Yesterday my husband and I were driving around looking at Christmas lights. As we drove, we talked about the ancient mysteries. Earlier in the day, we had watched a documentary about the Vatican’s secret vaults. It suggested lots of different things about what could be in the secret vaults, but the one thing they didn’t suggest is what I believe is there. The fact that all belief systems come from the same place. There is no one true religion. Religion is something that man created. The problem is that some many people are indoctrinated with these ideas since they were children that to let go of those ideas and see a bigger picture would seem like heresy. There are some Catholics that can’t stand the idea of a female priest, how could they handle the idea that they aren’t the one true religion?
The other part of it is that most people seek a sense of belonging when they find a religion. It gives them a sense of identity and worth. The religion serves them. However, as I have grown in faith, I have realized that God gave us freewill and to be saved, I must surrender to Him and become His servant. Religion doesn’t emphasize servitude to God, not in any real sense. They don’t talk about realizing that your life doesn’t belong to you and that you should follow God’s guidance and His will, even if it isn’t what you want. They never talk about that. People don’t want to be told what to do.
As my husband and I continued our drive and spoke about what I learned, I suddenly heard him speak about the Tower of Babel in abstract terms and I finally understood the allegory. In the story, the people of Babel all spoke the same language, they worked together to build a tower so tall that it could reach the Heavens, God punished their pride by having the tower collapse. When it collapsed, He gave them different languages and they could no longer communicate with each other without a common language, and they split up into different tribes.
At some point in time, human beings all came from the same place, and the same life. We knew it and understood that we were all connected somehow. Yet, in our pride, as we grew and multiplied, some of us, most of us lost that knowledge. We lived together, we spoke the same language, we worshipped the same deities, and we knew who we were, but in our pride, we fell apart and scattered across the world. We broke up into different tribes, groups, religions, nations and we lost that knowledge. However, it was not completely lost. It survives in the symbols of nature, it survives in the symbols of religion, and it survives in the depths of ancient mysteries.
I feel hope because I know that even as it seems that horrible things are happening in the world, there was a time when we knew each other and loved one another. That truth hasn’t been lost. It’s still there. Although it might take a miracle or several millennia for us to get in back again, God is full of miracles and He doesn’t operate on time. Therefore, there’s hope that one day, that which was scattered across the world like grains of sand will once again be unified as children of God.
My faith saved me. May God’s peace reside in all of our hearts.
