I don’t know when I started to wonder if I have a choice in how I view myself–as a creature living in this world. This choice has to be both a spiritual and a practical one. I see three alternatives. Two are religious traditions which have influenced, in their different ways, how I interpret what happens in my life: Christianity and Buddhism. The third is the non-religious, non-spiritual, scientific perspective that is the underlying orientation of our modern world.
Each of these three approaches tries to account for our presence in a realm that we all assume must be real because we know no other. In the West, the hands-down winner in this philosophic yard-sale is the secular perspective. I include myself in this prevalent view: that I live in a physical reality; which doesn’t have a visible spiritual core.
This secular view, which has replaced religion for the great majority of us in our modern world, is so obviously inadequate as a complete account of the symphonic wholeness that makes up our planet with its inhabitants on land, water and air, that it clearly cannot be the final word on our presence here.
I find myself wondering which of those two religions have the greatest claim on relevance, truth and authority in our modern secular world–and on me personally.
When I think of what distinguishes Christianity and Buddhism from each other, I think of how Christian writing invariably invokes a God; and Buddhism does not. Buddhism does invoke heroic figures who have transcended the suffering of being trapped in a secular way of living, but those beings are not God and they have no special relationship with God, such as being his son. I’m not sure why this seems like a significant difference, since both Christianity and Buddhism see worldly concerns, when they dominate our minds, as a bleak state of imprisonment leading nowhere. And both invoke feelings of freedom and joy at the possibility of liberation from the dark prison of isolation.
Yet, envisioning a Creator of everything who loves His creations and is looking out for them simply feels different than being offered a way out of darkness if we can just overcome the obsessions and mistaken understandings that bind us. I can’t help but wonder why I have never believed in the existence of a Creator, other than the cosmos itself as an innately harmonious and possibly conscious whole. What, I have begun to believe is that Mother Earth is a living whole who does her best to look after all her children for the simple reason that all her children are part of her.
Without some belief that what we do matters, we cannot be guided by an aspiration that we and our fellow inhabitants on Earth can be free to live our best lives. I see in our Mother Earth the chief agent of that freedom. Living without a sense that we are all connected within a greater whole has become common in our society. To feel part of a greater whole, who notices our presence and whose presence is visible to us, is the rarest of gifts. Alienation from that wholeness is the greatest single loss of our modern world.