|
Excerpt: A "Newhour" Interview with Peter Gomes (Dec. 20, 1996) Submitted by Octavia Miles
David Gergen: What role can the Bible play to those who are on a (spiritual) search?
Peter Gomes: Well, I'm absolutely convinced that the Bible, the power of the Bible, is not so much in its lofty theologizing or its sort of doctrinal purity or clarity because it isn't doctrinally pure or clear. But what is powerful about it is that it is a record of people very much like ourselves who have been engaged in such a pilgrimage and many of them have achieved the result of the pilgrimage. Many of them have had deep encounters of the ultimate kind with God. And the Bible's a record of that experience... when we read it, we are reading the experiences of companions along this pilgrimage. It's sort of a gift from experienced pilgrims to inexperienced ones. And the Bible let's us know that we are neither alone in our despair or our anxiety, nor are we alone in our search, and we certainly are not alone in the joys and the hopes that awaits us and that are ours already in the process.
Gergen: Where should the pilgrimage take you, in effect?
Gomes: The pilgrimage I think draws you to a place where you can be in a way dispossessed of all of the things that heretofore were thought to be valuable and significant and important. You sort of put those things aside and you are then ready to both respond to and receive a kind of spiritual insight, a kind of wittering, what the Buddhists in ancient times call a formal enlightenment. You have an almost "a-ha" kind of experience, and it's not simply coming to sort of doctrinal clarity. It's coming to a sense of who you are and even more important than that, "whose" are you.
I believe that you begin to recognize that the spiritual life is not an alternative to the life you're living. The spiritual life is the only life worth living, and it begins to provide the basis for your thinking and your feeling and your being. And it will be with you from this life into the next one.
(Editor's Note: St. Augustine is the sole sponsor of the "Tea for the Soul" ministry at the Santa Monica Hospital, in which is created a "sacred space" for staff consisting of quiet conversation and prayers, hot tea, delicious cookies and anointing of healing hands by the Chaplains. This year we collected over 50 boxes of herbal tea and contributed $500 from the pledges of our membership).
Copyright © 2002 St. Augustine by-the-Sea
|
