Sacred Ground

by Eboo Patel

  As faith clubs took off, I noticed something interesting—my own book, Acts of Faith, started selling better.3 It turns out that a lot of faith clubs were choosing it as their common reading. “Of course,” I thought to myself, “it’s a book about how my personal spiritual journey as a Muslim was shaped by a Catholic activist, a Jewish poet, and a Buddhist monk.” Faith clubs were using it as a vehicle to spark conversation about personal spiritual journeys among their own members. I had provided the score for their chamber ensemble. It made me proud, but it also left me wondering: beautiful as chamber music is, it is not a language easily acquired by large groups of people, it is not particularly suited for rallying the masses, and it certainly cannot be heard above the thrash metal of religious prejudice. It is neither the right theme song nor the best format for a social movement. During the furor around Cordoba House, as Pamela Geller was putting large “Leave Islam” advertisements on the sides of New York City buses—the sheet music of religious prejudice for millions to learn on their way to work—I imagined thousands of Americans speaking in a sacred whisper about appreciating each other’s spiritual journeys within the intimate confines of their faith clubs.

  The more I thought about the Dalai Lama’s visit to Chicago, the more I viewed it as a perfect example of preaching to the choir, and moreover doing it in a manner that seemed to follow the science of the interfaith triangle. The Dalai Lama can obviously assemble a pretty large choir, but still, he was strategic about how he went about organizing it. The day after his talk at the basketball arena in Chicago, he did a panel discussion with three American religious leaders—Professor Ingrid Mattson, the former president of the Islamic Society of North America; Reverend Peg Chemberlin, the president of the National Council of Churches; and Rabbi Michael Lerner, a well-known progressive Jewish leader. I was the moderator for the discussion, and as I talked with some of the audience members who attended, I realized that there were Christians, Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists who had come to see their religious leader interacting with the Dalai Lama. By putting those leaders on the same panel, the Dalai Lama had gotten Chicago’s religiously diverse communities in the same theater together. In other words, he had created a religiously diverse choir. In the framework of the interfaith triangle, he had shaped a powerful opportunity for positive, meaningful encounters between people of diverse religious faiths.

  After gathering the choir, the job of the preacher is to teach us the song. The content of the Dalai Lama’s teaching in Chicago was based on his book, Toward a True Kinship of Faiths: How the World’s Religions Can Come Together, a book that is basically the lyrics of interfaith literacy. The Dalai Lama begins with a beautiful story about Thomas Merton’s visit to his residence in Dharamsalla in 1968. The two monks compare their robes, their meditation practices (Merton woke up at 2:30 a.m., an hour earlier than the Dalai Lama, to begin his prayers), the relationship between ritual, values, and spirituality in their respective traditions. That personal narrative provides a doorway for the Dalai Lama to discuss Tibet’s history of interfaith encounter, with a special focus on the story of an Italian Jesuit who spent enough years in dialogue with Buddhist monks that he wrote a lengthy text about the value of comparative religious study in Tibetan. The Dalai Lama picks up the thread of the meeting with Merton again in his chapter on Christianity, where he emphasizes “the centrality of the compassionate ideal of relieving others from suffering as a key motivation in both Buddhism and Christianity.”4 In his early brush with Christianity, the Dalai Lama had found the stark and bloody image of Jesus on the cross somewhat startling. Merton points him to the picture of the Virgin Mary cradling the Baby Jesus and the verses in the Bible that speak of love, and emphasizes to the Dalai Lama that all of Christianity—the sacrifice, the blood, the cross—has to be understood in light of that single, central value: love.

  In his visit to Chicago, the Dalai Lama did not stop at simply teaching the lyrics. He made sure the choir, at least the panelists on stage, sang the song. He wanted to hear about our personal friendships with people from different religions. Could we relate stories of service projects we had done with people of other faiths? He spoke about the lessons he had learned about compassion from other religions. Could the religious leaders on stage point to something they admired in other traditions? Was there a teaching central to our religions that we had found enriched by other faiths, in the way that he had learned about compassion from the image of the Virgin Mary holding the Baby Jesus? In a world where all the noise is about faith as a barrier of division and a bomb of destruction, the Dalai Lama had us singing the song of faith as a bridge of cooperation.

