will find a lot to believe in again when we are permitted to stop confusing faith with the saga of a few lionized male leaders. When we stop hearing the ram’s horn as tyranny but as music. When we maintain respect for traditions but keep glory at arm’s length. When we are smart enough to sprinkle the salt of skepticism upon the hard-won bread of life.
Spirituality is the story of thousands of everyday people going about their nonsensational lives until, when trouble or cruelty or cancer call, necessity intervenes, and they show up, line up, reach out, and sometimes even pray. And there is hope when those prayers are not crushed by the small-mindedness of church leaders who care more about their power than our piety.
“Take off your shoes,” God admonishes Moses at the site of the Burning Bush. “You are standing on holy ground.” What was this God actually saying? Moses was not at the Vatican. He was not at the Mosque of Omar. He was not even in Jerusalem. He was in the wilderness, in the middle of nowhere. In other words, wherever you feel God, that is holy ground; and what you feel and what you experience is real and it is what you believe.
A wise pastor of the Gospel once told me, “Religion works best as a salad. It has to have a variety of ingredients mixed together to come out good. Each one of us is an ingredient.”
These days, too many people are inbred from childhood to follow extremist chief rabbis and self-righteous evangelicals and sexually deviant priests. There are imams who have lost their minds and any connections with Mohammed. The majority of Muslims, who honor the Prophet’s historic message, have watched their faith become transposed in a regrettable way.
Mohammed was a complex and charismatic man who embraced all of the preceding faiths, affirmed the prophetic qualities of Moses and Jesus before him, and who stated: “Do not be people without minds of your own, saying that if others treat you well you will treat them well, and that if they do wrong you will do wrong. Instead, accustom yourselves to do good if people do well and not to do wrong if they do evil.”
This is the beacon in whose name mothers send their children to be suicide bombers? Moses is the freedom marcher and teacher in whose standard clerics in Jerusalem spit at teenage girls, who excommunicate one another, and yearn for the destruction of the Dome of the Rock. Jesus asked, “What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church?” What are you to believe? One thing worth knowing is that the religions have somewhat fossilized into archaic, even dangerous organisms, spewing out hate and division, enslaving minds, and that you have to go back to the beginnings to rediscover that each one of us is God’s equal child and all we have to believe in is pastoral kindness.
Just because some of God’s professionals and profiteers have lost contact with the rhapsody, the aspirations, and the aches that came with their faiths does not mean that any one of us is going to give away our desire to believe in something or to feel a moment of awe without a priestly tutorial. In the end, the Bible is a library of ideas and people and oracles and phonies and miracles and romances and murders and music, and like the human experience itself, it is loaded with contradictions.
The Bible is, at once, the most widely published and completely unknown volume in the history of this planet. It sits unopened, like a perfunctory slab, in most every hotel room drawer on the globe. People open and shut the drawer, notice the book, but rarely pick it up. It seems to us like it belongs there—we expect it there, like some ominous reminder of forced, past devotionals or hand wringing on the part of a parent or a priest. But we rarely open or refer to it. It remains a bound mystery that we never really understood and we go on with our business.
The Jews say, “If you only have Torah, then you don’t even have Torah.” In other words, there’s more—a lot more—to living life and believing in something than just arbitrarily quoting from one segment, or even a single passage, from a book. It’s not holy because God wrote it. It’s holy because men and women inspired by God wrote it. With each successive writer came a new layer of insight, of pain, of yearning, and breakthrough. If we surrender the authorship to God, then we human beings are just vessels and poetry dissolves into the earth.
We upgrade or discard our cellular phones within months of each edition. Our cars become outdated within minutes of leaving the dealership, but we still believe in the automobile. Does all this make a cell phone or a vehicle any less essential to us in the twenty-first century? Can’t we be just as nimble with the data and the information we cherish and still pray while acknowledging that that book was canonized when people rode on camels and the only upgrade available back then was their imagination?
We know George Washington did not chop down a cherry tree. Does that make what he had to say and how he fathered the United States any less sacred? So does it really matter if Moses actually climbed up Mt. Sinai and came down forty days later with two stones inscribed, “with God’s finger,” and called them “the Ten Commandments?” Doesn’t it matter more that we have the legacy of law and decency and the notion of honoring our parents and the prohibition against stealing from others?
As I mentioned previously, the text is not our homeland; life is. God is not to be determined; God is to be discovered—like dawn is a personal experience and the moon is seen in as many ways as there are eyes that can look up.
I remember gazing into the wedding canopy where my younger daughter exchanged marriage vows with her betrothed just a few years ago. The evening ceremony took place outdoors in an orchard-filled community complex not far inland in central Israel.
The open field, the fragrant citrus, the celestial ceiling, the bittersweet sentiments of life and generations all converted the setting into a natural sanctuary. There was a palpable holiness in the air, none of it organized, legislated, or tethered to any one creed. Muslims, Jews, and Christians, agnostics, atheists, doubters, and zealots became one in the liturgy of love and the religion of romance.
I was there, simply as the father of the bride. Ironically, even though I am a veteran rabbi, I could not perform her ceremony. Israel forbids non-Orthodox rabbis from officiating at milestone events because the fundamentalist rabbis control all such things. And they actively prevent all other inclusive denominations from functioning. The ordination of Reform and Conservative rabbis is not recognized by the government, presenting yet another travesty of organized religion and its duplicity with cynical political operatives.
But it didn’t matter that night. God knew what was in my heart and my daughter knows how much I love her—therein is the sanctity. She was happy; she was no longer a child and the twigs bent under her feet toward eternity. I wasn’t concerned about religious ordinances and church hypocrisies. I looked up at the glittering sky and felt the moon knew everything that had to be known.
These are the moments when you just know there is a God and the best part is you don’t have to struggle with what that even means. You float in those rare interludes of tender human milestones and you cross, with some of the mystics, over the “bridge of judgment” into paradise.
You dance with the Hopi Indians, cotton strands in your hands, making flowers to symbolize the heavens. Your eyes sting with the Buddhist wisdom that those who live in these moments may yet bless this realm again with angelic insight.
You are at one with everything and your pockets—like the white burial shrouds of the Jews—are empty. Your soul is full and you are not afraid of the future. The happiness of a child is the bridge that binds this side to the other, and there you are and you comprehend for a fleeting, delicious moment why it is good to be born and it is okay to die.
I don’t need anybody to tell me who or what God is and I’m not in terror over death anymore. Experience and birth and sacred promises and exceptional pain have all filled me with quiet compliance. Who can be free near a child’s rapture and not know there is a God?
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