catholic Church there are significant differences, indeed it was among catholic scholars that biblical criticism developed in the 19th century - but very quietly.  

My own upbringing was not in the Christian church as I have explained in other columns. My parents who had been Catholic and Lutheran in their youth left  their respective churches to become politically active. Social democracy, human rights and economic justice was their spiritual motivation. 

Somehow or other I made my way into the church, probably through the ministrations of a Czech expat who ministered at the Church of All Nations in Toronto. Henry Vaclavic became a kind of  role model and mentor for me.

I decided to become a minister of the United Church  whose activism I and my parents admired. Soon after becoming a candidate for the ministry  I had occasion to visit the church headquarters on Queen Street West in Toronto. While there I had a conversation with one of the church leaders who sent me to the book store to buy a book by Lewis Dunnington called Something To Stand On. He probably sensed that my religious foundation was a bit wobbly.    

Dunnington was a Methodist minister in a college town in Iowa. In those days, the forties, students flocked to churches on Sundays to hear interesting and uplifting sermons and meet some nice young ladies and gentlemen. Dunnigton put a question box in the lobby and invited students to put their queries into it which he would attempt to preach about.  He later turned these sermons into the book with chapters such as  Hell: A Place or State of Mind, The Fall of Man: Fiction or Fact? and Miracles and Universal Law. He did not believe in a corporeal resurrection of Jesus. I would love to have been in his pews.

I devoured the book. A light went on in my mind: did I really not have to believe in the Sunday School stories I had heard? Later I showed the book to a fellow student who was appalled by it. Questioning anything in the bible left it open to doubting all of it, he told me.

But for me it was a faith saver.  Dunnington “believed that the simple, loveable, dynamic personality of Jesus has almost been buried beneath a load of theological dogma.”  He felt that, “ the evidence should be examined with an open mind  so that Christians may return to Him.” It was time that the boulder be removed from his tomb. 

I suppose the same may be said for other faiths, Jews and Muslims, who seek to probe deeper into their religious beliefs rather than memorize verses, leading them to dispute what had been held as sacrosanct. 

I can recognize something of this in the recent declarations of Pope Francis that have made the  news. He wants his church to change, to become a servant church as was the founder, willing to get its hands dirty as it seeks to help the poor  and downtrodden. He questioned the “trickle-down” theory of economics so dear to corporate fundamentalists. For too long the church has stood on the side of the rich and powerful unlike his namesake Saint Francis. A change is imperative if the church is to be faithful. 

I am getting old and within me are the seeds of my demise. For me, however, death is not the extinguishing of the light, nor is it a transmigration to another realm of time and space. I am faced with a mystery as big as all of life.

Bishop Spong, whom I have both met, read and quoted and whom I much admire, has written the following in his latest book: Eternal Life: A New Vision. “The goal of all religion is not to prepare us to enter the next life, it is a call to live now, to love now, to be now and in that way to taste what it means to be part of life  that is eternal, a love that is barrier-free.”

It is the joy of living that is inspired by such freedom that I aspire to even in my dying days

Hanns F Skoutajan

SQ 28/ 11/ 2013.