Each religion originated from a personal encounter and experience of its founders with God. They all stem from a mystical experience. Much more than our need for religion is our need for direct contact with the divine. Religions are valuable carriers of tradition but they must not choke out the breath of the spirit, which breathes where it will.
Most Christian churches focus on prayer at the level of worship and devotion and barely mention the mystical life. The same is true in much of the Jewish and Islamic traditions, the Kabbalah and Sufism being exceptions. The religious life has decidedly been on the corporate, devotional level, while the contemplative and mystical have been neglected.
By allowing inward change, while at the same time simplifying our external life, spirituality serves as our greatest single resource for changing our centuries-old trajectory of division. Spirituality is profoundly transformative when it inspires in us the attitude of surrender to the mystery, as the New Testament reminds us…
Acts 17:28 “For in him we live and move and exist. As some of your own poets have said, ‘we are his offspring.’”
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