Sunday II of Christmas
January 4th
Jn 1, 1-18
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God”: with this solemn proclamation, the Gospel of John begins. Now, this statement is an almost exact echo of a verse from the Rig Veda: “In the beginning was Brahman, with whom was the Word and the Word was truly the supreme Brahman.” Indeed, the philosophy of the Word can be traced in its various forms and modifications, from the ancient Hindu Scriptures, through the teachings of Plato and the Stoics, to Philo of Alexandria and the author of the fourth Gospel.
Word, Logos, Brahman… are terms that, beyond the geographical or cultural origin of each of them, point to that which transcends the world of forms or objects, that which, being the only thing that remains, is the truly real.
Therefore, ancestral wisdom is not proposing a belief to be assumed, but a clue to investigate. What is that which, amidst constant change, remains immutable? What is that which, amidst all kinds of variations, remains always identical to itself? That, only that, is the only truly real thing.
The problem arises when, led by the operating mode of the mind, we objectify that reality and, even without being consciously aware of it, we turn it into “something,” into another form or object, even if we call it “God” and write it with a capital letter. *The truly real is unobjectionable*; it lacks form and cannot be adequately named. It can only be perceived and experienced as that “more” that inhabits us – constitutes our ultimate identity – and yearns to be lived within us. To perceive it, we need to train ourselves to silence the mind and listen: what is in me beyond everything that I can observe and name?
“In all of us,” wrote José Saramago, “there is something that has [cannot have] a name. That is what we are.”
Enrique Martínez Lozano
(Weekly Bulletin)
English version translated with AI