Part one of this endeavor to find a language that progressive Christians and secular humanists can share spoke of replacing the word god with the word love. Part two involved replacing the word sin with the word egotism, a human trait that is inevitable and inescapable. We each create a reality unique to us, and we believe it to be Reality with a capital R. That’s the human problem: our reality is always distorted.

Now we ask: what’s the cure?

In a word: liberation. We need to be set free from the confines of our limited and distorted perception, and we, on our own, are incapable of attaining that freedom. We are in bondage, and we lack the ability to escape that bondage. To say that we require assistance is not to say that we have no part to play, because we do. We are responsible for our behavior because even though we need help, the help is always there, challenging the limiting reality that we have created for ourself.

It goes something like this. We create our own reality and are locked into it. We are not free to escape. And then, on occasion, something happens, some event that I call a moment. A moment is not a measure of time, as in…that happened a moment ago. It is, rather, a measure of transcendence, as in …aha!…when something strikes you, something you had not imagined before, and it can be anything. You see a tree for the first time, even though you have seen it a hundred times before. You hold a baby and experience a peace beyond description. A storm, a beggar, a starry night, a thought…moments come in all shapes and sizes. You can’t make them happen, but you can allow yourself to be available so that they can happen. Something comes to you in the moment, -and it could literally be anything-, such that this happening invades your reality and temporarily sets you free.

In that moment a choice is set before us: to retreat into our private world and return to the darkness in which we feel safe, or to step forth and begin a journey into the light. If we exercise our newly found freedom and exit the cave, we will now require help as we continue on the path, and that help mostly or at least often comes in the form of family, friends, and neighbors who are bound to us by love. These bonds of humanity are an essential part of the new life.

Our fellow pilgrims perform at least two functions. They will be there to assist in our endeavor to leave behind the confines of closedness. This will involve their being critical of us when we backslide, and we must be willing to accept this help. The second function will be the positive interaction that helps us grow into the new and expanding awareness. Both, critique and comfort, together in love. I’m not saying that this cannot be done on one’s own, but, to quote Joe Cocker, I get by with a little help from my friends.

Moments and community. That seems to be the cure for our egotism, and they are concepts common to both humanists and Christians, words we can agree on.

If we move over into Jesus talk, the same concepts apply. Some of the people that Jesus encountered did not allow themselves to be receptive, while others did. Matthew the tax collector, the various fishermen, Mary Magdalene- these are the people who allowed the transcendent to enter their lives and lead them on a new way. I do believe that Jesus had that power and that that power was rooted in the fact that he himself lived in Reality, big R. Because he was not trapped in his own little reality, he was able to do for others what they needed most, to be set free and encompassed by love. In a more limited way, we can do the same, hopefully always getting better at it as we go along.

What happened between Jesus and his followers could happen anywhere. Perhaps there are thousands like Jesus, on this planet and the next. Who can say? We must never become fundamentalists who claim to be protectors of the whole truth. But what we can say is that what we learn from Jesus coincides with what we learn from looking at the world around us. And that is that love is the key, egoism is the challenge, and moments/community together comprise the solution.

Read Part One Here
Read Part Two Here