FAITH HOUSE Manhattan

A Book Review: A Puzzle, But the Pieces Fit

~ by Melody Tan

Nathan Brown is a writer and editor, based just out of Melbourne, Australia. He has written for a wide variety of publications in Australia and around the world, and is a regular contributor to the Faith House website.

Nemesis Train could simply have been a notebook filled with the journey of the author’s ponderings and explorations of various people’s lives. But what makes it a compelling read is the fact that the reader not only joins the ride as a mere commuter, but becomes a participant in a very real way as well.

This is not a book in the old-fashioned sense of the word, as chapters often appear unstructured and the flow of the book will take most readers by surprise. However, like Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, readers of Nemesis Train will find themselves unwittingly and inexplicably drawn into a story that makes them want to find out more, if only to discover how all the characters fit into the story.

Nemesis Train provokes thought and, more often, encourages the reader to ask questions rather than provides any real answers. Brown chooses to dwell deep in the thought processes of the characters, paying a lot of attention to their state of mind and what spurs them to do what they do.

Brown has a real talent in seeing details that may have been missed by most writers, and certainly by people going about their normal everyday life. Because he takes the time to pause and study the surroundings, he succeeds in painting a clear and real picture in the mind’s eye. The reader is drawn into the world that Brown has created and becomes a part of the book. The interesting, and sometimes quirky descriptions are also often unique and unexpected.

There is often an overarching sense of loss and loneliness present in the book, a sense that life may be a waste of time without any real meaning. However, there are also rare glimpses of wry humor and, through the character Jed Hill, the reader sees hope.

A book that makes a strong statement against war and the detrimental impact it has on war veterans and perhaps the world in general, it also offers grace and understanding to all those involved. But perhaps, it also offers these gifts to everybody, encouraging patience and kindness to those we come in contact with.

And what makes Nemesis Train a rare treasure is the fact that the surprise ending not only helps everything fall into place for the reader, it makes you want to go back to the platform and board the train all over again with your newfound piece of puzzle.

To learn more about Nathan Brown and Nemesis Train, click HERE.

Cute and Sad

~ by Samir Selmanovic

Recently I got one of the regular mailing I receive from Tanenbaum Center, a vocal proponent of the Golden Rule. Enclosed was a card that would shake any believer who still lives with an illusion that the heart of his/her religion is in its center.  It has moved to the edges, where one's religion touches the world and the other.

Interreligious Prayer: Suggestions from Catholics

~ by Father Francis V. Tiso. Father Tiso is Associate Director of the Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, where he serves as liaison to Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, the Sikhs, and Traditional religions as well as the Reformed confessions. A New York native, Father Tiso holds the A.B. in Medieval Studies from Cornell University.  He earned a Master of Divinity degree (cum laude) at Harvard University and holds a doctorate from Columbia University and Union Theological Seminary where his specialization was Buddhist studies. He translated several early biographies of the Tibetan yogi and poet, Milarepa, for his dissertation on sanctity in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism.  He has led research expeditions in South Asia, Tibet and the Far East, and his teaching interests include Christian theology, history of religions, spirituality, ecumenism and interreligious dialogue. Father Tiso has written and lectured widely. He is the recipient of grants from the American Academy of Religion, the American Philosophical Society, the Palmers Fund in Switzerland, and the Institute of Noetic Sciences in Petaluma, CA.  He is a musician and paints in acrylics and watercolors.

Samir Selmanovic: When people ask me how to begin an interfaith ministry I usually direct them to their family members, neighbors and friends (where life is), and then to Interfaith Youth Core (where action is). Here is another way to begin. Where prayer is. I meet wonderful Father Tiso at our regular gatherings of National Council of Churches (Interfaith Relations Commission). Following are suggestion for churches (and other faith communities) that want to organize a meaningful interfaith prayer service.These suggestions were drafted by Father Tiso with consultation from a large number of theologians, practitioners, and diocesan officers for ecumenical and interreligious relations. They have been published in Walking Together series by USCCB.

- Interreligious ceremonies grow out of and reflect respect for all traditions present.  This respect should find expression in collaboration in the planning as well as in the actual event.  If it is not planned interreligiously, it is not a genuinely interreligious event, but a service planned by one group with others invited as guests.-We advise in any interreligious worship event that each group present clearly distinct and separate moments of prayer, meditation, or reflection.  Those preparing the event should communicate clearly the amount of time allowed for each contribution to those who are invited to lead the different parts of the service.

-We advise careful attention to those prayers that come from one tradition, but which refer in some way to other traditions, present or absent.  Only those prayers that refer to other traditions in a respectful way should be used.

-Presentations should avoid proselytizing or "advertising" one's religion to the attendees.

-Ritual gestures that are alien to the presenters and/or to the congregation should be avoided.  Whereas some groups have the practice of using silent prayer at interreligious events, long periods of silence at a large public event might evoke distraction rather than unity.   Music is an integral part of prayer for many religious communities, but not for all.  Therefore, musical contributions should be agreed upon in the planning process by all participating groups.

-Participants should be informed before they arrive about dress requirements such as head coverings, shawls, or whether they are to remove their shoes. 

-Key positive beliefs of the traditions present are allowed (Christians can mention Jesus as God, Trinity; Jews and Muslims can speak clearly but non-polemically about the unity of God, etc.) as long as others who do not so believe are not singled out for disagreement, etc.  Some prayers express particular, creedal beliefs with which some participants may not agree.  However, such prayers may also offer valuable insights into the worldviews of the various traditions present.

-In the use of symbolic objects, there needs to be sensitivity to traditions that avoid iconic forms; this is particularly true of the house of worship in which the event is held.  The house of worship does not need to change its configuration, but the groups hosted by a particular house of worship should respect the sensitivities of the host community.  The treatment, handling, and position of sacred books or scrolls are important to many religious traditions.  Care should be taken to see that scriptures are handled only by those authorized to do so. 

