Tales of Wonder by Huston Smith.✔✔✔

CBC's Tapestry on Sunday afternoons is one of my favorite radio shows, and having just heard the end of the program when Huston Smith was interviewed, I decided to read one of his many books. Huston is now in his early 90s, was born in a remote village in China to missionary parents, and has spent his life "chasing the divine", adventures which have led him to examine and experience first-hand such religions as Buddhism, Hinduism, Sufism, native American religions and yet he calls himself a practising Christian. It was this all-embracing spiritual journey that intrigued me, plus his voice in the interview, where he replied to questions very slowly but with complete humility.

His spiritual reading includes the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, the Qur'an and Sufi poems. a practise he follows every day after he does some yoga poses. ( He relates teaching a class of students while standing on his head!)

The book has been designed around the image of a cross, not the Christian cross but an ordinary cross, where the horizontal arm signifies the historical dimension of his life, while the vertical arm suggests the sacred dimension- his life "amid timeless truths".

He has become friends with such diverse and interesting persons as Aldous Huxley, Martin Luther King Jr., the Dalai Lama, and Timothy Leary - and yes, he tried mescaline with him. He has also travelled extensively, both on his own and with students.

Quoting from this autobiography: " The proper response to a great work of art is to enter into it as though there were nothing else in the world. The proper response to a major spiritual tradition, if you can truly see it, may be to practice it. With each new religion I entered into, I descended ( or ascended?) into hidden layers within myself that, until then, I had not known were even there"

And the last words of his book? "Thanks for everything! Praise for it all!" He certainly has lived life to the fullest.
I now want to read his book "The World's Religions".