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Open to the Light
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Today's Saying: "Every minute that your heart is open is a minute to cherish."
*Dzigar Kongtrul. Training in Tenderness.
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I attended a meeting with a church group gathered for breakfast. We were asked our opinion on a matter of religious belief. A woman gave her answer. The facilitator asked her why she had come to that conclusion. She answered, "Because God, to me, is love."
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Christology: the theory of who Jesus was or is; an ideology about Christ.
A Seeker and the Sage
Sir, what is your Christology?
What do you mean?
On what side of the theological divide do you choose to reside?
What do you mean by theological divide?
I mean, some say Jesus was God, and some say only a man. In seminary, I learned the first group has a high Christology and the other group a low Christology.
And?
I just want to know on what side of the divide are you. Do you teach a high Christology or a low Christology?
When you hold the hand of a hurting person, does that person need your love or your Christology?
I guess love.
Then, you have your answer.
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One can rightly have beliefs, religious or otherwise, but the wise keep such in the background. They know beliefs easily divide us one from the other. What the "i" believes becomes a mental idol one unquestionably adheres to. One may soon see she or he has closed both heart and mind: mind to seeing otherwise, heart to those who disagree.
Shunryu Suzuki wrote, in Zen Mind, Beginners Mind, "The beginner’s mind is the mind of compassion. When our mind is compassionate, it is boundless." So, with an open, ever-teachable mind, not a closed one, boundlessness is present, for the mind is not closed down over its thought - and a belief is a thought. Ego tends to see security in hiding behind belief. In this hiding, the self can excuse the most horrible treatment of others who are apparently one of the others unlike me, unlike us. With this attitude, persons easily speak of love and even God's love and behave unjustly toward persons who hold a different system of belief or style of life. Two main venues where we see this taking place is religion and politics.
So, one can confess a creed or confession of faith. That creed or confession is a series of thoughts; in itself, it is nothing but a collection of ideas that may or may not reflect Truth. In boundless mind, the heart of innocence, there are no fences to define inside from outside, so no limit to love and compassion. However, what we often do is use our beliefs to create a boundary and place all those who differ or differ enough from us on the other side; in this scenario, of course, we are on the inside - the right side. Yet, in the Boundless, there is no other side. There is only one side. There has always only been one side. We could say "God" is fenceless.
For wise beings, in the foreground is what is most important. And the most important is not what you think but that you are. And compassion is not an ideology; compassion is a quality of being - not believing or doing. Compassionate beings prioritize compassion, for they have become compassion.
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*© Brian K. Wilcox, 2021
*Brian's book, An Ache for Union: Poems on Oneness with God through Love, can be ordered through major online booksellers or the publisher AuthorHouse. The book is a collection of poems based on wisdom traditions, predominantly Christian, Buddhist, and Sufi, with extensive notes on the poetry's teachings and imagery.
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