"Love is not a pleasure garden, it is agony that leaps
Into your spirit, carries out its work that makes you dear
To yourself and to Him, ready to spark the Way in you
That lives beyond belief and unbelief, that merely reaps
Religious piety. With love you shall change, make true
What your souls signify, singing psalms in the air with deep
Regard for the mystery that waits for you both out and in.
When you start the journey you wash away your shadow's sin."1
1. From The Conference of the Birds by Farid ud-Din Attar, new interpretations by Raficq Abdulla. Interlink Books, New York, 2003.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Sunday, August 29, 2010
Always a Theological Question
This is reunion week in New Hampshire for Jan's and my (by marriage) family, an event we look forward to all year long. In the reunion "down time" between meals and activities, I've been reading a book by Ori Soltes entitled The Ashen Rainbow: Essays on the Arts and the Holocaust. --Yes, it's a strange topic for what's supposed to be a relaxed, fun weekend.
A main thesis of Professor Soltes' book is that an event of the enormity and import of the Holocaust can never be understood solely through reviewing the facts and figures, knowing the details, reading the descriptions, or even through exhaustive and ongoing analysis; that the arts can present another way of knowing and interpreting what is and will remain an essentially unfathomable event in huamn history. As if to prove his point, he has written a book that is engaging and well presented. It fascinates and repulses, and prompts the thinking of new thoughts and the grappling with questions of enormous import. But at the same time, the book has it's greatest impact in the oblique comment, quote, or description that provides a flash of visceral insight, adding new layers of meaning or connecting on a level not possible through the intellect alone.
A second, less explicit but all the more deeply embedded thesis of the book is that all contemplation, discussion or analysis of the Holocaust is ultimately a theological question; Where was God? Where is God? Is there a God? Is it morally possible to even believe in a compassionate God, a just God, in the face of such utter evil and the negation of everything we like to believe defines our humanity? At the same time, if there are those who went through this worst imaginable manifestation of the world we create for each other and still wrestle with and affirm the Divine--still seek, and sometimes find, meaning even in the middle of a such a travesty--then who am I to so easily dismiss what they have proven with greater perseverance and sacrifices than I could ever imagine?
As ever, the contemplation of the Holocaust (or any of humanity's unfortunately all too numerous examples of atrocities that belie our clam to being "humanity") begs the question that has no answer, but that we must, nevertheless, try to comprehend. How could such things happen? Beyond the simple but powerful "fear of other," I think that three "biggies"are the malleability of memory, our need to be right and to think of our own actions as good and just, and the very human tendency to want our own suffering to be acknowledged first, before opening our hearts to respond with compassion to another's suffering. It's disturbing that these tendencies are ones I recognize very strongly in myself.
Why is it that I am so stingy with compassion? From childhood, where the excuse for hitting a sibling is, "but I was upset" or "I wanted what she had" to my responses to social injustices -- isn't it always, "but I have suffered too"? When faced with the Holocaust, I shy away from knowing too many of the actual details, the too convincing proof that, as Soltes writes, "never before or since has the entire apparatus of a sophisticated state been turned so obsessively and completely toward the destruction of an entire people." I want to be able to point to the suffereng that my family felt during th war; my uncles who fought, my German grandmother and family who bore the ill will of their community in the US because we were at war with Germany, even the small depravations that the "war effort" constituted for those who were so far from the true reality of that dreadful time. I definitely DON'T want to ask myself what being Christian means, what being German means, in any context of culpability for any part of such a series of events. Even in ultimate breakthrough, when the clear presentation in words and analysis, as well as in art and emotion, of the terrific magnitude of the suffering of the Jewish people finally unmakes me and I fall in awe out of my petty protestations before the unfathomable, there is still the insidious voice inside my head that whispers, "NOW do I deserve compassion? Look how sorry I am, how sympathetic, how GOOD."
Even the idea that ordinary people did inhuman things because they succeeded in mentally dehumanized their enemy bears questioning. Would it have been possible or necessary to devise more and more elaborate and cruel tortures if the Other were seen simply as nothing, less than a gnat to flick away? To arrive at such an attitude about a fellow human being is in itself appalling, but if that were the whole case, why not simple efficiency? Why the sadism and grim delight in mind games of the worst imaginable? For some there may have been only simple indifference, but the imagination and cruelty that characterized the "final solution" could only come from intense hatred, the kind of hatred that is the tragic flip side to admiration and respect. If I can recognize something in the other that I would wish for myself but do not possess, a quality I admire but cannot achieve, a light in another to which I pale by comparison, and if I cannot find in myself the ability to confront and be reconciled to my relative inadequacies, then I must hate. Without humility, I must destroy what threatens to blow away the house of cards of my self-concept.
