I understand how tempting it is to take religious figures and mold their identities to fit our own wishes and bend their teachings to match our own beliefs … We all would love to simply be able to kick back, worship our version of God appropriately and then someday be rewarded with “salvation”. After all, who wants to do anything scary or difficult or uncomfortable? Who wants to take responsibility for one’s own happiness or one’s own redemption or one’s own life?

And so we see men & women taking the teachings of “the “Masters” throughout the ages and altering them — tweaking them and editing them and amending them to make them more more comfortable and to make them more self-serving.

In this process, the gentle brilliance of those original wise teachings become more & more about fear and less & less about Love; more & more about exclusion and less & less about Acceptance; more & more about attaining entrance into “Paradise” in the next life and less & less about serving those in need in this one.

This is how religions are born … and this is how the true Salvation offered by the founders of those religions becomes lost.

Fortunately, we have all been given a conscience — an “Advocate Within” as Jesus called it — a bellwether of Truth & Goodness that we can call upon whenever we wish; whenever we have the courage to set aside what we wish were true in favor of what we KNOW to be True; whenever we choose to set aside our desire to be “right” and replace it with the desire to be truly Righteous (i.e. Caring); whenever we decide to make our lives about serving our version of God by serving others instead of worshiping that God so that He (or She) might serve us.

In essence, the original, soft-yet-Strong Truths of the founders of all our religions are still waiting for us … They are embedded within the words of our sacred texts (for those who can read them with “Eyes that See” and hear them with “Ears that Hear”), and — much more importantly — they are waiting to be rediscovered in every opportunity we have to be Kind to those least deserving, and every chance we have to be gentle with those most in need.

Jesus’ brilliance has been buried in Christianity, Buddha’s genius has been obscured by Buddhism, and Rumi’s magic has been tainted by Islam … And yet their Truth lives on.

It lives on in the hands & hearts of every Human Being who remembers what life is truly all about;

It lives on in all those who remember to reach out right here & right now to LOVE;

It lives on in YOU.

Amen … Let it be so.

Filed under: Reconciling the Religions by Scaughdt