The Great Circle-Dance of the Religions by Bro. David Steindl-Rast O.S.B.

Every religious tradition starts from the mystical insight of its (known or unknown) founder. Every one of them has for its highest goal to lead its followers to mystical oneness with the Ultimate.

[Cont. from page 1] ... The great teacher concerning the heart in the Christian tradition is St. Augustine. That he was an African may well have something to do with his awareness of soul and heart. Living during the collapse of the Roman Empire from the fourth to the fifth century — the collapse in fact of the known world of his time — he turned inward and discovered the heart. His Confessions have been called the first psychological autobiography. In Christian art he is depicted as lifting up a heart in his hand.

"In my heart of hearts," St. Augustine wrote, "God is closer to me than I am to myself." Paradoxically, he also wrote, "restless is our heart until it rests in you, O God." The first of these two quotations expresses our deepest belonging, the second our restless longing for ultimate meaning. T.S. Eliot touches the same paradox when he writes "home is where we start from," but also,

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

What we know at the end of our quest is the meaning of belonging. And the driving force of the spiritual quest is our longing to belong.

In order to check this out more concretely against your own experience, please try to remember now one of your most alive, most awake, most meaningful moments. Psychologists call these moments peak experiences; religious parlance speaks of mystical moments. The mystic experience is an (often sudden) awareness of being one with the Ultimate — a sense of limitless belonging — to God, if you wish to use this term. Suddenly, for a brief moment, you feel no longer "left out," as we so often do, no longer orphaned in the universe. It feels like a homecoming to where you belong.

Rightly understood, the mystic is not a special kind of human being; rather, every human being is a special kind of mystic.

We all have had these moments even if we shy away from calling them mystical. Rightly understood, the mystic is not a special kind of human being; rather, every human being is a special kind of mystic. At least, this is our calling. In peak experiences we glimpse what life could be like if humans were relating to one another and to all there is, not in an atmosphere of alienation, but out of a deep sense of belonging. All of us are challenged by the glimpses we catch in our best moments. Those who rise to that challenge become mystics.

Remember how these glimpses surprise us, when we least expect them? Thomas Merton suddenly felt one with all on a street corner in Louisville/Kentucky, when he had merely set out to go to the dentist. You may have felt this limitless belonging on a mountaintop, or when listening to music. But you may just as likely have been surprised by it when you were stuck in rush-hour traffic or changing your baby's diapers. Whenever it hits us, we know: this is it! This is the answer, as it were, to a question we keep carrying around with us, unable to put it into words and unable to drop it. We may not be able to put the answer into words either — who can put the meaning of a sunrise into words? — but we can rest in it. We have come home. We have found meaning.

If this description rings true to you from experience, we have found a launching pad for our exploration into the vast universe of religions. We have found our personal access to what all religions have in common. For, by their own testimony, the mystic experience lies at the core of every one of them. Every religious tradition starts from the mystical insight of its (known or unknown) founder. Every one of them has for its highest goal to lead its followers to mystical oneness with the Ultimate.

Attention to our moments of meaning, no matter how fleeting they might be, can lead us even further. They provide us with a brief taste of the nectar, the sweetness in the chalice of all the different religions blossoming like so many flowers in the garden of this world. Our moments of meaning also provide us with a pattern for understanding the differences — and the mutual relationships — between the world's religions. In order to explore this pattern we must look deeper. We need to look carefully at some subtle aspects of your experience to which you may not yet have paid attention.

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