The need to feel good about myself is so strong, so consuming. Might I too be willing to destroy the other to preserve the pleasant fiction of my own goodness? How would I even know where the line is drawn, to descend, but not TOO far? When I do or say or feel something that I cannot call "good," I find myself immediately in need of finding an alternate reality, an alternate memory that puts me in the right, shows my action as just. I realized long ago that my memory is altogether too malleable. I am unnervingly accomplished, if I am honest with myself, at rewriting memory to erase what I can't countenance. I can quickly bring myself to a point where I truly do not know what is truth and what is fiction. I find I've rehearsed over and over the events until I am convinced of the goodness, the necessity of even my most unworthy deeds. Yes, small self-deceptions to start with. However, with layers upon layers of rewritten memories, what distortion of truth have I wrought? In how many of those compromises will I hurt others to keep my self-justification intact? Ultimately, what perversion could result -- Doesn't history give us enough examples? And yet, I cannot seem to keep myeslf from repeating the "little" self-deceptions each new time I frighten myself with a glimpse of my own capacity for evil.
What would it take to live with the reality of those parts of myself that I simply cannot face? I think I would have to believe in the existence of love. I would have to believe that to question myself is not the ultimate abandonment, not self-annihilation; that there is some "safe space" for my soul carved in the heart of an Other. If there IS some Other who upholds and affirms my meaning and value then perhaps I can risk relaxing my own efforts at self-deception.
And so, as Soltes predicts, my response to his book is to find myself confronting the ultimate question of theology, of God. And for me too, there is no easy answer. If there is a Divinity, it does not make it easy. There is no proof that love exists, that there is meaning, that there is any such thing as goodness, or immanence, or transcendence. I feel no lightning bolt, see no signs. I am no Moses visited with a burning bush, no Paul on a Damascus road... I am left only to consider and chose; to believe, or to trust in my own devices. I fear, and yet my soul longs to believe, and my heart longs to be free, to love.
A main thesis of Professor Soltes' book is that an event of the enormity and import of the Holocaust can never be understood solely through reviewing the facts and figures, knowing the details, reading the descriptions, or even through exhaustive and ongoing analysis; that the arts can present another way of knowing and interpreting what is and will remain an essentially unfathomable event in huamn history. As if to prove his point, he has written a book that is engaging and well presented. It fascinates and repulses, and prompts the thinking of new thoughts and the grappling with questions of enormous import. But at the same time, the book has it's greatest impact in the oblique comment, quote, or description that provides a flash of visceral insight, adding new layers of meaning or connecting on a level not possible through the intellect alone.
A second, less explicit but all the more deeply embedded thesis of the book is that all contemplation, discussion or analysis of the Holocaust is ultimately a theological question; Where was God? Where is God? Is there a God? Is it morally possible to even believe in a compassionate God, a just God, in the face of such utter evil and the negation of everything we like to believe defines our humanity? At the same time, if there are those who went through this worst imaginable manifestation of the world we create for each other and still wrestle with and affirm the Divine--still seek, and sometimes find, meaning even in the middle of a such a travesty--then who am I to so easily dismiss what they have proven with greater perseverance and sacrifices than I could ever imagine?
As ever, the contemplation of the Holocaust (or any of humanity's unfortunately all too numerous examples of atrocities that belie our clam to being "humanity") begs the question that has no answer, but that we must, nevertheless, try to comprehend. How could such things happen? Beyond the simple but powerful "fear of other," I think that three "biggies"are the malleability of memory, our need to be right and to think of our own actions as good and just, and the very human tendency to want our own suffering to be acknowledged first, before opening our hearts to respond with compassion to another's suffering. It's disturbing that these tendencies are ones I recognize very strongly in myself.
Why is it that I am so stingy with compassion? From childhood, where the excuse for hitting a sibling is, "but I was upset" or "I wanted what she had" to my responses to social injustices -- isn't it always, "but I have suffered too"? When faced with the Holocaust, I shy away from knowing too many of the actual details, the too convincing proof that, as Soltes writes, "never before or since has the entire apparatus of a sophisticated state been turned so obsessively and completely toward the destruction of an entire people." I want to be able to point to the suffereng that my family felt during th war; my uncles who fought, my German grandmother and family who bore the ill will of their community in the US because we were at war with Germany, even the small depravations that the "war effort" constituted for those who were so far from the true reality of that dreadful time. I definitely DON'T want to ask myself what being Christian means, what being German means, in any context of culpability for any part of such a series of events. Even in ultimate breakthrough, when the clear presentation in words and analysis, as well as in art and emotion, of the terrific magnitude of the suffering of the Jewish people finally unmakes me and I fall in awe out of my petty protestations before the unfathomable, there is still the insidious voice inside my head that whispers, "NOW do I deserve compassion? Look how sorry I am, how sympathetic, how GOOD."
