The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me because the Lord has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the humble, to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to captives and release to those in prison, to proclaim a year of the Lord's favour. (Isaiah 61: 1-2)
THE PROOF THAT the Holy Spirit is truly alive in a person lies in his changed attitude to the world. He is no longer centred in his own concerns, seeking his personal benefit. Nor does he feel the need to assert himself or even justify himself to others or to the world at large. Instead he knows an inner peace, a deeper repose, that is far removed from complacency.
This peace emanates from his own deep centre, where he is immutably fixed. From that centre, where the Spirit dwells in him, he can flow out in blessing to the world. Once you apprehend the truth within yourself, your approach to life is radically changed. You have been vouchsafed a security so strong that your balance can never be permanently disturbed. The attitude is described as "equanimity" or "holy indifference". In this state, the emotional response to outer events is calm and serene; success does not produce great elation nor does failure cast a shadow of depression. Each is seen to be a pageant in the passing show of life; this life persists long after the isolated events have faded into the recesses of the past.
The security of the Spirit within brings the well-known "fruits" with it; love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, fidelity, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5:22). The Spirit takes us beyond the fleeting pleasure of sensual delight and the evanescence of happiness that depends on favourable outer circumstances and an agreeable inner disposition to a state of constant inner radiance. This is the meaning of joy. It is the light that illuminates the whole personality from within the depths of the soul, where its nature is one with the Holy Spirit. This is the uncreated light by which God shows His outflowing energies to the mystically aware person. In the personality that light is transformed into an emotional radiance which illuminates the darkness and aimlessness of the world around it. This joy does not depend on sensual stimulation, equable surroundings, or even a warm temperament. Indeed, it persists even during moments of the greatest darkness when the world around you is falling into chaos. This is because the Spirit is not limited by material stability or even psychic sensitivity. We can then know intuitively that even if this world were to be destroyed, God would create new worlds, worlds that we may glimpse when we die.
The Spirit that emerges in us enables us to give unstinted service to the world. It is the freedom of this Spirit that makes us profitable servants. The Spirit liberates us from an undue reliance on results to justify our actions. Whatever arrests our emotional response so that we become attached to it, has the power to enslave us. It is only when we have passed beyond the need for personal reassurance and the comfort inherent in clinging to past associations that we can know true personal freedom. We can at last be ourselves without needing to possess things or people in order to substantiate our own identity, with the result that we can grant freedom to all those people whom previously we would have held in subjection. By doing this we can begin to rejoice as they attain their own authenticity. In this way we can glimpse that higher love of one for another, in which we hold the other in the deepest concern while at the same time leaving him unimpeded by emotional demands to work out his own life in a world of tumult and trial. Likewise, the affairs of our lives are presided over best when they are allowed their own impetus, which is a function of the Holy Spirit, and are not being constantly stirred on by our selfish solicitude. We do not realise how much our own obsessional intensity of purpose and thrusting zeal for what we regard as right principles hinder the progress of those very causes we hold most dear. How often does a personal desire for results from our actions, praiseworthy though these may be, exclude the Holy Spirit from the field of activity! His conscious presence is shut out, and everything for which we have toiled is rendered vain.
The advocates of many modern social, philanthropic, and spiritual movements (including the three I have already touched upon) injure their particular cause by this obsessional demand for results. Though these people are well intentioned and capable of great self-sacrifice, they live for results that will confirm their particular creed and crown their efforts. They yearn for personal approval and exaltation, nearly always without being consciously aware of this craving. People of this type are seriously incomplete in themselves, and need the substantiation that comes from an ideological triumph to attain a more stable balance and a firmer sense of identity.
Unfortunately this same criticism can be levelled at the missionary zeal and intolerant fervour of many of the adherents of the higher religions. They too are strengthened in their personality as well as their belief according to the number of people they can claim as converts. Religions that have a strongly dogmatic basis tend to attract those who are unsure of their own identity and need some outer formula of certainty to gain inner assurance. At present there are a considerable number of bizarre cults derived perversely from the higher religions. Their adherents claim to have absolute truth, so that any who will not accept their particular way to salvation are believed to be irrevocably doomed to hell, if not total extinction. The demands made on these disciples are hard and exacting; an outsider might wonder how anybody could be attracted to such an irrational system of belief and gain so paltry a material benefit from it. Indeed, many of these disciples are literally enslaved to the organisers of their particular cult. But they in their turn enjoy absolute certainty of salvation, so much so that their lives are controlled from without and they need no longer strive for enlightenment, or experience the pains inherent in spiritual growth. The one Person Who is excluded from their lives is the Holy Spirit.
