interfaith_heartformanyfaiths

For quite some time now I have been studying the world of religion as an academic discipline, though of course I can't help but experience it as a

religious person, too.

Exploring religion in the first context, you read a lot about people's thoughts on love and, especially, their Love of God.

Sometimes it is an exposition of the heart; a treatise of

deeply moving sentiment from the pen of a mystic enraptured, a devotee awestruck, or a

layperson awakened. Other times it is a treatise clearly attempting to tread

ever-closer to the beacon of truth sprouting from the philosopher's

stone--a Grecian thinker hoping to capture "goodness" and thus "God-liness," or perhaps a modern

scholar loquaciously hoping to make

empirical

sense of faith. To me, it has always been paradoxical that the study of something so beyond categorization should fall prey to

such a

gluttony of

words. Yet the truth is that reading about the love of others' invariably becomes a meditation on my own, producing ever more words

about an

Essence I

can never hope to capture; and, now, it is in the space of that conundrum that I have been led to the thoughts and feelings I

hope to

share here.

For, it is my intention to focus on the very fact of this "categorization," a streamlining of what the "experience of God" is. I know what it is for me;

and

as I've said, I've read a

lot about what it is, or for that matter is not, for other people. And it has dawned on me that in all of these instances,

and in

fact so much of the way we experience religion is

intent solely on expressing God to Me. It is all personal impressions, personal

expressions, which

of course are extraordinarily important. They maintain our sense of

connectedness and indeed it is they, as in the prophetic

tradition that are the

very cornerstone that have allowed for many religions' growth and ability to touch lives and

inspire souls.

It appears, however, that in focusing so resolutely on our Love of God, our pondering, our searching, and our community's collective seeking, we

somehow forget God's

Love of Us. Allow me to explain: as is obvious in an age of immediate and vast swathes of information, people's

impressions

of The Infinite occupy many guises. I am sure

most feel resolutely committed to their mode of loving, the shape of their faith if you will.

Yet can we

truly imagine that God's love of us is as singular as our own is for It?

Though we may reach out to God in a particular, if not an

individual way, how

can we forget that God is much beyond the categories that we ourselves have created; indeed,

God participated in the

fashioning of them all. The

Divine assumes the ability to see us, and Love us, in ways and means far beyond not only our own understanding, but

also

our own instituted

mechanisms of connecting with It. We may Love God with all the might our heart can muster, and adopted or embraced a

lens, a faith, a religion, a

tradition, a path through which to begin to fathom the awesome splendor of The Divine, but we should not discern that

because we have been able

to embrace just one

course, that God's Heart too occupies a single route down to dwell within and among us.

In the world of today and the world of the past, politics has remained a hindrance to remembering, in a sense, that our humanity and its

propensity

to dwell in the finitude of

the singular, masks the infinitude and diversity of God and God's Love. We take ownership of and claim

superiority in land,

and likewise in the vital connection we, and our

specific singular communities, have cultivated with The Infinite. We juxtapose

this to others' claims of

ownership, and find ourselves in a war of egos--living in total ignorance

of the memory that each of our personal paths,

each of our faiths, each of

our traditions is a gift from the same well that extends far beyond a clash of convictions.

The endeavor to cultivate and realize peace and tolerance amongst nations--weather demarcated by region, by history, by religion, or sometimes

all of these--is not an

issue that can be easily classified as either "liberal" or "conservative" as is so often assumed. These ideals are not

meant to

function on the political plane though in our

secularized world they are often relegated to the ranks of political strategy, plan, and

ideology. Because

the simplicity of terms like liberal and conservative does not capture

the complexity of the peoples and fates encompassed in

the aim for peace and

tolerance--for truly, it is all of us. In some way, to focus once again on categories (i.e. liberal/

conservative), and allow their

ideological offspring to

be the starting point for "meeting one another" in peace, is no real quest for that intention at all. Peace between

religions

is construed in actually

finding one another with a recognition of the Greatness, the Vastness, and Universality of The Divine Heart. It is simply up

to us to recognize

our pre-

existent brotherhood as many souls on many paths to a singular source. Indeed it is here, when we give into an

appreciation of another's creed, and

an appreciate of

another's Love for God, that we give in to the richness of God's Own Love.

photo credit:

www.interfaithresources.com

Amaany
MAGAZINE

A Heart for Many Faiths

Sephora Matzner

Sephora Matzner grew up in Los Angeles as a Reform Jew and studied Religion at UC Berkeley. She now lives with her husband-to-be in

Cambridge, MA where she will be continuing her study of Religion at the Harvard Divinity School in the Fall.

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