Bring your best to interfaith pot-luck

I'm a big proponent of talking across our religious fences, even when the discussion is difficult. It's like a community pot-luck supper; you might not like every dish, but everyone can appreciate the abundance and variety of food -- and of course the fellowship.

But there are two temptations at these interfaith pot-lucks, and I don't mean the dessert table.

The first is the temptation to get so caught up in arguing the rightness of your beliefs that you forget to listen. It's like insisting that everyone get a big scoop of your casserole but refusing to sample any other dishes. When we single-mindedly push our own view, we miss the insights of others. And we can't begin to heal the wounds between faiths unless we're willing to hear about the pain that we've inflicted.

The other temptation is to bring nothing to the table at all. To be so afraid of offending anyone that we speak in generalities and hide what is best in our own tradition.

That's what came to mind when reading this excerpt from J. Philip Newell's newest book, "Christ of the Celts: The Healing of Creation":

"A number of years ago, as the little spirituality centre of Casa del Sol in New Mexico was being conceived, I spoke with a native leader about the types of conversations we might have in a community of listening and dialogue. I asked, 'What is it I am to bring to the table of humanity? What am I to bring to our relationship in this place?' He answered very simply, and very challengingly: 'Philip, bring your treasure, bring Christ.' He then said, 'Would you expect me, as a native leader, to bring something less than my greatest treasure? Would you be satisfied with something less? So I tell you, bring your treasure. Bring Christ.'

"I understand why those of us of liberal sensitivity in the Christian household have hesitated from bringing Christ to the table. In the past, he has been used to beat others over the head and to tell them they need to become 'like us.' So I understand the hesitation. I know why many of us have simply gone silent. But if we are to establish true relationships in the journey of the world today, as distinct cultures and religions and nations, we need to find ways of bringing our treasure to one another.

"... this is my desire, to bring the treasure of our Christian household to the yearnings of the world today. And I am seeing that we can do it in new ways, in ways that listen reverently to the hunger of the human heart and in ways that will bring us closer to one another, as individuals and as distinct traditions, instead of into further separation and brokenness. This is a desire that issues up from deep in the soul. It is not a Christian desire or a Jewish or a Muslim desire. It is a holy human desire, and it will cost us much. But it is for the healing of creation."

What can you or your tradition bring to the table?

Buddy Christ to the rescue

"Religion is very market driven," Anonymous wrote at 5 p.m., April 25. He or she offered the thought that even monotheistic religions adopt different gods over time, or at least modify their views of God.

"Jesus is almost portrayed as a big brother 'buddy' nowadays."

I couldn't help thinking of the movie "Dogma," which is hilarious and thoughtful if you can stand to wade through the constant profanity and juvenile sex jokes (it more than earns its R rating; even edited for TV, which is how I first saw it, it's pretty raw). In one scene, a cardinal played by George Carlin announces that the Church sees the need to update its archaic image and so has decided to replace the "wholly depressing" image of the crucifix with a "new, more inspiring" image: the "Buddy Christ." The statue unveiled shows a grinning, winking Jesus giving an approving thumb up.

What makes this scene is so funny -- apart from the ridiculous, smarmy statue itself -- is the idea that a religion desperate to attract followers would dump the central symbol of its message in order to make it more "user-friendly."

And yet ... it is good and necessary for our images of God to grow and expand. If faith is to remain relevant, it must speak to the needs of the current generation -- while also connecting this generation to the wisdom and traditions of the past. A living faith isn't afraid to find new ways of describing God. A living faith isn't afraid to see God in new light.

Christianity doesn't have to kick Christ off the cross to also embrace a laughing, accessible, warm Jesus. Buddy Christ is silly satire, but he makes a point.

Are religions today watering down their messages to attract followers? Should they change with the times? If so, in what ways? What should never change? Let me know what you think. (And thanks for the thoughtful comments on the last post. I enjoyed reading all of them.)

One-way signs on the road to God

If life is a highway and God is our destination, there are an awful lot of one-way signs along the road.

So is there only one true religion? I just came across a passage that addresses that contentious issue in "The Soul of Christianity: Restoring the Great Tradition" by Huston Smith. After pointing out that every religion claims superiority, he writes:

"...revelations are for the civilizations they create, and within each the truths revealed are absolute and can brook no rivals. There is no dissembling here: when a man says that his wife means the world to him, he is not claiming that she should mean the world to other men. Moreover, underlying the 'relative absolute' in his assertion, there is an absolute Absolute: he does believe that all men should feel for their wives the love that he feels for his wife. In our multicultural age Christians are coming to understand this point."

He then gives several examples throughout history of Christians maintaining the integrity of their own traditions while honoring other paths to God for other cultures, and concludes:

"These examples betoken a new mood in Christendom, a more conscious, general recognition that though for Christians God is defined by Jesus, he is not confined to Jesus."

That makes sense to me. It shows how you can be a passionate follower of one faith without assuming every other faith is nonsense.

What do you think?

Scrubbing stains and memories

The stain in the carpet came back this week, stubbornly marking the spot where a man last touched his home. He fell, bleeding and unable to rise, and died in the hospital a few hours later. One year ago today.

