Hiding in Plain Sight

Gospel: Matthew 11: 25-27

Religion had its beginnings when people began to share the stories of events and insights that revealed great wisdom.  These stories conveyed deep meaning and values that everyone in the community could benefit from.  The stories would be told around the fire to all the people, and they would reflect and share about those stories and what they mean.  Over time those stories became collected into books of sacred writing.  Then, elaborate rituals, sacrifices, vestments, music, and buildings would be added.  But the core of religion is the story that contains the wisdom.

Everyone loves to sit and listen to a story, but different reactions are had to the stories.  For the learned and clever, they reduce the story to child's tales and myths that have no meaning for us.  But to children and the childlike, they understand that the story is thickly overlaid with deep meaning for us throughout our lives.  The story is an inexhaustible source of wisdom that never stops teaching us, always having something to offer us.

The learned and the clever will dismiss the story.  They will argue over the fineries of rubrics, vestments, and the like.  But the childlike will know in every generation where the real treasure of religion lies.  They will follow the cycle of the stories year in and year out to derive wisdom ever ancient and ever new.