When I use the word “religion” please know I am not speaking of any one religious practice or sect. To me, the word “religion” refers to a shared sense of reverence before the cosmos and a shared sense of being intimately connected with all that is. Just as I want to reject the worst of religion (superstition, hierarchy, etc.), I also want to learn from the best (reverence before nature, a sense of unity with all being, etc.). Here are some moments when my idea of religion became bigger thanks to other world scriptures.
1. When I was a child my parents had a few books of Jewish wisdom tales. I fell in love with the rabbinic method of using tall tales to teach deep insights. It was in those mystic stories I learned to read miracle stories, not as magic tricks, but as parables of the miraculous nature of life itself. It was from Judaism that I learned love must grow into justice.
2. My school once went to a museum displaying Christian art in early colonies. The art was so horrible that I snuck off to take a peek at an exhibit of Egyptian hieroglyphics. The hair on my arm instantly stood up when I entered a room filled with the pictographs. Some deep place within me instantly recognized I was seeing a coded message from the past. I had no way of decoding the message at that point in my life but I could tell the pictures of human-animal hybrids were not about fantastical beings but about the deeper transcendental tie that binds plant, human, animal, and stars together.
3. In college I took a class on Homer that further widened my horizons. The classics professor unpacked the Odyssey as a parable of the human pilgrimage through a wonderful and terrifying world. Once again, I learned to hear scripture, not as history or science, but as a coded pilgrimage into my own deep and unlit psyche. Homer was using a story about a wandering hero to illumine my fear and courage in my own human heart.
4. It was in reading the Bhagavad Gita of Hinduism that I first began to realize that the “I Am” sayings in the Gospel of John could be understood as a profound call to the heart of being instead of a superficial call to sectarian exclusivity. The “I” being spoken came from the heart of every being. The Gita was a song that helped me hear the song of life in me and in all those around me.
5. The Tao Te Ching is a wonderful scripture from China that taught me to recognize the sacred in natural processes instead of invisible beings haunting our human melodramas. It was from Taoism I learned that the sacred is found in the ordinary.
6. The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali taught me that any practice could become my “yoga” if it helped me settle my mind and realize my basic nature. I realized there is always a vast peace in the space between my thoughts.
7. The Sufi Islamic mystic Hazrat Inayat Khan taught that life is a kind of music. He taught that singing the song of life in harmony with others can be the beautiful heart of religion. Sufis taught that dance, or any great art, can be an expression of the sacred.
8. Finally, while my Atheists friends don’t usually consider their words to be sacred, it was from Humanists and Naturalists that I learned “I don’t know” is often the most reverent answer to give when questioned about life’s mysterious source. If was from Agnostics and Atheists that I learned to make my peace with life’s fundamental ambiguity.