I hated that stain when it was fresh; it reminded me daily of what I had lost. So I scrubbed that spot over and over with every product I could find, until finally it faded. For a while.

My sharp memories of that awful night -- and the long illness that led to it -- faded as well, though more slowly. There's no cleaning solution for the brain, so instead I looked often at pictures of him as he used to be, with wavy hair and full beard, before chemo left him bare as a newborn. The mind-scrubbing worked well enough that when I recently saw a photo taken during his illness, it startled me.

Now and then I run across pictures from that time, but I don't seek them out. I don't hang them on the wall. It's not that I want to forget; I just don't want to be trapped in the raw emotions of that night, any more than I wanted to preserve that stain.

I'll bet we all know people who have become so attached to their pain that it becomes their identity. They live in the past, nursing resentments and regrets. They loudly proclaim their misery, while clinging to it as if to a lifeline.

One of the great gifts of the spiritual journey is learning that although misfortune is inescapable, misery is optional. That you are more than the circumstances of your life. That there is a Source of light and healing. That when you live fully in the present moment, there are no regrets for what was or fears for what will be.

Just a stain to be scrubbed.

I can deal with that.

It's heavenly to cherish the earth

The noisy, seemingly endless squabble between adherents of creationism and evolution can hide the fact that, on one issue at least, believers and scientists are growing closer. That issue: caring for our planet -- however it came into being.

Churches that previously emphasized mankind's dominion over the earth now speak of stewardship: The planet is not ours to ravage but ours to cherish and protect from harm.

Emagazine.com wrote in "Stewards of the Earth: The Growing Religious Mission to Protect the Environment" of the rise in faith-based environmental awareness: "When conservative evangelical Christians call for action on global warming, Hindu holy men dedicate themselves to saving sacred rivers and Buddhist monks work with Islamic mullahs to try to halt the extinction crisis, boundaries are clearly being redrawn in the ongoing struggle for the political hearts and minds of the world’s believers." The whole article is worth reading.

As I write this, on the afternoon of Earth Day, I'm distracted by the view from my window. The oak's spring greenery sways against a backdrop of heavy clouds. Geese honk as they fly in tandem toward the pond. Birds and toads join their voices in song. A hawk circles and swoops to earth.

It's art -- as fine a work of art as anything that has been displayed in a museum or performed on a stage. It's life -- the air we breathe, the food we grow, the water we drink. It's a gift from God -- one we can't afford to neglect. The wonder is that it took some theologians so long to figure that out.

Passover's celebration of freedom

The Jewish celebration of Passover began at sundown on Saturday. The eight-day festival commemorates the exodus of the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt, so it is closely linked with the ideas of freedom and liberation.

Historian Claire Simmons wrote a powerful column for The Washington Post that relates Passover to the Jewish uprising in the Warsaw ghetto of the 1940s. It's a horrifying tale. Nazis had forced hundreds of thousands of Jews into a tiny, 1.3 square-mile section of the city. When German troops came to deport them to concentration camps after a few years of inhuman conditions, a few hundred fighters held them off -- for a while.

But the fighters weren't the only ones who resisted courageously. "Public prayer was forbidden and punished by execution. Yet prayer services were held in hundreds of clandestine locations. Secret factories fabricated matzoh. Thousands of children affirmed their freedom to be human by studying the Torah in underground schools."

Simmons writes, "The actions of the men, women and children of the Warsaw ghetto teach us that Passover is not a passive celebration of historical events or superficially similar current events. ... We are not celebrating the freedom to be left alone. We celebrate the freedom to repair the world, to light a candle for posterity, to continue to perform the many small prosaic acts of solidarity and sacrifice -- for friend and stranger alike -- in the shadow of totalitarianism and under circumstances calculated to make us think these acts are meaningless."

During this Passover, I hope all of us will celebrate our freedom to worship and will work to ensure that all people, of every faith and in every nation, enjoy that same freedom.

Interfaith listening for truth

Continuing his visit to the United States, Pope Benedict XVI met with representatives of other religions at the Pope John Paul II Cultural Center in Washington. In his remarks there, he praised dialogue between faiths, but not for the primary purpose of peace and mutual understanding. Instead, he said, the purpose must be "to discover the truth."

Rather than focusing on what we believe in common, he said, we should "discuss our differences with calmness and clarity."

I think he's right about the approach we should take, but I suspect that he and I have different ideas of what the outcome of such discussions should be.

Ecumenical discussions do no one any good if their only purpose is to blend differing religions into a bland mush. The point is not to grind down any particular faith's sharp edges so what's left is blunt and safe. So Benedict is right to call for discussions where differences are clearly visible and not ignored or hidden away.

He's right, as well, that anyone participating in such talks should "listen attentively to the voice of truth" so that "our dialogue will not stop at identifying a common set of values, but go on to probe their ultimate foundation."

But here's where we differ: I suspect he hopes that attentive listening will convince other-believers that truth is found in Catholicism. He is, after all, the leader of the Catholic Church.

My hope, though, is that those of us who speak clearly and openly of our faith -- of what we have in common as well what divides us -- will strive less to persuade others of our truth than to hear the voice of truth in one another.