To Meet at the Source; Hindus & Quakers

Recently I was with a group of Friends visiting an old California Mission. As I sat in the ancient church with its thick adobe walls, and strolled through the vine-covered cloister, I was overwhelmed by a deep sense of the Presence of God. I was suddenly catapulted back to an occasion in South India when I was alone in a small section of a large Hindu temple. The room was dominated by a large statue of a bull and an equally large Ganesh (the elephant god) stood just outside the door. There I also felt this sense of Presence. Ordinarily such statues do not move me spiritually--and it was not, of course, the statues themselves but the fact that this had been a place of worship for many centuries. I have had the same experience in the ruins of an ancient Buddhist Monastery in Sri Lanka, and in an old Quaker meetinghouse in England. The Reality was there in all of them, transcending the varieties of outward worship that had taken place there.

In India, the spiritual dimension of life is felt in the atmosphere. It is an unforgettable experience to be in a land where the search for and worship of God have come down through the centuries and are still part of daily life today--the classical music, all based on religious epics and prayers; the housewife tending the household shrine as her first act of the day; casual conversations in which a spiritual dimension of life is taken for granted...