Ecumenical Jihad by Peter Kreeft;

Author:Peter Kreeft; [Kreeft, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781587312175
Publisher: Chicago Distribution Center (CDC Presses)

If there is peace in the heart, there will be peace in the family.

If there is peace in the family, there will be peace in the city.

If there is peace in the city, there will be peace in the nation.

If there is peace in the nation, there will be peace in the world.”

“So the first step is to have peace in the heart toward my neighbor?” I asked.

“Have you forgotten your own Scriptures?” he chided me. “The first and greatest commandment is to love God with all your heart, to have peace with God. Only then will your love of your neighbor be filled with a more than human power and peace.” Again I was startled and heartened to hear Buddha speak of God. He went on: “Did not one of your most popular writers, Thomas Merton, sum up all your social problems in two sentences? ‘We are not at peace with each other because we are not at peace with ourselves. And we are not at peace with ourselves because we are not at peace with God.’”

I was impressed with this simple wisdom, but I voiced a worry about it: “Isn’t there a danger in focusing all our attention on God instead of on our neighbor?”

“No!” was the reply. “For God will always send you to your neighbor. But your neighbor will not always send you to God. Mary will never supplant Martha, but Martha may supplant Mary. Listening to God will never dull your ear to your neighbor; it will sharpen it.”

I was impatient to move beyond this simple lesson and curious about what had happened to Buddha since his death. So I asked, “Are you a Christian now and not a Buddhist?”

In reply, he asked: “What did the Buddha teach? What but the Four Noble Truths? And of the four, which is the crucial one? The second, the diagnosis of all human suffering as stemming from craving, from greed and lust. This teaching remains true, and my alternative, my prescription for a cure, also remains true. In a word, it is what all your saints called detachment. Without it there is no liberation from your slavery to time, to clocks, to activism, to your own ego. Your own saints taught you the same thing, or the same three things: cultivate poverty, chastity, and obedience, not money, sex, and power; not the world, the flesh, and the devil; not greed, lust, and pride. These last three groups are the main ingredients of what I called tanha, selfish craving, the cause of all your problems. Let them die. Don’t feed those beasts food; let them die. Then God can be born in you. This is your wei-wu-wei. Let your souls be wombs, be women, be anima, be open, be tubes for the wind of God’s Spirit to blow through you, in one end and out the other, in by contemplation and out by action, in by faith and out by works, in by Mary and out by Martha.”

I was

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