What The Bible Forgot
by Brian Robertson
"What does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?"
Micah 6:8"Religion that is pure and undefiled before God and the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world."
James 1:27
The Bible is amazingly silent on the subject of Religion with a capital R. The word "religion" comes from "religio" which means "to bind together" or "to link back." Both meanings have merit -- we bind together both ourselves and others in the Mystic body of Christ, and we link back to our most authentic self and, therefore, to the Divine found therein.
But both of these quotes have great meaning for the Christian mystic. In Micha, we read that we are to do justice without ourselves judging, we are to walk in kindness and love through the world and to accept the grace of God with a humble heart.
In James, religion is shown to be not a measuring device for how well we know how to quote chapter and verse, nor is it a scorecard for mystic experiences. That's fortunate, because the experiences of God are not of our doing, directly, but of God's. Yet we are told, plainly, that religion consists of two things - taking care of someone, loving them as we love ourselves is the first.
The difficulty in that is that we never seem to have enough time for that kind of care. We've left it up to government agencies and charities to handle that aspect of our lives for us. Having said that, it often amazes me that people will complain about the role of government in our lives, that it should stay out and let us handle things. That would cause an interesting problem. After all, if our money was not being spent as a kind of stand-in for our own time and effort, how many people would make the opportunity in their day to feed a person who had no food? To visit those who are afflicted? Certainly part of any society's health is the compassion it shows toward those in despair and trouble.
The hope is, of course, that regardless of how much is being done to help those in need, we ourselves will work to aid those who fall through the cracks or who, for one reason or another, are unable to take advantage of the public aid that is available. The point is, there's no substitute -- tax dollars or social programs -- for our own private efforts in this area as Christians.
Yet there's another part to what is being said in James. We are called upon to "keep oneself unstained from the world..."
Now what is the meaning and sense of this? It is that we are to avoid doing harm or evil to others -- and reminds me of the teaching of the Buddha who said, when asked what must be done in life, "Cease to do evil. Learn to do good." The person who asked the question shrugged his shoulders and said, "Everybody knows that.." to which the Buddha replied, "Yes, but who does it?"
If we are to remain "unstained" we have to use a little bleach here and there, because no matter how hard we try the world will get a little of its troubles and wrongness on us. The bleach is prayer and contemplation to make certain we go about the world with love and understanding. To that end, it's not so much a question of bleach as it might be a shield or, perhaps more to the point, Teflon.
A person who walks in the light, who hopes for and longs for union with the Divine and, therefore, to be a conduit for that love and light, can endure much that the world has to offer. If mystics throughout the history of Christianity can go to the fires and to death willingly, we should be astonished if we are not able to walk through the petty anger and squabbles that crop up in the day!
To have a "Teflon coating" has been applied to Presidents who allow their personal problems or attacks to hit them without sticking. In a more mystical and, I trust, higher meaning, we find we are able to pass through this world, to "walk through the valley of the shadow of death and fear no evil." This is not some intellectual decision that we have the power to make. No one can sit down and have a good heart-to-heart talk with oneself and say, "I'm not going to be rattled by the idiot driver on the freeway," or "I've decided to be calm when somebody verbally attacks me."
Instead, such a way of live, of remaining "unstained by the world" is the ultimate result of a deep and loving mingling of our soul with the essence of the Divine. It is the byproduct of grace and of our own efforts at preparing to receive entry into the kingdom-consciousness.
