Amherst Community Church

            I’m a sucker for interesting words. As much as I try to keep a lid on recurring deposits to my e-mailbox, I’ve joined a Web site called A Word a Day, which delivers just that. Sometimes they’re interesting.

            One word I love is autodidact, which sounds vaguely suspect but in fact means “one who is self-taught.” Lincoln, by legend, was an autodidact – all those nights in front of the fire reading law and philosophy.

Along with the word itself, the concept is appealing – the idea that we can start from a pretty much blank slate and, through reading, become well-educated and wise. It implies a degree of self-determination, that we can choose what kind of expert we want to be and then go become that person.

I read a lot, of course. It’s part of the covenant of pastoral ministry, and I’m a habitual bookworm anyway. And even though I keep lists of what I should be reading, imagining that someday I’ll read myself smarter and better-rounded, sometimes serendipity puts in front of me the words that I really needed to hear.

That’s what happened – serendipity, known in the church as the action of the Holy Spirit – with The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. A friend of a friend had this book on CD, gave it to my friend, he lent it to me, and I listened to it in the car. (There’s nothing like listening to books on CD to bring home just how much driving a person does!)

The Power of Now tries to get at the essence of the human-divine connection by stripping away the trappings that the world’s religions have superimposed on those essential truths. Not that trappings don’t have an important place in faith life – Holy Communion, for example, for me continues to be a powerful connection to the living Christ. But Tolle is concerned with the unembellished, seamless connection between humanity and God. He sees less an “I and thou” orientation, which was Martin Buber’s revolutionary conception of a discrete and personal God, and more a dissolution of the self into the omnipresence of the holy.

The world is too much with us, he says; to transcend an ego-based state of consciousness, we have to recognize that our unhappiness results not from our life circumstances, but from our thoughts about them. The present moment – the now – is sacred because only there are we truly present with the divine. These ideas are reflected in the sacred scriptures of all religions, he says, and he cites several biblical passages in ways that opened my eyes.

I can’t explain it as well as he does. But there was something about listening to this German author’s voice that brought it home for me. When the student is ready, the teacher will come, goes an old Zen saying. This student was ready.