Theos-Talk Archives (January 1997 Message tl00167)

At 03:48 PM 1/8/97 -0500, you wrote:
>
>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.
>

Here my 2 cents worth.

I have seen occassions wherein whether it is in a Church, or a Mosque, or
Hindu Temple or Zoroastrian Temple, or even some important occassions, there
is the elevated sense of something peaceful, loving, joyful which cannot be
easily explained. It is there no matter what your personal beliefs are. I
have seen this in TS meetings as well.

This issue of your observing that in Theosophical organizations you have
noticed the preoccupation with their exclusive rights as channels to the
highest wisdom, is something you may have seen. But my experience,
especially in India has been that you will see a truly brotherly/sisterly
feeling and openness in every lodge I have been to. Of course you do find
one or two snobs in each lodge who think and act as if they are somehow
superior because of their (imagined) feeling closer to the higher beings
than rest of the people.

These are my observations. Everyone else's mileage and direction may vary.


MKR