Rivers to the Same Ocean

I strongly believe there is only one God, and that across the world people see that one God in different forms and call out to it by different names.

Religions and spiritual practices are like rivers. They rise in different places, they run through different country, and they are not the same river — but they are all going to the ocean, and they all arrive.

That last part is the whole of what I mean by the comparison. Not simply that the paths resemble each other, but that they share a destination and they reach it. Different practices, different forms, different names; one arrival. The ocean all of them are running toward is God.

People follow the river they were born beside, or the one they were given, or the one they find they can walk along without strain. That seems entirely right to me. A river you can actually follow is worth more than a better river you cannot.

The difficulty comes later, and it is quiet when it arrives. Some of us grow more attached to the river than to the ocean. The practice stops being the way to God and becomes the thing itself — to be defended, compared, ranked against other people’s rivers. It is possible to spend a whole life arguing about the correct way to walk the bank and never once look up at where the river is going.

What steadies me is that the rivers agree on so much. Love everyone. Forgive others. Nearly every practice I have looked at says some version of this, and says it early, not as an advanced teaching. Whatever else a path asks of you, that much is the movement toward God.

The mind, though, does not simply agree to be peaceful because you have decided it should. It goes back to its grievances the way a tongue goes back to a broken tooth. The one thing I have found that genuinely keeps it away from negativity is to recite the name of God, and to keep the thought of God somewhere in the room. Not as an argument against the negativity — as an occupation, so there is less space for it.

And underneath the practice there has to be an actual belief, held wholeheartedly and not merely agreed to: that God is unbiased, gracious to everyone, and will surely take care of us. When that belief is real rather than borrowed, thoughts start to come out clean. Adversity does not stop arriving. It stops being the whole sky.

But I want to be careful here, because this is where trust in God is most often misunderstood — sometimes by me. Believing that God will take care of us does not mean we sit still and wait to be carried. It means the opposite. Full trust is what lets us act with our whole strength.

Watch a small child playing while her mother is nearby. She is not careful. She is not managing anything, or holding part of herself back in case she needs it. She plays with everything she has, and she can do that precisely because she is certain she is held. The trust is not what replaces her effort. The worry is what would have eaten it.

That is what I am trying to learn. Not to do less because God will handle it, but to stop spending so much of myself on fear, and put that back into the work.