Even the idea that ordinary people did inhuman things because they succeeded in mentally dehumanized their enemy bears questioning. Would it have been possible or necessary to devise more and more elaborate and cruel tortures if the Other were seen simply as nothing, less than a gnat to flick away? To arrive at such an attitude about a fellow human being is in itself appalling, but if that were the whole case, why not simple efficiency? Why the sadism and grim delight in mind games of the worst imaginable? For some there may have been only simple indifference, but the imagination and cruelty that characterized the "final solution" could only come from intense hatred, the kind of hatred that is the tragic flip side to admiration and respect. If I can recognize something in the other that I would wish for myself but do not possess, a quality I admire but cannot achieve, a light in another to which I pale by comparison, and if I cannot find in myself the ability to confront and be reconciled to my relative inadequacies, then I must hate. Without humility, I must destroy what threatens to blow away the house of cards of my self-concept.
The need to feel good about myself is so strong, so consuming. Might I too be willing to destroy the other to preserve the pleasant fiction of my own goodness? How would I even know where the line is drawn, to descend, but not TOO far? When I do or say or feel something that I cannot call "good," I find myself immediately in need of finding an alternate reality, an alternate memory that puts me in the right, shows my action as just. I realized long ago that my memory is altogether too malleable. I am unnervingly accomplished, if I am honest with myself, at rewriting memory to erase what I can't countenance. I can quickly bring myself to a point where I truly do not know what is truth and what is fiction. I find I've rehearsed over and over the events until I am convinced of the goodness, the necessity of even my most unworthy deeds. Yes, small self-deceptions to start with. However, with layers upon layers of rewritten memories, what distortion of truth have I wrought? In how many of those compromises will I hurt others to keep my self-justification intact? Ultimately, what perversion could result -- Doesn't history give us enough examples? And yet, I cannot seem to keep myeslf from repeating the "little" self-deceptions each new time I frighten myself with a glimpse of my own capacity for evil.
What would it take to live with the reality of those parts of myself that I simply cannot face? I think I would have to believe in the existence of love. I would have to believe that to question myself is not the ultimate abandonment, not self-annihilation; that there is some "safe space" for my soul carved in the heart of an Other. If there IS some Other who upholds and affirms my meaning and value then perhaps I can risk relaxing my own efforts at self-deception.
And so, as Soltes predicts, my response to his book is to find myself confronting the ultimate question of theology, of God. And for me too, there is no easy answer. If there is a Divinity, it does not make it easy. There is no proof that love exists, that there is meaning, that there is any such thing as goodness, or immanence, or transcendence. I feel no lightning bolt, see no signs. I am no Moses visited with a burning bush, no Paul on a Damascus road... I am left only to consider and chose; to believe, or to trust in my own devices. I fear, and yet my soul longs to believe, and my heart longs to be free, to love.
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Repairer of the Breach?
This week I am still thinking about the House of Abraham and the almost impossible breach of these traditions as physically manifest in the conflict in Jerusalem. I thought it was fitting that the scripture in the Lectionary picked up where my sister left off last week, in Isaiah 58.
Nowhere in the world do the foundations of so many generations contain so much shared, and so much conflicted, meaning and history than in Jerusalem, and there is nowhere that is so much in need of a repairer of the breach and restorer of the streets to LIVE in, not die in. The city, in all our traditions, is a place of holy ground and a physical location close to the divine presence. Yet it is a place where the buildings of one generation arise on the ruins of another, and supplant, sometimes by war or rebellion, one sense of the holy with an opposing tradition. It is a place where the physical presence of the holy has become a stumbling occasion for even the members of the same tradition, who can't decide who is worthy to maintain a particular site and so allow it to deteriorate while arguing about jurisdiction.
Perhaps those foundations we need to raise up are not the buildings themselves, however holy they are to our traditions, but those foundations that were destroyed by our original human breaches? I believe this prescription we are called to fulfill can repair the breach back even so far as Cain with Abel, Isaac and Ishmael, the sons of Jacob, even to Peter and Paul, the 1st century Jews with the early Christians, and the misunderstandings of Islam with Judaism and Christianity. And what is called of us? Simply to stop repressing, stop maligning, stop pointing fingers, cease from speaking evil, treat each other with compassion and empathy, and look out for others and their needs even as I look out for my own. It appears that to address these issues of deep theological and historical divide, all I have is a simplistic solution not much different that the "golden rule." But, isn't that EXACTLY what it takes?
