The answer is convergence. Now what was the question?

Like any free thinking open minded god fearing liberal Christian I spend much of my time looking for Secrets of the Universe. Secrets are revealed, never original. You can't deduce them rationally and for some reason those passed on by authority are suspect. Sometimes they are Eureka moments like when you hit your thumb with a hammer and shout "Appropriate force!" which is more socially acceptable than the more common <expletive deleted>.

Actually, the number of questions may be infinite. More than I can count at any rate. What are we going to have for dinner? Which movie should we go to? Who is going to walk the dog? Take out the garbage? How are we going to resolve the conflict between us and militant muslims?

You see - deep social and philisophical questions may have the same answer as seemingly mundane questions. It is not just about common ground. In the debate about women's reproductive self determination and extraction of fetuses we may be able to agree on the primacy of "life", but whose? Immigration is another example where one side says "illegal" and the other says "inhuman". I am not here to argue about which side is the "right" side in these debates (but I might another time) but to suggest a direction and a process.

Lately, I have been intrigued by the Jesus - Buddha thing. In the book "Going Home" by Thich, Jack Cornfield tells a story of travelling down the Mekong River during the Viet Nam War with war planes steaking overhead when they approached an island with a 50' statue of Buddha. As they rounded the island, they saw another 50' statue of Jesus. The two were hugging each other. Thomas Merton says, "Thich is one with whom I agree completely." So how does a Buddhist monk and a Catholic monk arrive at the same place?

Clearly meditation and prayer were common methods. So was a concern for others. There are commonalities in their sacred texts (see Marcus Borg - The Parallel Sayings). However they did it, they did it at the expense of dogma.