Jeanette Outside Readings #3

I read in "Behold the Pierced One" by Cardinal Ratzinger (Later Pope Benedict XVI) something that I think is so easily written and heard but not very easily responded to..."we have picked up the idea that all religions are the product of history, some developing this way and others that [...it] reduces religion from the level of truth to the level of habit. It becomes an empty flux of inherited traditions which no longer have any significance".

I had a conversation just yesterday with one of my best friends in the whole world, and she was telling me that she could almost convert to Hinduism because she found so much truth and reason to live in it. I asked her to tell me about it, and the more she talked the more surprised I was that she found anything that she was saying surprising, or different from Christianity. She told me that she wanted so desperately to believe that Jesus was who he said he was and that he was "the way", but that it didn't connect with her the way Hindu scripture did. Then she asked me why I thought she identified with it so much more.

This is what I told her, but I was speaking out of my own experience a lot and am not quite sure it was right.

I said that I thought she found truth in it because there was truth in it, first of all. She was talking specifically about the passage in the Bhagavad Gita where Krishna is illuminating the relationship between duty and love for Arjuna; the main point is that duty is a way to seek out and live love. And that's true. It's so true.

But I think it resonated with her better specifically because it is a religious text that is divorced, for her and for most of us, from our culture. Much of our American population is nominally Christian, and so we have all sorts of interpretations and degrees of religious devotion to Christianity flying around our heads as we grow up here. In contrast, I only had one Hindu friend growing up. One.

So we don't hear the different interpretations. We don't have the opportunity to be disillusioned by Hindus in the same way we have the opportunity to be disillusioned about each other as Christians.

So if you're looking for truth, it's easy to approach the Bhagavad Gita and see the truth that's in it more easily because you don't have the filters of all of your cultural and personal baggage.

Going back to the Ratzinger reading, though, it's important not to stop at a truth in a text, or even hundreds of truths. It must all be true, if it speaks of an absolute. And that's why you have to keep asking if multiple religions resonate.