The doors of Islam were opened to Huston Smith when he was an adult, after discovering the Sufi mystics. He became enamored with Islamic conceptions of order, justice, mercy and compassion. He still prays five times a day as Muslims do. In this episode of The Wisdom of Faith, Smith discusses misconceptions about Islam held in the West today.
WATCH A CLIP
TRANSCRIPT
BILL MOYERS: I’m Bill Moyers. Fifty years ago, if you were studying comparative religion, your main subjects were most likely Christianity and Judaism, unless you were studying with Huston Smith. Huston Smith was fascinated with all the world’s great religions, so in addition to the Judaic tradition of law and justice and the Christian gospel of love, he exposed his students to the values and beliefs of Hindus, Buddhists, Confucianists and Muslims. Fifty years later, America is catching up with Huston Smith. Hindu temples, Buddhist retreat centers and Muslim minarets now dot our religious landscape.
On a subway in New York City or riding a bus from St. Paul to Detroit, you are as likely to see another passenger reading the Koran as the Bible. The Koran is the holy scripture of Islam. Muslim faithful are inclined to experience the words themselves, even their sounds, as a means of grace. For almost one billion followers of Islam around the world today, this is a repository of revealed truth and a road map for the will.
For Huston Smith, all roads lead back to his classroom. He has spent his life combing the globe in search of Zen masters, monks, sheiks and Sufi mystics. Students at MIT, Berkeley and Syracuse University have reaped the benefits of what he has collected on his journeys, as have readers of his now-classic text The World’s Religions. Huston Smith was prophetic 50 years ago in wanting Americans to learn about the world’s great religions in distant lands. Today, those religions are next-door neighbors. Islam, the subject of this program, is the fastest-growing religion in America. Some of these believers are immigrants, but others are converts from different faiths seeking spiritual sustenance outside the tradition they were born into.
Huston Smith himself was born, and remains, a Methodist, but five times a day he prays to Allah, whom Muslims call the one indivisible and universal God. Huston Smith’s life work has been to go beyond scholarly observation and enter into the heart of each religion. He writes “To glimpse at what reality means to the mystic Sufi adds dimension to the glance of spirit. To understand how the Muslim communicates with his God engenders a larger world to live in.”
Come with us as we join Huston Smith in his continuing search for the wisdom of faith.
[Interviewing] Is prayer a part of your regular, routine, every day, mundane world now? Every day?
HUSTON SMITH Historian of Religion: It is. It is, and actually, you know, Paul, who says we don’t know how to pray does as, say, prayer without ceasing. And that is my aim, but don’t let me let on like I do this a lot because my mind gets distracted and therefore I get caught up in what I have to do and this sort of thing. But perhaps the most important thing is, ever since I came upon the Sufis and Islam-
BILL MOYERS: They’re the mystics of Islam.
HUSTON SMITH: The mystics of Islam, right. And I was living with them and got into the rhythm of the prayers five times a day. I both like that-I mean, it resonated with me so much, and I liked also the structure it gave the day -on arising, at noon, when the sun is halfway down, sunset and bedtime, just before bed. It gives a structure -to the day which I just find kind of cleansing. It builds an order into a day which can go to pieces and just go down the drain.
From the top of the minaret, the muezzin calls the faithful to prayer -“God is most great. I testify that there is no God but God. Come to prayer. Come to salvation.” And five times a day, the faithful drop what they’re doing to bring their minds back to what is truly important, to what is everlastingly enduring. The ritual washing that precedes prayer symbolizes the aspiration to inward purity.
BILL MOYERS: I can certainly understand the importance of structure to one’s prayer life, the kind of structure you have in the Muslim prayer, five times a day. What about the content, though? What is the content of those prayers?
HUSTON SMITH: They call it a rak’a, and it is repeated in all five. Most of the Muslims in the world don’t know Arabic, but they all say the prayer. And their pronunciation, many of them, isn’t any better than mine. This is the way it goes in Arabic-
[Huston Smith recites the prayer in Arabic]
HUSTON SMITH: “Praise be to Allah, the Creator of the world. ” So right at the start, we get things in place. This life, this world, is no accident. Randomness isn’t much of a philosophy to live by. It all flows and emanates from a Being infinite in power and equally infinite in goodness. Having established the reality of this absolute Allah, we move to the character. What is its character? The merciful, the compassionate. And there’s two flows there. The merciful in having created us, given us this gift of life; the compassionate in drawing us back to Him, in Islamic imagery, to Heaven.
