Sacred Ground

by Eboo Patel

  When looked at across a religious tradition and a religious population, we recognize that this is a problem whose solution begins with theology and continues into faith formation. Just as the abolition and civil rights movements caused faith communities to articulate a theology of race relations, just as globalization spurred faith communities to articulate a theology of the world church or the global ummah, just as climate change has catalyzed articulation of theologies of environmentalism and creation care, the dynamic of increased interaction between people of different faith backgrounds should encourage religious communities to articulate theologies of interfaith cooperation. And just as all of these things were first articulated in books and then worked their way into Sunday school, so must it be with the theology of interfaith cooperation. The most important institution on that road is the seminary, the space within a religious tradition where future religious leaders grapple with questions at the intersection of faith and culture, of history and theology, all with the hope of applying the solutions in the world.

  By theology, I mean a coherent narrative that references key Scripture, stories, history, heroes, poetry, and so on, from the cumulative historical tradition of the faith community. By articulate, I mean to highlight that all our faith traditions already contain resources that speak to positive relations with the religious other. Our challenge is to make those pieces salient, interpret and apply them to the contemporary dynamic of religious diversity, and string them together in a coherent narrative. It is this interpretive process that keeps traditions founded thousands of years ago relevant to the contemporary age. It is what Harvard scholar Diana Eck means when she says that “our religions are more like rivers than monuments, changing.”5

  The seeds of this theology are not in the esoteric or ethereal dimensions of our religions; they are right there at the center, located in what Wilfred Cantwell Smith might call our key symbols. We need to give those key symbols a fresh look, seeing them from the angle of a world defined by interfaith interaction.

  In the ten years I have been teaching in seminaries, the Bible story that I have heard most often is the story of the Good Samaritan. It is a story familiar to nearly every Christian, and most non-Christians as well. A lawyer asks Jesus the question “Teacher, how shall I gain eternal life?” Jesus suggests the man answer his own question, based on his knowledge of the holy law: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind—and your neighbor as yourself,”6 the lawyer dutifully replies.

  But then—“desiring to justify himself,” the Scripture says—the lawyer presents Jesus with a more complex matter: “Who is my neighbor?” In response, Jesus tells a story:

  A man traveling the road from Jerusalem to Jericho is set on by robbers and left for dead. A priest walks the road, sees the man, and passes to the other side, willfully ignoring him. A Levite does the same. Along comes a traveler, a certain Samaritan, who Jesus says is moved by compassion. He approaches the man, dresses his wounds with oil and wine, places him on his animal, brings him to an inn, and spends the evening caring for him. The next morning, he gives the innkeeper two coins and clear instructions that this man is to be nursed back to full health and that he will pay the additional cost, whatever it may be.

  “Now, which of these three do you think seemed to be a neighbor to him who fell among the robbers?” Jesus asks the lawyer.

  “He who showed mercy on him,” the lawyer responds.

  “Go and do likewise,” says Jesus.

  I imagine Jesus telling this parable about a man from the other community, the despised community, to a large gathering of his main audience—Jews. As Jesus proceeds, describing the brutal robbery, the two men who see and ignore the traveler, and finally the Samaritan who nurses him back to health, I imagine the series of realizations, the layers of understanding, occurring in the minds of this audience.

  Clearly, helping those in need is an important part of this story. Well, why don’t the priest and the Levite—both representing important positions in the community of Jews—stop to help? They were both aware of the law. In fact, they were expert in the law, and had responsibility for interpreting and implementing it. Perhaps it was their very expertise that prevented them from helping. One of the laws forbade the touching of the dead; another forbade them from touching Gentiles. Perhaps the priest and the Levite feared that the man was dead, or thought he was a Gentile, and chose to follow the letter of the law so that they would not become unclean. Clearly, Jesus is saying there is a good higher than following the letter of the law—the ethic of helping one in need.

