the sacred did not shield us from the fears of men
nor hide the dignity and wisdom of women,
hidden deeply within the unconscious, unwelcome and denied
until safe space is held to bring this wordlessness to voice?
How might your life have been different?
How might our world be different?
Desire
“We’re never going to use this,” responded a student to the end-of-semester discussion in my interreligious-intercultural methods class, a master’s course crafted to shape peaceable and impassioned faith encounters in the ministries of fledgling religious leaders. “We don’t even have a Catholic church in town, let alone a synagogue, mosque, or temple. We’re never going to use this.” I was stunned, and not a little stung. How could that possibly be true? How could he not see the value in learning how to learn about one another across difference, learning to actively love one another across culture and tradition? Does he not live in the same world that the rest of us do? Does he not encounter political refugees and immigrants around every grocery store aisle?
Blunt honesty stings, which is why so few of us offer it to one another. When received with curiosity and an ability to hold negative energies, his words eventually showed me what I had refused to see. Because he was absolutely right. He and his words reminded me of a portion of the American population increasingly misunderstood or misperceived within discourse and media attentive to other concerns. He spoke as a leader in a community disenchanted with industrial agriculture, technological overwhelm, and globalization. He spoke as one whose lived reality is one of more oral communication than literate—which is not to say an illiterate community, just one less inclined to receive information or news from print media. He spoke of a large population often defensive against or “unplugged” from what appears to some of us as an unavoidable global village. Just because religious pluralism and cultural diversity are touted both directly and indirectly from ivory tower and multimedia outlets does not mean that this diversity informs everyone’s daily lives. One (or many) can choose to craft a reality that diminishes pluralisms, avoids diversity, regulates the most important fundamentals. Diversity’s prevalence does not mean that all of us have to confront it regularly. Yet.
Moving the Discourse Inward
As with many hot-button issues in our day, there seem to be those who find diversity an unadulterated good, evidence of the mystery of infinite creativity. “We” are the ones who urge progressive reform of political and religious institutions, who attempt to open doors that slam in the faces of those who do not look like us or believe as we do. We think everyone should learn skills of peace-filled community building across diversity lines. Then there are those who find this diversity to be an unadulterated bad, a threat to the unity of community, belief, practice or tradition—with its complex interrelations of all those things. “We” are the ones who rightly see the diminishment of life we hold sacred, the relativism of what’s most important toward the flatness of what is most common. Instead, we see our lives as ones of integrity, commitment in the face of opposition, truth in the face of the common denominator attempting to make us all the same—those attempting to say these sacred things don’t matter, are not sacred.
Of course, these “those” are caricatures of various polarized adjectives—liberal/conservative, progressive/traditional, etc.—purported to be addressed and redressed with scholarship on religious pluralism, interfaith and/or interreligious concerns. Most everyone willing to talk about these things knows that diversity is neither an unadulterated good nor an unadulterated bad. It is complicated. Even so, all this brought a new question into my awareness, a question of willingness and desire. I began to see a need to awaken to “ourselves” anew in an increasingly fearful world of “other.” We need to relearn something so basic as how to see more of what is, to perceive without evaluation or judgment, instead of seeing as we have been shaped by those closest to us.
The literatures on religious pluralism, interreligious dialogue, interfaith service, and more develop exponentially by the year, if not by the month. The able work of Diana Eck and the Pluralism Project7 ought not to be underestimated for its contributions, nor should any other seriously critical engagement with today’s complexities: academic disciplines like theologies of religious pluralism, comparative theology, and scriptural reasoning. The inquiry broadens, as it does, and the disciplines specialize, as they do. Other figures drawn into cross-pollinating work—Joan Chittister, for example—offer expansive texts rooted more in story and wisdom distilled in their travels: The Tent of Abraham: Stories of Hope and Peace for Jews, Christians, and Muslims (written in collaboration with Murshid Saadi Shakur Chishti and Rabbi Arthur Waskow) or Welcome to the Wisdom of the World and Its Meaning for You, for example. Everyone who writes in this field, as I have engaged it, is so far into the work that the actual motivations and the desire to engage can often be presumed. Willingness and desire must both be functioning in order to come to fruition in a book or extended writings.
One of the most recent resources illustrating this conundrum comes through Kristin Johnston Largen, in collaboration with Mary E. Hess and Christy Lohr Sapp. She begins with the question, “How interreligious is your life?”8 and then argues for how implicitly interreligious our world is, whether we are aware of it or not. She examines and wrestles with four practical situations worth your pursuit, if interested: the practice of yoga, the media stunt of Qur’an burning, Buddhist meditation, and the growing trend of “Christian” Seders. She offers an excellent Christian rationale for engagement with interreligious learning, with careful attention to “praxis points” and practical reflection questions. She seems to feel the same urgency I do about a more expansive sense of community and the role of the body in finding a more companionable way to be with those outside our traditions’ identities. But who will pick up a book on “encountering otherness,” on interreligious learning, except those already so inclined? While I am interested in the arena of interreligious and intercultural encounters, I’m actually more interested in something deeply rooted in each of us, no matter our tradition (or none).
Desire for Awakening to the Unexpected in a Violent, Fearful World
My beloved student’s bald statement—“We’re never going to use this”—brought me up short with a much more elemental question I now need to ask: How do we awaken desire for deepening in a world so captivated by fear and violence, particularly as the deepening may be not what we desire or expect? How do we awaken desire for unexpected and uncontrolled encounters with any and all those in our “global village” whose lives are hidden from each other, from us, whether by hardened intention or unintentional circumstance?
I suppose you could also ask it this way: if you are a seeker, how do you see those who are not seeking (as you are) with compassion? How do you hold your own fear and frustration that “they” do not find your seeking faithful or they refuse to venture outside their own safety zones? How do you awaken desire to see this “other” anew, again and again, even when s/he angers, frustrates, even enrages you? Or perhaps you are one of those who feel this deep certainty, even absolute assurance, in your beliefs. What gifts are seekers bringing for you? What does their spirit have to teach you? How do we awaken desire to see anew in a world of fear and violence?
These questions are much more ubiquitous, and much more urgent, than I first supposed. My first associations as I listened to these voices were those of an analytical academic greatly surprised at rurally shaped human worldviews, habits of mind. I admit the words “ignorant” and “sheltered” came to mind. “Out of touch” and “lack of civic responsibility” weren’t far behind. How could it not be obvious that the world needs to learn peaceful behaviors of coexistence across cultural and religious diversities . . . and that means us, you, me? Of course, these things tell you more about me than anything about them. I