  In his closing, the Dalai Lama turned to each panelist and gave us a charge: Ingrid Mattson should focus on involving women in interfaith cooperation, Peg Chemberlin should lift up the example of Jesus as a model of compassion, Michael Lerner had to write about the Middle East in a way that embraced the humanity of both Palestinians and Israelis, and I was to continue to energize young people, especially Muslim youth, to join the interfaith movement. He was basically telling us that being in the choir was great, singing the song of interfaith cooperation was great, but we all had to go a step further. He wanted us to become preachers and start new choirs.

  When the event was over, people didn’t rush for the doors. They lingered and chatted, shook hands and exchanged greetings with people they’d never met before. A religiously diverse audience felt like it had a special moment not just with a great spiritual leader but with one another. I overheard one person call the event “a reorientation of my spirit.” The social science term for that feeling is “attitude change.” This was not the time to tell people how perfectly the Dalai Lama had followed the interfaith triangle, but I couldn’t help noticing it myself. The part I was most struck by is how naturally he had advanced the most intimidating part of the triangle—the knowledge side.

  The Dalai Lama’s teachings in Chicago were an example of what I’ve started to call interfaith literacy. It’s a concept that first occurred to me after I read Stephen Prothero’s important book, Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know—But Doesn’t. Prothero argues that all citizens ought to know basic terms and reference points in major religions to participate in our religiously diverse and devout society. He is careful to say this is not about liking other religions; it is only about knowing their basics. Part of the reason for this emphasis is that Prothero wants religious literacy taught in public high schools, and feels that a subject as loaded as teaching about religion, while it may be perfectly legal, is likely to provoke a sharp reaction. Exhibiting a studied neutrality—what Prothero calls the “just the facts” approach—is the best chance of disarming the skeptics.

  But the Dalai Lama was going a step further. He wanted people to do more than recognize the terms of the discourse in a religiously diverse society. He wanted people to like one another, learn from each other, build bridges, form friendship, work together, thrive together. He was advancing a knowledge base that served this end. The stories he was telling were about the parts of different religions he admired and found beautiful—the call to prayer in Islam, Hinduism’s Kumbh Mela festival, the example of St. Francis in Christianity, Judaism’s Kabbala, the spiritual discipline of observant Jains, the passages on peace in the Sikh scripture, the architectural magnificence of the Baha’i Temple in New Delhi. The Dalai Lama wasn’t interested in becoming an expert in other religions; he wanted to be an expert in what he loved about other religions.

  The first part of interfaith literacy is an appreciative knowledge of other traditions. This means learning about what we admire in other faiths, the beauty in their texts and rituals, the contributions that their members have made to our society, the type of knowledge that fosters friendships and facilitates work together. The second part of interfaith literacy is the ability to identify values that all religions share—compassion, mercy, hospitality, service. The third part is an understanding of the history of interfaith cooperation
in our nation and our world. The final part is developing your own theology of interfaith cooperation, based on the texts, stories, and rituals of your own tradition. Taken together, these four parts are a knowledge base for cultivating pluralism in a religiously diverse society.

  The part that struck me most in Toward a True Kinship of Faiths was the material on Islam. The Dalai Lama begins by effectively admitting not knowing much about the tradition until the attacks of 9/11, and in the aftermath finding himself disturbed by the constant news reports of terrorism committed by Muslims, and the peculiar alliance between Muslim extremists and Muslim haters to try to prove to the world that Islam is inherently violent. Common sense said this couldn’t be true. Religions don’t spread around the world, last for nearly 1,500 years, and attract 1.5 billion followers when they are only about violence. But simply being convinced that the media portrayal was skewed was not enough. And so the Dalai Lama undertook a program of study that effectively gave him interfaith literacy about Islam.