Rigid systems of dogmatic belief substitute a heavy burden of imposed authority, whose claims it is forbidden to question, for the life-giving power of the Holy Spirit, who leads us into all truth as we are able to bear it. Indeed, "the written law condemns to death, but the Spirit gives life." This condemnation, which is total in many contemporary, irrational cults, is also at least partly true of some of those enthusiasts who have propagated the higher religions founded by the great saints of the world. It is important to consider the harm these people do to the causes they champion.
The saint sacrifices every material comfort, every worldly security, every good opinion that others might have had of him, so that he can venture forth into the wilderness, there to encounter truth. He will bring this truth back to his fellows and, perhaps to the sacrifice of his own life, lead them out of the bondage of illusion into the freedom that the Spirit bestows. Those who follow the way of the Spirit lead dangerous lives. They learn early what most of us barely glimpse before we die, that nothing in this world can be trusted, neither people, nor institutions (including religious ones), nor teachings. Each is limited by the age and circumstances in which it finds itself. One alone is to be relied on, the Holy Spirit Who proceeds from God and is God. And this Spirit makes Himself known definitively within the depths of each person's soul. To know the Spirit within is the end of the spiritual life, and its way of attainment is by the consecration of the will and the descent downwards into the darkness of the psyche, both personal and collective. The saint has overcome material and psychic illusion, and is in communion with the Spirit within him, which is the apex of the personality. He who knows the Spirit knows that the life of Christ is the only free life; at last the Word can be affirmed in that person's life.
But those who come afterwards hope to acquire this unitive knowledge by attaching themselves to the saint and his teaching. They expect to attain perfection by a punctilious observance of the outer forms of religion, which in themselves can no doubt be helpful methods of achieving inner peace and dedication. But this is at the barest foothills of the Mountain of Transfiguration. Deep within, they know that this way does not lead to the Kingdom of God, but in order to assuage their unease, they seek to influence others. In this way their attention is diverted from the spiritual quest - the unitive knowledge of God - and focussed on such secondary matters of the organisation of an institution and the number of people they have been able to influence. Those who follow the Word without being servants of the Word tend to single out a particular doctrine of the full teaching and to emphasise it to their own advantage. It may be personal salvation, survival of death, spiritual healing, or the second coming of the Messiah (to which all the higher religions look forward, though He is given a different name according to the particular religious tradition). Eventually their gospel is largely restricted to this one facet of truth to the virtual exclusion of the larger concerns of humanity. In other words, many of those who devote themselves to propagating a particular religious view are really using other people to supply their own need for recognition and inner certainty. They cast themselves in all sincerity in the role of servants of mankind, but are intent on absolute spiritual power over others. The Spirit has been dethroned and the personal self, gorgeously attired in religious raiment, sits triumphant in their lives. Were the effect not so destructive, one might laugh outright at the naive, unconscious hypocrisy that punctuates so much misguided religious activity.
Is dogma therefore wrong? Should we live according to our inner feelings about the rightness of things and discard all teaching based on religious authority? If we did that, there would be such chaos that we would long very soon for some central direction in our lives. This, in its present state, would be forthcoming from the secular arm with its strongly atheistic tendency, or else from some dominant cult with a bizarre master figure at its head. Dogma rightly understood is a system of teaching that comes from a divine source and has been transmitted to man through the agency of great spiritual leaders. These have been directly attuned to the Word within them (that was also before the creation of the world) and have been inspired by the Holy Spirit to proclaim the word to mankind. In the higher religions of the world, we see a coherent system of doctrine that can lead man from his isolated animal inheritance to participation in the divine life. The proof of the excellence of a religious tradition lies in the witness of its saints, in the illumination of its mystics, in the perfection of its art, and in the precision of its work in the world. No person can be a scientist, artist, mystic, and philosopher al1 in one unless he is a universal genius of rare calibre - and even then there is bound to be some unevenness in his personality. But an authentic religious community can, and should, contain these types of humanity amongst its members. This is because a great religious system fosters the potentialities latent in all its members by working towards the full development of man in the divine image implanted within him. It has a profound view of the destiny of man and the nature of the good life. It is in mystical communion with the eternal values of truth, beauty, and goodness (or love). And, above all, it brings these values down to earth.
True dogma is the way of abundant life. It is all embracing, or catholic, in sympathy. Nothing that pertains to the world is outside its scope or beneath its consideration. It has much to say about such matters as survival of death, personal salvation, spiritual healing, and the divine manifestation in the world of limitation, but it is never restricted to any of them, nor does it exalt one above the other.
What then is the true dogma? Is it Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic, Jewish, or Christian? The answer is, to the discomfiture of the bigot and the joy of the mystic, that all these great religious systems, properly understood and lived, contain the true dogma, despite their very different emphases and their individual approaches to life. Their saints and mystics have shown that each way leads to the communion of the self with God, however He may be understood in mental concepts and verbal imagery. Once again, "the written law condemns to death, but the Spirit gives life."
