The Divine

As we can’t help but snap tons of pictures trying to capture the awesome beauty around us in these southern Utah parks, our conversation turns toward the Divine. In particular,
The Da Vinci code. Okay, I didn’t read the book, but Joseph read it while I was hospitalized and he enjoyed it. I haven’t had time to pick it up, I was reading “Whole hearted Way” at the time, and eventually named my coaching website after the title.
Still I have been following the controversy around the film and the book. Joseph being an agnostic sees how the Church would want to maintain Jesus as God and not an ordinary man in order to elevate his teachings as gospel.
The film also gives a negative view of Opus Dei – a devout Christian lay group that practice self- mortification by the wearing of a thorned brace on the upper thigh. I remember as a little girl raised in Catholic schools my admiration for such practice. In fact, I studied the Saints and picked St. Dorothy as my confirmation saint. Dorothy put stones in her shoes and thorns in her hair and offered up her pain and suffering for the sins of the world. As I grew older in my twenties, I realized how stupid this was and that a kind and benevolent God would not want us to inflict pain on ourselves. We get enough pain and suffering in our ordinary lives, thank you. An even older and hopefully wiser adult now, I understand the teachings of Jesus and Buddha- that the unenlightened life is suffering and that they taught us to offer up our everyday suffering for the sake of others that they shall not suffer. In other words, when we can understand our suffering in the bigger views that others suffer too, and that our pain and suffering is universal and not unique to just us, then that suffering becomes much more bearable and much more “small” than our minds would like us to believe.
This is a common trait among all religions and spiritual practices. And that is what we all need today- is to find what we all have in common, our Basic Goodness, not our differences.
Check out our travel blog at http://jlarocca.typepad.com/rvlarocca/