Previously, I put forth my own ideas on the aims of life and the variability of legitimate spiritual goals. My final point about enlightenment and liberation may have been a big ambiguous, expressed as it was in poetic, if commonplace, terms. So what of religious universalism and the like? Part of my point, of course, was that everyone needs to figure that one out for themselves.
Every year, just after Halloween, I become a bit Christian for a couple of months. I wasn’t raised in any religious tradition, but I couldn’t help but experience a bit of Catholic tradition by way of my extended family and local community. I have to say that, as a child, I fell in love with the figure of Jesus — with his birth and death, but mostly with his life and teachings. The inner traditions associated with Christ, such as the Three Magi, the mysteries of Mary, and so on, only became more important to me as I explored things like Hermeticism, alchemy, Goddess worship, grail spirituality, and the like. Now, many years older and practicing Yoga, this appreciation of the person of Jesus has only grown.
When I say that I become a bit Christian this time of year, what I mean is that approaching the celebration of Jesus’s birth (whatever time of year it actually happened matters very little compared to symbolic appropriateness) makes me feel more deeply a spiritual kinship with Jesus Christ. He came into a rough world for a hard destiny; whether there is any sort of salvific power in his fate, his teachings in the gospels still have resonance. And, in my view, they have been badly misunderstood and (often intentionally) poorly represented.
And there we have the crux: a Catholic, a Baptist, a Syrian Orthodox, a Unitarian Universalist, and a Swedenborgian may all disagree with my own understanding of Jesus’s meaning and message. Whether through their own reasoning, the accumulated conditioning of tradition, or a combination of the two, they will have their own take on the gospels. But you will find drastic differences even within these! Saint Francis, Saint Dominic, Saint Ignatius, Thomas Merton, Saint Teresa of Avila, and Saint Therese of Lisieux all had vastly different experiences of their religious lives. All were Catholic, and all thought of themselves as well within the party line of Catholicism. The views on how true this is will depend a great deal of who you ask and when. If I were to sit in a room with any three of these figures and tell them that I firmly believe that Jesus was effectively a Yoga Guru whose message landed among his audience with a dense thud, maybe one of them would entertain me, another would laugh, and the third would threaten me with murder contingent upon how quickly I recanted and accepted baptism.
It seems to me, then, that a Christ, a Saint Francis, and a Meister Eckhart have more in common with a Dattatreya, a Matsyendranath, or a Sankara than they have with any given Christian of just about any time or place. Whether or not they would be allowed to recognize it by their cultural baggage is a different question.
I think that that is the real form of religious universalism. It is not that the formal religions are identical or even equivalent in any real sense, but that human spiritual potential is. Some religions, some cultures, some times and places, have done a better job of encouraging that potential to be realized fully, but humanity being what it is there will always be some individuals who can make the highest spirituality or the greatest miracles manifest under the conditions at hand. And they will use the language, imagery, and methodology of their religious environment because those are the tools at hand. G.K. Chesterton has it that any institution which could produce a Saint Francis must have some merit. This may have a small measure of truth in it, but it seems to me that the reverse formula is the far more notable: any Saint Francis who comes of the Catholic Church must be a spiritual prodigy indeed!
"Jesus was effectively a Yoga Guru whose message landed among his audience with a dense thud..." is probably the best overall summary of Jesus' life. And the "thud" morphed into something grotesque he didn't intend, in my opinion.