The Peasant and the King
by Hermit Crab 21.11.2006, changed 30.11.2006

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It began in 2002, while I was living with a group of dissident Christians, the most devout and dynamic group of believers I had ever met. They began as a neighborhood church in Tennessee in the late 1960s, but broke away from the mainstream Christianity that they considered too worldly and decadent to deliver the Good News of the living Christ. In place of the dominant religious apparatus they shunned, these followers of Yahshua— the native Hebrew name rendered as Iosus in Greek and later anglicized as “Jesus” —have built a network of communities where surrender of self and the love of one’s neighbor is the aim of every aspect of daily life, not just the theme for a Sunday morning pep rally.

I was drawn to this aspect of the community, the chance to lay down my schizoid perspective on life and seek the unity of a greater sense of Self, that spirit we all know by so many names. There was a very palpable sense that the spirit which moved them in their everyday lives was the same which motivated me to live for more than simple amusements and perpetual postponement of death.

I also knew that total devotion to a particular verbal articulation regarding the origin of this spirit (ie. Gospel) was considered a prerequisite to sharing the “life abundant” in this community, even more so than in the modern Christian churches. I was no more inclined to accept their Gospel than any other that had presented itself to me over the years. But I went in with the same hope I always had in these situations: that the cultivation of this spirit would be powerful enough to overcome our sense of separation that arises from the diverse ways we arrive at it. Maybe I had finally found the place where the symbols would be allowed to do their job and rest in peace, letting the unsayable name of God work its magic in us and make us all whole once again.

When even their version of the Gospel started to sound the same hollow ring of dissonance in my heart, I despaired that there was no place where my love of Christ could not be nurtured to fruition without butting theological heads with my neighbors.

Then I started listening to the ring. I felt like it was trying to tell me something…..four years later, this book is an elaborate summary of what it has told me.

The answer, not surprisingly, led me back through many of the traditions I had studied over the previous ten years, but also introduced new ingredients I had ignored. In many ways (and you will soon get the full relevance of the analogy in the forthcoming tale), this experience was the straw that broke the camel’s back, forever disabusing me of the notion that I could build a spiritual home upon a rock that is held to be the exclusive Truth, and everything to the contrary was fair game. The Christian mystics of antiquity joined forces with latter-day descendants like the Trappists and the unprogrammed Quakers; Sufism and Jewish Kabbalism rounded out the Abrahamic mystic traditions. I revisited the piercing clarity of Buddha and the melt-away smoothness of the Vedanta. The rugged iconoclasm of Zen rekindled the same fires as the gentle just-so of Lao-Tzu’s Taoism. To this eclectic mix was added the virulent agnosticism of Nietzsche; the universal love poetry of Mirabai and Rubia, Walt Whitman and William Blake; the mythos studies of Joseph Campbell; and the emergent field theories of post-modern physics. Bringing it full circle, perhaps, is the recent discovery of the faithful Christian anarchism of Sören Kierkegaard, Leo Tolstoy, Ammon Hennecy and company. If I had originally gone to Christ looking for the uniformity of a simple Truth on which to lay my head, it may seem like I was given the exact opposite.

Unlike previous journeys, however, I did not go to these traditions seeking the right one or even the best one for me: I was just following a single subliminal thread of truth that runs through all of them –the same thread that led me to explore Christianity, a spiritual tradition I had written off as a dangerous anachronism in my youth. This thread was the root of my faith. Disregard any manifestation of this thread, I learned, and the whole thing disappeared. My faith had to be found in all faiths, or it would be nowhere.

So I took this spiritual jambalaya and brought it back to the Christian Gospels, to the Good News of the reality of Eternal Life brought by one Jesus of Nazareth, embraced and professed by Christians and Yahshuans alike. In doing so, I found that I could see the spirit I called Christ in every one of these traditions. While most mystic paths are unconcerned with the historical personage of Jesus of Nazareth, none of them were devoid of the Way, the Truth and the Eternal Life that I felt. Seen in this light, the way of Yahshua is a unique manifestation of a universal spiritual Truth. This was Even Better News to me.

Just as apparent, of course, was that every one of these traditions had its own analogy for the thread of truth that was not the least inferior to the manifestation presented by the Christian Gospels. No one manifestation was an analogy for another –they all spoke for the same unspeakable Truth that vibrates in our deepest silence, a Truth that is only interrupted when we open our mouths to proclaim one of our gospels as the sole truth!

All notion of a hierarchy of Truth disappears when this thread emerges. Suddenly the divergent faiths of the world are no longer competing against each other for the status of Ultimate Truth—they are collaborating with each other to tell the greatest story ever told in every possible theological language. This is definitely the Best News Yet.

I have no reason to doubt that the News will keep getting Better as the story unfolds.

[Editor's Note: This article is based an excerpt from introductory material to a forthcoming novel-in-progress. The author, Hermit Crab, is the creator of the Fish Out Of Water Project (FOOW.Org) and is a frequent contributor to The Four Precepts Web Portal. ]