On All Faiths Lead in the Right Direction: Blasphemy, right?
At dinner, we were seated next to several people, but the gentleman to my left and his date were hands down the most exciting guests we met. His name is Emerson and his date is Grace. They are both artists. Emerson plays the trumpet and conducts orchestras. Grace is a painter. They both had sharp wits and minds and you can see by their picture that they weren’t entirely young.
They have both lived full lives and show no signs of slowing down. What intrigued me most was they are both followers of the Baha’i faith. I have never heard of Baha’i before.
As we were talking, Emerson drifted toward that cliché church talk that I talked about in “The Yeshua Fog” post. I got a little nervous, but excited, because I was hoping to share my views with someone at the wedding. It was going to be hardest to share them with an elderly man. But I was down, so I buckled my seat belt and waited to be proselytized.
Boy was I wrong!
Baha’i is an integrated faith, I imagine like Unitarianism. All paths lead to “salvation” or to god, so Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Flying Spaghetti (honk), etc, all faiths lead in the right direction. I know … blasphemy right!?! NOOOOOOO!
But how cool is it when a gentle old man tells you about his passion of a church that is all inclusive. He leaned into me at one point — he spoke to me with his eyes shut — and he said, “We don’t do any of that superstition or anything.” Which I took to mean the Jeffersonian bible kind of thing where all the magic and BS is removed from the bible and what’s left are truly great words. ...
What impressed me most about Emerson and Grace was their clarity of vision and their studious personas; their beings exuded education and worldly gnosis. It’s bizarre to hear an elderly man refer to googling something in one sentence and then telling me about how the practice of performance is the best self education that one can encounter.
After we talked for most of the evening, Emerson and Grace encouraged Tina and I to dance for them. Which was cute on so many levels. We had a lot of fun.
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