A different experience of Christianity In what has sometimes been called His 'hard teaching,' Jesus describes the problem of the humanity of his time, the problem He perhaps came to overcome. Briefly and succinctly He describes the action that must be taken. We must change what is within us. To find the Kingdom of Heaven, we must search within ourselves, 'for the kingdom is within you.' To live in that Kingdom of Heaven, or to live according to the divine teaching of love, we must cleanse ourselves within. Then we can love without thought. This chapter also describes a book, called A Different Christianity, written by Praxis Director Robin Amis, and published by State University of New York Press (SUNY). This is often regarded as a 'hard teaching,' in which Jesus describes the problem of the humanity of his time, the problem He perhaps came to earth in order to overcome. Briefly and succinctly, He describes the action of self-therapy which must be taken. To find the Kingdom of God, we must search within ourselves, 'for the kingdom is within you.' Then we must learn to live in that Kingdom, and this means that we must accept the rule of God, and learn to live according to the divine teaching, which is to live according to love. For this, we must cleanse ourselves within, for only by a higher love, agape, can we transcend our own self-love. To act out of love, this is a hard part of the teaching, because thinking alone cannot do this. Since the writing of the book A Different Christianity, the ideas outlined in it have become more firmly confirmed by experience, their implications have come to seem even more far-reaching. | This view is fundamentally different from that of modern Christianity. It is a view of life that at one-time believed that in order to be saved we must first cleanse ourselves and then - with God's help - our souls, our psyche's, must be healed. And then they believed that the only true way to be healed was one in which we became actively and not merely verbally obedient to God. To this, Saint Paul added detailed instruction on how this could be done. His instructions were fundamentally correct for the time. Because of all this, the early church developed ascetic and psychological disciplines intended to cleanse the soul, to heal it, and to make it a fitting instrument for the service of a God who was Himself known inwardly; the Christ within, the Healer of souls. Thus it opened the way for a true Christian consciousness opening to a life of true self-knowledge. At one time this Interior Life was a fitting equivalent of the inner sciences of the great faiths of the East: of Yoga, Sufism and Zen Buddhism - all of which found their parallels in that early church. Christians once believed in changing themselves, not in forcing change on others. Yet it was their energy and their beliefs of those times which formed our civilisation, and it is the drift from those ancient standards that fuels our contemporary discontents. We remember the standards of that time but no longer know how to achieve them. Our thinking has changed so much since those days that these ancient ideas have to be interpreted before they can be applied; and our way of life and our very character are so much changed that ways have to be discovered of applying ancient ideas to modern life in ways that lead us back to and not away from the original aims of Christian life. We can still discover that ancient Christianity in small pockets here and there around the world, often on the borderline of East and West, or in communities on hills and mountains from India to the United States. Properly understood, it offers an alternative solution to the human dilemma. When it is adapted to modern thought in ways that do no violence either to its original sense or to common sense, it offers practical solutions to the multiplying human problems of our time. A Different Christianity, the book by Robin Amis, was published by State University of New York Press (SUNY) in 1995, and has since been reprinted many times. It is available from bookshops in the UK or USA, or direct from Praxis Bookshop. It forms a valuable guide to the forgotten Christian roots of our own civilisation. In those roots lies the solution to the problems besetting the West from it the origins of our lost morality can be rediscovered and restored. |
