I experienced a sacred moment last night in Ubuntu-a group of friends meeting regularly on a journey to faith. A collective epiphany emerged. Something became individually clear in the company of the group-an idea living in murky waters just below my conscious surface.
Ubuntu, a Zulu word, roughly means, “we only become human in the company of other humans.” Bill Moyers and Karen Armstrong joined Ubuntu through interview transcript to midwife our epiphany.
Moyers says Armstrong “is one of the foremost, and most original thinkers on religion in our modern world”-a personal standing caused by her own epiphany. In her studies, Armstrong crossed a footnote that referenced the “science of compassion. Science, not in the sense of physics or chemistry but in the sense of knowledge, scientia, the Latin word for knowledge…Feeling with the other. Putting yourself in the position of the other.”
Seeking to practicing this difficult art sets Karen Armstrong on the journey to the most fundamental and difficult teaching of all great religions: The Golden Rule. “Do not do to others what you would not like them to do to you.”
Compassion seems more harmonious with life in the pre-modern world. Individuals found meaning in the great religious texts as they married the words to their personal experience. The antithesis of collective absolutes and certainties no religion stood superior to the other.
Armstrong quotes a scene in the Koran. God is talking to Muhammad: “If We-using the royal we-had wanted the whole of mankind to be in one single religious community, We would have achieved it, We would have made that happen. But We did not so wish. This is not Our desire. So you, Muhammad, leave them alone.”
Listen to Karen Armstrong on Bill Moyers Journal and ponder your own what ifs. For example, this age of terrorism: What if we understood the Osama bin Laden’s of the world work from a political, not religious, foundation? What if we knew that 92% of those surveyed in 35 Muslin countries believe the 9/11 attacks were not justified? What if we learned their religion is the basis for their opinion? What if post 9/11 we practiced compassion to better know how Muslims experience Western politics?
Karen Armstrong knows society in today’s world does not live in compassion. She also understands what the great religious leaders understood-its practice offers escape from violence that will destroy the world.
As I leave the company of Ubuntu I sense human possibility. A new consciousness brews. I pray it makes me more deeply human.