- A printed order of service is recommended because the content and sequence of the celebration will most likely be unfamiliar to many of the attendees.  Translations of prayers said in languages other than English should be provided.

- Attention to political repercussions, through consulting with leadership.

-There is to be respect for people who have chosen freely to convert to another religion, but there is also to be a sensitive "reserve" towards them in dialogue and public events.  Normally persons who have changed religious affiliation do not lead ecumenical or interreligious prayer events, nor do they represent their communities in dialogue with representatives of their former community of religious adherence.

-Inclusive language is acceptable only if the participating religious bodies are in agreement on this concern; no one should be required to use inclusive language in violation of religious beliefs or liturgical norms.

-If there is a reception after the event, those preparing the refreshments should assure that the dietary regulations of different communities are respected and, if necessary, that the foods be clearly labeled so that their contents are known.

-Whenever possible, the Catholic portion of an interreligious prayer event should make use of the approved liturgical resources.  Some interfaith prayers are given in the Book of Blessings, sections 570-573.  The Orders for the Blessing of Pilgrims (Book of Blessings sections 590 – 616), the Liturgy of the Hours, and the votive Masses for Peace and Justice are recommended resources. 

Answering Christian Critics of Faith House (Part 3): Great Commission or Great Invitation

~by Samir Selmanovic

A thought experiment: let’s imagine the whole world has converted to Christianity. Every group professes the Apostle’s Creed, the classic statement of Christian belief. There are no mosques, synagogues, temples, or altars of any kind—just churches. Governments are run by Christians, corporations are run by Christians, all art is Christian. Every teacher of every school is Christian, every politician of every party is a Christian, every owner of every business is a Christian, every book, every movie, every event—all Christian. A question: “How does that make you feel?”

I suspect increasing numbers of Christians feel as scared about such a possibility as everyone else would. But to be a Christian should mean to strive to make this scenario a reality. The Christians’ mandate to go to the world and convert it is based on the last words of Jesus in the gospel of Matthew. Standing on a hill with a handful of His disciples, frightened and disoriented by the swirl of events surrounding Jesus’ death and resurrection, before leaving them, Jesus finished His call with the precious words of comfort, “Go and make disciples of all nations … baptizing them … and teaching them … And surely I am with you always, to the very end of age” (Matthew 28:19,20). Christians have dubbed this call of Christ the Great Commission. No commandment can be more important. Why then inside many of us who love Jesus does something recoil against the fulfillment of this mandate?

The most obvious hesitance comes from history. Christians have had the chance to organize communities, nations and even empires, and have been found wanted. But there is a reason that goes deeper. The world is interdependent. A multiplicity of atoms and variety of life forms are necessary for our world to exist and function. Nobody has life independently. Without the intrinsic and intricate complexity of all life, there would be no life. Reality itself is interdependent diversity.  None of us simply “exists;” we all “exist with.” Cut off the “with,” and there would be no existence for anyone one of us.

Every once in a while I go to Christian conferences, places where Christian leaders explore, evaluate, and equip each other for “impacting the world.” These days, my friends and I leave these conferences increasingly empty. I think it is because we are living under the assumption that while the world needs Christians, Christians don’t need the world. There is no reciprocity or interdependence. We don’t expect to be impacted. The world and its religions have been left out of God’s consideration to give them any significant commission to us. 

Something feels utterly wrong with a claim that we Christians are in charge of God. When Jesus told His disciples “And surely I am with you always,” did He also mean “And surely I am not with anyone else”? Does my mother’s love for me depend on her withholding love from my siblings? Does God’s saving presence among us have to mean God’s saving absence among them? For Christianity to be true, does every other religion have to be wrong?

Christians and Christian churches are not exempt from the dynamics of all known existence that allows nothing to be—let alone thrive—in isolation. Instead of designating the call of Christ as the Great Commission that establishes us as brokers of God to the world and Christianity as a form of God-management system, perhaps we should embrace the call of Christ as the Grand Invitation. 

Christians are sent to the world with an extraordinary message: the self-giving God calls humanity to self-giving love! However, instead of having a commission to bring God to the world, we are invited to the world where God already is, expecting us to bless the world with our teaching about Christ, as well as receive the blessing from Christ that is already in that same world. Not only to go, but to welcome; not only to teach, but to learn; not only to give, but to receive; not only to change, but to be changed. In a Great Commission, the world needs us and we don’t need the world. In the Grand Invitation, we humbly embrace our creaturehood. The Great Commission demands conversion from them; the Grand Invitation demands transformation from us all.

In an interdependent world, truth cannot be captured, portioned and delivered, it must be experienced relationally. Christianity is a religion, a window into the kingdom of God, not the kingdom of God itself. Jesus has repeatedly called us to enter this kingdom and sit at the large table, as Ananda K. Coomaraswamy says, “not to preside—for there is Another who presides unseen—but as one of many guests.” God is greater than us! For me, the Good News just got better!

(adopted by the author from Signs of the Times, Australia, June 2008)

Bless Your Pharaoh

~ by Amichai Lau-Lavie, Faith House Advisory Council member, and founder, executive, and artistic director of Storahtelling Inc.

"God Bless You"– this common post-sneeze sacred invocation that has gone completely secular is uttered endlessly and mindlessly around the world. Just like 'God Bless America,' this is often simply a polite figure of speech, a civic, civil nicety. In Hebrew you say "La'brioot" – "to health."