The way taught by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount is a dogmatic approach to the God-centred life, as are also His parables and, above all, His own life and ministry. The same can be said of the Buddha's teaching about suffering and the way to end it, as enunciated in the Four Noble Truths which culminate in the Noble Eight-Fold Path. The prophetic teaching of Judaism, starting with the Mosaic Law, is another dogmatic approach to fullness of being. The same can be said of Koranic doctrine. Nor can the sublimity of the Upanishads and the Bhagavadgita be relegated to a lesser place in the pantheon of human wisdom and sanctity.
The teaching is there. What is necessary is the living of this teaching. The founders of the religions lived them, thereby making these ways of life available to their fellow human beings. The saints of these traditions followed the same path, proved its reliability, and, by their own witness and in the power of the Spirit, blazed new trails of glory for mankind to follow. What is even more significant is that these saints paid homage to the same values and began to transcend the limiting barriers of their particular tradition as they moved towards communion with God. They began to show in their lives what they had long known in their minds, that love alone matters, and only by it is evil overcome and God apprehended.
When this catholic scheme of salvation, or healing of the whole body of mankind, is compared with the limited outlook and objectives of modern movements that aspire to spiritual understanding, the difference is very obvious. The practitioners of these movements and cults emphasise one factor in their teaching. It may be meditation, psychic development, positive thinking, or charismatic gifts. None of these in themselves is unworthy; indeed, meditation is a necessary precursor for the practice of deep prayer, and charismatic gifts should be the natural outcome of a truly spiritual life. But these can become, all too easily, an end in themselves, and the person who is proficient feels that he has attained great spiritual heights and is decidedly superior to his fellow men. The truly spiritual person never feels superior to anyone else; on the contrary, his love is such that he feels most closely identified with the outcasts of society, and his greatest desire is to be of some help to people from whom most of us would shrink in horror. As one progresses on the spiritual path, so one becomes increasingly aware of two truths; one's own insignificance and the amazing love of God. It is this love that transforms our insignificance into some- thing of unique value for all men. When contemporary movements exploring spiritual reality can produce a literature of the same stature as that of the world's higher religions and when they are proclaimed by a company of saints comparable to those of the great religions, then will they have something of real value to show the world. At present they exist, as I have already pointed out, to emphasise a particular aspect of truth which has been inadequately acknowledged in the contemporary religious scene of a particular tradition.
Are then all the higher religions of the world of equal value? Are they all equally valid? The answer must be, and is emphasised by the pluralistic society in which we now live, that God, in His inscrutable wisdom, has determined that a number of different paths should be available for men to attain spiritual mastery and to know Him even as we are known by Him. This will naturally disconcert the religious bigot who demands that his way should alone be the right one. According to the principles of logic laid down by Aristotle on which the methods of science are based, only one of a number of contending propositions can be true. Therefore if, for example, Christian belief is true, it is inevitable that Buddhists and Moslems must be in error. However, the world of eternal values is not restricted by this very obliging, but extremely limited, view of truth. In the power of the Spirit, we are taken beyond the circumscribed logic of the sciences (a logic incidentally constantly challenged by the data of nuclear physics, and proved inadequate by them to explain the remarkable properties of the elementary particles which are the very stuff of what we call matter) to the logic of mysticism, in which any number of propositions have their own validity in a totality of truth whose nature is that of God.
In the divine society, as I have already mentioned, there is no loss of personal identity so that the individual becomes fused into a shapeless mass of humanity, such as occurs in the far from divine totalitarian state subservient to some political ideology, which is such a terrifying feature of our present time. There is, on the other hand, an intimate union, so that the individual ceases to be an isolated unit in an indifferent, unfriendly world, but becomes instead a member of a body of aspiring souls, in which his full personality can at last begin to flower. In this holy fellowship he ceases to be merely an isolated individual and starts to become a real person. His gifts, which are unique, contribute to the well-being of the whole community, which in turn calls forth those gifts by the recognition and love it accords that person. And this love does not depend on what the person has to offer the community, but simply on his vital presence within it, for, as St Paul says on more than one occasion, we are parts of the one body. This is the mystical body of the Word; it is potentially with us on earth, but will be fully revealed when the physical body is resurrected into all-embracing spiritual substance. In other words, the fusion of the individual into an amorphous mass denies the validity of the person and exalts the mass, which is subservient to an authoritarian external power. By contrast, mystical union exalts the person to a full status of deification, in that he realises his potentially divine stature in the divine community presided over by God, "in whom we live, and move, in whom we exist." In this community alone there is freedom to be oneself, to be the other, and to know God in oneself and in the other, and by His presence in and beyond all manifest things.
