I like to think of religions as schools, because the potential is there to learn a lot. Also, like schools, some are better at passing along valuable information than others.
Today is Good Friday and also the Feast of the Annunciation, the day the Virgin Mary was visited by an angel and heard that she was to become the Mother of God. One of the things I learned at the school of Christianity that I was fortunate enough to attend, is that the Angel announces to each one of us that God is to be born within us. God is present within us like an egg. Once fertilized, our God-nature becomes gradually more and more apparent, at first appearing like a child and at last maturing into a fully grown human being.
I attended several schools of Christianity during my earlier life. The first one was Roman Catholicism in the 1950’s, and the emphasis there seemed to be on rules and social behaviors. There were all sorts of competitions going on among groups and families in our community that revolved around church. I didn’t get much out of that. I’ve heard it said that religion exists to help society, but spirituality is about the individual. As a child I was fortunate enough to experience the gift of spirituality, even in the context of this first school of christianity. The annunciation (above) pictures what I personally got out of that first school: the sense that I could go within and meet God, the notion that prayer and contemplation were a valuable part of life.
My next school of Christianity centered on love, forgiveness and healing. It was a school of reconciliation, for people who needed to forgive and be forgiven, for people who needed to heal. It was right after the Vietnam War, the drug explosion, and the destabilization of society by the civil rights movement, so there was a lot of pain around. Our group was especially focused on the Holy Spirit as guide and teacher and source of personal transformation. Of course, there were members of our group who felt that people needed to comply with formulaic belief statements in order to be christians, but it didn’t take me long to see that those statements were not at all important, and what mattered was the intentions in the heart. If a formula expressed how you really felt, fine, but I learned the difference. Spiritual experience became the most important thing to me, because it seemed to me that everything we needed to learn, and to see, comes from within, if we can just listen attentively. As for personal transformation, I saw our intent as bringing to us what we needed for changing ourselves, for becoming more who we really were, uniquely ourselves, designed by a loving God.
The third school of Christianity I attended was centered on the suffering of Christ. My earlier, first school focused on this a lot too, but in a different way. The first school saw the suffering of Christ as God’s way of atonement. But the third school saw Christ’s suffering as having something to say about our suffering, and the transformation that could come out of it. This was the school of ‘a seed falls into the ground so that new life can spring up.’ This school helped people deal with the (perceived) failures of their lives. Our American culture and society is very much centered on the concepts of success and prosperity. But clearly not everyone is enjoying those, and even when we do, it isn’t necessarily going to last forever. We are all going to have to face our eventual demise. This particular school of Christianity is very compassionate, and wants to help us walk through ‘the valley of the shadow of death.’
It feels appropriate to review my schooling in Christianity on Easter Sunday. To express my appreciation. I’ve moved on now to a university that seems like the perfect continuation of my education. Within this university there is the vast and varied school of Hinduism, for one thing. But my present school seems to have room for the whole world, so I won’t try to limit it with a name. It’s Amma’s School, and Amma means Mother, so maybe her school is the mother of all kinds of learning. It seems to be that for me. I want to express my appreciation for all the wonderful schools of life and religion I've attended.
Wishing you Easter Blessings! With Love, Karen
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