The cultural differences are interesting but either way, these are expressions of empathy, and I've been intrigued by this word/concept--empathy--for about a week now. How come there is no word for "empathy" in Hebrew? No exact translation, that is – Israelis say "empatia," one of many foreign words that migrated into Modern Hebrew and stuck. It's a telling fact, though, that words like 'empathy' or 'pluralism' or 'text' do not have an Israeli life of their own. These days, I wonder not only about the missing word in Hebrew but also about the collective ability to exercise the word's imperative: to feel empathy towards others, esp. others in distress, and esp. others in distress who are very much 'the other.'

Ten days since the ceasefire in Gaza, and many efforts at rehabilitation take place– physical, emotional, political and diplomatic. But for many here in Israel, the anger remains. Maybe I shouldn't be surprised. Merely suggesting the expression of empathy towards the people of Gaza, alongside support for the IDF soldiers and the people of Sdeort, gets many Israelis – including family members and close friends – furious. Calls for empathy and care for the estimated 20,000 Gaza residents who are now homeless is met with pursed lips: "let Hamas help them, its their own fault." Empathy, generally recognized as "the ability to sense and understand someone else's feelings as if they were one's own," seems to take a backseat to her fierce and frugal sister -- survival. "I just can't afford to be thinking about them right now" M. tells me. I get this approach but it drives me nuts. ‘You’ve been in NY for too long’ B. tells me ‘this is how we roll here, remember?’ This isn’t helping either.

There are, thankfully, other voices, and other initiatives that think and do otherwise. L., for instance, a 27 year old student from Jerusalem who teamed up with another student and organized within 5 days a 7 truck convey of emergency supplies to Gaza, thousands of Israeli donations of clothes, food, blankets and personal letters from Israeli citizens to the families beyond the border. I met L. at the weekly Zohar class we attend at the Hartman Institute – who knew she was such an organizer? She didn't sleep for a week and offered many of us a way to be really helpful. I helped by carrying boxes. The story hit the media two days ago -- even Al Jazeera wanted to interview her…

And meanwhile, I've been asking people for Hebrew translation for 'empathy' – heads are scratched, options offered, all admit that there is no one single perfect Hebrew word for it. Yet. How long has it been missing? How come there isn't one?

"In essence," L. tells me, mid-carrying-boxes, "'love your neighbor as you love yourself' is the root of empathy – and Judaism's core concept – but I guess it got lost in translation. isn’t this in the Bible somewhere?"

So I turn to search for empathy in Exodus and check the tale out this week's Torah reading. It’s got the Prime Time coverage of the actual moment of the Exodus – the last midnight in Egypt. The firstborn of Egypt are slain – and there isn't a home in the land that has not been struck by death. Amid the screams, the king relents – demands that they leave the land – and offers the most audacious invitation for empathy:

"Take both your flocks and your herds and be gone; and bless me also" (Ex.12:32).

He's asking them for a blessing?

How can he expect Moses and his people to have anything but hatred in their hearts towards him? And yet he asks. And we are invited to consider, seriously, his request. Can we bless the enemy – then, now?

And let's say we do decide to grant him a blessing – let's pretend that empathy swims in our veins – what blessing would he receive? What blessing would you offer the ruler who has ruled over your misery?

This past Sunday evening, right after the Zohar class (in which L. updates us that the convoy of trucks, courtesy of the UN, made it into Gaza and that the supplies have already been delivered) I walk over to my parents’ house to have dinner. it’s a 10 minute walk, the evening is cold and crisp, and on the way I ponder this question – who is my Pharaoh? Would, could, should I bless him? I recall the psychological/mystical reading that the Zohar offers the Exodus saga – this is all a description of our inner drama. The oppressed slaves are within me – yearning for more freedom, for more autonomy, for more self expression, Moses is my inner drive for growth, my connection to the Higher Self, and sometimes this inner Moses will resort to strange tricks or fierce strikes to get its point across. And Pharaoh – Freud would call him ‘ego’, and I see him as that part of me that refuses to change, yet knows he – I – have to change in order to grow. Can I have empathy towards my inner resistance? Can I have empathy towards my fellow Israelis who have no empathy?

After dinner with my father (my mother is out at some lecture) I sit with him and open a Torah and read the verses with him and ask – what blessing would you have given the king?

My father, who is no Pollyanna, may or may not be thinking of his Nazi jailers, or the Hamas fighters or any other mythic or historical 'Pharaoh' as he quietly, and with great empathy, offers this version of a blessing to the King of Egypt: "May your river continue to flow."

God Bless him.

(And, If you were to bless the Pharaoh – what would your blessing be?)

Answering Christian Critics of Faith House (Part 2): God Our Stranger

~ by Samir Selmanovic

Throughout the history of human interaction, we have been faced with the problem of the stranger. For every “us” there has to be “them.” To describe ourselves, we have to differentiate ourselves—me and you, kin and non-kin, friends and enemies, neighbors and foreigners. Without dividing the world, we would have no identity. Since the beginning of humanity, belonging to a group has been a matter of survival and, over the ages, multiple identity boundaries have been drawn—gender, tribe, race, religions, nations, possessions, political parties. The stranger is different from us.

We are engaged with strangers in inverse proportion to the distance that separates us. With globalisation, however, the distance between “us” and “them” has been rapidly vanishing. Through the media, in our workplace and in our families, the stranger has come close. Now, the other is not only “out there.” They have moved into our physical, intellectual and emotional neighborhoods. The distance that used to separate us is being abolished and our perspectives are changing.

In this new relationship, we are confronted not only with a new view of those we used to consider “outsiders” but with a new view of ourselves. They see in us what we could not recognize in ourselves and, when we let them, they tell us what we cannot tell ourselves. They have arrived into our daily lives with their beauty, wisdom, and vulnerabilities, as well as their suffering, grievances and aspirations. Like an uninvited company consultant who can see what the company cannot see, the stranger reveals. And that’s the problem of the stranger. To survive we need to protect ourselves from the stranger; to survive we need the stranger to help us see.

