*This is from a piece that I wrote in my PhD program on diversity. If you wish to see the whole paper, Diversity: Form from Formlessness, please email Jenny at jenny@somamovement.org

The highest form of love is intimacy that does not annihilate difference. Evelyn Keller 

            I have been a student at the Benet Hill Monastery in Colorado Springs for three years. In this four-year program, we study the Bible in a circular fashion, with the sequence determined by when and why it was written. After reading the letters of Paul, I have questioned how the Christian church as a whole was formed. As I read these letters and the Old Testament I recognized that what unified the early Jews, and later the Christians, was a strict adherence to a certain set of beliefs and traditions. Anyone who strayed from this set of beliefs was seen as “doing it wrong” and efforts were made to convert them. We still do this today, focusing on belief rather than experience to unify. I recognize that traditions and boundaries are what make a particular faith what it is. But I wonder, can we respect these boundaries that create difference and be united with those whom reside outside of that boundary? And I wonder if it is the breath (soul) and the body (form) that can bring down to the earth the abstract beliefs that divide us and perpetuate a fear of difference?

            One of the students in the Bible class challenges me. She says things like, “my sister practices yoga and she is not Christian. I don’t know if she will be okay in the after life.” She says about Jewish tradition, “why do they not celebrate worship on Sunday, what is this Shabbat anyway?” and wonders how Jewish people live with “no belief in the after life.” She comments on people who identify as gay and lesbian and says things like “well, the church says they are fine if they remain celibate.” When I asked her, “do you know anyone who is Jewish? Do you know anyone who is gay or lesbian?” she responded with a no. It is often as if she is repeating Catholic doctrine. It is not about a personal experience with God, but an adherence to dogma that is not rooted in our humanity. My blood boils when she speaks and I have to breathe very deeply in order to not react to her. It is this strict adherence to beliefs with little connection to the here and now that frightens me. How do I accept this difference in thinking and living in the world in the simple confines of my small class?

            My safety must begin within me. This security is born from a unifying breath within that runs much deeper than our beliefs. This formless “breath of life” (Capra, 2002, p. 67)  gives rises to an infinite number of diverse forms of matter in the world. When I forget the breath that unifies, I stop at the form (in this case above, the student’s beliefs) and I judge her and try to convert her to my side. I am intolerant of her intolerance because I have forgotten my breath. I too then begin to live in the abstract landscape of ideas alone. Marion Woodman (1982) Jungian analyst writes “There can be no grace where the relationship to the self is cut off, that is where there is no love between the human and the Divine, in psychological terms where there is no conscious connection between ego and self because the ego is too frightened to receive from the unconscious. Without that communication, the ego tries to set up its own kingdom.” (p.60) When I breathe, I make a connection to the Divine. And I am reminded that though our interpretations of Christianity differ, we are sisters unified in the formless, infinite, breath of life.