My own journey away from fundamentalism,
as I'm calling it tonight, has led me
to what Thoreau called "the unroofed church
of the natural world."
It's led me from a communal religious experience
to a solitary one and from a god of history to a god of nature.
I completely embrace the idea of the stoics and Spinoza,
that creation is indistinguishable
from the creator.
For me, then, it follows that the search for God
is first and foremost an ecological enterprise.
In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus said to his followers,
"The kingdom of God is within you and it is without you."
One way I understand that saying is to mean we
can only find God, we can only know God,
through the internal landscape of the heart
and the external landscape of the natural world.
One is the path of intuition, the other,
the path of the naturalist.
I'd like to just read a short journal
entry I wrote that I think kind of gets at this idea,
and I hope it acts as a sequel to what I just read.
I live in a beautiful, wooded part of central Kentucky
on a very, very beautiful creek.
I'm very lucky to live there.
"Up above the treetops, I hear the cheerful zree
of pine siskins.
That's followed by the whirring wings
of the season's first hummingbird, a male that
flashes his sequined red throat for a second at my feeder
and then is gone.
The hummingbird's arrival signals
that the pine siskins will soon be departing, and moving North.
They've been good winter companions,
and I'll be sorry to see them go.
On one arm of my Adirondack chair,
a translation of the Upanishads sits inadvertently
on top of my field guide to Kentucky wildflowers.
They are each, I realized, guides
to two worlds, two landscapes--
one inner, one outer.
Each points to the oldest scriptures,
one that writes itself into being through what Thoreau
called 'the poem of creation,' and one that tries to capture
through pictographic Sanskrit what is perceived in that poem.
Swami Vivekananda, the man who introduced Vedanta religion
to the United States at the end of the 19th century,
warned that, quote, 'books never make religions,
but religions make books.'
The problem is that within books, religions usually
ossify into doctrines and dogma.
The search for the god within oneself
becomes too often a campaign to impose one's religious views
on others.
But for Vivekananda, all religions
are manifestations of one fundamental religious impulse--
what he calls 'the realization of God in the soul.'
In this view, all of the world's religions
are branches of the same tree, different articulations
of the original voice that whispers
to us of our own divine, though hidden, nature.
My grandfather was indeed convinced
of his own superior religion, and he
spent his whole adult life trying to impose
that vision on others.
He once told me that the Jews who
converted to Christianity in the concentration camps
were spared the gas chamber.
His dogma, his church, his oppressive certainty
eventually made my father's life unbearable.
So now when I read Vivekananda's words--
'It is good to be born in a church,
but it is bad to die there'--
I find myself in deep agreement.
'The ceremonies and symbols of a church are good
for children,' he wrote, 'but as we grow,
we must become our own individual churches.'
In the uncertain terrain of the human heart,
we must light our own candles, burn our own incense,
find our own salvation.
In the Baptist tradition, when you decide to leave one church
and attend a new one, it's called moving your membership.
I've moved my membership to this unroofed church
in the woods of Kentucky beside a beautiful body of water
called Clear Creek.
There are, I have come to believe, only two paths to God.
One is through the natural landscape of his creation.
The other is through the inner landscape of the heart.
They are like facing mirrors, each infinitely reflecting
the other so that what Vivekananda called
'the realization of God in the soul' is also a recognition
that the world is utterly infused with the sacred,
that it is what Walt Whitman called 'a realm of budding
bibles.'"
So I hope that's sort of a happy ending to my sad story.