Religions are Like Languages

I believe that all religions have a common source which is the Divine. Recently I read the following quote from Rabi Shapiro and immediately thought “YES! This is it.” My ‘mother tongue’ is Christianity, especially protestant evangelical, Baptist, white, and middle-class Christianity. I honor and respect my background and am grateful for the foundation which it has provided me. Nevertheless, my desire, which I attribute to God, is to grow beyond my Christian birth inheritance. I am grateful that God has given me the blessing or gift of an insatiable and wide curiosity. Our languages and concepts are but words pointing to the Divine, they are not the Divine. I share his quote with gratitude to Rabi Shapiro. “To me, religions are like languages: no language is true or false; all languages are of human origin; each language reflects and shapes the civilization that speaks it; there are things you can say in one language that you cannot say or say as well in another; and the more languages you learn, the more nuanced your understanding of life becomes. Judaism is my mother tongue, yet in matters of the spirit I strive to be multi-lingual. In the end, however, the deepest language of the soul is silence.” Rabi Rami M. Shapiro