In the Scripture, this problem has been inversed and transformed into one of the most potent commandments for God’s people. While the Hebrew Bible commands, “you shall love your neighbor” only once, it commands no less than 36 times to “love the stranger.” For example, it demands, “When a stranger lives with you in your land, do not ill-treat him. The stranger who lives with you shall be treated like the native-born. Love him as yourself” (Leviticus 19:33). In the New Testament, Jesus insists the ultimate judgment of our acts will come from the way we treat the stranger (see Matthew 25:31-46). In the Muslim world, informed by the Quranic texts, one is expected to take a stranger into one’s home and treat him with honor and care no less than three days, even when one is considered an enemy. This may seem as nothing but a simple invitation to a virtue of neighborly love, but there is far more to this insistent call of God.

Abraham, the father of three monotheistic faiths, was ordained by the priest Melchizedek, an outsider to the covenantal family. Although a stranger, he was called “the priest of the Most High.” We have no idea where and how he became a priest before Abraham was called to follow God. Later, Abraham and Sarah were visited in their tent by three strangers to whom they offered hospitality, only to discover they were God’s angels. In what is generally known as the Christmas story, “wise men” from the East who look to the stars for answers—outsiders to the race and religion of Israel—after following an unusual star to Bethlehem, visited baby Jesus to confirm the identity of Jesus as Messiah. The entire history of people who follow God has been held together by the visits, wisdom and care of strangers, people who were not “us” but “them”—the other. Why the other? Why does God insist on speaking to his followers through strangers?

Because understanding our relationship and life with the Divine Other—the Holy One who will always confound us—is inextricably intertwined with our relationship and life with the human other—humanity that also confounds us. God comes in the form of and works through a stranger because the otherness of a stranger is akin to the otherness of God. The human other is a trace of the Divine Other in whose image the stranger has been made. The challenge God poses to us is to see God’s image in one who is not in our image. The less strangers we know the more truncated out vision of God will be.

The blessings and corrections of God come to us from the outside of the boundaries we have made for our groups, through those who can tell us the truths we cannot tell ourselves.  If we could know these truths on our own, they would not be strangers. Strangers bring not only danger to us, but also advice, solutions, beauty, opening for us new vistas into understanding the humanity, the world and God. But the blessing of the stranger goes deeper. When encountering another, we also encounter ourselves in a new way. Each encounter challenges our isolated and ingrown ideas and helps us become our better selves. And this is where the grand invitation of God to humanity lies: without knowing and caring for the other, we cannot know neither God nor ourselves.

Religion has been one of the most potent identity-forming mechanisms. It has bound people together in common purpose, joy and action as well as contributed to the prejudice, exclusion and violence toward the outsider. Now when globalization has turned our societies into societies of strangers, every religion has a chance to transcend its own limitations. We live in a society where relativism—claim that no differences really matter—is too weak to stop the aberrations of religious or anti-religious fervor. Mere tolerance of the other will not do. As Jonathan Sacks, chief rabbi of England, points out, “Only an equal and opposite fervor can do that. Healing . . . must come, if anywhere, from the heart of the whirlwind itself.”

We are all part of a larger web of life in which “the other” is part of our own life. Those not in our image are, however, in the image of God. In the past, the whirlwind of religious passion came from our experiences of being visited, corrected, and blessed by God. Today, God has not withdrawn Himself. He is calling us to a profound experience of meeting Him in a stranger. For those open to the strangers, the whirlwind never stops.

(from Signs of the Times, Australia, adapted by the author)

The Story of "God In the Other"

~ by Sheryl Fullerton (article from www.readthespirit.com)

It seems everywhere I look these days, there is talk of interfaith this or that, for or against. The impulse either to strengthen boundaries or breach them seems intense, maybe because of the general feeling that change is in the air, that an era is ending and we need new ways forward—or, as some feel, we need to do everything in our power to resist the changes.

It’s from such times of tension and uncertainty and passionate discussion that books are born. And that is the case with a new book we’re publishing next fall by Samir Selmanovic, tentatively titled for now “God in the Other.”

I remember when I first opened up Samir’s proposal. His opening statement hit me right between the eyes: “For years I’ve been talking about three monotheistic religions to nonbelievers. And here is what I hear: ‘At best, Jews, Christians, and Muslims look like three religious stooges in a slapstick comedy. At worst, they look like three brothers with hands clasped in prayer and soaked in blood.’ We have littered history with incredible amounts of stupidity, injustice and suffering. The world has simply had it with us. They are not listening anymore… Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have painted a picture of God that is difficult to admire, much less worship….Either monotheism will die, or evolve.”

When I read that, I nodded.

To continue reading The Story of "God In the Other" click HERE.

Live Words: The Way the World Is Structured

No individual can live alone, no nation can live alone, and anyone who feels that he can live alone is sleeping through a revolution. The world in which we live is geographically one. The challenge that we face today is to make it one in terms of brotherhood....

Through our scientific and technological genius, we have made of this world a neighborhood and yet we have not had the ethical commitment to make of it a brotherhood. But somehow, and in some way, we have got to do this. We must all learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools. We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the way God's universe is made; this is the way it is structured.

~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

(from A Knock at Midnight: Inspiration From the
Great Sermons of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.)

The Invitation Home (Part 2)

~ by Juliet rabia Gentile

(This is a continuation of the last week's article. To read Part 1 click HERE.)       

