My own lifelong study of world religions has actually been a fascination with the depths of human consciousness.
I was working as a student chaplain and realized that some of my dying patients were trapped in emotional nightmares. They were trying to get closure with old memories, but I could not help them because I did not understand the coded vocabulary they were using to express their irrational animal depths. I was stuck at the surface of their storm and could not enter their emotional depths to be with them.
Beneath our vital but thin veneer of reason, pulses a silent hurricane of animal glands and secretions. As animals, we live in coded maps of our emotional world that are sometimes inaccessible without symbols and rituals to bring our darkest regions into consciousness and to find bridges between the fragmented aspects of our lives.
When I learned to listen to people without judging their mythic worldviews I was able to draw close and be with them wherever they found themselves. In my experience, when most people’s deep irrational storms have subsided, they will choose to be reasonable and compassionate with or without my help.
I have long ago lost interest in religious creeds or rituals for their own sake. For me, religion is now a call to love. Knowing religious rituals and metaphors from around the world can be enormously helpful in understanding the coded language of people’s emotional world.
Whether it is Jesus, or Buddha, Homer or Aesop, if we can get past the superstitions, magical rituals and cruel moralisms of religion we may discover a priceless gift- ancient maps to the human heart.