Holy Envy

by Barbara Brown Taylor

  The way it was explained to me, the dead person still gets a choice. When someone on earth is baptized in his or her name, the deceased—who is by now living in the spirit world awaiting Jesus’s resurrection from the dead—receives one last chance to say yes to the gospel. Those who are baptized by proxy may refuse, even from beyond the grave, but not without recognizing that someone on the other side has gone to great lengths to include them among the saints.

  Since Lutherans have historically shied away from Catholic teachings about how the living might benefit the dead, Stendahl had nothing like vicarious baptism in his own tradition. Yet he saw value in it and proceeded to envy it across the fence. He even went public with his scholarship on the subject, appearing in a Mormon video on vicarious baptism and contributing an article to the Encyclopedia of Mormonism. At the moment I cannot think of a parallel in my own tradition for such a gesture. Perhaps if the archbishop of Canterbury went on record as envying the Quaker practice of silent meetings?

  Stendahl’s decision to stand with the Mormon minority in Stockholm was about more than his interest in the afterlife, however. “In the eyes of God, we are all minorities,” he told a reporter shortly before his death in 2008. “That’s a rude awakening for many Christians, who have never come to grips with the pluralism of the world.”1

  From my limited perspective in a small college classroom, I believe that increasing numbers of young Christians are coming to grips with pluralism—embracing it, even—though they are getting very little help from their elders as they think through what it means to be a person of faith in community with people of other (and no) faiths. No preacher has suggested to them that today’s Good Samaritan might be a Good Muslim or a Good Humanist. No Confirmation class teacher has taught them that the Golden Rule includes honoring the neighbor’s religion as they would have the neighbor honor theirs.

  Come to think of it, I do know one preacher who tried something like that—from the pulpit of a cathedral in a major city, no less. I do not remember what the subject of her sermon was, only the response to it. She must have suggested that the Christian way was one among many ways to God (a wave and not the ocean), because afterward a man came up to her and said, “If God isn’t partial to Christianity, then what am I doing here?”

  I wish ordinary Christians took exams, so I could put that question on the final. As natural as it may be to want to play on the winning team, the wish to secure divine favoritism strikes me as the worst possible reason to practice any religion. If the man who asked that question could not think of a dozen better reasons to be a Christian than that, then what, indeed, was he doing there?

  An old story is told about Rabia of Basra, an eighth-century Sufi mystic who was seen running through the streets of her city one day carrying a torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other. When someone asked her what she was doing, she said she wanted to burn down the rewards of paradise with the torch and put out the fires of hell with the water, because both blocked the way to God. “O, Allah,” Rabia prayed, “if I worship You for fear of Hell, burn me in Hell, and if I worship You in hope of Paradise, exclude me from Paradise. But if I worship You for Your Own sake, grudge me not Your everlasting Beauty.”2

  In Christian tradition this comes under the heading of unconditional love, though it is usually understood as the kind of love God exercises toward humans instead of the other way around. Now, thanks to a Muslim mystic from Iraq, I have a new way of understanding what it means to love God unconditionally. Whenever I am tempted to act from fear of divine punishment or hope of divine reward, Rabia leans over from her religion into mine and empties a bucket of water on my head.

  This, I believe, is how holy envy is meant to work. When students study the Five Pillars of Islam, they linger over the five daily prayers. “People actually stop what they are doing to pray five times a day? They do it wherever they are, even if other people can see them?” This astonishes students who may bow their heads before meals or kneel by their beds at night, but who have never imagined what it would take to ask for time off from work to say their midday prayers or to unfurl a prayer rug at the stadium at sundown to say their evening ones.

  Devout Christians struggle with the fact that devout Muslims pray more than they do. They might not call it “holy envy,” but it leads more than a few of them to take their own prayer lives more seriously. A Christian student who has never heard of the season of Lent decides to try it this year. It will be her Ramadan, she says. A Muslim student who stopped praying when he came to college says he is getting an app for his phone that will go off five times a day. Maybe all he will do is turn it off, he says, but at least he will know what time it is.

  I still remember a Methodist pastor who took the class one fall. Joel was a “nontraditional student,” which is academic code for someone who comes to college later in life. I am not sure he ever told me the story of how he came to Georgia from Puerto Rico, but the regional bishop recognized his gifts for ministry and put him in charge of a small congregation before he had earned a college degree. When Joel received a scholarship to Piedmont, he wowed his teachers by carrying a full load at school while he kept his full-time job. When he stopped by my office to say hello with his wife and children in tow, it seemed clear that he was doing as good a job of loving them as he was doing with everything else. He never missed Religion 101 unless one of his church members was being rushed to the hospital or he had a funeral to do.

  Joel went on all of the field trips, including one to a large masjid for Friday afternoon prayer. Since Friday is the day Muslims gather for public worship, the service typically draws a large crowd, and this Friday was no exception. More than once during the sermon, the ushers walked among us motioning us to move closer together, so more people could find places to sit. By the time everyone stood up at the end of the service to perform their prostrations, Joel was off to the side with the rest of the students watching three or four hundred people touch their heads to the floor in unison. In the van on the way home, he was very quiet.