 Konya is a small industrial town set like a dusty jewel in the crown of Central Anatolia. It is famous and widely visited only due to the fact that it holds the tomb of Mevlana Jelaladdin Rumi. Over the years since Mevlana Rumi’s death on December 17th 1273, a mystical order based upon his teachings called the Mevlevi order grew. The ritual practice called Sema that one associates with Mevlevis or whirling dervishes – think spinning figures in generous white gowns with funny tomb stone shaped hats whirling for hours - developed out of an incident in a marketplace right there in the town square in Konya. Everything that we know about Rumi has been preserved by his students and family members and can be found in the landscape or in the hearts of the people of Konya.

My flight from Istanbul touched down several hours late due to a burgeoning fog that wrapped itself around Konya’s empty streets like an old friend. Soon after my arrival the phone began to ring and plans mounted up. The celebrations in Konya were well under way despite the cold and fog: there was no time to rest!

It is tradition that Sufis gather together from across the globe every year for seventeen days leading up to the Shebi-Arus celebration which culminates on December 17th. This event known as the “wedding night” commemorates the time when Mevlana Rumi went to join his Beloved. The anniversary of his death is celebratory rather than somber. In fact Rumi wrote in one of his poems, “if you harvest the wheat growing over my grave and bake bread with it, it is sure to intoxicate!” So strong was Mevalana Rumi’s love for God that his fragrance still attracts lovers of all walks of life, religions and nationalities, some 800 years after his death, like bees to honey.

My first stop in Konya was the informal headquarters of the trip: Dervish Brothers Center. DBC was the place of beginning and ending of all journeys and adventures and was visited by many dervish sisters despite its name. It was a place to make and break plans, listen to music and poetry, sip endless cups of tea and have intimate discussions extending into the morning. Before long I had lost track of the number of dhikrs, impromptu musical gatherings, meals and endless prayer vigils I had attended. One highlight of historical importance was a Sufi dhikr held at the tomb of Shems i Tabriz (the mystic thought to be responsible for the full flowering of spiritual wisdom in Rumi’s adult life). This beautiful prayer ceremony which somewhat spontaneously coalesced after the afternoon prayer in the Mosque of Shems was well attended and miraculously accepted by the Mosque authorities, a quiet, though great victory for Sufi activity in Turkey.

One of curiosities of traveling to Turkey is that everywhere you go you encounter people and businesses selling Sufism and Sufi paraphernalia (not always authentic) to tourists, even while its practice is illegal under Turkish law. You may ask yourself why, at a time when Islam is weighed down with fundamentalisms of various stripes and colors, would anyone want to suppress an interpretation of Islam based upon the principle of universal love? Well, despite changing public and political opinion in favor of Sufism, its practitioners are still vulnerable to law enforcement, therefore making the beautiful that day a great triumph towards further opening the gates of understanding and tolerance. 

Perhaps more than any other lesson this journey to Konya taught me the importance of tolerance and understanding, even when I fell short. When you are in a strange country, speaking a new language the importance of open heartedness and true understanding become crystal clear. You become acutely aware of your utter dependence on the kindness of others and their willingness to cover your faults. It takes truth, sincerity and perseverance to navigate cultural divides and find common ground with the other in often difficult or awkward circumstances.

At home, surrounded by the comfort of “my family, my city, my country” it is easy to become complacent and intolerant. It is harder to extend a hand of guidance, friendship, or love. We think our lives don’t depend on it.

In a rapidly shrinking global world colored by increasing violence and polarization, perhaps now more than ever we are challenged to open, rather than shut down, to question and learn, rather than judge. This realization, which I experienced directly rather than ‘thought about’ was one of the most precious gifts I received from Mevlana Rumi and my journey to Konya. In the shadow of His light I witnessed the power of personal connection. The soul stirring invitation afforded by a warm glance, a smile, a prayer – signals that reach across language, race and religion.

In the airport on the way home we encountered that divine fog once again, hemming us in as we waited for hours in the small Konya airport. In the huddled masses there were various fellow pilgrims from England, Pakistan, South Africa and Iran. As the hours wore on and we shared stories, fruit, tea and tears it became crystal clear that we were all drawn to Konya from our various far-flung destinations for one reason: love.

Despite what shade our skin was, what language we spoke or what lives we were returning to, we were all, in our essential natures, one. In those hours of listening to the stories of my fellow pilgrims, the inner meaning contained in Rumi’s famous verses - the importance of extending the invitation of love to others, despite what we think of them - was revealed. This is true Godliness, this is the invitation Home.

"Come, come again
Whoever you are.
Pious one, infidel, heretic, fire worshipper.
Even if you promised a hundred times
And a hundred times you broke your promise,
This door is not the door
Of hopelessness and frustration.
This door is open to everyone.
Come, come as you truly are."

The Fundamentalists We Need Now

~ by Samir Selmanovic

Certainty is out of vogue. Dogma is the devil. We are learning to communicate any convictions we have more tentatively; any statements we make, we feel obliged to qualify. And for a good reason. We have noticed something common to people who blow themselves up in buses or fly planes into tall buildings. Or economically colonize other countries or bomb them into submission. They are sure. The rest of us—the vast majority of people—cringe and protest.

We see violent people as having dangerous levels of certainty and conviction— fundamentalists and extremists—and ourselves as peacemakers, free to question anything and think for ourselves. But since experiencing the September 11 terrorist attacks while living in Manhattan, I am not so sure anymore. I am beginning to think neither is true: we are not free thinkers; they are not religious extremists.

First, we are all part of one of the most fundamentalist ideologies in history. Never has such a large group of people submitted themselves to a single ideology like we have. The ruling dogma of our time has become the economy. Albeit in different words, we hear this rumor of the oppressive dictatorship of the economy over all our lives. From workers in Chinese rice field to Wall Street moguls, we have become unquestioning followers. We have subjected our individual and communal lives to decisions that honor the market above any other force, the story of economic progress over any other story, corporations over any other institutions, and possessions over any other values that govern our lives. The present economic crisis now demonstrates how deep that fundamentalist devotion has been running.

