But God Finds a Bridge
But God Finds a Bridge
Some years ago, as a young speaker I was addressing a rather small audience in New Brunswick, Canada. During the evening, my hosts invited another Indian gentleman to join us for dinner, a schoolteacher. In the 1970s the Indian population in Canada was very sparse. So anyone who knew two people from India took it upon themselves to make certain that the two should meet. Such are the vagaries of human friendships. He came from a Hindu background and when he met me for dinner, he was extremely hostile. He believed I had betrayed my culture by becoming a Christian and somehow made the assumption that the purpose in my meeting him was to convert him to Christianity. To say that it was an uncomfortable evening was to put it mildly.
I listened and assured him that whatever prompted the host’s invitation, I was as much a guest as he and that he was under no obligation to attend the evening talk later that evening. It was entirely his choice. He did attend. He did listen. He left without saying anything.
Several years went by before I received a call from him. He was in a hospital in Toronto and asked if I would come to visit him. I knew that the hospital he was in specialized in cancer treatment. When I walked into the room at the hospital, I quickly apologized to the occupant for being in the wrong room and stepped out again. But he corrected me and called me by name. It was, indeed, he, but he had been reduced to a shadow of himself and tears flooded my eyes. He gave me a hug and told me not to feel bad for him and then began to tell me that during the twisting path he had followed after we met, he had come to know and enjoy a relationship with Jesus, the same Jesus he had so shunned at our first meeting. He had learned what it meant to walk with God while still cherishing the culture of his birth and to find peace and hope in his innermost being. As we talked and finally bade each other good-bye, it was a fitting parting. God was with him, and he knew what true spirituality was about.
Why Jesus? What difference does it make what you believe? Is truth really even knowable? Could it be that postmodern spirituality is really the expression of a universal hunger rather than an answer to anything? What are the deep-seated questions that drive the quest for spirituality? Why is it that in the West we seem to have discarded the message of Christ, while in the East they have begun to realize that he is the one they are looking for? I have just one plea as we proceed: Let us consider these things frankly and honestly, without the rancor or bitterness that too often clouds the vision and makes truth the casualty.
In my college days, I read an essay in which the writer stated that one ought always to be grateful to those who made you try harder. I mention this because I have to commend the New Spiritualists for setting the bar high for us by awakening us to the questions of life’s purpose and forcing us to take the journey of life earnestly, and perhaps consider seriously what we have always taken for granted. As a philosopher and follower of Jesus Christ, I cannot ignore the New Spirituality; I have to ask myself whether the worldview being espoused really has the answers people claim to be looking for or the package that is presented is more substantive than its content. Are they pointing to a disease without giving a real cure?
One thing the promoters of New Spirituality have unintentionally done with certainty is to illustrate the truth of C. S. Lewis’s statement that each of us as a human being does not have a soul; each of us is a soul. We each have a body. That is the paradigm from which I want to respond to the New Spirituality and demonstrate that everything the New Spiritualists say they are seeking is actually found in Jesus. No, not the Jesus of popular television marketing. Not the Jesus of the New Ager’s imagination. And not the Jesus of all talk and no walk, who is heard but never seen. The Jesus I am talking about is the Ultimate Reality who became flesh to bring us grace and truth that we might become the children of God.
Our destiny is in a relationship to a person, not in a pilgrimage to a place. Our purpose is in communion with the living God, not in union with an impersonal idea or nameless Higher Power: Such categorization is intellectual cowardice. Access to an abstract power gives you no one to be grateful to in times of blessing and no one to question and receive comfort from in times of sorrow. The world was made for the body. The body was made for the soul. And the soul was made for God. Not everything is actually as it is marketed to be, good or bad.
Hinduism uses the term “leela” to describe its story. The very word means a “play” or a “drama.” So as the wheels of fortune have turned from texts to pretexts to contexts, we have arrived at a time in human history when science claims to be the ultimate authority for everything, and if science can’t quite explain everything just yet, it is on the verge of a theory. We are at a time when postmodernism defies certainty, truth, and meaning; when spiritualism dabbles in quantum theory; and when randomness has become the order of the day. Isn’t it ironic that at the same time, the world is on the edge of financial bankruptcy because we have conducted our financial affairs in a random fashion, as if there are no absolutes? Every serious-minded person needs to ask the questions of spiritual truth honestly. The game shows and showmanship in the marketplace may tantalize for a while. But truth will triumph in the end. The daunting questions represented by this New Spirituality, so obscured and propelled by the media, will not go unanswered.
I remember a statement made by the president of the ill-fated PTL. Commenting on the icons they had become in the eyes of the masses and the material success that oozed from their gains in wealth and fame, he said, “We became less than what we were meant to be.” That statement is profound.
The New Spirituality represents this same tragedy. In promising sublimity and divinity to each of us, its proponents have actually made us less than we were meant to be. God alone knows how to humble us without humiliating us and how to exalt us without flattering us. And how he effects this is the grand truth of the Christian message.