GOD-centric :

A life centered on the pursuit of a good and fair God of love

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Ch. 5 The Quest (continued)

Perennial Philosophy

  When I shifted my attention from West to East in my religious quest, I had this fantastic idea of exploring all the major world religions to see what their common thread might be. I thought I was very clever until I ran across Aldous Huxley and then later discovered that Mr. Huxley was a relatively recent addition to a long line of seekers of the universal truth shared by all religions. In addition to my own searching and reflecting, I read Hans Kung's Christianity and the World Religions, Huston Smith's The Religions of Man, Mircea Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane, William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience, Wilfred Cantwell Smith's Faith & Belief, and Joseph Campbell's The Power of Myth. In the end, I decided that none of the religions I had explored satisfied me in and of themselves and that they were not really pointing to one universal truth other than perhaps the golden rule or maybe that God was love (though most had plenty of examples of God's not being love). Mysticism seemed to be the unifying bridge but it did not seem possible that I (or we) could live day-in and day-out in a loving mystical state. I knew that I could not build my foundation on mysticism because the experiences were too fleeting and the aftereffects too difficult to hold on to. I needed something more sturdy and permanent on which to build my foundation.

  Exhausted with religious studies, I decided to move my quest for a new foundation to a study of the philosophy of religion. I remind you that I was still in turmoil and actually even more depressed since I had not been able to build a new foundation during my religious quest. I had lost my practice of the presence relationship with God; I had lost my Roman Catholic belief system; and I had not found a new belief system in any of the major world religions. I was losing any glimmer of hope and I was tired, very, very tired but I trudged on: “Give me truths;/ For I am weary of surfaces,/ And die of inanition.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Blight”)