  But if that were indeed the main point of the story, why not have the priest or the Levite choose to override the letter of the law in the spirit of the higher good? Certainly, that would have brought home the holiness of helping. Something else is happening here.

  The priest and the Levite get only three short sentences in the story. The Scripture is not about them. The man who is hurt is also barely described at all. It is the Samaritan who gets all the attention. His actions are described in rich detail—using oil and wine (valuable resources) to dress the wounds, using his own animal to transport the man, spending his own time caring for him, offering the innkeeper whatever money is necessary to nurse him back to health.

  Jesus is telling a story about people who were not part of his audience. In fact, he is making one the hero of his story. The Samaritans who were not just “other,” and not just despised; they were heretics, people of a different faith.

  When Jesus finishes, he turns to the man who asked, “Who is my neighbor?” and gently suggests he answer the question based on the story he just heard. The lawyer is unable to bring himself to speak of the man the way Jesus does, to say the word Samaritan. But he gets the point of the story: “He who showed mercy on him,” he tells the teacher. Jesus doesn’t force him further. He trusts the moral will work its way through the man’s prejudices. The story ends with Jesus telling the lawyer, and the crowd that has gathered, “Go and do likewise.”

  I imagine the question lingering, the stillness in the air, the sense of joy and fear and desire that this story has provoked in the audience. I imagine them nervously looking around at one another. No heretics here. No despised ones around. No “others” present. The Samaritans are safely elsewhere. I imagine the comfort this community felt being amid their own as the story opened. And then slowly, as the story develops, as the characters are introduced and the action unfolds, a nagging feeling starts to set in. The respected leaders among them—the priest and the Levite—are not the heroes of this story. Elsewhere in the Bible, Jesus makes it clear that he disagrees with the theology of the Samaritans.7 Still, it is the Samaritan, the heretic, Jesus tells them to emulate. Jesus seems to be saying it is not enough to stay within the fold of the faithful, not enough even to follow the way, the truth, and the life. To attain the eternal, the story suggests, you have to engage with people who believe differently than you.

  “How many times did you hear the Good Samaritan story when you were growing up?” I asked my friend April.

  “About a thousand,” she said.

  I wrote about April in my book Acts of Faith—she was the first person hired at Interfaith Youth Core with our initial grant of $35,000. Since then she has helped build IFYC into a $4 million organization, running just about every one of our programs along the way, and launching half of them. She was raised a devout Evangelical Christian in rural Minnesota by a family who believe that faith is about action. Her mother, out of Christian conviction, adopted children. April led not only Bible studies at church but also service and mission trips abroad throughout her high school years. “Jesus taught that you helped people, especially people different from you,” she told me. “That’s what the Good Samaritan story is all about.”

  The turning point in April’s faith life came when she was president of the Christian Students Group at Carleton College. A mosque in nearby Minneapoli
s suffered an arson attack, and April received an e-mail requesting that the religious leaders in the area support the Muslim community in its time of need. April immediately shot back a yes. When she brought the idea to the next meeting of the Carleton Christian group, some members had different instincts. A few suggested that this was a good time to proselytize to the Muslims whose prayer space had been destroyed. When April said she had already sent back an e-mail saying she would help, and thought that turning service into evangelism was disingenuous, one person spoke up with indignity, saying, “Those people aren’t Christian. They do not believe in Jesus Christ. They pray to a false God. If you help them, you are supporting devil worship.” The problem is, those people had not just their instincts, they also had a very clear interpretation of Christian texts. Out came the fangs and the Scripture, and April found herself subject to a session of religious bigotry decorated with Biblical proof texts.

  “While you were being barraged with all these verses claiming you should hate people from other religions, why didn’t you just tell the story of the Good Samaritan?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I just stayed silent. I let them out-Scripture me, even though I knew the Bible as well or better than any of them. I guess I just never thought about how those stories applied to people from different religions.”

