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Journey to the Center

The first thing I remember about Sunday School is reciting from memory—I was about 4—a couple verses from Luke 2 in our Sunday School Christmas pageant. I’ve been in the church my whole life. But as I got older, there were some things they didn’t talk about in Sunday School that I had to grapple with:
       How does my faith fit in with other world religions:
       In other words, is God a Christian?

       If God is so profound,
why is the church so often trivial?

If God is so big, so expansive,
why is religion so often confining?

I’d like to share with you an image that has been very helpful to me as I dealt with those kinds of questions on my spiritual journey.

THE WAGON WHEEL: OPTIONS ON LIFE’S JOURNEY
Imagine a wagon wheel. Here is the hub, the center.
That is going to represent Ultimate Reality; in our
tradition, we call that God. It is when one gets to the center that one has a direct experience of God.

These are the spokes, and we can imagine that each one is a path to God: Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, various paths of indigenous peoples, even paths that are spiritual but not specifically religious. The shape of the wheel reminds us that no path is better than the other, and they all can lead to the same center.

The rim represents ordinary life, especially before we have decided to journey towards the center.

Now we can look at this wheel and imagine the options we have on this journey. Generally there are three.

We move around the rim, and at some point in our life, we hunger for the center. We may or may not recognize that as a hunger for God. But it comes to us in some way; I believe that hunger for the center is programmed into the human species. So at some point we find a path, and follow it towards the center. We may, by the way, look across at the other spokes and borrow from them,
(notice that the paths get closer as they get nearer the center) but mostly we go more and more deeply on our chosen path. This is the journey of a lifetime; it is the purpose of life.

But we have another option. We can just keep running around the rim, and never try to get to the center at all. Since we are programmed to want to go to the center, living on the rim is always eventually painful; to ease that pain we move into addictions, or we keep too busy to feel, or we find ourselves in depression, or we veg out, shut down, close up. We’ve all lived on the rim at times.

And there is a third option, one that is very popular today: spiritual web-browsing. We try one path and it gets challenging. They all do: the closer one gets to the center, the harder the path gets, which is why so many people quit part way down their spoke. So we move back to the rim and try another, and follow that until it gets hard, and then back to the rim again, and we just keep repeating that pattern. You can see that by doing this, though we may have lots of spiritual knowledge, we never get to the center, to Ultimate Reality beyond all images.
By the way, for some people this is an appropriate part of exploring; but eventually, if one is serious about the journey to the center, one chooses one primary path.

These are the ways we can choose to make—or not make—the human journey to the center. Now let me talk about what we find if we get to the hub.

DESCRIBING THE CENTER
The world’s wisdom traditions differ profoundly. It reminds me of 4 year old Sally Spalding who had just moved into a new neighborhood.  Because all their neighbors were one religion, and the Spaldings were another, Sally’s parents worried about whether she’d fit in all right.

She became friends with her nextdoor neighbor, Timmy O”Flannigan, also 4. They were playing in the creek that ran behind their houses. When they had splashed so much water that their clothes were soaked, they just took them off.
Sally’s mother happened to observe all this from the kitchen window. When Sally came in, her mom asked “Sally, did you like playing with your new friend?”

“Oh, yeah. He’s nice.”

“What games did you play?”

“Oh, we didn’t play games. We splashed in the creek. We got so wet we had to take our clothes off.”

“Oh. Is there anything you’d like to tell me?”

“Well, yes, Mommy. I didn’t know there was that much difference between Catholics and Protestants.”

There are major differences between faiths. But still, they all have a very similar understanding of the center, because they all have the same experience when they live out of that center.

Borrowing from scholars such as Smith, Aldous Huxley and others, we can describe ultimate reality in a way that all traditions could agree upon. These truths are universal and found in every human wisdom tradition. See what you think of them.

       Spirit exists.
       Spirit is found within, permeates the universe.
       Our cultural model of reality is false.
              Everything is separate.
              Duality is the nature of things.
              Death exists.
       This false model causes sin and suffering.
       There is a path (many of them) of liberation
              from this sin, suffering.
       When we follow this path to its end, we have
              a direct experience of Spirit.
       This experience transforms us; resurrects us.
       We perceive reality very differently.
       We move beyond our ego: sense of separate self
       We know joy and peace, and act with compassion
              and justice for all beings.

That is what the view from the center is like. We might take the Buddhist path (which doesn’t name a personal God) or the Sufi path (which names God as Beloved) or our Christian path or the path of the Maori people in New Zealand, or the Jains or many others. Our sacred words are different, our rituals are different, our symbol systems, our holy stories, all different, just like the two children in the creek. But they will all lead us to this same center, to these same universal truths, the same perception of ultimate reality.

I want to clarify, by the way, that living in the center is not an escape from the world.  As we get close to the center, we move back and forth to the rim to serve the suffering who are there. In fact, at the beginning of the journey, there is a big difference between the rim and the center. From the center, though, it is just all one.

DIFFERENT PERCEPTIONS FROM RIM, CENTER
People who live mostly on the rim have a very different worldview than those who live closer to the hub.

On the rim, we believe that everything is separate.
       Common sense tells us that.
But at the hub, we recognize that separation is an
illusion. We are more connected than we dreamed.

At the rim, religion may be boring, confining, legalistic,
       offering a small god. (Progressives are just as
       prone to this as conservatives).
The closer we get to the hub, the more faith is open,
unafraid, inclusive, free, vibrant, experiencing a limitless God.

Near the rim, religion is concerned with rules.
Near the hub, it is concerned with relationship.

Near the rim, religion is about sustaining us.
Near the hub, religion is about serving others.

At the rim, God does not exist, or is way out there,
very separate from us.
At the hub we discover Universe is permeated with God.
See: our perceptions shift as we move towards center.

I think of the journey to the center not so much as the religious journey, but as the journey of life. Our religion is the map that guides us on that journey. Our faith tradition, like each of the others, can enable us to make that journey to the center. All the directions we need are there, like a treasure map leading us to the greatest treasure of all.

But it has often seemed to me that the church forgets it has that map, and just joins the culture in teaching us how to survive on the rim, as if there were no hub. Sometimes it has seemed to me that the church is standing on a whale, fishing for minnows.

In my life, somewhere along the line, I decided that I would never be content with minnows. I also decided, somewhere along the line, to fall in love with Jesus. Maybe it happened back in Sunday School when I learned “Jesus Loves Me’. Jesus was one who lived out of that hub. On my journey towards that center, towards the treasure we name God, Jesus is my treasure map.

There is More than we can see,
says religious scholar Huston Smith.
That More is a stupendous More.
May God bless you on your journey to the center.

©2009 Janice Jean Springer.