Now, just as we’re about ready to say “Well, that’s fine,” and sort of slack back, why, we get “ruler of the day of judgment. ” In other words, watch out. Don’t relax. This is a world of law. And mistakes have their consequences. Therefore, watch out, the steps that you’re making in this day.
BILL MOYERS: Is there a single image of Islam that comes to mind that articulates the essence of that powerful story?
HUSTON SMITH: One could hold the Koran in one’s hand and say this, as the believed word of God, would be the symbol of it. But the Koran does not reveal itself to the outsider. Those who are within it just relish it as the apex of all human poetry and everything else, but for the outsider, it is a daunting effect. So I can remember how hard I worked to try to wring the meaning from this.
BILL MOYERS: I suspect that others would say the same about the Book of Leviticus and the Book of Numbers in the Hebrew Bible, or the Book of-The Epistle to the Romans in the Christian New Testament.
HUSTON SMITH: Well, that’s true. There is a clue to the difference between the outsider and the insider, reading the Koran. One of them, by the way, is language, because Arabic does seem to have a power to effect the emotions like few if any languages do. But there’s something else. See, in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, they are really stories, and theological points are sort of interspersed in the story.
Now, in the Koran, theology is the main thing, and as for stories, they presume that the reader will know the basic story of the Hebrew canon and of the Christian canon, so it sort of alludes to those. But no coherent account. And we’ve been talking about our problem understanding their text. They have a problem understanding us. They do not see how we can put so much prize and faith and esteem for a book in which God talks only in the third person. In the Koran, it is Allah speaking directly, and that gives a kind of immediate power to the assertion. The other books seem oblique on that matter.
BILL MOYERS: And that would help to explain the architecture which is very direct, very immediate, very experiential, like the voice of God in the Koran. I mean, there’s no beating around the bush-no pun intended.
HUSTON SMITH: No beating around the bush. And when the central point which is announced in every sura is the majesty and supremacy of God and the human being as a -they use a word we don’t like -slave. But let’s just get to the point, namely, this Allah is ultimate and in power, and everything turns on our relationship, which would be submission.
The core of Islam is embedded in its name -submission. We don’t like that because we like to be masters of our fate, captains of our soul. But we don’t see what that is. The submission is to reality, given the name Allah. And Allah is-that reality perfectly designed wherein good will, justice and so on are the norms to which our lives should be given.
BILL MOYERS: And the mosque, again, as you go into it, calls forth that surrender. It puts one in a position of understanding how small and insignificant we are compared to the architecture of the universe, as they see it.
HUSTON SMITH: And the beauty of that architecture. You know, it’s not blind power. A beauty, a majesty, and, of course, a compassion and concern for the worshipper representing humanity as a whole -all of that just encircles one in the mosque.
BILL MOYERS: Something in the soul seems to give itself up as you go in there.
HUSTON SMITH: You enter into another world, as you cross that threshold. Hindu temples -they just have to cram in everything. You get these facades leading up to pillars and every inch is crammed with figures, like they’re trying to get the unity of all being just depicted. By contrast, Islamic art is sober, suggests peace and fullness and expanse. The beauty of sobriety and containment. Frank Lloyd Wright studied the Islamic architecture that hugs the earth and is planted solidly. Now, of course the minarets rise because there must be some pointing to the above, but nevertheless it’s space and quietude, sobriety, serenity, for Islamic art.
BILL MOYERS: What do you think we ought to know about the figure of Mohammed, those of us in the West? How should we perceive his role in Islam?
HUSTON SMITH: Well, not central, because it’s the Koran that is central and Mohammed was only the mouthpiece, the conduit through which those words came.
His role was basically that of an exemplar. So his importance lies primarily as an example of how someone whose heart and soul were dedicated totally to Allah would support himself in a wide variety of situations, including those of political power.