Following this line of thought, it becomes evident that each of the higher religions of the world has its own priceless gift to bestow. Without it the world would be immeasurably poorer. God, in His wisdom, has decreed by what we would call an accident of birth, that some should be born into one great tradition and others into another. Many nowadays are born into an environment of religious agnosticism, and this too is no tragedy when we consider some of the foul things that have been done in the name of religion. It could indeed be easier for the person of the future to come to his own religious understanding without too much conditioning in his childhood, a conditioning that is as likely to alienate him from his ancestral faith as to draw him into it. The form of a religion is its dogmatic basis. If one is to progress on the spiritual path, one must accept the discipline laid down by the dogma. One will find the dogma, far from being the religion, is simply the outer way that leads one to the inner sanctuary. As Jesus said: "Whoever has the will to do the will of God shall know whether my teaching comes from Him or is merely my own." (John 7:17) This will has two components, a regard for the outer demands of religious observance and a punctilious concern for personal sanctity in terms of right relationship with the world. This consists in serving the world so that some of its burden and suffering may be relieved.
The latter of these components of true religion, a selfless concern for the world, will strike a ready chord in the hearts of most people, even if they themselves merely pay lip-service to this ideal. But why should religious observance be given equal emphasis? Surely it serves to divide people, and in addition is a waste of time which could better be spent in alleviating the world's tragedies! But without a life of prayer and inner discipline all our attempts at world service arc certainly bound to fail. The religious dimension of our common life stresses our dependence on God and makes His Spirit more readily available to us. Even the most primitive races know this truth, but their aspiration is psychical rather than truly mystical, by which I mean an attainment of union with God Who is beyond limitation and is the ground of a1l being. The secular dimension of our common life teaches us that the grace of God comes not merely to redeem us personally, but to transform the world. And it is we who are the instruments of God's grace. If we aim at transforming the world by our own initiative, we will simply impose another system of dictatorship on our unhappy planet, which already bears the terrible scars of human insolence and pride. Nevertheless, it is the second component that is the vital one, for "faith, if it does not lead to action, is in itself a lifeless thing." (James 2:17) It is on the basis of the fruits of action that the world finally judges the claims of any religious faith. The fruits of spiritual action are described in the quotation from Isaiah which heads this chapter. They were spelled out even more definitively by Jesus at the beginning of His ministry (Luke 4:18), and they are of vital importance to the understanding of authentic spirituality, which is something distinct from religious observance, while at the same time closely connected with it.
We are called to bring hope to the humiliated, healing and sight to the broken and the blind, freedom to those who are enslaved, release to those imprisoned in the depths of their own mind, and to recall all men to God's unfailing love by showing Him to the world in our own lives. According to the urgency with which a religion transmits this summons in the lives of its believers, so it is judged in the world of eternal values. Its concern must be universal in sympathy so that no one is left outside the redemptive love of God. It must also free man from the illusion of dependence on any object, whether material or psychical, until his soul finds its eternal rest in God alone.
The eighteenth-century German man of letters and theologian, G.E. Lessing, was one of the pioneers of modern biblical criticism. He was also an early protagonist of religious tolerance and years ahead of his time in spiritual vision. He told the story of a father who bequeathed a precious ring to his favourite son. This ring had the power to bless the life of whomsoever wore it. But the father had two other sons also, and his love for them was so great that he could not bear to deprive them of a ring. And so he had two other rings fashioned which were identical in appearance to the original one. In due course he died, and it came about that each son inherited a similar ring, so that one could not be distinguished from another. There was great strife among the three young men as to who had acquired the genuine ring and who the counterfeit ones. And so they consulted a wise man to solve the problem. He too could not distinguish one ring from another. In the end he judged that the son who possessed the genuine ring would show its blessing in his life. Therefore he urged all the sons to live the life by which the ring he wore would be justified. Only by the quality of the life led would the ring be identified.
In this parable, Lessing symbolised the three great monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. We could add other religions also, but the lesson remains. In the end it is not the ring that blesses the wearer so much as the wearer who glorifies the ring. And let it not be assumed that the one who does possess the pearl of great price, which is in all of us though known by the few only, will lead the easiest or the most pleasant life. Judaism has known in its many tragic moments that God's chosen one suffers and serves according to the remarkable prophecy of Isaiah 53. Christians have seen the Incarnate Word typified in that same prophecy. The saints of all the great religions have born witness to it in their lives.
As Jesus said to the lawyer who questioned Him about the attainment of eternal life, after He had related the Parable of the Good Samaritan to him; "Go and do as he did." (Luke 10: 25-37) The claims of religious orthodoxy do not depend on the observance of the written word so much as the Spirit that proceeds from it.