  He read the poems of Rumi and the history of tolerance in the Muslim tradition. He visited mosques and went to Muslim events. He searched in the Qur’an and the Hadith literature for examples of compassion. He found shared values between Islam and Buddhism and reviewed the history of interfaith cooperation between the two communities. He concluded, “Since God [in Islam] is characterized as the Compassionate and the Merciful, in my understanding, the faithful are actually offering an absolute submission to the ideal of universal compassion. . . . In my own Buddhist tradition, there is a similar practice in which one offers one’s entire being as a servant to the embodiment of compassion.”5

  Chicago wasn’t the only American city where the Dalai Lama came to talk about interfaith cooperation. In the last few years, I’ve participated in events with him in New York City, San Francisco, and Bloomington, Indiana. I noticed that the Dalai Lama seems to prefer a two-part format. Frequently, he’d hold an intimate meeting with a smaller group of leaders, discussions in which he could ask pointed questions about the other faith and offer more complex ideas about Buddhism. And then he’d hold larger teachings in which he would hold up, for a mass audience, the commonalities he’d recently discovered. I started to view the two parts as serving two very different but connected goals: In the smaller meeting, the Dalai Lama was adding to his own song on interfaith cooperation and helping his fellow preachers improve their song by contributing to their knowledge on Buddhism. In the larger meeting, he was teaching the song to a large choir. Both were necessary for effective interfaith leadership. The intimate settings were where the Dalai Lama got his own inspiration and knowledge, and the larger settings were where he inspired and enlightened a large group of others.

  Reflecting on this strategy helped me understand the power and purpose of faith clubs and interfaith book groups. These are the spaces where the preachers of the movement improve their own interfaith literacy, develop their most intimate interfaith relationships, and keep their own inspiration flowing. Without these spaces, the song gets stale and the preachers get tired. But if the preachers don’t create larger formats, invite in those bigger choirs, teach them the basic melody and lyrics, encourage them to sing loud and proud, then the song of interfaith cooperation doesn’t exist in the world.

  In Bloomington, as the Dalai Lama was walking out from his intimate meeting with Muslims to the larger teaching he was preparing to offer, he told me the story of his earliest Muslim friendship. It was with a clock repairer in Tibet, when the Dalai Lama was just a boy. His Holiness used to be so rough with his pocket watch that he broke it frequently. The best clock repairer in Lhasa happened to be a Muslim, and he would come dutifully to the palace when the attendants called and said the young Dalai Lama had broken his watch yet again. One day, the old man gave the Dalai Lama some advice on gentleness: “Treat the watch as if it is a raw egg,” the man cautioned. “Gently, gently.” The man offered the lesson with such gentleness himself that the Dalai Lama began to view him as an embodiment of that quality, and when he thought about Islam in the days after 9/11, he reflected on his memory of this Muslim watch repairer instead of focusing on the images of the terrorists.

  There was something about that story of an uncommon friendship, and the way the Dalai Lama told it, that made me think of Chris Stedman. Like the Dalai Lama, Chris is an interfaith leader, but he doesn’t have religious robes, a religious title, or even a religious commitment. Chris is an atheist, a gay atheist, with a body full of tattoos and a face covered in piercings. He’s also one of the best interfaith leaders I know. And that’s because he and the Dalai Lama share the key talent in interfaith leadership: the ability to build relationships across difference, and tell stories about these relationships that inspire others to do the same.

  There is a moment in the middle of Chris’s forthcoming book Faitheist that about took my breath away.6 Chris is living in Bemidji, a small town in the northern part of Minnesota near the headwaters of the Mississippi River. The nearest big city, Fargo, is several hours away. In the winter, the snow piles up so high he can’t see out of the bedroom window in his garden apartment.

  Chris arrived there hoping to escape his past, to find a place where, as he writes, “I didn’t run into ghosts from my former Christian life that reminded me of the years I spent hating myself for being queer and unable to change it.” By the time he was a student at Augsburg College, Chris’s disgust with religion had come to define him as deeply as his Evangelical faith once had. To a group of fellow students whom he knew to be believing Christians, he described getting a Bible verse tattooed on his leg as the single stupidest thing he’d ever done, and derived a peculiar pleasure from the offense he caused.

