That We All May Be One

Conversations with a visiting bishop from Pakistan yesterday highlighted for me once again the great difficulty of interfaith dialogue. While we in the United States, and so many in the West, seek to put the best face on Islam, consider it one of the three great “Abrahamic faiths,” and seek mutual understanding, tolerance, and even cooperation where possible, there are Christians in other parts of the world with a very different perspective.

It reminds me of a moment at the Lambeth Conference in 1998 when there was a session on “interfaith dialogue.” A bishop from one part of the world spoke of the richness of interfaith dialogue and the deepening of relationships and mutual understanding, an African bishop from the same podium exclaimed, “If they would just stop killing us, we would be glad to initiate a dialogue!”

This is not so much due to the fact that there are different “Islams” — there is a certain unity in Islam (even with the Sunni, Shiah, Sufi divisions) that Christianity, and perhaps even Judaism, lacks. It seems to me more a factor of culture and context. Muslims — like the rest of us — are products of their nationalities and upbringing and cultural contexts.

Political frustrations — and the resultant violence too often — are brought about by marginalization, arrested economic development, poverty, demographics and the environment among many other factors. If we are to engage productively in interfaith dialogue, we must first of all understand the essence of the religions themselves. But we must also take very seriously the cultural context in which each of our religions is lived out.

This can be very tricky indeed. But it is absolutely essential in our day. For, as Hans Kung has said,

“No peace among the nations without peace among the religions.

No peace among the religions without dialogue between the religions.

No dialogue among the religions without investigation of the foundations of the religions.”

And those foundations include the cultural as well as the theological ones.       

The preacher today shared some memories of September 11, 2001 and suggested we might want to do the same, during this week, not to cling to them but to acknowledge and remember the past, live fully into the present, and  embrace the future.  Not a bad idea. You might want to do the same thing. I  remember…

*Watching the whole event unfold, with my staff, frozen to the TV in our midtown Manhattan office…

*Worrying about my fiancee who was at a meeting closer to Ground Zero than I was…

*The sound of silence in the city streets, even with so many streaming past our building…

*Volunteering to take some shifts as a chaplain, whatever that might mean…

*Days later,  putting my fiancee on a train in Grand Central, crowds like a train station in a WW II movie…

*Serving food at the Seamens’ Institute, talking with construction workers in St. Paul’s Chapel…

*Presiding and preaching at a requiem for a clergy couples’ son in our Chapel of Christ the Lord…

*Wondering, as I still do, why this nation chose misguided vengeance rather than reconciliation and healing…

We left church this morning with these words, sung to the tune of “Melita,” the great Navy hymn, still ringing in our ears:

“So brief, the joy since each was born/ So long the years in which to mourn/ Give us compassion to sustain/ Each other in this time of pain.

Guard us from bitterness and hate/ And share with us grief’s crushing weight/ Help us to live from day to day/ Until, once more, we find our way.”

Indeed. Help us, O God, as a individuals…and as a nation…”find our way.”