I think that objective historians, not just Muslims, but historians of any nationality, will give him very good marks as to how he utilized his power during that de in which he was in power. This is Mohammed when he rose through the seven heavens into the presence of Allah. The seven heavens symbolizing the seven states of consciousness as we advance towards the Divine. He is surrounded by these flames, indicating the divine spirit. there’s actually a little humorous element here because on the way up, he met famous prophets that were in each of the heavens, and on the next to the last, he met Moses. And so, after he had been with Allah, on the way down, why, he decided to hop off and hobnob with Moses again. And Moses says “Well, what did Allah tell ” And Mohammed said “He told me to tell my people, his people, to pray 50 times a day. And Moses says “Come on. That’ll never work. They’ll never do that. Go back-Go back. So Mohammed goes back and comes down and Moses said “What? Well, how’d it go?” “Well, he brought it down to 40. And then “Impossible. Still off the chart.” Moses says -“Look, I know those people. I had to work with their predecessors. Even 10. It’s too many. They’ll never live up to it. You’ve got to back one more time. Tell Allah to be reasonable and merciful. And so when he comes back, he comes back with five which is what it was fixed. Even then, Moses says “Take my word for it, they won’t live up to it. ” But then, Mohammed said “I’m not going back. If you want to bring it down, you’re gonna have to go up and talk to Him.”
BILL MOYERS: Makes you wonder how many original commandments there were before Moses negotiated a reduction.
HUSTON SMITH: Exactly. Well, this was the times of prayer. And so-
BILL MOYERS: Right. But what does this say about-
HUSTON SMITH: And so it stayed with five times a day.
BILL MOYERS: You talked about the Sufis earlier. Who are the Sufis?
HUSTON SMITH: The Sufis are the mystics of Islam. Those-every Muslim expects to see God, to meet God at some point beyond death. But the Sufis were, you might say, the spiritually impatient. They wanted God right now in this life. And they were willing to undergo the added disciplines that would be required in order to bring the sense of the presence into the immediate moment, day by day, step by step.
BILL MOYERS: And you say they opened the door to Islam for you?
HUSTON SMITH: They did. For the Sufis, you could say there is no reality but The Reality. Immediately, the door is opened to us as outsiders for whom Allah may be a strange word because anybody can understand that reality with a capital ‘R,’ namely things as they finally are -Well, and the claim is they are a unity, not a melange of competing powers and things like that. There is a structure of reality and there is no other reality than that. There are partial realities. I hate to tell you this, but you’re only partially real, Bill, and I’m only partially real. And in our common parlance, there’s a lot of phoniness mixed in with our reality. But there is only one ultimate reality.
BILL MOYERS: What is it about what they do that enables them to come back from the mystical experience and say “This is the reality that we have experienced.”
HUSTON SMITH: Like the non-Sufi Muslim, they are very meticulous in terms of observing the five pillars, the five requirements of being a Muslim, which are first, their affirmation of faith, which is very brief.
[Huston Smith recites the affirmation of faith in Arabic]
HUSTON SMITH: “There is no God but God and Mohammed is the prophet of God.”
And then there are the prayers five times a day. The third one is the poor due or the alms. It is an expression of Allah’s will that we share the abundance of this world. The fourth is the month of Ramadan, where, from the moment of dawn, which is defined as when you can distinguish a black thread from a white thread, until sunset, neither food nor drink nor smoke nor sexual indulgence may be engaged in. And the last is somewhat optional. It is a pilgrimage to Mecca if finances and health make that possible. Now, the Sufis will be meticulous in observing that structure. They’re not-do not consider themselves above that, but they enter into all of this in greater intensity and in symbolism, greater symbolism. For example, the fast, for most Muslims, and during Ramadan, is simply abstaining from food, drink, smoke and the like. The fast for the Sufis -they tighten it up into fasting from worldly thoughts. And therefore, they try, during that month, to keep their minds focused on the holy, taking on more regimen, more exercise, like an athlete in training, pour more of their lives into it, to make Allah reality in their everyday life.
BILL MOYERS: And they dance.
HUSTON SMITH: And they dance. And they dance. Most Muslims shun dancing, It for Sufis, it is a meditation that brings them to Allah. It was really Rumi and the Mevlevi Order that he started because he was a poet and would go into ecstasy so easily. And many of his greatest poems were composed while he was gyrating and the poetry would flow out. And so dancing, the circling dance, derived from that. But there is this famous story, the time for prayer, for the noon prayer, came. And this non-Sufi Muslim saw Rumi and his disciples dancing in there and he threw open the window and shouted “Prayers! Prayers!” And Rumi replied calmly “We are at prayer.” And the dancing continued.
