All in the Same Boat by Bro. David Steindl-Rast O.S.B.

When we sense the direction in which our heart is yearning, then we realize: In that direction lies God.

[Cont. from page 3] ... You’re doing this in a Christian context, following the model of Jesus. Could you tell us, in simple terms, who is Jesus and what is the tradition of Jesus?

That’s a big and difficult questions, but a good one. First of all, I’d say that a Christian is a person whose spiritual quest in some way or other has received a decisive impetus through Jesus; the tradition is just what brings that impetus to us. And what the Christian message is all about is not so different from what all the other spiritual traditions are about. When you come to the core, to the essence of it, it is about finding meaning in life. That’s ultimately the simplest common denominator: every religious tradition in the world is a way of finding meaning in life.

Now, each one of us, every human being, has religious experiences, whether or not they are in some way associated with organized religion. I would call an experience in which you find meaning in life a religious experience, because the religion within all the religions is the quest for meaning. That’s what makes them all tick, and so your heart, yearning and looking and searching for meaning – that is your religion. An organized religion like Christianity or Buddhism or Islam or whatever is not automatically religious – you have to make it religious. You have to link it with your own religious experience; then it becomes religious for you. You have the task to make religions religious, to tie them back to your own deepest experience of meaningful living.

Everyone has moments of insight – what psychologists call “peak experiences.” Abraham Maslow, who coined the term, originally called these “mystical” experiences; he said, that, from all descriptions, that’s what they are. What happens is that we experience communion with ultimate reality. Profound gratefulness is always a sign; it’s one of the elements that Maslow’s respondents always mentioned – “I felt so grateful, I didn’t know grateful to whom. I don’t believe in a god, but I felt like kneeling down and thanking life or fate or good fortune for it” or something like that. We’ve all had these experiences, and by talking with other people, we come to the conclusion. “That’s what people call ‘God.’” You see, it isn’t as if we first knew God and knew that God is the source of meaning. We know nothing but ourselves and our own experiences. When we sense the direction in which our heart is yearning, and begin to see the source of that meaning which we sense in our peak experiences, then we realize: In that direction lies God.

That is something that all human beings have in common; it is sort of the common stock of human religion. It is also the kind of religiousness that you can talk about with every human being. It is the most important religiousness, because it’s the heart of every religion.

And do you see the different religions as different interpretations or different ways to articulate this basic, universal mystical experience?

Yes, A founder of a religious tradition, like Buddha, would give it one interpretation, not basically different but quite distinct from the interpretation that someone else gives. You and I experience what the great religious figures experienced, because otherwise we wouldn’t know what they’re talking about; but what they do with it is that they discover something in it. That’s what makes for the newness of the Buddhist teaching that pops up in the sixth century before Christ, or the newness of the Christian tradition. This man Jesus who started it all made a discovery in our human religious experience which no one before had made with that intensity and that clarity – and here I come to answer your original question: “Who is Jesus?” I’m sure every Christian would express it in different words, but my way of expressing it is that what Jesus saw more clearly than others was that this source of meaning, toward which we strain and for which we long, isn’t just somehow out there, where we can eventually hope to reach it, but turned toward us.

I’m calling it “it” because I’m speaking in a general language, but in Christianity, it becomes more than an “it”; it becomes “the Father.” Here, you have to be very careful, because for us “Father” has sort of macho overtones; for Jesus it had no macho overtones whatsoever. The Jewish father at the time of Jesus was more like the Jewish mother in our time. You see it in the story Jesus tells of the prodigal son who has wasted all his father’s money; then when he is down and out, he comes to the father. The father behaves like a Jewish mother and smothers him with kisses; he doesn’t even let him get an apology out. He says, “Look at your dress, we have to put a new garment on you. " 

In other words, Jesus was using the term “Father” in a broader sense than God as an old patriarch?

Yes. When Jesus speaks about God as the “Father,” he means the parent, the loving father/mother. Now, that seems to have been pretty strongly anchored in the culture at his time anyway, and so the newness that has now come into human religious experience is not that; it’s not as if the idea were absolutely brand-new and nobody had ever had an inkling of it. No, the great thing is that everybody has had an inkling of it, and it has echoes everywhere in religion. The newness consists in the clarity, in the centrality of this insight.

Jesus tells us that God is compassionate, God is our father. He is speaking to simple people, so he doesn’t say it in abstract terms like even “compassionate.” He just says, “God is my father,” and he addresses himself to God as “Daddy.” He used a term that was shocking for his contemporaries and thereby set up a community in which everybody is included. If ultimately reality is my father, then every human being is my brother and sister, and not only every human being but every cat and every dog and every animal and every blade of grass – everything.

So Jesus’ breakthrough was that he went beyond a watchful, avenging God to a God whom you can trust and rely on, someone who can be a friend.

Yes, but it is important to remember that Jesus didn’t invent Christianity. He was a Jew all his life and died as a Jew. And I wouldn’t even say he made a tremendous break with Judaism; what he provided was just a new insight. The name “Father” for God was there in the Old Testament; it wasn’t very frequent, but it was there. Jesus just picked it up and made it central and lived it. That is the decisive thing, because this is what we always do with our peak experience, whether it’s our private religion or whether it’s an organized religion. We have to deal with our experience on all the different levels of our psyche, and that means we have to interpret it.

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