  Chris had come to Bemidji because he wanted to live in a place where he could slow down and reflect, form deep relationships with small-town neighbors, take the first steps down a career path of service. He found a job working as a direct-service professional for adults with developmental disabilities at a social services agency run by Lutherans. (Yes, he is self-aware enough to note the irony.) His closest relationship was with a man named Marvin, a man who couldn’t talk and who could barely sign. They found other ways to communicate: Marvin would pretend to sock Chris in the jaw, and Chris would fall down and bounce back with his dukes up and say, “This isn’t over yet, buddy,” sending Marvin into gales of laughter. Chris watched movies with Marvin, sat with him for hours just keeping company, read to him from his favorite books.

  One day, Marvin brought Chris into his room and placed in his hands one of his most precious possessions: his prayer book. He wanted Chris to read from it. Chris hesitated for a second. Perhaps he was reminded of all those nights he lay awake searching through Scripture for verses, hoping to find one that would make him feel loved for what God made him. Perhaps he was reminded of the time when, in a drunken rage, he kicked in the glass panel of a church sign. But neither longing nor anger overcame him now. This moment was about what it means to be a friend, about expressing care for something Marvin values. Chris read Marvin a prayer. Marvin, normally tense, let his arms relax. Perhaps he sensed that some deep personal bridge had been crossed in his presence. He pressed his face tightly to Chris’s blue flannel shirt and kept it there for a long time.

  This is the beginning of Chris’s path to interfaith leadership, the moment when he makes the decision to discover what about faith would mean so much to his friend Marvin instead of focusing on those dimensions of religion that frustrate him personally. This is when Chris realizes that the loudest preachers in the choir of his identity group, atheism, have been saying that such friendships are suspect because all people of faith are purveyors of prejudice and ticking time bombs of extremism. Chris decides to write a different atheist song and teach it to the choir of his own community. It is an atheist song that doesn’t hate religion; it is one that loves people. It is a song that says the atheist movement ought to be standing up for those who are suffering, and working in solidarity with those who are d
ifferent. It is a song that Chris sang loudly and clearly during the Cordoba House crisis.

  “[Cordoba House] is under attack because of how demonized Muslims are in America, plain and simple,” Chris wrote. “Many Americans see nothing but godless, immoral, savage heathens when they think of Muslims. As a community comparably cast, we should empathize and come to their defense. Defending their freedom is defending our own.”7 It is precisely because atheists value freedom of religion (“because of it, we are able to choose none,” he wrote), and know what it means to be marginalized as a result of their views, that they ought to be on the front lines in support of those who are having their religious choice demonized.

  Chris teamed up with two IFYC alumni, Josh Stanton and Frankie Fredericks, a rabbinical student and a born-again Christian, respectively, to organize one of the largest gatherings in America in support of Cordoba House. On the tenth anniversary of 9/11, over a thousand people from different faith backgrounds (including a healthy contingent who, like Chris, proudly proclaimed they had no faith at all) gathered in the rain in Lower Manhattan for the Liberty Walk, listening to speakers, chanting slogans, and marching to support the idea that Muslims (like everybody else) should be able to build their institutions anywhere on America’s sacred ground. Somebody on the street told Chris that the whole country was against them. That just made Chris think of how hard past generations had worked to protect religious pluralism, and how proud he was to be working with friends like Frankie and Josh to extend that value into our era.

  In a way, they served as Chris’s intimate interfaith book club. They were the people he had the deepest relationships with, the ones who most inspired him. But what makes the Liberty Walk noteworthy is how they collectively inspired so many others. How they organized a choir of over a thousand people to sing the song of religious pluralism in a place that had, a decade before, suffered from the death chants of religious extremism, and for several weeks prior, the thrash metal of religious prejudice.