BILL MOYERS: You say of the dancer “He has achieved the stillness that is the dancing.”
HUSTON SMITH: I borrowed that from T.S. Elliott. That’s his phrase. So let’s together, think, what did he mean by the stillness that is the dancing? Well, the dancing is the outward. It’s the movement of the body. But the stillness is of the spirit, to which geography is utterly irrelevant. As Augustine said, “God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” The stillness is that center, which is everywhere. And, as his disciples circle, why, their bodies are the dance, but the stillness is the moment of concentration.
BILL MOYERS: Did you dance?
HUSTON SMITH: Did I dance? [laughs]
BILL MOYERS: Did you experience it?
HUSTON SMITH: Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Oh, yes.
BILL MOYERS: You did.
HUSTON SMITH: I know the first one that I was in was as the sky became dark and no lights inside, I could only see the silhouettes of the figures against the windows where there was still a little bit of light. And at that one, why, there was one person who became intoxicated with God and just went into these convulsions. But they’re prepared for it, and they’ve got a bulky bouncer, and the bouncer would come and just embrace, sort of surround the person, and quiet the ecstatic fervor within them. And then-then it would go on to dances, where we would all rise to our feet and sometimes we would be holding hands, and locking arms around shoulders, and sometimes just alone and moving from one foot-but the tempo and the pace would change. I did not go into ecstasy, partly because the observer part of me was too alert to what was going on, but people differ in the threshold between their conscious and the uncontrolled aspect of them and the capacity to spill over into a more spontaneous, where spirit takes over and they’re not conscious of what’s happening. And I don’t have much of that capacity.
BILL MOYERS: Nor do I. I have seen it in services in this country of the Charismatics, the Pentecostals. Even my own childhood church, the Baptist Church, I
people – go into a state of ecstasy in revival – what we call revival meetings, Evangelistic meetings.
HUSTON SMITH: Exactly. I have seen that, too.
BILL MOYERS: -that sounds a lot like what you’re describing among the Sufis.
HUSTON SMITH: Very much so. Very much so.
BILL MOYERS: So mysticism, in a way, becomes a kind of universal experience available to people who might not enter the faith, as you said, through the difficulties of the Koran or the Holy Scripture of the Christians or Jews. Mysticism is-
HUSTON SMITH: It spills over into all of the traditions. There’s no way to keep it out, because it’s part, and a potential of the spiritual make-up of a human being, however much it is expressed or limited in a given lifetime.
BILL MOYERS: Exactly what is the mystic view of a human being?
HUSTON SMITH: Approached experientially, it is an altered state of consciousness. In those moments, one knows that this-what passes for reality in our lives, would be the difference between a postcard of Crater Lake and seeing Crater Lake. If you had those two, there’d be no–I mean, it’s not a matter of argument. You know that Crater Lake is greater than the postcard of it.
BILL MOYERS: So when you say “I am a mystic” you were saying that “I’ve had an inner experience that is real to me, so real that I see everything else differently after that. My consciousness has been altered.”
HUSTON SMITH: Yes. And this is the apex, the ultimate. There is only God. There is only the holy. You can put it almost in an “E equals MC squared” kind of formula. Nothing but God exists, and, paradoxically, everything that exists is God. Now, that’s absolutely nonsense in terms of our ordinary everyday view of things, but I have studied that enough to the point where I am absolutely sure that that is true, even though I only stammeringly can articulate or point to why it is true.
BILL MOYERS: It’s authentic for you because you have experienced it.
HUSTON SMITH: Well, again, I don’t want to make great claims, but let’s say foothills experiences. And certainly-and yes, there come those moments when, yes, it does seem-it does seem self-evident.
BILL MOYERS: You mentioned the mystic poet Rumi, 13th Century. I’ve become very enamored of his poetry.
HUSTON SMITH: Did you know, I just heard that he is the most read poet in America today?
BILL MOYERS: You have a couple of his poems in your book. Would you read these?
HUSTON SMITH: This is the famous “Listen to the Sound of the Reed,” and before I begin it, it’s just the flute made from a reed and the reed plucked from the marshes and then the longing of the flute to be back home in the marshes as a symbol of the longing of the human heart to be back in the bosom of Allah.
