Mahatma Gandhi believed that “God is Truth.” Gandhi wrote “To me God is Truth and Love; God is ethics and morality; God is fearlessness. God is the source of Light and Life and yet He is above and beyond all of these. God is conscience. He is even the atheism of the atheist. … He transcends speech and reason.” (All Men Are Brothers, 55) For Gandhi God was a “felt want” in moral and spiritual progress, and no one religion had a monopoly on truth. All religions were in fact pathways up a common mountain, where the spiritual vista may not look identical, but in which moral elevation was necessary. In short, religions embraced a common set of moral ideas, and elevated the person by their spiritual goals and beliefs. Having studied religion for over 20 years, it seems to me Gandhi was right. In Making Sense of the Sacred I illustrated several general moral norms which religions share. “God is Truth” indeed captures that moral and spiritual hope that life is more than just physical matter, that there is a leaven of love and divine grace in this world.
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