We can not heal by agreeing. As one of the lecturers I heard at Chautauqua last week [Ori Soltes; Georgetown U] reminded us multiple times that "None of us was there." We have nothing other than our deepest held convictions to convince us of the "rightness" of our point of view, but we each have deepest held convictions that are different from each other. None of us was there -- there are no objective, conclusive proofs to convince anyone who does not already believe that we are right. We have generations of coerced and forced conversions to demonstrate the folly of insisting on "rightness" in the absence of conviction. So if we cannot, with reason, hope to ever agree, how can we heal but through respect, empathy and even love for the other despite our not being able to see eye to eye?
Having true empathy for another involves being able to step aside from my own perspective and convictions and feel what the Other feels from their own perspective. It sounds dangerous and is dangerous. I cannot, I believe, feel from the other's perspective and come back to myself unchanged. But, that danger may be the thing I have to face in order to be a "repairer of the breach." In the Buddhist tradition, a person who achieves enlightenment completely merges with the ultimate reality, losing identity as a separate entity in the ultimate reality which is non-self and perfect unity. But, a person can delay ultimate enlightenment and become a Bodhisattva, a person who is near enlightenment (or, some say, has already obtained it) but who delays ultimate sublimation into non-self to help other sentient beings realize their own enlightenment.
I believe a similar type of empathy, a culture of Abrahamic Bodhisattvas, is needed, even required, from us in healing the relations between our three traditions (and our several political entities that are tied up in the problem). It is possible to enter into the world of the other and yet retain my own identity; and without doing this how can I hope to know what is the truth, to avoid speaking evil or being thoughtlessly insulting, and to understand and attempt to meet the other's needs? I can't insist that anyone else enter into my world, and if I wait to enter theirs until I see that they are ready to commit to the same path, when will any healing ever get started? If I believe it is right, I have to get started whether or not there is any to come with me, and whether or not I see any chance of success.
I want to be a healer of the breach. I want streets restored where we ALL can live in peace and mutual understanding. I want us all to see and celebrate the common foundations of our most deeply held beliefs, even though they have diverged. There is so much pain today, and so much more destined for tomorrow unless we act now to counter it. I believe this passage gives us the only prescription with any hope to cure the disease.
- Isaiah 58: 9f
- If you remove the yoke from among you,
- the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil,
- if you offer your food to the hungry
- and satisfy the needs of the afflicted,
- then your light shall rise in the darkness
- and your gloom be like the noonday.
- .
- .
- .
- Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt;
- you shall raise up the foundations of many generations;
- you shall be called the repairer of the breach,
- the restorer of streets to live in.
Nowhere in the world do the foundations of so many generations contain so much shared, and so much conflicted, meaning and history than in Jerusalem, and there is nowhere that is so much in need of a repairer of the breach and restorer of the streets to LIVE in, not die in. The city, in all our traditions, is a place of holy ground and a physical location close to the divine presence. Yet it is a place where the buildings of one generation arise on the ruins of another, and supplant, sometimes by war or rebellion, one sense of the holy with an opposing tradition. It is a place where the physical presence of the holy has become a stumbling occasion for even the members of the same tradition, who can't decide who is worthy to maintain a particular site and so allow it to deteriorate while arguing about jurisdiction.
Perhaps those foundations we need to raise up are not the buildings themselves, however holy they are to our traditions, but those foundations that were destroyed by our original human breaches? I believe this prescription we are called to fulfill can repair the breach back even so far as Cain with Abel, Isaac and Ishmael, the sons of Jacob, even to Peter and Paul, the 1st century Jews with the early Christians, and the misunderstandings of Islam with Judaism and Christianity. And what is called of us? Simply to stop repressing, stop maligning, stop pointing fingers, cease from speaking evil, treat each other with compassion and empathy, and look out for others and their needs even as I look out for my own. It appears that to address these issues of deep theological and historical divide, all I have is a simplistic solution not much different that the "golden rule." But, isn't that EXACTLY what it takes?
