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There is no single road
to spirituality

All of our religious faiths and forms of spirituality have many common elements.

Back of the differences of language, symbol, image, story and myth lie the same human experiences. No one individual may have had all of them, but they are all normal, common human experiences. "Nothing that is human is alien to me."

There is no "hole in the soul," God-shaped or otherwise. We are each OK, but we are different from one another in ways both subtle and obvious.

We each have to learn to be fully human. We each have different experiences shaping the background against which that learning must take place. We each bring different abilities, inclinations, preferences, "sets-to-respond" to that learning to be fully human.

My friend Harry Zeigler never could understand what was meant by the little voice that talks to you on the inside of your head. And until he was several years old, my son Joshua's voice was out loud. Vocalized. He had to learn to internalize it.

Ritual works for some people. For some that experience is an irritant. For others, just meaningless noise and commotion.

Even with a good teacher, some find meditation only a sleep inducer. With the right approach, which varies from person to person, almost everyone can learn to use that tool. Still, the differences. For some the metaphor of the two realms seems intuitive and natural. For others it seems like a form of denial, or wish fulfillment, superstitious magic. For others it seems just as obvious that the universe is one realm. Much is unknown, but when it becomes known it will be seen to be part of one seamless web.

Ironically, we humans seem to be as loath to accept the otherwise obvious differences between us as we are to accept the commonalities, whatever guise they wear.

Many attempts have been made to devise a common human language, like Esperanto. Yet some things can be said in one language that cannot be said with the same connotation and denotation in another. "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" does not equal "The vodka is good but the meat has spoiled."

Metaphors, similes, figures of speech do not translate one-for-one from one language to another. And it is a rare second-language speaker who ever comes to speak it as a first-language speaker does. That is why poetry is so hard to translate, and more of our consciousness is language-based and poetrylike than we realize.

Similarly, there have been many attempts at a common human religion. Indeed, many religions hold themselves out to be such and are consternated when one says, "Gee, that just doesn't seem to work for me." One Christian witnessing to me, for example, could go no further when I didn't fear going to hell.

Can a religious community survive, even thrive, without a common spiritual vocabulary? American theologian Howard Thurman acknowledged the common base but thought that its individual expression would always be particularistic. One might "know about" the commonality but be unable to experience it with any authenticity except in one or a few expressions. I think that the answer to the question at the beginning of this paragraph is yes, but it requires a leap of imagination and empathy that does not typically characterize any of the other faiths with which I am familiar.

I can say my faith in Christian, Buddhist and secular humanist terms. I have been able to enter at least partway into others. But I tried very hard with Shinto and found it totally opaque to me. I can identify with animistic traditions at an aesthetic level, but it remains metaphor -- "as if" -- for me.

However, each time I have tried to enter the universe of discourse of another faith, I have always learned more about my own. Like Indra's Net, each experience lets me see the whole from another facet, or from another point of view, that I might never have seen from within my own familiar context. A part of what I see as my job as a religious leader is to help others find their own spiritual vocabulary, their own language for experiencing their religious lives. For each of us learns to be fully human on and in our own terms.

Fortunately, it appears that if God exists, God is multilingual.

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