  And then she turned the tables on me. “If you were in Morocco or Pakistan, and a group of fanatical Muslims burned down a church, how would you convince the local community that it was part of being Muslim to help the Christians rebuild?” She wanted to know if there was a theology of interfaith cooperation within Islam. I would be lying if I said I had the answer at the tip of my tongue.

  One of the hidden dimensions of interfaith cooperation is how it strengthens your own tradition, precisely because when other people ask searching questions like the one April posed to me, you go back in the sources of your faith to find the answer. And who knew that at the source of Islam, contained in the Prophethood and practice of a respected merchant in Mecca named Muhammad, lay a theology of interfaith cooperation?

  Every year during the month of Ramadan, Muhammad would make a spiritual pilgrimage to a cave near Mt. Hira, outside of the city of Mecca. On one of the odd nights of the last ten days of that month in 610, while Muhammad was praying on the mountain, he felt a powerful force enveloping his whole body and heard a voice say “Iqra,” Arabic for read or recite. At first, Muhammad was terrified. Trembling, he said to the force, “I am not a reciter,” meaning that he was not one of the poets of the Arabian desert, figures whose verse was said to be inspired by demonlike creatures called jinns. Again the force enveloped him, again came the command to recite, and again Muhammad said, “I am not a reciter.” It happened a third time—the grip, the command, the shock of fear—but during this cycle, Muhammad felt the following words come forth:

  “Recite in the name of thy Lord who created!

  He createth man from a clot of blood.

  Recite: and thy Lord is the Most Bountiful

  He who hath taught by the pen,

  taught man what he knew not.”8

  It was the first verse of the Qur’an pouring from his lips. Muhammad returned to his wife, Khadija, crawling on his hands and knees, shaking with fear. There are traditions that say that the event of this first revelation so frightened the Prophet that he considered flinging himself off the mountain, disgusted that he had allowed himself to become possessed. Khadija calmed her husband, assuring him that Allah would not let a demon enter a servant as righteous as he. She had a cousin, a man named Waraqa, a man learned in the Scriptures, and she would go to him and ask his counsel as to what they should make of these events.

  When Waraqa heard the story he exclaimed, “Holy! Holy! . . . There has come to him the great namus that came to Moses aforetime, and lo, he is the prophet of his people.” When Waraqa next saw Muhammad in Mecca, he ran to kiss the Prophet on the forehead.

  Who was Waraqa, I wondered? What did it mean to be “learned in the Scriptures”? It turns out that the first person to recognize the Qur’annic revelation was a Christian, an Arab Christian who never converted to Islam.

  The revelations continued, and Muhammad started preaching the message of Islam—mercy and monotheism—in Mecca. As the number of converts grew, so did the anger of the powerful Quraysh tribe. They viewed Muhammad’s mission as an insult to their faith and as a threat to their way of life. Attacks on Muhammad and the early Muslims became more brazen, and his companions became afraid for the Prophet’s life.

  For the Quraysh to rid themselves of Muhammad entirely, they would have to ask the clan leader Abu Talib to lift his protection of the Prophet. The anti-Muhammad forces did not want to risk an internecine war by attacking a man who had the protection of a respected clan leader. Abu Talib was Muhammad’s uncle; he had taken Muhammad in after he was orphaned at five years of age. He was also a man fully committed to the pagan gods of Arabia. Muhammad had asked him to convert many times, but Abu Talib had refused. This was one of the points the Quraysh leaders made to him: they collectively belonged to a tradition that Muhammad was effectively saying was wrong. But Abu Talib rebuffed them and refused to lift his protection. “Go and say what you please,” he told his nephew, “for by God I will never give you up on any account.”