  “What are you thinking?” I asked him.

  “I am thinking about how many people were there,” he said, “compared to how many people are in my church on Sunday morning. What is the difference? What makes the difference? That is what I am thinking about.” The last time I checked, Joel was a fully ordained elder with a new congregation under his care.

  The more I explored the concept of holy envy, the more kinds of religious envy I discovered—and not all of them holy. When I first began teaching Religion 101, my envy took the form of spiritual shoplifting. When I saw something I liked in another tradition, I helped myself: Tibetan singing bowls, Hindu deities, necklaces strung with Zuni fetishes, Muslim prayer rugs. I paid handsomely for all of these things. My desire to possess them stemmed from a genuine wish to draw closer to their original owners, but when I survey the objects on the windowsills in my office—a nineteenth-century spice box made of sterling silver once used for the Jewish prayer service that ends the Sabbath, a splendid wooden Buddha covered with gold leaf from an antique shop in Bangkok, a rare set of Muslim prayer beads from Morocco made from amber—I feel more than a little like a colonialist displaying her loot. It is not that I lack respect for the objects; it is that I have separated them from their religious roots for display purposes.

  I justify my ongoing possession of them for teaching purposes, but I still remember the look on one Muslim student’s face when he saw me pack a study Qur’an into my book bag under a menorah and a statue of Shiva. I would not have thought twice about doing the same thing with a study Bible, but that was my mistake. A Bible is not a Qur’an, and it was a mistake to assume that a Muslim’s attitude toward his holy book was the same as my attitude toward mine.

  Let the other define herself, Stendahl cautioned those who engage the faith of others. “Don’t think you know the other without listening.”3

  Although my fingers still get a little twitchy when I see a really nice Tibetan temple b
ell in a shop window, I have learned that possessing an artifact is not the same as possessing the spiritual reality it represents. The jewels of the world’s great religions have their own sovereignty. I may look, but I may not poach. As much as I admire the brilliance of the Jewish Talmud—especially the way it hallows sacred debate across the centuries—I cannot have it. It belongs to those in whose lifeblood it was written. As much as my soul leans toward the whirling of the Sufis who bring heaven to earth with their ethereal spinning, I cannot have that either. It belongs to those who have devoted their lives to the love of Allah. This kind of holy envy comes with its own safeguard. Although I am allowed to admire what is growing in the well-tended fields of my religious neighbors, I am not allowed to pull off the road and help myself. The things I envy have their own terroir, their own long histories of weather and fertilization. They do not exist to serve me, improve me, or profit me. They have their own dominion.

  Another kind of holy envy alerts me to things in other religions that have become neglected in my own, though they may go by different names. Buddhist meditation is not the same as Christian centering prayer, but my envy of the discipline required by the former increases my desire to put more effort into the latter. A Muslim goes to Mecca for different reasons than I go to Bethlehem or Canterbury, but my envy of the Hajj causes me to wonder why I make my pilgrimages alone. What do Muslims know about the power of community that has all but withered from my neglect?

  Surely this is what Stendahl meant by his second rule: “Don’t compare your best to their worst.” Instead, compare your best to their best, so that each becomes better in its own distinct way. Isn’t this what the best athletes do? When I see two tennis champions approach the net to shake hands at the end of their match, I like to think that they are not only observing the rules of good sportsmanship but also acknowledging one another’s excellence. Later one of them may even watch the match on tape to see what there is to learn from the other. This is how holy envy functions at the top of its game. What I see in the neighbor’s yard does not belong to me, but it shows me things in my own yard that I might otherwise have overlooked. If the same thing happens to the neighbors when they look at my yard from their side, we may have a chance to help each other practice our different faiths better.

  This brief survey would be incomplete, however, if I did not mention a troubling form of holy envy that keeps me up at night, since it leads me farther from home than I really want to go. This happens when I envy something in another tradition that is so foreign to my own, or so absent from it, that taking it seriously means questioning one of my basic assumptions about how divine reality works. If I want to learn what it has to teach me, I may never see my yard the same way again.

  This is what happened when I encountered the Buddhist teaching that human beings are responsible for our own destiny, with no divine mediator to erase our mistakes or offer us a free pass to salvation. Our words and actions have natural consequences, which affect everyone around us. Some lead to joy and some to sorrow, but no one else can handle them for us. They are ours to handle—and to learn from—as best we are able. When the Buddha himself lay dying, his disciples asked him how they could possibly go on without him. Who would guide them after he was gone? “Be lamps unto yourselves,” he told them. “Rely on yourselves, and do not rely on external help. Hold fast to the truth as a lamp.”4

  This was so close to something Jesus once said to his disciples—“You are the light of the world” —that I was warmed by the parallel sayings. But I did not find anything in my tradition that came close to the Buddhist view of human ability and responsibility. In the Christian view, human beings are incapable of saving ourselves from our sins. Our only hope is to accept the miraculous intervention of God’s only Son, who can take away the consequences of our actions if we let him. In the Episcopal Communion service and in the prayers of the people, we praise Jesus as “our only Mediator and Advocate.”

