Introduction to Religious
Traditions . . .
Welcome to the introduction of "Religious Traditions." Our quest for meaning in the religious sphere is a noble one, and we will promote every attempt at intelligent expressions in this section, as in others. The "Paradigm Shift" and "Perception" diagram and "Phoenix" of our Religious Traditions are original drawings of the site’s Author and serve as icons and trademarks of Being Quest.
It’s a wonder how any serious personality can presume to involve themselves with their culture’s evolution without honestly incorporating, in some degree, the religious ideas that have helped shape their society and civilization. At Being Quest we will avoid such neglect and promote a more generous disposition toward those spiritual traditions that in so many ways have informed our youth and still remain instructive in our ever-present education to life.
As Being Quest expands upon the scope of our interests in the future we shall be pursuing a more thorough exploration of our cultures’ great spiritual traditions, their essential insights, and their potential unanimity. At present however we will be contemplating the Christian tradition primarily till such time as our Inner Court and Inner Sanctum membership is better equipped with the intelligent voices of our many traditions. Until then, the following is a justification of our temporarily limited scope with an overview of this section’s importance to Being Quest.
The present contributions for this section of Being Quest are limited to the Christian tradition because, quite simply, it is the tradition for which the site’s Author owns responsibility for as a native member of that tradition. Despite any apparent prejudice for the validity of this tradition to our world’s spiritual enterprise, the present and projected offerings of the site’s Author resolve upon a reflection for what ‘may be’ valuable in this tradition without intentional or dogmatic employment of any sectarian perspective.
"Testimony of the Saints" may well challenge the sectarians’ understanding of Christianity and the importance of that tradition for our humanity’s spiritual enterprise. However, our interest here is not for intellectual criticism or apologetics but a genuine affection for the honest hope that the Christian faith aspires to in the experience of the actual individual. So, the ‘five movements’ that comprise the Testimony of the Saints takes seriously the claims of the Christian faith in what regards ‘sainthood’ for the world. The contemplation here regards those ideas that may hold just cause for our acknowledging the tradition’s claims in this regard and, by inference, what that may mean for the practice of Being Quest. The respectful reader will take this to heart and avoid treating Testimony of the Saints as either a didactic work or as an attempt at promoting institutionalized Christianity, or as a defense of the pretended authority of the same. It is none of these.
Readers should understand that the five movements of the Testimony are heartfelt considerations of the Author in quest to make meaningful the claims of Christianity upon the contemplative soul. Naturally, the ‘seriousness’ of these movements will impress one reader with more, another with less, of the validity of the contemplation itself. The goal of the contemplation, however, is not the rational persuasion of the reader but the meaningfulness of the endeavor itself for the Author and for the dynamics of just reflection. Such careful goal of contemplation in our tradition is valid for everyone, no matter what tradition one has the fortune to be responsible for as an integral aspect of human culture. Any reader might consider what their aspired-to responsibility is for the invigoration of their own culture in this respect, whether it is in the mere outward form of their tradition, its neglect, or the worthiness of that tradition to their own charitable disposition. The affective value of true faith hangs in the balance, against which stands the hasty confidence of cynicism and fanaticism, the twin magistrates of the present world’s controlling paradigms.
Being Quest will not promote the discipleship of certain traditions or argue for the validity of our wisdom literatures per se. True wisdom is justification of itself in the discerning soul and requires least of all the pedantry of intellectual conceits. What’s more, we will not propose a priority for our spiritual inheritance over other aspects of our cultural heritage. The place of Religious Traditions at Being Quest is purely an honest recognition that these have been and will continue to be valuable in our quest for meaning and relating to each other. Who does not recognize this is something of a sectarian in his or her owns right, secular or otherwise. At Being Quest, the respectful reader will find nothing embarrassing about owning our diverse spiritual traditions and the heartfelt aspiration of making them live anew in their relevance.
In every reexamination of our traditions, established doctrines should be permeable to various perspectives and emotional clarifications. What we seek here is a respectful allowance for the many reflections of our traditions in pursuit of our life’s quest. In this sense, everyone has something of the mystery to solve and no one is an autonomous agent until they own the task of making their inspirations communicable to the heritage in which they move about and have their being. Such reflections, when well disciplined, are as legitimate, and the validity of such reflections as inviolable, as the integrity of our own intellectual and emotional quest through life. Let this integrity and discipline be maintained and the world is enriched with the faith that our personalities are the real treasures we seek to mature and invest with admiration. Such is our human character; noble and sincere, most of all, wise and beautiful when nurtured with a thoroughgoing responsibility for everything that concerns our respectable futures, thence rebounding in just association to social peace, cultural equanimity, and the preservation of civilization itself.
So we must all carefully work with the heritage of our own culture and insist on the essential and inalienable right to do so. To fail in our appreciation of this discipline is to abandon the potentials of our personal autonomy and the fondest hopes of human civilization in all its many wonderful and legitimate expressions. We become social parasites then, wholly informed by the ruling prejudices of our selfish age, gender, and ethnicity. Traditions wane, die, and disappear with such neglect despite the worthwhile values that are embodied in them.
If then we are carelessly disregarding the mystery of life, failing to actually experience, perfect, and express our culture’s essential faith, we become incapable of demonstrating the valid grounds of our tradition’s noblest hopes, either to ourselves or to others. We appear to be a mere shadow dancer then, not the living, breathing embodiment of our culture’s excellence and beauty. When enough members of a culture or civilization have slipped into such complaisance, they have become the empty shells of their avowed self, doomed to an inevitable dissipation. We very much wish to avoid this fault here and recommend to the respectful reader a kind disposition for the honest enterprise of our Religious Traditions, so wonderful and beautiful in their hopes for grace, love, and peace. The Testimony of the Saints is merely one of many possible orientations toward the essential faith of our spiritual enterprise, though we must find the grace in each tradition to respect what is essential and worthy in all.