I was fortunate to have been exposed to a progressive Christian environment when I was a child. When I asked questions such as “Did Jesus really walk on water?” or “Did Jesus really die, then come back to life after three days?” the usual response I heard was “What do you think?” Then I would talk with my parents or Sunday school teachers about what I thought. I am so grateful for these conversations, because by doing that they were teaching me how to love.
Love, for me, is accepting others completely as they are, just as I was accepted, with no judgment based on what I believed. I even learned that I could be truthful to people who lied to me, generous to those who stole from me, and faithful to those who betrayed me without my sense of God changing one bit. These are the kinds of lessons you learn by applying the teachings of Jesus to the life situations you experience. Time and again I was surprised to discover how accurate the wisdom of Jesus’ teachings really is.
I still remember the moment I realized that applying the Golden Rule to help resolve life’s problems, works whether or not you believe Jesus walked on water, or whether or not you believed he physically came back to life after being crucified. When you understand the spiritual truths to which Biblical metaphors point, then the question of whether or not Bible stories represent actual historical events is no longer relevant. I also realized that spiritual understanding and faith cannot come from merely believing in history anyway. Faith develops as you notice changes in your own life events that result directly from relying on higher, more universal truths.
When this understanding occurred, it was an “Aha” moment for me and it happened when I was a teenager standing in the hallway of the old wooden Sunday school building of our Methodist Church in Annandale, Virginia. At that moment it was clear to me that whatever is spiritual and true is between an individual and his/her experience of God. I look back at that moment as the beginning of my personal search for a spiritual experience with God. It was a feeling of putting away “childish things”; what I had been told I could believe by others (including my parents, siblings, ministers, and Sunday school teachers) and taking responsibility for the evolution of my own spiritual awareness.
This search has led me to the understanding that God is love and love is a spiritual reality you can bring to awareness each moment of your life. Love does not require any specific set of acts, but rather simply appears when your conscious awareness of each moment includes God’s presence. I am no longer interested in being for or against others because they are Americans or foreigners, straight or homosexual, wed or unwed mothers, Republicans or Democrats, liberal or conservative. None of that matters in the presence of love.
Jesus was a radical teacher of the power of love. He worked to fill his followers with the awareness of God’s presence and free them from the human sense of futility they experienced from the political-religious domination system of their day. As Jesus demonstrated, we must be willing to dine with anyone, and still be true to ourselves and God. Only then might we be able to move with others toward the freedom and happiness we all seek, independent of circumstances.
Each of us wants to live a meaningful life, which requires we acknowledge and respect traditions or relationships that are meaningful to others. Love requires respect even when you don't personally understand others or cannot accept their standards in living your own life. Still, we have all evolved from the same source of life. We are all expressions of God’s truth and have the option to become one with it.
Efforts to describe our purpose in detail greater than this lead to unlimited opportunities for error. Consider the following. Can fish understand the realm of horses? Can horses understand the realm of mankind? Can mankind understand the realm of God? The answer is the same for all. Yes, we can understand the limited ways other realms touch us, but most of what is true outside our own realms is beyond our ability to grasp.
An attitude of love puts us in the best position to learn all that we can and to accept whatever is beyond our awareness. An attitude of love is the foundation for faith.
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