We can not heal by agreeing. As one of the lecturers I heard at Chautauqua last week [Ori Soltes; Georgetown U] reminded us multiple times that "None of us was there." We have nothing other than our deepest held convictions to convince us of the "rightness" of our point of view, but we each have deepest held convictions that are different from each other. None of us was there -- there are no objective, conclusive proofs to convince anyone who does not already believe that we are right. We have generations of coerced and forced conversions to demonstrate the folly of insisting on "rightness" in the absence of conviction. So if we cannot, with reason, hope to ever agree, how can we heal but through respect, empathy and even love for the other despite our not being able to see eye to eye?
Having true empathy for another involves being able to step aside from my own perspective and convictions and feel what the Other feels from their own perspective. It sounds dangerous and is dangerous. I cannot, I believe, feel from the other's perspective and come back to myself unchanged. But, that danger may be the thing I have to face in order to be a "repairer of the breach." In the Buddhist tradition, a person who achieves enlightenment completely merges with the ultimate reality, losing identity as a separate entity in the ultimate reality which is non-self and perfect unity. But, a person can delay ultimate enlightenment and become a Bodhisattva, a person who is near enlightenment (or, some say, has already obtained it) but who delays ultimate sublimation into non-self to help other sentient beings realize their own enlightenment.
I believe a similar type of empathy, a culture of Abrahamic Bodhisattvas, is needed, even required, from us in healing the relations between our three traditions (and our several political entities that are tied up in the problem). It is possible to enter into the world of the other and yet retain my own identity; and without doing this how can I hope to know what is the truth, to avoid speaking evil or being thoughtlessly insulting, and to understand and attempt to meet the other's needs? I can't insist that anyone else enter into my world, and if I wait to enter theirs until I see that they are ready to commit to the same path, when will any healing ever get started? If I believe it is right, I have to get started whether or not there is any to come with me, and whether or not I see any chance of success.
I want to be a healer of the breach. I want streets restored where we ALL can live in peace and mutual understanding. I want us all to see and celebrate the common foundations of our most deeply held beliefs, even though they have diverged. There is so much pain today, and so much more destined for tomorrow unless we act now to counter it. I believe this passage gives us the only prescription with any hope to cure the disease.
Sunday, August 15, 2010
Honor in the House of Abraham?
So, the big question of the day in America seems to be, is there room in our hearts for an Islamic Cultural Center near Ground Zero?
On September 11, 2001, I sat in a Washington DC office just 2 blocks from the Nation's Capitol watching the news. A plane had just flown into one of the World Trade Center towers in NYC and none of us knew what to think. Surely this was some tragic accident of technology, mechanical failure, a horrible navigational mistake -- at very worst, the work of a lone extremist! We struggled to go on with our usual routines while keeping one eye and both ears on the TV in the conference room. One colleague left for a meeting across town, another returned to his office. The secretary went to answer the phone. I sat alone in the conference room watching the TV as a second plane flew into the camera's view and crashed into the second tower. In the several seconds before the newscaster even knew what the world had seen happening on the video feed projected behind her head, my brain registered that this was no accident or isolated event. We were at war. Nothing would ever be the same. I screamed for our secretary and we sat watching in stunned silence. The news hit her in a way it could not touch the rest of our office. She is Muslim. As the first words of "Islamic terrorists" and "Jihad" began floating across the airwaves, she began to realize the profound changes that she and her family, her faith community, and her entire way of life would undergo. Her first thoughts were for her children, attending Islamic school in the middle of the city, and for her family. The rest of us worried about the process of being evacuated (The Pentagon had been hit and it was thought a 4th plane was headed for either the Capitol or the White House), the uncertainty of getting home (I walked for hours before finding a way out of the city), or about staying in contact with friends and family (cell phones were the only, and very sporadic, means of communicating). She worried about when the retaliation would start -- would her children and husband make it home without harm, even alive? Was she safe on the street? When would the backlash start? Would there be riots? Would they ever be safe or feel accepted in this community again? We assured her that her fears were groundless -- that this is America, after all! Americans wouldn't turn on our own over something as senseless as this, would we? Unfortunately, she was more prescient than we.
I did not understand at the time what a gift it was to experience Sept 11 with a devout American Muslim about whom I care deeply. I had the privilege of experiencing from the first what so many have yet to realize, and some stubbornly refuse to realize: this attack on America was in even greater part an attack on American Muslims, an attack on our co-existence and on the hard earned interfaith respect and collaboration that had been blossoming all across the US and across the globe. But, although our hearts in the office went out to our Muslim friend, the hearts of so many of the American people began to turn away...
As bad as it was in 2001, the attacks on American Muslims and on Muslims of goodwill across the world seem to have gotten only worse. Don't you feel a terrible urgency that something must be done? I do. I an convinced we must rescue the situation before we lose, catastrophically, all possibility of coexistence.
