Shared Spiritual Reckoning

At this point in dealing with the requests of the computer, I always feel as if I were welcoming myself: “Come in, sit down, enjoy your soup, whatever.” And in a way, I suppose I am, because I am looking for a way to find that part of me which is already you, and that part of you which is already me.

This blog originates from a passage in The Alchemy of Happiness, by the medieval Muslim theologian al-Ghazzali:

He, therefore, is a wise and prudent man,

Who, after morning prayer, spends an hour

Renewing his own spiritual reckoning,

And says,

“My soul, you only have one life;

No moment that has passed can be recovered,

And in God’s mind the number of your breaths

Has been set down and cannot be increased.

When life is done, no spiritual highways

Will hold the traffic of your freighted soul,

Therefore what you would do, you must do now;

So treat this day as if your life were spent,

And this, an extra day, was granted you

By special favor of Almighty God.

What folly greater than to lose this chance?”

From reading this, and meditating on it, I arrived at the idea that it would help us in our poor human condition if we understood more about the process of spiritual self-evaluation that each and every person finds, to a greater or lesser degree, in the transactions of this life.

And so, I am seeking ways to arrive at a purer form of sharing.

I hate words like ecumenism, and syncretism. Why should I use a fifty-cent word to express something so simple as saying, “trust.”

Somehow ordinary people who believe in good things have yielded authority for trusting to clerics and councils and politicians. And the world is an echoing babel of spiritual distrust; and the politicians sell themselves to corporations and make their voices into instruments of commercial interestThe purpose for a shared blog is to share. I consider myself a seeker after the truth wherever it is to be found. If we have differences, I am more interested in seeing what it is that we share, rather than what differentiates us.

Let each of us try to make an entry that reflects our own process of self-evaluation, and invite others to comment by doing the same. I think at the outset it will work best if we do not comment on each other’s self-examinations. I want to focus on what I have to say about my own spiritual welfare, not on the differences and similarities between our viewpoints.

Did you see the video of Colin Powell describing his reasons for endorsing Obama? He didn’t say it in the interview, but he was inspired by a photograph he had seen in the New Yorker magazine of a Muslim mother embracing her son’s headstone. After he saw this photograph he just meditated on how it made him feel, for over an hour, then he decided to endorse Obama.

I would aspire to have a blog that held moments like this up for the readers to contemplate, and to communicate the value to each reader of having a daily moment of sincere and unvarnished introspection. I believe that if we did this for a while, perhaps more people would see that we have more in common than we have in opposition.