Week 36—Monday Galatians 6:1-5
Week 36—MONDAY
“JESUS CHRIST IS THE GURU OF THIS ASHRAM”
The Christian faith is a universal faith and as an expression of that universality it picks out local forms and uses them. Coming in contact with Greek thought it picked out the conception of the Word—a conception not native to Hebrew thought—and put a Christian content into it: “In the beginning was the Word.” Coming in contact with Indian thought, it saw in the Ashram a form it could use. This did not mean that the Christian Ashram would be an amalgam of Christianity and Hinduism. Eclecticisms pick and choose, syncretisms combine, but only life assimilates. Christianity repudiates eclecticisms and syncretisms, but it is life, so it assimilates. But in assimilating it changes. A plant reaches into the soil and picks out elements akin to its nature and takes them up into the life of the plant, but in taking up it changes these elements into the likeness of its own nature, according to the laws of its own being.
So we took up the framework of an Ashram and put a Christian content into it. The Hindu Ashram is organized around a guru, or preceptor—we too would have a guru, but not a human guru, only divine shoulders can bear that responsibility—“Jesus Christ is the Guru of this Ashram” is a motto on the walls of the Sat Tal Ashram, with us the original Christian Ashram. Around him, the Ashram would revolve. That was important, for as we have all denominations in the Ashram fellowship we could have a center of unity: everyone who belongs to Christ belongs to everyone who belongs to Christ. If we say, “What do you believe?” we go apart. But if we say, “Whom do you trust?” we come together—one name upon our lips, one loyalty in our hearts. Our non-Christian friends too can come, often saying, “We love your Christ, but not your Christianity.” If the Center of our faith is Christ, the center of that Center is “the Word become flesh.” That determines the center of our emphasis: this group must be the Word of the Kingdom become flesh.
O Lord and Savior, you are the center of our loyalty and our love. Help us to make you the center of our manifestation of you. May we be the Word made flesh. Let others see in us the Kingdom—the Kingdom in shoes. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: “A conspiracy of love to keep each other at our best.”