Some things are being done; more are needed. Here in New York, The Chautauqua Institution designated the week of August 9-14, 2010 for the study and discussion of "Sacred Spaces," and I was extremely fortunate to attend. The Department of Religion focused their several lectures on "Sacred Spaces: Jerusalem" with lecturers from Muslim, Jewish and Christian perspectives who eloquently argued for learning to respect and share this space that is sacred to all three of our family of traditions. In addition to the Ground Zero dilemma, the powder-keg of today's Jerusalem threatening to erupt into violence between Palestinian and Jew confirm these topics of shared space, shared history, and mutual respect as some of the most important discussions of our time. Our very survival as a species, even as a planet, could easily depend on our learning to understand and ability to respect and honor the Other in a shared search, but very individual approach, to the divine.
With the comments of Chautauqua's speakers still echoing in my mind, I listened this morning as my sister preached at her church, using as her text Isaiah 58: 9-10 (NIV quoted below) --
9 Then you will call, and the LORD will answer;
you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I.
"If you do away with the yoke of oppression,
with the pointing finger and malicious talk,
10 and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry
and satisfy the needs of the oppressed,
then your light will rise in the darkness,
and your night will become like the noonday.
She spoke of a God who will bring us only as far as we are willing to go, but who wants us to commit everything that we have and are to "glowing in the dark," being a light to the nations. That's actually a concept all three Abrahamic traditions share, especially as concerns Jerusalem as a tangible model of holiness and a "city on a hill" that shows its light to all nations.
I do not know how to promote true interfaith dialog and cooperation among our three sister faiths. The Chautauqua lecturers were profoundly moving and are doing tremendous things, yet still too few and too far between. Those who participated were inspired and grateful. Yet still, it sometimes seems the only ones anxious to participate in interfaith dialog and collaboration are those who believe that one path is as good as another, that all paths lead to the same divine, that each faith is equally valid. Their participation doesn't bring to the table the considerable factions, most probably majorities, in each Abrahamic faith who do believe in the exclusivity or at least preeminence of their own tradition. What hope is there of engaging the necessary critical mass in interfaith conversations when the barriers seem so high? I think my sister's text of Isaiah gives an important prescription: First "do away with the yoke of oppression, with the pointing finger and malicious talk."
I am guilty of letting the yoke of oppression go unchallenged. I am guilty of seeing and not deflecting the pointing finger, of hearing and not correcting malicious talk and slander. How many times have I heard the charge that there are no moderate Islamic voices? ("If there were, why did they not speak out against the terrorism?") And yet I sit by as the American Society for Muslim Advancement and Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, who have been passionately active in interfaith dialog and promoting peace and understanding since well before the 2001 attacks, are slandered in the current press as celebrating the triumphalism of extremist Islamists. I hear the Qur'an misquoted or taken out of context to incite hatred and loathing. I hear Sharia law twisted and presented as entirely backward and brutal. In as much as I do not check it out for myself and I accept these exaggerations, these deliberate lies, I am guilty. When I do know the truth and I don't speak up, I am guilty. Whenever I stay silent and allow suspicion and rumor to rule the day, I am guilty. Whenever I do not actively seek the truth, I am guilty. I sit in my own self-righteousness and demand that the Other sacrifice for the sake of my convictions and sensitivities, instead of seeking to meet the Other more than halfway for the sake of our joint humanity. I am guilty.
It may be that we can never agree on our faiths, perhaps never truly worship or pray together, but we can be, we must be, scrupulously honest in our our dealings and entirely just in our judgments. Anything else is, for all three of our Abrahamic traditions, a travesty of our own beliefs and our shared beliefs. We have this much in common, to commit ourselves to do justice and to love mercy. Can we get to know each other as friends and siblings? Can we perhaps ask of ourselves, in the pursuit of compromise, to give 60% and seek only 40% in return (understanding in our human frailty that this is how strict reciprocity generally feels)? Might this be enough; to learn to love despite our differences for the sake of our similarities? If our boundaries and our shared spaces were defended by mutual honor, respect and affection instead of defensiveness and aggression, could we wage peace as actively as we now wage war?
Perhaps, as Isaiah implies, we will need to give even more. What would it mean to spend myself on behalf of the hungry -- to seek to satisfy not my own needs, but the needs of the oppressed, the Other? I can control only one tiny bit of the necessary currency, my own self. I can't ask it of anyone else, and I can't know what contribution my bit of currency could ultimately make, but I can begin to ask myself what I am willing to sacrifice for peace. Are you with me?
