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In one church, our director of music requested to meet with me in private. He sat before me, and he tested me on whether I was a universalist or not. I failed his test, as I spoke of the Grace transcending the church and its version of a Christian Christ. He, with smugness, told me I had failed his test. You would have thought I was a carrier of some dangerous, infectious virus. He, stern-faced, got up and left the office. At least I was not in a society and age when my head might go rolling due to a heresy of inclusion, one that certainly was instrumental in getting the law elite and religious vips on the heels of Jesus, until his being killed as a heretic. I found out we, in the churches, loved the idea of unconditional Love, but loving the idea is not the same as unconditional Love ~ that becomes the challenge. We often seemed to want to be the only flavor of ice cream in the cosmic ice cream parlor-the others, sad for them, could just melt on the sidewalk.
As for myself, I prefer a rainbow with many colors, I choose a God who does, too. Yet, that was a problem to many of those I chose to serve. I came to see most of them had never thought through what they thought, only were saying what they were taught they ought to say, believing what they had been taught was the only way to believe. Now, do not point fingers at the church, for the church is simply oft a reflection of the way we humans act out how we have forgotten who we are, how we have oft been anesthetized by an acculturated culture of preferential treatment, rather than embodying the aliveness of the beauty and power of Love.
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Grace unites, for we are already united prior to the differences we use to find security in being special, being the only chosen, being the blessed while others are looked at as the doomed, being the enlightened while the rest of the world walks around in darkness.
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From a Buddhist teaching, we see another insight into our belonging-together, yet a Buddhist would deny this has a dogmatic nature. This is simply, scientifically, how Life works. And how Life works, is how Grace works, for Life is Grace, is graceful.
When the Buddha attained enlightenment beneath the Bodhi tree in Bodh Gaya, India, he gained insight into the secret of the universe. It was from this insight that he revealed the powerful principle of pratityasamutpada, which is commonly known by its English translation, “dependent arising.” Pratityasamutpada describes how everything we experience-both material and conscious-arises, plays out, and falls away in reliance upon an infinite web of contingent relationships. In other words, it is because things depend that life moves and we can experience it.
*Elizabeth Mattis Namgyel. The Logic of Faith: A Buddhist Approach to Finding Certainty Beyond Belief and Doubt.
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