Ultimate
Answers
“I have
always been a religious seeker. I think all human beings are. This
does not mean that I find all my ultimate answers in religion, for I
am not sure those answers are actually there to be found. It is the
nature of human life, however, to seek that which is ultimate, and
that seeking is what people now call religion.”
John
Shelby Spong (Eternal Life)
I, too, have always been
a religious seeker. Maybe that stems from spending the first two
years of my life in a convent hospital—who's to say. But I don't
think I'm different from any other human being. We all seek answers
to unsolvable questions. Answers that we know we don't have, and no
other human being has. Some of us find those answers, at least for a
while, in organized religion.
What we seek, I believe,
is connection to the ineffable. We sense, energetically, that there
is something greater than we are able to comprehend; we feel it, we
know it's all around and within us, but none of our senses can define
it. And we humans do so want to define everything. We want to be able
to capture the essence of that power we sense and somehow tap into
it. Religions are our efforts to do just that. We've come at it in
various ways because we are a diverse species—what speaks to the
heart and mind of people in one place and time is different in detail
from what speaks to people in another place and time. Different in
the particulars, but with the same underlying desire to find those
elusive answers.
The religious institutions, as we know them now, are in decline. They have calcified and become
rigid and intractable in their insistence on conformity. The essence
of life, the Truth that we seek, is fluid and ethereal. It is not
definable, nor can we capture it once and for all. It is our seeking,
and not our finding, that is the path to the ultimate Source.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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