During our "economic boom" virtue has morphed from something valuable in itself into a helpful strategy to overcome the cost of transactions. Relationships have become a natural network for spreading one’s influence and business. Our “free time” has become a paid-for activity. News about the world has become a form of entertainment, whose bottom line is to keep advertisers happy. Marketing strategies have molded us into consumers with a similar fantasy life. While insisting we are unique, we have been using words from commercials to describe our life dreams and celebrity personalities to describe the person we would like to marry. The millennia old concept of communal life has morphed from being a citizen to being a consumer.

Something else has happened. Across the planet, people have been discussing different scenarios of the end of the world: “Religious people will destroy us with their wars. Global warming is going to cook us all. Viruses will wipe us out. God is going to come and clean house.” But while we can imagine different scenarios of the end of the world, we are unable to imagine a more modest shift in the way we run this world. Since the fall of communism, discussion about what is going to come after modern liberal capitalism has ceased. We all agree: our view of human beings as Homo Economicus is here to stay. There is a vacuum of options in our collective psyche. We have become fundamentalists of a religion with its own dogma (“nothing is ever enough”), its own sense of belonging (industry brands), its own temples (shopping malls), its own centering meditational practices (life punctuated by commercials), its own priesthood (get-rich experts), its own sacred (accrual of personal satisfaction) and its own plan for spreading the faith (expansion of the market). Now, the economy is collapsing under the weight of our expectations, we are forced to take a break from this fundamentalism. Now we have an opportunity to see and question the dogma.

When a movement, a revolution, a religion, a country, matures and moves away from its first ideals and ability to adapt, from the ability to keep on dreaming and changing, and becomes “fundamentalist,” fear has taken a hold of the imagination. Capitalism with its initial insights into the human spirit, ingenuity, and perseverance has been steadily deteriorating into consumerist fundamentalism. We have learned to live by the fear of losing everything through some misfortune of world events, by the fear of the poor or lazy who might take everything from us, by the fear of finding ourselves among the “have nots,” by the fear of old age, by the fear of being ugly and by the fear of being alone.

So most of us watching “extremists” blow things up are not free thinkers at all. Most of us are fundamentalists of our own kind, unaware of the fact, participating in the madness of self-destruction. Moreover, our public ideology has found a way to criticize itself or laugh about itself while constantly strengthening its grip on our actual lives. We can talk as much as we want about the need to live sustainable lives, curb our desires, talk about the sacredness of the earth and learning to see that small is beautiful, as long as we—individually or corporately—don’t try to change the way we actually live. The only power that makes us change our lifestyle is—again—economic. Nothing else can move us. That’s not freedom.

But we also should consider that supposed extreme religious fundamentalists are not extremely religious at all. Their fundamentalism is much closer to consumerist fundamentalism than we think. To blow oneself up in order to wake up surrounded by sighing virgins or any other bliss expresses nothing but a desire for extreme products and services, with celestial goods instead of earthly ones. People who blow themselves up are actually people without conviction, commitment or certainty. Deep inside, they carry ambivalence about their faith. They do not trust.

And because they are not sure about their faith, they gravitate to acts of self-destruction. Because they cannot find peace with their creaturehood, they take upon themselves God’s prerogative to create or destroy life. Because they have not grasped the religious teaching of the inter-dependence of all life and the absurdity of reducing the other into an enemy, they are so detached from the image of God in themselves that they are ready to act on their self-hatred and self-destruct. They see their acts of violence as a way to push themselves over the threshold of unbelief.

At the same time, we give them a title of “religious extremists?” So what are then people like Gandhi, Martin Luther King and thousands of others who have given their lives protecting the interest of those with whom they disagree? Religious light-weights? No, people who are extreme enough, rooted and certain about something care enough to be capable of standing up to the officially promoted reality.

There is a scarcity of religious or humanist extremists willing to dissent, not so much with talking, writing or protesting, but dissenting deeply, from within. In a fundamental sort of way. It seems leaders like those who have helped humanity in the past cannot surface and lead today. Their ideas are swiftly subjugated to the unyielding master of our public ideology. First political campaigns and now the whole world runs under the banner, “It’s the economy, stupid.” If you think anything else can matter more, you are not sane enough to be trusted, we are told. United States, president elect Obama, keenly aware of these dynamics, repeatedly yet timidly warns the public, "the road before us will not be easy." Any direct appeal to values other than economic prosperity are still considered only inspirational at best and heresy at worst.

The resulting scarcity of public dreamers on all levels of civic life then creates a vacuum of imagination. In the past, the world was young and progressing. History was going on with the future wide open. Today, not only has the culture lost its critical distance from the social reality of unstoppable consumption, but most religion has lost this critical distance as well. For many of us, modern liberal capitalism has been adopted as not only one moment among many in history. It is the last one, inevitable. The current order of things has been regarded like something given to us, like a revelation, something that can’t be argued, something that we cannot change with our choices, something eternal, after which there is no future to be fathomed. 

We have grown up with a classic myth of what it means to wage war. It always meant taking the weapons, conquering the other and preserving one’s own way of life at all cost. Yet, on our interdependent planet we have no more territory left to exploit and no more wars that can be won. In this world, empathy, cooperation, and forgiveness are becoming the most potent agents of transformation.

To take the risk of refusing to reduce anyone to “an enemy,” a risk to contribute instead of just take from the world, a risk to be inter-dependent instead of self-sufficient, the risk to forgive and absorb wrong instead of retaliate, takes people with courage and strong convictions. We have to learn to measure our lives differently--find different fundamentals of life. And may thousands of new fundamentalists across the globe please step forward.

