Other languages of return

The Godward Way is strengthened by listening carefully to other traditions. Careful listening preserves differences instead of translating every spiritual word into our own vocabulary.

The Qur’an combines divine incomparability with trust and return. In the immediate setting of 42:11, which denies that anything is like God, 42:10 speaks of trusting Him and turning toward Him. Incomparability does not prevent address.¹⁸

That pairing is close to this book’s central invitation. We need not form a likeness of God in order to entrust ourselves toward Him. The resemblance concerns relation under the condition of incomparability; it does not erase differences between Islamic theology and this framework.

The Bhagavad Gita, 12:5, recognizes the difficulty that embodied people encounter in approaching the unmanifest. Its chapter explores devotion in a setting with its own understanding of the divine. We can receive its acknowledgement of difficulty without claiming that Hindu traditions all reject sacred forms or that their metaphysics duplicate ours.¹⁹

For a Godward practitioner, the difficulty has a practical consequence. Be patient with the imagination. A mind accustomed to forms may reach for a form when it is asked to pray. The work is steady relinquishment, without contempt for the mind’s attempt to help.

The Buddhist raft simile in Majjhima Nikaya 22 treats a teaching as a means of crossing rather than a possession to carry indefinitely. Buddhism does not thereby teach relationship with a Creator. Its contribution here is the discipline of allowing a useful means to fulfil its purpose without becoming an object of attachment.²⁰

The same question can be asked of this book: am I using it to turn, or carrying its vocabulary as a burden and identity?

The apophatic strand of Jewish thought also reaches a limit in speech. Maimonides, in Guide for the Perplexed I.59, reflects on the inadequacy of multiplying positive descriptions of God and invokes silence in praise. His philosophical account does not supply every feature of this book, but it shares a concern with the presumption of descriptive mastery.²¹

These encounters leave us with several forms of discipline: do not confuse likeness with God; do not demand ease in approaching the unmanifest; do not cling to the instrument; do not mistake a growing vocabulary for possession of the divine.

They do not produce one universal theology. They make the practice of attention more exact.

Practice: read a passage from another tradition with enough patience to hear its own claim. Receive what clarifies your practice. Leave its differences intact. Offer the urge to recruit every tradition as evidence that you were already right.