  Through long habits of devotion, I learned to love that language along with the restriction and dependence embedded in it, which made the Buddha’s dying words all the more startling to me. After I read them, I could not stop thinking about what it might mean to praise Jesus for lighting the fire in me and then to step into the full adulthood of being a lamp unto myself, burning in a community of others who accepted that responsibility with me.

  A closely related holy envy flared up when I discovered that neither Judaism nor Islam includes a doctrine of original sin. In the orthodox view of my own tradition, human beings are born with a congenital flaw due to Adam and Eve’s original sin in the Garden of Eden. By eating from the one tree God had forbidden them to eat from, the first couple did permanent damage to their offspring, who would all be born with the same tendency to sin. As depressing as this sounds, the doctrine explains why Christians need a Savior who is both fully human (so he has enough in common with us to know what ails us) and fully divine (so he has the power to overcome it).

  While different kinds of Christians posit different kinds of remedies—baptism, personal reform, universal reconciliation—the stain of sin is never entirely eradicated, since it shows up in each generation anew. On days when the entire human race and I seem to be at our worst, this comes as something of a comfort. Sin is in our DNA. At the same time, it drops the bar on being human so low that you have to wonder why we don’t all just stay in bed. Weren’t Adam and Eve also made in the image of God? What happened to that part of the story?

  As I learned from teaching Religion 101, Jews and Muslims also recognize the reality of sin without viewing it as an inherent flaw in human design. In their religious worldviews, God created humans exactly the way we are, with freedom to choose good or evil. God tipped the scales by offering divine guidance in the form of sacred texts and prophets, but no one can do our choosing for us. In this view, Abraham bargains with God on the people’s behalf, and Moses pleads their case; Muhammad shows them what perfect submission to God looks like, but God leaves people free to decide how they will respond. No one dooms them to sin, and no one can take their sin away. Humans have everything they need to choose what is good.

  Once, after Friday prayer at a masjid, my students and I joined a group of students from other colleges in a circle on the carpet of the prayer hall. The imam who had just led the prayer and delivered the sermon had offered to stay late in order to answer any questions we had. My group was silent, but a young man from another college raised his hand.

  “Without Jesus, how do Muslims gain forgiveness from their sins?” he asked.

  “Muslims confess their sins directly to God,” the imam said, “and God directly forgives them.” If we had been in a synagogue instead of a masjid, a rabbi would have said the same thing—an answer that might have given any Christian pause. Well, that makes sense. But if it makes sense, then what sense does one make of Jesus’s death on the cross?

  Holy envy is not a prerequisite for exploring answers to such questions. All one needs is the willingness to enter another religious world and engage those who live there. It helps to be invited and to assume that the people who welcome you are people of goodwill. It also helps if they are skilled at speaking of their faith with people who do not share it, but even under the best of circumstances troubling questions can arise. What is the true nature of God, and how do we know what God desires of us? How capable are we of responding to those desires, and what do we hope will happen to us if we do? If the religious world you are visiting is one where neither “God” nor “religion” is a meaningful term, even more unsettling questions may arise. Is there a larger consciousness at work in what happens to us or are we the makers of our own meaning? What moves people to lives of compassion in the absence of belief in God?

  I can think of all sorts of reasons to stay in my own yard. They are often the same reasons students say they do not take religion classes in college: because their elders have warned them to stay away from competing truth claims. Those who leave home anyway are often sta
rtled to discover the strenuous benefits of engaging truths different from their own. In the first place, they get to think much more deeply about where their beliefs come from and how well they fit together. In the second place, they get to figure out how to explain their beliefs to people who are not already committed to them. If you are Christian, try explaining the Trinity to someone who does not already believe in it.

  In the third place, they get to discover points of contact with neighbors of other faiths along with points of irreconcilable difference. Finally—and this is the most strenuous benefit of all—they get to engage those who are different without feeling compelled to defeat or destroy them. This requires skills. It also requires spiritual and psychological maturity, which makes it a work in progress for humans of any age.

  I am not sure whether the virtue of holy envy requires holy humility or creates it, but the two are clearly related. After you have allowed the other to define herself, listening carefully to all the ways in which she is not you, it is hard to overlook the fact that you and she are made of the same basic material. You are dust, and to dust you shall return.

  Across all our differences, we come into the world more or less the same way, through the body of another human being. We breathe the same air and depend on the same earth for our sustenance. We all weep salty tears and bleed red blood. Though we find different things funny, we laugh (and sneeze) in amusing ways. Up to a certain age we are so curious about each other that someone has to teach us to fear each other. None of us is born with a belief system or a worldview. We acquire those from our elders, along with our DNA. This does not diminish the importance of our religion, but it does establish a certain priority. What we have most in common is not our religion but our humanity, which is recognizable across class, continent, and color—unless someone goes to great pains to blind us to one another.