(from Signs of the Times, adopted for this website by the author)

Transcending Partisan Politics

~ Sammer Aboelela, a friend of Faith House, is Community Organizer with the NYC Community of Muslim Progressives. He also serves on the Board of Directors of Muslims for Progressive Values.

“Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim American kid believing that he or she could be President?”

With this simple rhetorical question, Colin Powell concisely expressed the frustration felt by many Americans toward the use of the American Muslim identity as a foil for partisan fear-mongering.  In case you missed it, during the lead-up to his widely publicized endorsement of Senator Barack Obama for President, Powell cited the rumor campaign against Obama, which claims him to be Muslim, as one of the factors weighing in his decision to endorse Obama over McCain.  Choosing not to simply disavow the claim of the rumor, Powell challenged the underlying bigotry by openly rejecting the notion that being Muslim would somehow disqualify a Presidential candidate.

(the whole thing is 7 minutes, Powell speaks about Muslims at 4:25 point)

As a Muslim myself, I am grateful to hear an acknowledgment of this nature from a figure such as Colin Powell, and was genuinely moved by the way he framed his message.  The optimistic image of a Muslim child hoping to someday lead our country truly caught me off-guard, as did the story Powell relayed of a young Muslim American soldier laying down his life for his country.  Through these twin images of hope and sacrifice, he was able to convey that Muslims share fundamental American ideals – a point that many of us in the Muslim community have been struggling to make for years.

Still, I feel compelled to point out one implication of the rumor campaign that I don’t believe Powell addressed directly enough.  It has become clear to me over the past several years that my religious identity is being used as a wedge to cleave many non-Muslim Americans away from their political interests.  As those Americans who would benefit more from Barak Obama’s proposed tax and health care plans choose to vote against him based on the possibility of his being Muslim, they might just be voting against their own futures, the futures of their children, and the well-being of the country at large (this is just an example of course - not a political endorsement of one candidate over another).

The price of bigotry, therefore, is not simply borne by its targets.  Indeed, bigotry is a form of self-inflicted collective punishment upon a society, and can only be effectively confronted through interdependent action and willful introspection.  As a prominent non-Muslim standing against Islamophobia, Colin Powell demonstrates this point.  For that, I thank him.

Answering Christian Critics of Faith House (Part 1): Cherishing the Gold of the Golden Rule

~ by Samir Selmanovic

We have come to a time in history when religion is involved in more killing than any time since the Crusades. According to the United States’ State Department, more than 70 per cent of world conflicts are fueled by religion. Although most of these conflicts have dynamics that are fundamentally economic, environmental or political and would have happened outside of a religious context, religion is still partly to blame. The question all religious people need to be agonizing over is “How can religion become a bulwark against violence, injustice and oppression, instead of an ally?” This question applies to our personal lives, family lives, workplace, citizenship, art, politics, everything. And no religious person can afford to ignore it.

To Christians, like to all religious people, some things matter deeply. These convictions vary in substance and expression but through their uniqueness hold our communities together. Our religious imagination spurs us to proclaim our unique message to the world and work hard to embody this message in the way we live. Yet our aspirations have not protected us from harming others. What can we do to withstand the destructive economic, environmental and political forces around us? And more importantly, what can we do to protect the world from our own good intentions?

If all we want to do is tell others what we think they need to know or change them into who we think they should be, we as Christians—or religious people in general—will inevitably stop treating people as subjects with whom we relate and begin to treat them as objects—no matter how noble our intentions. Some years ago, while pastoring a church in New York City, our cause was to reach people in the city and offer them what we have experienced as the best thing in life—God. One of the ways we did that was by organizing a series of public meetings that would convert people.

In order to accomplish this, the church board would meet regularly to discuss the strategy. Meeting after meeting however, I felt uneasy about talking of people as objects to be targeted by our efforts. However, such talk was so deeply rooted in some of the members’ psyche that none of my pleas against objectifying people came through. So I decided to bring two of these “objects” to the next meeting.

“OK, let’s discuss how we are going to convert these people in their presence,” I invited everybody. Some thought I was making a circus out of the meeting, but I persisted. For several church board members, this was nothing but a difficult evening. But for others, this experience was a door into new relationship, not only with people outside our religion but also with God. The language changed. The tone changed. The goals changed. The methods changed.

For me personally, as a Christian, everything changed. While Christ tells me to go out to the world and spread His teachings, He also teaches me that the primary way to do so is to treat others the way I want to be treated (see Matthew 7:12). This command, which has come to be known as the Golden Rule, excludes making other people the object of my best intentions. This is at least a part of the core, if not the heart, of the Christian message. I would not want to be objectified by their efforts to convert me, so they should not be my objects either.

To follow the Golden Rule, I need to learn compassion—meaning to “feel with.” As such, the Golden Rule turns the tables on many of our religious impulses. If we want them to attend our events, we must attend their events. If we want them to be spiritually open to us, we must be spiritually open to them. If we want them to change, we must be ready to change. If we want them to read our Scriptures with trust and respect, we must read their Scriptures likewise. We are interdependent.

And this can be expanded to the national and international level. Imagine all Muslims treating converts to Christianity the way they want Christian converts to Islam to be treated. Imagine Christians reciprocating. Imagine faith leaders standing up to politicians saying, “Your enemies are not our enemies. Any method you want to use on them, you will first have to use on us.”

If we want to convert people, we must be “convertible” first. Concerned believers would say that to live such open Christianity would first undermine our Christian identity and then halt the impact of Christ’s teachings in the world. I passionately disagree. To respect others, to be interdependent, to receive, to refuse to be in charge of God, to be humble and teachable by them, is to be our identity.

