Cross-pollination

Ben Reist, my Reformed The­ol­ogy pro­fes­sor at San Fran­cisco The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary, told the class, “If a lit­tle bit of Jesus rubs off on the Bud­dha, that’s good, and if a lit­tle bit of Bud­dha rubs off on Jesus, that’s good too.” In the lib­eral reformed tra­di­tion, I was a part of, my back­ground as a Radha Krishna devo­tee was wel­comed as an asset, and I was able to see my Chris­t­ian ser­vice as a West­ern ver­sion of my Radha Krishna devotion.

Now that I am no longer min­is­ter­ing in the Chris­t­ian church and have returned to my Radha Krishna devo­tional prac­tices, I find that most Radha Krishna devo­tees are fun­da­men­tal­ist, lit­er­al­ists who think they have the ulti­mate answers to Truth and that their answers are supe­rior to any­one else’s. When I interned at Cal­vary Pres­by­ter­ian Church in Berke­ley, Cal­i­for­nia, Pas­tor Larry Peter­son said, “Remem­ber, your truth is truth with a small “t” just like every­one else’s.” I live in a rel­a­tivis­tic, plu­ral­is­tic world that is open to truth in all forms. I feel it is our unique oppor­tu­nity at this time to be able to take the best teach­ings and prac­tices of all paths and inte­grate them into a multi-faceted whole which gives a more com­plete pic­ture of Truth than any one path could do alone.

I hap­pen to find the eter­nal ser­vice of Radha Krishna in their spir­i­tual realm of Goloka to be the most attrac­tive vision for eter­nity. Yet, I feel a need to update it, give it a new look and adjust for life in the West. In this way, I wish to present a non-sectarian ver­sion of Radha Krishna devo­tion which I feel would be pleas­ing to my param-guru, the 19th cen­tury vision­ary, Srila Bhak­tivin­ode Thakur.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 28th, 2006 at 08:57 and is filed under Steve's Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.