Open my heart

I always thought that religious people were running away from life, that the world was just too big, too scary, too much to deal with and they found a way to escape from it. It always seemed like a great out to have. If god controls everything then we’re not responsible, I can pass off the blame on someone else.

That’s what I used to think.

I suppose for some people that is the case, I never truly believed that living a life for god, could also involved living a life for oneself; devoid of personal responsibility one could just put up their feet and enjoy the ride.

I know differently now, for many people it’s not like that at all. For me initially it was an act of curiosity… wait a minute… your telling me that all those random experiences I had of ‘oneness’ those moments of feeling beyond myself, those feelings of connectedness have been experienced by others? That they’ve been talked about and debated by scholars of every major faith? You’ve got to be kidding me. I felt so surprised to learn that many of the ideas that I held sacred were indeed considered sacred by my own faith.

I’ve often wondered if I could have gone to other faiths and found the same or similar things. I think the answer is yes, but after my initial fear and rejection of my own for so many years, it felt oddly right to me to give what I’d been given a real chance. Not that I didn’t buy a book about Buddhism with my first collection of Jewish books when I went to the local bookstore (the books I bought? To be a Jew, God is a Verb, Siddhartha and The Jew in the Lotus). I mean I had to make a nod to the multiculturalism that I grew up with and was holding on to with ferocity.

As I continued to learn, I was constantly surprised by the ideas I was dealing with, about how well the overreaching philosophy meshed with my own. God was a part of that philosophy but I still felt it unnecessary to really tackle the elephant in the room. It’s not that I ignored god, it’s that I felt the question irrelevant. Okay so maybe this ‘god’ character is at the center of all this amazing philosophy, I don’t need to believe in god to get wisdom from this. I can take what I like and leave the rest, after all if my own consumer dominated culture has thought me anything it’s that I can pick and choose what I like, whatever fits into my own groove.

The great danger of that idea is that we, being the selective selfish creatures that we are will most likely ignore the things that we may most need to better ourselves, preferring to stay within the comfortable assumptions and behaviors that got us to that point.

What I’ve begun to realize of course is that accepting god, god as I understand him / it / she / we?? Is ultimately an act not of complacency or surrender but an act of love, mans salvation is by and through love. Being in love means that we are giving up ourselves to someone .That you are allowing the way you act to be influenced by them because you want to connect with them. Its means that you are risking being driven insane by that person when you do something they don’t like; all because you know that they believe you can do better. It means that when you do disappoint them that you’re allowing them to make you feel sad, to feel pain all because you want so fully to connect with them, to be with them. And it also means that you are allowing yourself to cause them pain because when love is mutual, when it is truly shared it means that you will cause them pain because they care about you, because they believe in you. Because they don’t want to see anything bad happen to you, because they want to protect you even when that may not be possible. I was surprised when I learned this, I continue to be surprised when I see this fully realized in the world; because it is the ultimate act of greatness, it is the ultimate act of self to live this.

I accept my own selfish impulses, I accept that I am weak when I should be strong, I accept that I must fail, I accept that I have only one small part of the answer. Yet I do not despair, I once thought that turning towards god, was to accept certainly into one’s life. Now I know it is the act of accepting and embracing uncertainly, it is an act of rejecting tragedy and accepting hope and salvation.