Gujurat Sahitya Prakesh, Anand: India, 1982, 198pp
The more I delve into the spirituality of other faiths and other cultures, the more I see common themes recurring throughout. Nowhere is this more apparent than in their mythologies. Allegory and metaphor are powerful teaching tools and well-used in a good story they not only instruct, but nourish and heal the soul. Modern interest in the writings of authors such as George Macdonald and C S Lewis, or the films of directors such as Hayao Miyazaki are testimony to this power, but story-telling as a community building exercise dates back to tribal times and oral tradition.
Our own cultural and faith myths help inform who we are as individuals and as community. As we read or listen to them we find them reading us. One reading is never enough. We need to hear them again and again. The stories presented in "The Song of the Bird" have such drawing power and I find myself returning to them periodically. Each new reading reveals fresh insights.
Anthony de Mello was a Jesuit. Born in Bombay, he lived much of his life in India. He comments, "I have wandered freely in mystical traditions that are not Christian…and I have been profoundly influenced by them." It is from some of these traditions – Jewish, Moslem, Hindu, Buddhist as well as Christian that he has drawn this collection. They are all quite brief – no more than a couple of pages each, but profound. Often humorous, they poke gentle fun at our human foibles, especially our tendency to cling tenaciously to rigidly held beliefs or meaningless traditions. They challenge our need to make God fit our notions of God and the futility of searching for God when all that is required is that we open our eyes and look. We see in them also the needless use of words in endless philosophizing when real meaning is found in silence. We are confronted with our desire to make life more complex than it really is. In true mythic tradition, things are often not what they seem and we are surprised and delighted by paradox as natural orders are reversed.
Ultimately we are challenged to see that "to love God with one’s whole heart means to say a wholehearted Yes to life; to accept without reservation everything that God has ordained for it…" This is the choice between the constraints of dogma and the freedom to explore and be open to new ideas and experiences.
The author adds his own commentary to many of these stories, but cautions not only against limiting ourselves to his insights, but also against applying them to anyone but ourselves. Sometimes the meaning remains obscure, even after several readings, but this is part of their attraction for me. I liked his definition of Theology as: "The art of telling stories about the Divine. Also the art of listening to them." Deeply committed to his own Christian tradition, he believes that "if we want to make Christianity credible we need to plumb the depths of the human spirit, to reach beyond our present frontiers."
These stories will certainly help us to do that if we read them with an open and receptive heart. They invite us to experience Life, not vicariously through someone else’s experience, but by coming and seeing for ourselves.
© Lynne Roberts 2006
