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by Roger Mock
In another week I’ll be off with our extended family to the Finger Lakes. Well, just barely the Finger Lakes. We’ll be staying on Conesus Lake, the western most “finger”. It’s not one of the ones you remember from fourth grade geography. Last year I joked that it’s really more of a hangnail.
Get a picture in your mind of this glacier-carved region. Imagine one of those museum models. Now imagine you could take up the four corners of the model like a tarp and see all the water from the eleven lakes pool together in the middle. Let it back down and see it separate again into the long fingers. Do it a couple times. See how it’s really one lake? If you visit them, though, you will note differences beyond shapes and sizes. Conesus Lake, for example, is very thickly settled. Very. The next lake over, Hemlock Lake, has one small winery on it and that’s about it. And of course each of the other nine lakes has its own unique character. The water? It’s all the same.
The thought occurred to me some years ago that all of our faiths and religions are like that. Some are like lakes with grand palatial estates bordering them. You have to be born into the family to enjoy them and they don’t like it when you try to leave. Some have become tourist traps lined with roller coasters and miniature golf. Some are just dotted with a few fishing shacks and still others require a long, difficult hike to reach but are well worth the effort. Some are only like little backyard ponds but they still refresh on a hot summer’s day. The water in all of them? It’s still just water.
Later I heard that the theologian Matthew Fox had said that God is like groundwater into which many people sink their wells. People of many varying cultures and wells both ornate and austere. But when you get down to the groundwater, it’s always the same. The same Divine Source.
I just checked online to see which book Fox said that in and it’s called One River, Many Wells. Huh. That’s a pretty neat synchronicity, because I had chosen to call this Sunday evening’s multi-faith service One Truth, Many Paths. (August 10, 6:00 pm)
We’ll sing some songs to God. They’ll use different names. But she’ll recognize them.