On September 11, 2001, I sat in a Washington DC office just 2 blocks from the Nation's Capitol watching the news. A plane had just flown into one of the World Trade Center towers in NYC and none of us knew what to think. Surely this was some tragic accident of technology, mechanical failure, a horrible navigational mistake -- at very worst, the work of a lone extremist! We struggled to go on with our usual routines while keeping one eye and both ears on the TV in the conference room. One colleague left for a meeting across town, another returned to his office. The secretary went to answer the phone. I sat alone in the conference room watching the TV as a second plane flew into the camera's view and crashed into the second tower. In the several seconds before the newscaster even knew what the world had seen happening on the video feed projected behind her head, my brain registered that this was no accident or isolated event. We were at war. Nothing would ever be the same. I screamed for our secretary and we sat watching in stunned silence. The news hit her in a way it could not touch the rest of our office. She is Muslim. As the first words of "Islamic terrorists" and "Jihad" began floating across the airwaves, she began to realize the profound changes that she and her family, her faith community, and her entire way of life would undergo. Her first thoughts were for her children, attending Islamic school in the middle of the city, and for her family. The rest of us worried about the process of being evacuated (The Pentagon had been hit and it was thought a 4th plane was headed for either the Capitol or the White House), the uncertainty of getting home (I walked for hours before finding a way out of the city), or about staying in contact with friends and family (cell phones were the only, and very sporadic, means of communicating). She worried about when the retaliation would start -- would her children and husband make it home without harm, even alive? Was she safe on the street? When would the backlash start? Would there be riots? Would they ever be safe or feel accepted in this community again? We assured her that her fears were groundless -- that this is America, after all! Americans wouldn't turn on our own over something as senseless as this, would we? Unfortunately, she was more prescient than we.
I did not understand at the time what a gift it was to experience Sept 11 with a devout American Muslim about whom I care deeply. I had the privilege of experiencing from the first what so many have yet to realize, and some stubbornly refuse to realize: this attack on America was in even greater part an attack on American Muslims, an attack on our co-existence and on the hard earned interfaith respect and collaboration that had been blossoming all across the US and across the globe. But, although our hearts in the office went out to our Muslim friend, the hearts of so many of the American people began to turn away...
As bad as it was in 2001, the attacks on American Muslims and on Muslims of goodwill across the world seem to have gotten only worse. Don't you feel a terrible urgency that something must be done? I do. I an convinced we must rescue the situation before we lose, catastrophically, all possibility of coexistence.
Some things are being done; more are needed. Here in New York, The Chautauqua Institution designated the week of August 9-14, 2010 for the study and discussion of "Sacred Spaces," and I was extremely fortunate to attend. The Department of Religion focused their several lectures on "Sacred Spaces: Jerusalem" with lecturers from Muslim, Jewish and Christian perspectives who eloquently argued for learning to respect and share this space that is sacred to all three of our family of traditions. In addition to the Ground Zero dilemma, the powder-keg of today's Jerusalem threatening to erupt into violence between Palestinian and Jew confirm these topics of shared space, shared history, and mutual respect as some of the most important discussions of our time. Our very survival as a species, even as a planet, could easily depend on our learning to understand and ability to respect and honor the Other in a shared search, but very individual approach, to the divine.
With the comments of Chautauqua's speakers still echoing in my mind, I listened this morning as my sister preached at her church, using as her text Isaiah 58: 9-10 (NIV quoted below) --
9 Then you will call, and the LORD will answer;
you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I.
"If you do away with the yoke of oppression,
with the pointing finger and malicious talk,
10 and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry
and satisfy the needs of the oppressed,
then your light will rise in the darkness,
and your night will become like the noonday.
She spoke of a God who will bring us only as far as we are willing to go, but who wants us to commit everything that we have and are to "glowing in the dark," being a light to the nations. That's actually a concept all three Abrahamic traditions share, especially as concerns Jerusalem as a tangible model of holiness and a "city on a hill" that shows its light to all nations.
I do not know how to promote true interfaith dialog and cooperation among our three sister faiths. The Chautauqua lecturers were profoundly moving and are doing tremendous things, yet still too few and too far between. Those who participated were inspired and grateful. Yet still, it sometimes seems the only ones anxious to participate in interfaith dialog and collaboration are those who believe that one path is as good as another, that all paths lead to the same divine, that each faith is equally valid. Their participation doesn't bring to the table the considerable factions, most probably majorities, in each Abrahamic faith who do believe in the exclusivity or at least preeminence of their own tradition. What hope is there of engaging the necessary critical mass in interfaith conversations when the barriers seem so high? I think my sister's text of Isaiah gives an important prescription: First "do away with the yoke of oppression, with the pointing finger and malicious talk."
