Strange Bedfellows

Fear not that life shall come to an end, but rather fear that it shall never have a beginning.

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John Henry Newman was a major figure in the Oxford Movement. The Oxford Movement's goal was to bring the Church of England back to its Catholic roots. The movement tried to merge different beliefs into cohesive branches of one religious tree. Ideas and ideals got in the way, and a major legal battle ensued. Our history is filled with different religious movements that wanted change of some sort. Change is a hard pill to swallow even though we are in a constant state of change.

Fear certainly has a close bond with change. We fear change, and we fear when we think there is no change. Fear and change are strange bedfellows, and we constantly fuel their dreams. We could say our religious history has a lot to do with our fear of change. We have made that history the one light on which we focus. We believe our religious history is ancient, but it may not be as ancient as we believe. When we think about it, our religious history only represents one thin line of probabilities. We innately know that our religious history does not represent our entire reality. Our religious history is far more diverse in terms of cultures, physical rituals, wars and the fears associated with those interlocking realities. We choose to ignore the fact that there are endless possibilities and conscious developments that have been and will be part of our religious evolutionary system.

Newman’s statement about fear is a valid one in one respect. There is nothing to fear. Consciousness has no beginning or end. We create those restrictions in order to feel the religious reality we create. We focus on one thin line in our religious history in order to give our reality value and truth. Religion has value. Our valuable religion will always be filled with change as well as fear. We have always been beings of change, and creators of fear. But we want and will, at some point, experience other lines of our religious history without those strange bedfellows.