“Listen to the story told by the reed of being separated. Since I was cut from the reed bed, I have made this crying sound. Anyone separated from the one he loves understands what I say. Anyone pulled from the Source longs to go back. ”
[the wistful sound of a flute being played]
BILL MOYERS: There are similarities between what you just read and the “Song of Solomon” and the psalms-some of the psalms in the Hebrew Bible.
HUSTON SMITH: Sure. Sure.
BILL MOYERS: Again, poetry, music, like mysticism, do speak a universal language.
HUSTON SMITH: They certainly do, and we were just talking about the ecstatic. There seem to be three forms of union with the Divine. One is the ecstatic form, which is overt. The body goes into convulsions as the spirit sort of moves into a different state. In a way, an extrovertive- because it can be seen, ecstatic, lifted out of one’s self.
And then the second, which is more rare, but which goes off the charts altogether because it leaves fewer traces, but it is of the spirit moving into an identity with the Divine. But what can you say about that? It is so inward that it defies descrip- they use-try to use images -a moth being consumed by the flame, drawn to it, but then the moth is gone. And that, to most minds, indicates a loss. But for the higher mathematics of the spirit, it’s not like the dew drop enters into the shining sea, because then we say “Oh, poor dew drop. No more dew drop.” And we think of ourselves as dew drops, so we think of it as annihilation. But the more accurate image would be that the dew drop opens and the entire sea enters into the dew drop.
And then there’s a third kind, the love poetry. And that’s where the Sufis excel. I mean, playing upon this deep-perhaps deepest emotion in all of us, of love, and using that to indicate the union of the spirit with the Divine, in love.
“My God and my Lord, eyes are at rest; the stars are setting. Hushed are the movements of birds in their nests, of monsters in the sea, and You are the just Who knows no change, and the equity that does not swerve. The everlasting that never passes away. The doors of kings are locked now, and guarded by their henchman, but Your door is open to those who call upon You. My Lord, each lover is now alone with his beloved, and I am alone with Thee.”
This sense of intimacy -just total intimacy of which the lover alone with the beloved behind locked doors, and how together and apart they are. And then she having that same feeling with the Divine.
BILL MOYERS: How do you know when the mystical experience is authentic?
HUSTON SMITH: “By their fruits you shall know them.” If anyone thinks that they are getting closer to the Divine, by whatsoever name -the ultimate, personal or impulse -and is not growing closer to one’s fellows in terms of empathy and compassion and concern, you can be dead sure that you’re dealing with an illusion, and you have deviated from the mark, whatever, you know, euphoric, cloud-nine kind of experiences come to them. That is absolutely the surest test.
BILL MOYERS: And this?
HUSTON SMITH: This? I just recently within the last 10 days, I heard a lecture by a rabbi, and in the question period they said-somebody asked “Why do you wear that cap, that yarmulke, the kipah,” and he said “What I want to know is why does the Pope wear it,” which I thought was a delightful answer. I don’t know why the Pope wears it. But the symbolism in Islam is it’s a shield. It’s like radiation. We have, when we’re undergoing radiation, we have these lead belts. The power of the Divine is so incandescent and so powerful that if we were not insulated from it, it would consume us into absolutely nothing. So this is a concession that our life isn’t over yet and so we need to shield ourselves from that Divine incandescence so we can work out the days that have been allotted to us.
BILL MOYERS: After years under colonialism, Islam is emerging today as a very vital force in world affairs. One person out of every five or six belongs to Islam, and not an hour of the day passes without the faithful being summoned to prayer somewhere in the world. What does this say to you?
HUSTON SMITH: Well, it says to me that this is an important part of world history and it poses a special challenge to us because -when I say ï ‘us,” I mean the West, including Europe and the United States -because we have shared borders with Islam for 1,400 years, and borders don’t always make for best relationships.
We’ve been enemies. That’s the truth. We’ve been enemies for 1,400 years, and people typically do not have the best view, the most accurate view, of their enemies.
So I think there is more misunderstanding on the part of the West, of Islam, than there is of any other religion. And, even though technologically they’re behind us, nevertheless, there is a power in that tradition which remains vital. So this is going to be a good part of the 21st Century, how these two great faiths settle down into relationships with one another. And it’s going to require the keenest understanding that’s going to be desperately hard to achieve. But it’s our agenda, in a way.
