Being Wholly Holy

I was recently asked to be a guest on my childhood friend Rich Hancock’s radio show. During the interview, I was asked a seemingly simple question: Why do you read the Bible and study other faiths?

My seemingly simple answer: I don’t know what I don’t know!  But there’s so much more to it:

Although I’m reading at least one entire book every week, I can’t learn enough information fast enough to satisfy my lack of knowledge.  How do I explain this: am I simply thirsting for more information or hungry to learn what I haven’t yet in the first 48 years of my life?

Growing up as a Catholic in the northeast, I was never strongly encouraged to open a Bible at my Catholic grammar school or at home (or I didn’t pay attention to that wisdom).  We were taught by nuns and priests at school and we learned from listening to the scripture readings at church and from the priests’ homilies on weekends.

I thought that I was way ahead of the curve. Although I may have been, I was nowhere to being as close in my relationship with God as I could have been. I wasn’t close to being as good a person as I was capable of becoming.

Faith is relative |  Health is relative |  Wisdom is relative |  Kindness is relative

Reading the Bible allows me to understand the faith into which I was born in the context of history – from the Old Testament to the New Testament.  Whenever we’re truly trying to learn and change, repetition of key concepts and ideas allows the new trait or behavior to become deeply imprinted in our minds and being.  When we hear things in church or on the radio or television, we might say to ourselves, “that makes sense” but, do we imprint that information so that it becomes our second nature?

Most of the time (at least for me) the answer used to be no.  Many great ideas have slipped through my cranium because I didn’t write them down and repeat them so that they’d stick.

Whenever I am struck with a thought, quote or concept from scripture (or anywhere else) while reading, I immediately grab a 3 X 5 index card and write it down so that I can repeat the thought and assimilate it into how I think and act on a daily basis.  This process allows me to change and become the type of person being spoken about in scripture.

That is the whole idea behind religion.  It’s an organized way of teaching us how to live, think and behave in a God-like fashion.

I decided to increase my knowledge of other faiths because I realized that all of the major problems that we’re facing on our planet are the result of ignorance – lack of knowledge.  Many of the  problems that are going on in our world are because everyone is acting based upon the limited knowledge that he or she has and that knowledge is always incomplete. If all of my knowledge of God is related to Christianity, I am therefore ignorant as to how billions of loving, devoted people of other faiths have  come to know God.

Seek first to understand.  Then seek to be understood. Thanks, Mr. Covey!

I wanted to understand other faiths because it’s become very evident that there is a lot of fighting and killing going on today in the name of religion.

True knowledge of God will result in kindness, compassion and love – not in anger, hatred and killing.

The reason that so many people are so passionate about a particular faith is because it happens to be the one that they learned, studied and practiced since birth.  Because it’s the one that our parents or guardians gave to us, it must be the right one and therefore, everyone else of a different faith is completely wrong.

Is it possible to know God, love God, pray to God, listen to God and act in a God-like fashion incorrectly? I don’t think so.  I’ve come to believe that there are many ways in which we can deepen our knowledge of and relationship with God.  By studying other faiths, many things are happening to me:

• I am deepening my own relationship with God.
• I am solidifying my own faith.
• I am developing very strong respect and understanding of people from other faiths.
• I am developing very strong respect and understanding for people without faith.
• I am reinforcing the belief that there is only one Creator and that there are numerous ways in which we can come to know that Creator.
• I know that once we understand any differences that we have with another person – or group of people – that person is no longer a threat to us.

Fear is the absence of love

We’re threatened by the perceived differences which exist between us and others.  Any one who looks, dresses, worships, eats, speaks differently than we do is one of two things: This person is a threat to us and our way of life or this person is someone who has knowledge of things of which I’m ignorant and therefore is someone I can learn from.

Every person that you and I encounter has something that they can teach us (unless we’re know-it-alls!).  Each person is the way he or she is for very good reasons. Each of us is a product of our environment and education.

The more that I learn about people from every faith and from every culture and from every country is that we’re all the same.  We’re all beautiful sons and daughters of God whether we know it or not.  We’re all trying to make sense of today and this lifetime.  And if we’re very fortunate, trying to figure out the spiritual sides of our being which we’ll return to completely in the future.

We all want to love and be loved. We just show it in different ways – because we don’t know any better.

Seek to understand.  Once we do, we know that all people are good on the inside.  There may be layers of hatred, hurt and  anger which have grown on their exteriors which may cause them to be unpleasing at first glance. They’ve just grown those ugly layers to protect themselves from being hurt any more.

Inside each of us is the same loving soul that longs to unite with other humans and with God.

We’re complete and whole when we’re united with each other and with God. Until that happens, we’re all feeling incomplete.