A reflection during Inter Faith week 2021, by Rev Anne Cross
When I have a dream which calls me to take a serious look, I will arrange my room with a few scatter cushions and assign a cushion to each character or colour or feeling from the dream. I then sit for a while on each in turn. Moving around each cushion, I sit contemplatively on each, inhabiting that aspect, that quality, that symbol that had emerged in the dream. In this way I try to gain some clarity as to my subconscious enquiry.
Experiential exploration of World Faith paths is a fundamental part of training as a OneSpirit minister. Month by month over the two year training is an invitation into a faith path, woven together with a personal journey through significant life events, an immersion leading to developing ritual and ceremony to mark the moment.
Our training is a personal enquiry into the widest facets of traditional experience of belonging across the world. A movement inward to experience the outward.
as above, so below, as within, so without
As I sit with whatever emerges in my dreams, I don’t become that mermaid, that green explosion, that table top (yes, my dreams are beautifully weird!) but I do gain a greater understanding of where these things emerged from. When I sit with a mantra just learned from the Hindu faith path, I’m blessed to sit with the millennia of wisdom that inhabits the mantra, and with grace it might soften my edges, allowing this new experience to refresh my own story and understanding of the divine.
In our world of increasing complexity, it seems to be harder and harder to find common ground upon which we might be with our neighbour. That holy ground, where relationship cuts through all the differences, diversities, languages and values, beyond subject/object to one of I/thou – I see God in you.
Though many may have moved away from traditional faith communities, there remains an important place in all our lives for belonging; a belief system, a moral code, a community with whom to share a common understanding of God, provides that belonging. The Interfaith minister who facilitates dialogue between communities of belonging sits in divine space.
Though the scientific era may have debunked ‘religion’ it is the wise one who finds a sense of the spiritual in the vastness of the galaxies, the wonder of the interconnected and the mystery of consciousness. The OneSpirit minister holds mystical enquiry with curiosity.
Interfaith ministry sits with the complexity of difference, the dark and the light, asks the questions, holds space to hear the multitude of answers. A healing space, a space where Spirit is made manifest.
The OneSpirit Interfaith minister recognises that in complexity the way through is not to find ‘the’ truth and impart it, but to sit on holy ground with truthfulness.
The truth will not save us but truth-fulness just may.
