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?
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