Misrepresentation is a whole different issue!
I did a performance last year at Taplow Court, one of the primary Buddhist centres in the UK, and had the opportunity to meet and work with a number of practising buddhists. It was a very fulfilling and loving experience, and something I will always remember.
I think that among those buddhists, as among Christians or those of any faith, I have found such a range of interpretations, and a diversity of explanations, for their act of faith, that I acknowledge the uniquely personal nature of spiritual commitment. Perhaps that's a comment on the times we live in as well.
Khalil Gibran's work is 'spiritual' in the broad sense of the word. I don't think it diminishes any existing faiths, or attempts to supplant them with a new worldview ... but it is quite haunting, and lonely, and in some ways in tune with modernity (or the modernity of its time). I would say there is arguably a kind of attempted distillation of the major world religions at work, which was my original point.
The world of rational science has its own acts of faith too, with which I have some serious problems. We all acknowledge an unseen light in our different ways.
I am currently wading through The Silmarillion, which I am finding hard going. The Biblical parallels, or perhaps style, are very much to the fore, and there is something more distant and "stony" about it. I'm told it picks up later on.
But in the introduction in my print there is a letter from Tolkien to Milton Walden, which seems to me to answer with clarity and some humility most of the assertions in this thread, and I stick with my incursions on Page 3 (now losssst, the preciousss writingses). Evangelical? - No! Traditional Christian essence of morality? - Yes. Specific Biblical allegory? - NO! Mythmaking in the ancient (non-Christian) tradition? - Yes.
Peace
[ February 28, 2002: Message edited by: Kalessin ]
|