Ecumenical Noise

Is it more important to focus on living the Gospel in our midst than the arguments of our creedal faith and its liturgical expression? Is it more important to remember the historical development of the Sermon on the Mount and its etiology in the Hebrew Scriptures' Levitical Holiness Code. Its expression also in the Qur'an? Isn't the fact that we believe in One God the only point that really matters? And why do we in our human perspectives with all its frailties, believe that we can know the mind of God who searches the heart of all? Is this place, this place of believing in One God, the place of unity between us, that supersedes all other experiences and expressions of religion? Creedal or Liturgical, Dogmatic or Doctrinal? Is this the place where we begin to live, "Love God and love thy neighbor as thyself?" Isn't this the goal of all religions?

So what does a monastic heart, purity of heart, or new monasticism have to say about this? It is precisely in cultivating this purity of heart within us, this stripping away of the vanities we feel comfortable with in order to feel safe within ourselves that we are asked by God to surrender. We are asked to let go of the things of the world, the feelings of the world that would take us anywhere or anyplace other than an expression of love. We are asked to strip away the hardness of our hearts, to smash (horeb) our human hearts to allow the seeds of faith and love to flourish within and around us. This love will thrive to tear away the disingenuous, distracted and detached person to purify and flower the authentic, attached and attuned person whose heart is oriented to God, the Divine, and thereby all divine and godly things in others. Only then can we recognize any other and all others as neighbor. It is the achievement of harmony of heart and therefore the achievement of peace. A way of practicing radical hospitality to others.

Until we welcome within this new purified heart, our neighbor, and love them as ourselves, while loving ourselves in the God we believe in, our religions and their expressions will continue to divide our hearts and us. We are each created unique and good, as different as the wild flowers in a field. Each flower follows the sun with its roots intermingled with the roots of the flower next to it, yet all depend on the same "living water" to exist. Why in the world would we choose to see that as something to be changed, to become standardized, and thereby eliminate the natural beauty that exists?

All in the Ecumenical dialogue will be "noise" until we recognize and accept that the way someone else loves God will always be different than us. We are all fed from the same spring and nourished from the same source. The way another expresses their love of God and neighbor may actually be better than my own. How wonderful this celebration of love should be exhorted and not maligned. Harmony of heart, harmony in our houses of either Church or domestic church or sacred place is the expression of new monasticism... a state of being... not a destination point. It is a place of balance, within us, between us and among us. God Bless.