It took some conversation to clear up what she thought that should mean for me and what that actually meant to me. Needless to say, I stopped getting candles.
She thought religious people should have lots of symbols to prove their belief. Cross, pictures on walls, candles, statues, etc. In other words my home should be some sort of religious display house. I explained it’s not about the person I am in private, but who I am in public, as God has made us to be communally minded. I might add here, it really is a combination of the two.
There are many religious persons who have homes that display some sort of deity belief. I only have to walk around town to see gardens decorated with all sorts of statues depicting various religious beliefs. I haven’t been here long enough to have met them all, but I wonder what these people portray in public.
I worked with a lady a few years ago, and one day I complimented her calmness in our workplace of chaos. She then told me she got it from her time spent in her serenity garden at home and faith in Buddha. It was the first time she had mentioned any of that. She had established her home to encompass her faith, and tried to live out a life of calm and peace in public. She was a wonderful woman to work with, and after finding this out, we talked about a lot of the common factors of our faiths (and there are a lot!). Our conversations often included the opinions and experiences of others we worked alongside. She said she didn’t like to tell people because they often didn’t respect her belief or they tried to shut her down, so she kept it quiet. Instead, we found expressing our faith helped others to understand who we were and why we chose to live the way we did. Some of those things (valuing life, treating others as you want to be treated, speaking the truth, working out your differences directly, peaceable, etc) made our work space more enjoyable.
We did not argue over which was right or better, we did not stand in lofty manners to protect our beliefs, we did not gather a mob following to destroy the other. We simple found common factors and lived out our faiths, in harmony. This is what it is like when religion works well: we can find the common factors. Even my sister could agree with that.
The Ten Commandments were written to be inclusive (inviting people in), not exclusive (shutting people out). How many faiths are based on them?
Captain Jacky Targett,
The Salvation Army, Kyabram
