The Dalai Lama expands on a truth deep in a mother’s love: “One reflection that arises from the agreement of all the major religious traditions on the centrality of compassion is that it reminds us [that] because we have all been nurtured in a womb, because we are all born of a mother, affection is in our basic nature.”
Will Christianity pass away? Will some other religion or philosophy take its place? You hear such questions from time to time . . . A scripture says that “nothing will be impossible with God.” On the question whether God will keep God’s savings in the church forever, we might better err on the side of caution.
Is not this your transfiguration: “Now that I have felt him, I can see him?” Jesus is not visible except to the inward eye, the feeling eye. There was nothing there for all to see. The gospels are plain-spoken in this–some saw him as devil, some as disturbed, some as miscreant, some as master, some as transfigured in the light of God, some face to face. Never suppose that your faith, and your deepening faith, depends on some fact yet to be pinned down, or on your forlorn acceptance of some assertion that seems to you contrary to nature. Faith is not a thing so small. It is a feeling for life that gives sight to the blind.
Let us turn to the city of Corinth, A.D. 50. What news? Bad news. The church of Christ has been behaving badly from the beginning. There is a good news side to this bad news, however. The fact that we tell the story that then and now and throughout history, our churches have failed to grasp their purpose proves that some ships have been righted from grave wrongs and sailed on after the storms, guarding their treasures and handing them on for the living. That, and only that, is what is worthy in a tradition.
My mother, of blessed memory, remarked for years on a vexing boldness in her once tiny third son, myself: at two or three years of age, before he knew anything of swimming, this little boy so loved the waters where we summered that he would walk right off the end of the wooden dock and plunge in over his head, apparently unaware or unconcerned that he would shortly need to be saved. And then would do it again, and even again. The act is recorded on home movies! Now, it might occur to some of you that he is telling this story because he has gone and done it again: plunged into the ecclesiastical waters down by The Riverside Church, apparently unaware that he might need to be saved—again!
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