Saturday, September 8, 2012

Holy Envy


Last year, in the fall of 2011, our new students arrived in late August to begin the new semester. This occurred during the Muslim month of Ramadan. As you know, devout Muslims fast from all food and drink from sunrise to sunset during their holy month. It's a rigorous practice.

Later that semester in mid-September we had a dinner for our international students. One young man from Saudi Arabia was sitting at a table with other students from a variety of cultures and faiths. His name was Yusef or Joseph.

The other students were consuming their food with great relish. This young man, however, was not eating. He smiled and chatted, but did not eat. Ramadan had ended, I thought to myself. Maybe he is ill.

I approached and asked if he were okay, and if the food was to his liking. He said the food was fine. Then, with some embarrassment, he told me quietly that he was fasting. "I had to travel from home to school during Ramadan. It was a long journey, so my parents told me to postpone my fasting. So now I am observing the Ramadan fast."

Perhaps it was our common name. Perhaps it was the utter simplicity and humility with which he spoke. Perhaps it was divine grace. Whatever it was, I was filled with long ago memories of Lenten days of fast and abstinence, of twelve hour fasts before every reception of Holy Communion, of one Sunday morning at a late Mass when I almost passed out in church, faint from hunger--all these flooded my mind and stirred my senses.

The dedication and witness of young Yusef touched something inside me, something deep within my soul.

I knew what it was. I had learned that this type of thing could happen when you engage in interfaith encounter. Krister Stendahl (1921-2008) the great Lutheran Bishop of Stockholm, biblical scholar, and dean at Harvard Divinity School, had given it a name.

Active in interfaith dialogue, Stendahl applied his keen mind and opened his loving heart to engage people of different faiths. As a committed Christian, he strove to meet and embrace believers from different traditions and faiths, knowing that the Holy Spirit is active in all the world. 

While engaging with people of other traditions, sometimes a belief, or ritual, or ethical sensibility in another religion would catch Stendahl's attention and imagination. He would grow "envious" of that aspect of the other faith. Grateful for the insight or inspiration from another tradition, he would try to integrate what he found so compelling into his own Christian practice and spirituality. In this way, his interfaith study and conversation enriched his own Christian life.

Stendahl called this experience "holy envy". It is finding beauty, dignity, and grace in the other person's practice of their faith. It is "holy" because it is what Catholic theology calls an "occasion of grace", a divine prompting that opens our minds, stirs our hearts, and moves our will toward good.

The memory of Yusef sitting at that table, smiling, but not eating, chatting, but not drinking, became part of my Lenten observance this past spring. I suspect he will remain part of many Lents to come for me.

A Lutheran bishop; a Muslim student: each in his own way holy.


Krister, I'm envious!

Saturday, September 1, 2012

Isaac in the Rain

Hurricane Isaac has dissipated, spreading its generous rain over wide swaths of the south and central states. Welcome rain in many drought-ridden places. Not so welcome along the lower plains of the Gulf Coast.


There are many smiles of relief that damage was nowhere near that inflicted by Katrina seven years ago. Isaac confounded the forecasters whose anxious predictions it seemed to enjoy foiling. Should we expect anything less from a storm whose name in Hebrew (Yishaq) means "s/he laughs"?

But back to all that rain. There is something in rain that brings a smile to my face, a laugh to my belly. It has to do with a Hindu-like parable about rain. It has to do with God's love, with the God who is love.

Christians and Bhakti Hindus, and Jews and Muslims, all in their own ways, believe that God is love, Infinite Love.

We all have an idea of what love means. We've loved someone, or been loved. But Infinite Love? What does that mean? How does it feel? How even to begin to comprehend it? How can we extrapolate to infinity from a limited personal experience of loving or being loved?

Perhaps this parable will help. Imagine each drop of water to be in and of itself a symbol, an expression of God's Infinite Love. Infinite Love compounded and compressed into the millions of molecules that make up one tiny drop of water. Imagined this way, interpreted as an efficacious symbol, each drop of water becomes a holy event for the one who contemplates its simple beauty~holy water.

Then take a walk in the rain. Remember, each drop in and of itself is an expression of the Infinite Love that is God. But this profligate, extravagant God sends how many billion drops of water on us in just a summer's afternoon shower? Each drop that wets our hand or face or head is a splash of infinite, mysterious passion from the center of Being. One's walk in the rain becomes an immersion in infinities of symbolic love.

And a hurricane? Such a storm is a fearsome, awesome expression of Divine Love in countless beating, driving drops, each an expression of Infinite Love, love so fierce it pulls us into its fury.

Infinite Love is not to be ignored or trifled with. It is not just a summer shower. We do well to heed the warnings and withdraw inland to safer ground where we stand a chance of surviving the divine fury that is Infinite Love.

One danger in Christian faith is to domesticate God: to think that we can name and contain the divine essence in a system of dogmatic cisterns and ecclesial pipelines that deliver grace on demand at the twist of a sacramental faucet. Divine Love in its furious infinity can never be contained. Like the engineers in New Orleans who struggled to channel and control Isaac's deluge with their sophisticated pumps, we are always on the verge of being submerged in the torrents of God's jealous love.

Hence the "fear and trembling" so often mentioned in scripture.

But it is a fear and trembling before Infinite Love. We just need to remember that God's Love is not our invention, not under our control, and far beyond our imagination, though imagine it we must.

From the mysterious center of the Divine Storm, within the eye of the hurricane, emerges God's smile, God's belly laugh at our attempts to control or comprehend Infinite Love. Yishaq.