  And so it was that the first person to recognize the Prophethood of Muhammad was a Christian and the primary protector of Muhammad during those brutal early years in Mecca was a pagan. Interfaith cooperation was written into the very founding of my faith tradition, and an ethic that continued throughout Muhammad’s life. There is a story of the Prophet hosting a Christian delegation in Medina. The Muslims and Christians had a heated debate on the differences between their respective traditions. At one point, the Christians asked for the Prophet’s protection so they could leave the city and perform their prayers. The Prophet surprised them by inviting them into his mosque to pray, saying that just because their traditions had differences did not mean that they should not respect and show hospitality to the others’ practices.9

  This story of the Prophet highlights an important distinction—namely, a theology of interfaith cooperation is not about religions being the same, or even an agreement that everyone is going to heaven. A theology of interfaith cooperation does not state that we should not argue about deep cosmic differences. After all, in the story above, the Muslim hosts led by the Prophet were arguing with the Christian delegation about the different Muslim and Christian views of Jesus. Theirs was not a facile exchange along the lines of “You wash your hands before you pray, and I wash mine—we’re all the same.” Instead, the story shows that, in the midst of an argument about important theological differences, the Muslims and Christians showed each other kindness, respect, and hospitality. It was a theology of interfaith cooperation that focused on building bridges between people of different faiths, not about which religious bridge leads to heaven.

  If the Good Samaritan is the most common Christian story cited by my seminary students, Martin Luther King Jr. is the most quoted Christian hero. My students like to point out to me that King’s commitment to nonviolence was deeply influenced by the work of Mahatma Gandhi. It is one of the most inspiring examples of religious influence in modern history. Gandhi’s idea of satyagraha—literally “love force”—provided King a new instrument for combating social problems. King had long believed in Jesus’ exhortations to “Turn the other cheek” and “Love your enemies,” but he understood them as applying to individual relationships. Gandhi’s successful campaign of active pacifism against British rule in India convinced King that nonviolence could be employed as a method of broad social reform. It was an ethic that King had the opportunity to put into practice in 1955, during the Montgomery bus boycott, when King was just twenty-six years old. “Christ furnished the inspiration,” King wrote, “and Gandhi gave us the method.”10

  It is commonplace to trace King’s journey down the path of Gandhian nonviolence, b
ut King followed Gandhi down another path as well, one that my seminary students are surprised to hear about: the path of interfaith cooperation. Gandhi, of course, was not a Christian. And although he had great respect for the Christian Scriptures, the book that Gandhi drew his deepest inspiration from was not the Bible, it was the Bhagavad Gita.

  In 1959, King traveled to India to learn more about Gandhi’s life and work, and was struck that Gandhi’s movement involved people of all religious backgrounds and that the Mahatma had ranked interfaith cooperation as one of his chief goals. Two months after his return from India, in his Palm Sunday sermon at Montgomery’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, King referred to Gandhi as one of the “other sheep” of Jesus and said, “It is one of the strange ironies of the modern world that the greatest Christian of the twentieth century was not a member of the Christian church.” He ended his sermon with the following prayer: “O God, our gracious Heavenly Father, we thank Thee for the fact that you have inspired men and women in all nations and in all cultures. We call you different names: some call Thee Allah; some call you Elohim; some call you Jehovah; some call you Brahma; and some call you the unmoved Mover.”11

  King’s interfaith path involved far more than the study of different religious systems. The man with the bushy beard marching next to King in the famous picture from Selma is Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, a descendant of Eastern European Hasidic rabbis who had escaped the trains running from Warsaw to Auschwitz by six weeks. Instead of secluding himself into a religious bubble in America, Heschel threw himself into the work of the civil rights movement. About walking with King in Selma, Heschel wrote, “Our march was worship. I felt like my legs were praying.”12

  As King connected the civil rights movement to struggles around the world, from hunger in India to war in Vietnam, no contemporary figure influenced him more than the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. In his letter nominating Nhat Hanh for the Nobel Peace Prize, King wrote, “He is a holy man. . . . His ideas for peace, if applied, would build a monument to ecumenism, to a world brotherhood, to humanity.” In his first major sermon against the Vietnam War, King connected the Christian ethic that brought him to his antiwar conviction with the core lesson he had learned from the faith of other men: “The Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality . . . is that the force of love is the supreme unifying principle of life.”13