I was thinking yesterday at Mass that we need a new Gospel. The Good News seems neither to be news nor particularly good any more. When you explain it to others there is no point in waiting for the jaw-dropping realisation to dawn. It won’t. Much more likely the reaction will be, ‘OK, so?’ Part of the problem, of course, is the fact that there are so few who have discovered the Pearl of Great Price and who live with the joy and unselfconscious generosity of spirit that characterise it. We need a new worldview and it needs to be proclaimed with conviction. Too many have been inoculated against Christianity by exposure to the attenuated strain found in this country. The old Christian cosmology lost the battle with the Newtonian version. Now that the Newtonian one is seen to be inadequate, at least by those with a little science, it does not follow that the Christian one is restored. We live in a vacuum, in that difficult in-between stage of the dialectic while we are waiting for a synthesis to emerge.
There are two areas where there is a desperate search going on. One is at the level of fundamental physics and it is the search for a Grand Unified Theory which would unite and, hopefully, explain the disparate laws and theories. The other is the search for the meaning of consciousness and self. What does it mean to be a human person? Is my existence, my life meaningful? Do I have a purpose in living, a goal to find and if so how do I go about it?
Newton and Freud shattered my simple belief that I was a soul living in a body which would one day depart for Heaven where all would be happiness and bliss for evermore. I must admit it was not just Newton and Freud. The older I get the more I realise that true happiness, moments of ecstasy and bliss, are more likely to occur in times of agony, doubt and turmoil than in times of leisure and tranquillity. I am not sure that I want eternal rest, or even that eternal rest is a true description of the next life, if there be such a thing.
No, I am sure that there is because I have experienced transcendence and glimpsed the Transcendent in some of those fleeting moments of true happiness. But this knowledge leaves me no wiser as to who I am, what my life is for, or where my true destiny lies. And if I who have spent a lifetime of reading, thinking, searching, praying and meditating have no answers what must it be like for others who are just at the beginning of their journey. I sometimes envy the certainty and conviction of others. I feel guilty at times that I do not stand up more and speak out with firmness and confidence. But I am not confident that my view is right, or any more right than that of others. That is not quite true. I seem to have gone beyond the ideological proclamations. I no longer accept the myths of Christianity as literal truth but as symbols and metaphors pointing at the Truth. I am reminded of the Kena Upanishad:
Who says the Spirit is not known knows; who claims that he knows, knows nothing. The ignorant think that the Spirit lies within knowledge, the wise man knows It beyond knowledge.
Not that I consider myself wise, far from it. However, it is seldom possible to talk about this with others. It would not be understood and so I drift among them trying to hang on to my integrity without upsetting theirs.
I think Christ was a most extraordinary man, A man who knew the Divine within himself and who wanted to show others that they too could come to know God. I think he was very like the Gautama in many ways, cultural differences apart. He wanted to communicate experience not dogma. Buddhism remained firmly rooted in experience but in Christianity dogma took over from, and became more important than, experience. We should be showing people by example how to find inner peace, how to live unselfishly, where true joy lies, but instead all energy goes into indoctrination, into outworn ideologies and the production of catechisms.