Both by nature and training, I am inclined towards order. Others are often confounded by my leanings. This morning my colleagues at the CBSA office didn’t understand my point, or that eccentric excitement, when I saw a perfect pattern in the vapour bubbles formed inside the lid of the Starbuck coffee cup I brought to my work space.
I observe. I look for order. I see patterns and synchronicities all the time. Then I boldly, often, with fear and trembling, announce this order. Consequently I end as a witness, without becoming a religious fundamentalist or a philosophical absolutist, to a higher order that some dare to name as God. Naming as God is not my primary concern. But I like to recognize that there is in life always something more than my mind can readily grasp with the aid of my senses and educated rationality.
The basic religious instincts are sparked by the human requisite for order and meaning in life. All centuries old God-talk, hence, is hard-work to establish that combo of order-meaning. The desire to discern and discover order and meaning, in an otherwise chancy, chaotic and meaningless loitering, or a flowing, a flooding in human life, yields a variety of religious expressions.
Meaning, then, is only an inner aspect of that order. It is this preoccupation -- as some may consider it -- that eventually led to my evolving, both professionally and existentially into a religious person. But earlier when I was a teenager I fascinated myself with atheistic discourse. My role model was Abraham Kovoor, the then president of the Rationalist Association, promoted an absence of any transcendental meaning or order.
But today I have no religious models to imitate. My preference is a mystical merging into that self beyond the ego! I came to this movement from religious-social activism and after flirting in religious ritualism as a full-time parish priest for a short time in Canada.
Recently, with all that chaos on my family-front, when my soul was completely besieged by circumstances beyond my control, I have consciously explored the eastern concept of vanavāsam.
This notion of journeying through wilderness is to be found in the great epics Ramayanam and Maha Bharatham India has produced among many other. I think this is also found within other religious faiths. Some of these religions did not emerge from the Indian subcontinent. I see the concept and practice of vanavāsam also in Jesus’s faith and in the Native American spiritualities.
Vanavāsam is a process discussed in the epics to handle crisis in an individual’s life that is similar to that of Job, a non-Jewish character who had been included in the Hebrew Bible. Vanavāsam enables one to handle with patience -- that Qur’anic sabar -- the turbulence, or the rough time unexpectedly settling around a helpless self. Vanavāsam, gives you time and space, like Joseph’s prison in Egypt, or Muhammad’s Hijra, that fleeing to Madina, waiting for the opportune moment.
I observe. I look for order. I see patterns and synchronicities all the time. Then I boldly, often, with fear and trembling, announce this order. Consequently I end as a witness, without becoming a religious fundamentalist or a philosophical absolutist, to a higher order that some dare to name as God. Naming as God is not my primary concern. But I like to recognize that there is in life always something more than my mind can readily grasp with the aid of my senses and educated rationality.
The basic religious instincts are sparked by the human requisite for order and meaning in life. All centuries old God-talk, hence, is hard-work to establish that combo of order-meaning. The desire to discern and discover order and meaning, in an otherwise chancy, chaotic and meaningless loitering, or a flowing, a flooding in human life, yields a variety of religious expressions.
Meaning, then, is only an inner aspect of that order. It is this preoccupation -- as some may consider it -- that eventually led to my evolving, both professionally and existentially into a religious person. But earlier when I was a teenager I fascinated myself with atheistic discourse. My role model was Abraham Kovoor, the then president of the Rationalist Association, promoted an absence of any transcendental meaning or order.
But today I have no religious models to imitate. My preference is a mystical merging into that self beyond the ego! I came to this movement from religious-social activism and after flirting in religious ritualism as a full-time parish priest for a short time in Canada.
Recently, with all that chaos on my family-front, when my soul was completely besieged by circumstances beyond my control, I have consciously explored the eastern concept of vanavāsam.
This notion of journeying through wilderness is to be found in the great epics Ramayanam and Maha Bharatham India has produced among many other. I think this is also found within other religious faiths. Some of these religions did not emerge from the Indian subcontinent. I see the concept and practice of vanavāsam also in Jesus’s faith and in the Native American spiritualities.
Vanavāsam is a process discussed in the epics to handle crisis in an individual’s life that is similar to that of Job, a non-Jewish character who had been included in the Hebrew Bible. Vanavāsam enables one to handle with patience -- that Qur’anic sabar -- the turbulence, or the rough time unexpectedly settling around a helpless self. Vanavāsam, gives you time and space, like Joseph’s prison in Egypt, or Muhammad’s Hijra, that fleeing to Madina, waiting for the opportune moment.
Vanavāsam can be compared to an unfolding of events, like a soft caterpillar into a beautiful butterfly. The maggot, symbolically the struggling human, plods through countless hazards, covering self into a cocoon, transforming and pushing through a tiny opening to stretch as a bigger person. Such an evolution is usually very complex and carries within a miraculous element. With the commitment to vanavāsam, then, there is renewed calm and appreciation for the imminent order present always in all life and the greater meaning to develop.
Discernment and discovery of this already existing, that evolving order speeds my inner transformation. When pain is in excess, then, faith is vital. And faith is that ability to see the already surfacing order.
Therefore, the individual rooted in spirituality – the person striving to find order and meaning -- learns also the art of abandoning the need to fear abandonment. Religious persons can affirm, as does this Evangelical claim, “Even when people turn on us, friends forsake us, or circumstances separate us from loved ones, we are never alone.” This is a mystical, not mysterious, experience available to anyone who wants to look for greater order and meaning.
