Touching Presence

This Week's Quotation:

“The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.”

—Meister Eckhart

Touching Presence

 

Rev. Berry Behr, Interfaith Minister

Years ago, I was sitting in a crowded auditorium, listening to John Kehoe, author of the book Mind Power. Somewhere between attention and fatigue, I glanced down and then back up. Something had shifted. The man on stage seemed to change before my eyes—his features became older, more ancient, as though he carried a wisdom far beyond the person I had been watching moments before. He seemed larger, his gait looked different. No one else reacted. The room remained unchanged. But something in my perception had opened.

Recently, I listened to visionary healer and community leader, Orland Bishop, contextualizing a conference to be held in Cape Town, Re-Membering our Shared Future: To Speak from the Stars. His words were clear, coherent, and deeply attuned. Suddenly, I had a quiet, unexpected knowing that what was being expressed was somehow larger than the individual speaking. I became aware of a kind of luminous mist that seemed to fill the space around him. There was no form this time, no image to grasp. Only Presence.

In interfaith work, we spend much of our time learning one another’s languages—doctrines, rituals, names for the sacred. And this is good and necessary. But every so often, something else happens. Form falls away, and what remains is not Christian or Muslim, Hindu or Jewish. Not this path or that. Simply Presence: alive, compassionate, and deeply coherent.

When we are no longer listening only with the mind, something quieter and more spacious opens within us. In those moments, we are not encountering a person representing a tradition. We are touching something that precedes all traditions.

Sharing our wisdoms and perspectives in interfaith dialogue spaces is our way of striving for that point of unity that touches into what mystics describe as “The Tao that cannot be named,” “The Cloud of Unknowing,” and “the formless divine.”

When David Karchere and Keahi Ewa came to Cape Town, we invited our interfaith friends. Together we felt the unified field we refer to as Primal Spirituality. Beyond the mechanics of our religions and beliefs, we explored their impact on our perspectives and the way we relate to the world. We touched their essence, and in doing so, we touched Presence.

This is the invitation: to listen deeply, to see God in all eyes. To touch Presence everywhere.