BILL MOYERS: The Islam you have described this morning is at odds with the image of Islam in the minds of people who’ve only heard talk about the jihads, the holy wars, and the fundamentalist militants. And there is another side to Islam.
HUSTON SMITH: I think that’s true of all religions. There is a spiritual core to all of them, as well as the external form. And the genius for continuation and nurturing millions of people through the ages is this kind of balance between the spiritual essence and the external form. It’s like the kernel of a nut and the shell of a nut. And both parts are needed.
BILL MOYERS: When I hear people talking about the jihad, the holy wars of Islamic fundamentalism I think “Yes, that must be how the Christian Crusades appeared to the Muslims back when, in the name of peace and in the name of God, Christians were slaughtering the enemy. ”
HUSTON SMITH: Right. And just one element. The fact that jihad, that word, has been translated by the media as “holy war,” is one telling incident of how little understanding there is. The dictionary meaning of jihad is effort. If we want to strengthen that, it is exertion. War isn’t in the definition. Of course war requires effort. It requires exertion. But to pick that out as the meaning of jihad is just to get off on the wrong foot to begin with.
Now, if only Western people could understand that the meaning of jihad inclines more toward the war of evil within ourselves, and only in a derivative meaning against other people, already the atmosphere would have changed-would change a bit.
BILL MOYERS: What is the common wisdom that these six traditions have to offer to us today?
HUSTON SMITH: Well, they have to do with ethics and the virtues we should try to acquire and the vision of reality. In ethics, they come down pretty much to–well, in the West, the decalogue-
BILL MOYERS: The ten commandments.
HUSTON SMITH: Ten commandments. There are four areas of life that we can get all snarled up in for us in the spoken word. And sex and possessions and so they’re all very much one in giving guidelines to ethics. They’re all very much one in indicating the kind of people we should try to become, which means the virtues that we should try to acquire.
In Western idiom, the three most important are humility, charity and veracity. In Asia, they like the negative way of putting it, the obstacles that keep us from these virtues, so they talk about greed, hatred and anger. But they mesh perfectly, one in positive language, the other talking about the obstructions to those. And then in vision, they all say that things are more unified, more whole, more one, more integrated than we realize. By the way, science is now confirming that. Second, they say that not only is it more one; it is more wonderful. And here our spirits are just too small to encompass the exuberance of these traditions in terms of their sense of the human potential. There’s a rabbinic saying that every time a human being walks down the street, he or she is preceded by a choir of angels shouting “Make way! Make way! Make way for the image of God.” But these traditions have this exuberance that is contagious when you get it, and I think it’s true.
And then, finally, the third thing they say about reality is it’s more mysterious than we ever suppose. The more you learn about it, the more you see about how much more there is you don’t know than you originally realized.
BILL MOYERS: “The greater the continent of knowledge, the longer the shore of mystery, ” to quote you. The modem psychologists are beginning to agree that the single most powerful yearning in us is the yearning to be lovingly related to others, and I keep asking myself if these religions which espouse love cannot bring the human race together in the love of God, what good are they.
HUSTON SMITH: Right. Well, I think that they would all say that this life, this world, its purpose is not to be turned into a paradise. They all believe that there is a paradise, but they all believe that we gain by having to work out our-well, as Buddha would say, work out your salvation with diligence. In other words, we have to do it, rather than having it done for us. So, the agenda is before us and insofar as we contribute our energy to harmony, community, loving compassion, then our souls grow, but if we’re expecting a paradise on Earth, I think they would say what is hard for us to hear-“You do not understand the meaning of this particular stage in life,” which is to give us the maximum problems from which we can learn the most if we pour ourselves into that learning process.
BILL MOYERS: But you see, if these religions do espouse these and aspire to these qualities, this behavior, this wonder, how do you explain that so often they end in
antagonism within themselves and among themselves? I mean if God were one, why are His children fighting so much?
HUSTON SMITH: Uh hmm [affirmative). Yes. There’s a line from the Koran saying “If We had wished,” they use the royal “We” for Allah -“If We had wished, We could have made you one people, but as it is, We have made you many. Therefore, vie among yourself in good works.” Now that doesn’t-I think it’s a wonderful formula. It doesn’t say why We made you many, but I think the truth of the matter is-that they all get around to saying sometime, is that the one and the many together add up to a more glorious totality than if we had the one only.
This transcript was posted on April 2, 2015.
