Theos-Talk Archives (January 1997 Message tl00156)

On Christmas Eve I went for the first time in about 30 years to
the church where I was baptized and which many of my relatives
still attend.  Semi-reluctantly, I went with my mother who
would otherwise not go out at that hour; but was very glad to
have done so.  The experience inspired some reflections on
Christianity and Theosophical attitudes toward it.

It was somewhat surprising to find that singing hymns and
listening to a choir could be so thoroughly pleasurable, that a
minister's sermon could make me want to shout "Amen"
(Methodists don't, though), and that seeing all those folks
from the distant past would inspire such warm feelings.  But
the biggest surprise was communion.  The sermon really set up
the communion experience, since it was a "prodigal daughter"
story about a father who welcomed his wayward child home.  The
minister emphasized that *all* people were invited to share
communion, that our true home was with God who was eternally
loving and welcoming, and that Christmas Eve service was
especially a homecoming for people who had moved away or lost
touch with the church.  The overwhelming message was of
all-embracing acceptance and love.  Sounds shallow and trite in
the retelling, but I guess you had to be there-- the atmosphere
was intensely magical and uplifting.

Even as a teen, I was cynically critical of communion service,
thinking the Last Supper a "myth" and therefore silly, and the
"body and blood" stuff primitive and gross.  A few years as a
Baha'i reinforced the tendency to look down on Christianity,
and then many years of immersion in HPB strengthened that
tendency to the max.  Even if I had grown more open-minded in
recent years, there was still no real emotional openness to the
Christian *experience*.  And then, in this service in the old
home town church I'd shunned for most of my life, I *got it* in
a way that had eluded me before.  Partly it may have been the
minister's eloquence, but mostly my own attitude had changed.
What became so abundantly clear is that this experience was
really not at all about some dogma concerning the death of
Jesus and its effects on our own route to heaven.  It was
quite transparently a joyous celebration of the universal
siblinghood of humanity as reflected in that microcosm.  The
preacher was talking about, and people were feeling, a sense of
reconciliation that extended from individuals' relationship
with God to include their relationship with humanity and
specifically with the people present at the service.  I left
feeling quite humbled at the recognition that I had never truly
appreciated the beauty of the spiritual tradition in which I'd
been reared.

Of course part of the backdrop for these feelings was the
awareness that Theosophical organizations which talk about
universal brotherhood had never in my observation walked the walk
to the degree I was seeing at that moment, preoccupied instead with
their exclusive rights as channels to the highest wisdom.  And recent
monitoring of Baha'i developments has shown that too to be a movement
overwhelmed with its own superiority to other religions,
without much sense of what all-embracing acceptance means.

to be continued-- someone has to fax on the line I'm now using.