I am guilty of letting the yoke of oppression go unchallenged. I am guilty of seeing and not deflecting the pointing finger, of hearing and not correcting malicious talk and slander. How many times have I heard the charge that there are no moderate Islamic voices? ("If there were, why did they not speak out against the terrorism?") And yet I sit by as the American Society for Muslim Advancement and Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, who have been passionately active in interfaith dialog and promoting peace and understanding since well before the 2001 attacks, are slandered in the current press as celebrating the triumphalism of extremist Islamists. I hear the Qur'an misquoted or taken out of context to incite hatred and loathing. I hear Sharia law twisted and presented as entirely backward and brutal. In as much as I do not check it out for myself and I accept these exaggerations, these deliberate lies, I am guilty. When I do know the truth and I don't speak up, I am guilty. Whenever I stay silent and allow suspicion and rumor to rule the day, I am guilty. Whenever I do not actively seek the truth, I am guilty. I sit in my own self-righteousness and demand that the Other sacrifice for the sake of my convictions and sensitivities, instead of seeking to meet the Other more than halfway for the sake of our joint humanity. I am guilty.
It may be that we can never agree on our faiths, perhaps never truly worship or pray together, but we can be, we must be, scrupulously honest in our our dealings and entirely just in our judgments. Anything else is, for all three of our Abrahamic traditions, a travesty of our own beliefs and our shared beliefs. We have this much in common, to commit ourselves to do justice and to love mercy. Can we get to know each other as friends and siblings? Can we perhaps ask of ourselves, in the pursuit of compromise, to give 60% and seek only 40% in return (understanding in our human frailty that this is how strict reciprocity generally feels)? Might this be enough; to learn to love despite our differences for the sake of our similarities? If our boundaries and our shared spaces were defended by mutual honor, respect and affection instead of defensiveness and aggression, could we wage peace as actively as we now wage war?
Perhaps, as Isaiah implies, we will need to give even more. What would it mean to spend myself on behalf of the hungry -- to seek to satisfy not my own needs, but the needs of the oppressed, the Other? I can control only one tiny bit of the necessary currency, my own self. I can't ask it of anyone else, and I can't know what contribution my bit of currency could ultimately make, but I can begin to ask myself what I am willing to sacrifice for peace. Are you with me?
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Which Way God? (Outside us or In?)
Looking at all the scriptures for the past few weeks in the Lectionary, particularly the old testament lessons, I notice how so much has been about whether God is angry and will punish, or will He stay his hand and be patient with His disobedient followers. But, it's written, and I have always read it, as directed toward an external God that decides independently of his children how to reward or punish their actions. An independent actor on the stage of life.
This distant God out there somewhere does not any longer represent my concept or experience of God. In fact, everything that I personally know of faith and spirituality involves a God that we are part of, that is in us, who works through us, out of whom we are created and to whom we return. If this is true God, is there another way to read the message of these passages? [Or at least, a better way to read these Old Testament stories (and some of the New Testament ones as well) with a modern spiritual sensibility?]
In Matthew 16:19, Jesus says to his disciples, "I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven." Might he be saying that our actions and our decisions are the actions of God in this world? We ask God to "let your anger depart from us." "Will you not give us life again?" "Show us your mercy and grant us your salvation." Are we directing this cry outwards? Or perhaps inwards to ourselves and to our fellow believers? We hold the keys to God's wrath and God's mercy in our own hands, attitudes, actions. Such a reading would turn impotent railing against God or pleading with God into something more like giving ourselves a "good talking to" about getting our minds, hearts and actions in line with what we profess to believe and value. Instead of groveling and pleading in our unworthiness, almost bribing God with our flattery, might it instead be the case that we are struggling between our true selves -- our best nature and our connection to the eternal light and love -- and the ways we continually disappoint and embarrass ourselves as we come short of that best self in all our illusions and blindness.
This same type of thinking gives a different turn to the gospel lessons of the last few weeks as well--in particular, the teaching about prayer and asking in persistence: knocking, seeking, searching. Who are we asking and being demanding of except, again, our true selves? So, it's not some God out there who will supply, but we receive out of our own persistence in demanding of ourselves all that we can bring to light of our true selves, getting beyond the illusions that hold us back, insisting of life fully lived. If we want it, it is there but at the price of asking, seeking, searching, knocking, and persisting.
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