As we go to the world with our message, to neglect the Golden Rule would be to betray the teachings of Christ from the start. I would say that the following stands: “To be a Christian means, among other things, to seek God in the other as you want the other to seek God in you.” Just imagine, as Karen Armstrong suggests, if we would interpret the whole of our Scriptures as a commentary on the Golden Rule and read the whole of their Scriptures with Augustine’s rule of always seeking the most charitable interpretation of the text. Not only would this reflect the best of our traditions, but it would paradoxically work to preserve our own religion. 

The Dalai Lama and Tibetan Buddhism are a case in point. The Chinese government has built a train from Beijing to the small Tibetan holy city of Lhasa and has committed demographic aggression, not only by settling twice the number of Chinese in Tibet than there were Tibetans, but by opening 238 dance halls and karaoke parlors on the main street along with 658 brothels, turning Lhasa into an Asian Las Vegas. To top it off, the sacred Potala Palace, which has been home to nine Dalai Lamas, is now mockingly surrounded by an amusement park. 

And what was the response of Dalai Lama? He refused to call the Chinese an “enemy.” In fact, to preserve the value of compassion at the root of the Golden Rule, for the Dalai Lama it hardly matters whether the position of Dalai Lama, Tibet or even Buddhism continue to exist! For the sake of compassion, no sacrifice would be too great. Isn’t that what Jesus Christ was about?

And what is the result? In 1968 there were two Tibetan Buddhist centers in Western countries; today, there are 50 in New York City alone, and 200 in Taiwan. More French people call themselves Buddhist than Protestant or Jew. Not to count all the Chinese who are becoming Tibetan Buddhists.

The Dalai Lama said that calling others your enemy and calling your own people friends would be as crazy as calling your right eye your ally and your left your adversary. It used to be that victory could be identified as destruction of your enemy, but in today’s world, we increasingly have to see destruction of our enemy as destruction of ourselves. The Golden Rule is not just nice thing to practice, a mere virtue. It is a matter of survival, not only for the world at large, but for every religion that has aspirations to thrive in the future. By respecting and loving the other, we are open to the influence of The Other. Going deeper in loving God, now means nothing less than going deeper in loving all of humanity.

(from Signs of the Times, Australia, May 2008, adapted by the author)

The Power of Shared Faith

~ Kyle Fischer works with not-for-profit organizations (www.reserveinc.blogspot.com) and in music (www.endup.org). He will attend Union Theological Seminary in New York City in the fall of 2008.

Not long ago, I found myself sitting on the A train with my acoustic guitar on my lap. A man sat across from me, missing teeth and talking loudly to anyone who would listen. People kept getting up from the seat next to him. One woman hardly sat down before she stood back up again, making no pretense as to why as she moved a little further down the car.

Soon he had spotted my guitar case and started asking me questions. Claimed he used to be a bass player. I had to pull my headphones off to hear him. A couple of years ago I might have ignored him and gone back to listening to Sam Cooke, but my spiritual practice reminded me not to close myself off. So I put my headphones in my bag and practiced Christian theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer calls “the ministry of listening.”

He asked would I mind if he played my guitar? I had no reason to trust him, but then I really had no reason not to. I moved into the empty seat next to him and he strummed idly at the open strings a couple of times, not really making a chord. Then he thanked me and put the guitar back in my hands.

Without warning he produced a harmonica from his breast pocket and began to play. He wasn’t terrific but it was a nice sound, and I guessed at the chord, went with a big six-string G major. Happened to be right. Nice thing about the harmonica - they’re tuned to scale so you can’t really hit a wrong note once you’ve found the key. I played a simple chord progression and he hummed away.

I began improvising silly verses about our subway ride. He told me his name was Dr. J., so I sang, “Well, my name is Kyle and this here’s Dr. J . . .” He played his harmonica in the breaks.

“I’ve been to the Baptist Church you see,” I sang, “Dr. J’s on his way--”

 “From the Church of the Nazarene!” he hollered, finishing the line. It had not occurred to me that he too might be on his way back from church, on a Saturday, no less. It even rhymed.

We had really hit our stride now. People in our car were moving closer to hear. Across from me a teenager was videotaping us on his phone. I looked to my right and saw the woman who had moved away from him smiling, tapping her foot in time with the music.

We found a little refrain, my new brother and I, and sang our impromptu gospel song the whole way home, a gentle testament to the power of shared faith.

As Salaamu Alaykum, Eid Mubarak (Peace and Happy Eid!)

~ by Samir Selmanovic

For the last thirty days our Muslim brothers and sisters have been spiritually on the move, experiencing hunger and thus empathizing with those who are hungry, gathering together and celebrating their community, bowing to God in gratitude for the gift of life. Faith House wishes you joyous Eid-ul-Fitr celebrations with family and friends!

On this occasion, now for the second year, the Empire State Building will shine its world-famous tower lights in green on Tuesday, September 30 and Wednesday, October 1, 2008 for the annual celebration of Eid-ul-Fitr. The lighting for Eid is an annual event in the same tradition of the Empire State Building's yearly lightings for Christmas and Hannukah. Alhamdullilah!

We are elated about this recognition of the American Muslim community by one of the United States’ most cherished landmarks. In celebrating together with the Muslims of New York City and the United States, the Empire State Building once again shows itself to be a powerful symbol in America’s most culturally vibrant city.  

For those of you who are not Muslims, this would be a good time to turn to your Muslim neighbor, friend, coworker, or schoolmate and tell them, "I am glad for you. Eid Mubarak!" 

What does Faith House want to become? And how?

~ by Staff, Advisory Council, and Launch Team of Faith House

Our dear supporters, friends, and well-wishers, we are excited to introduce to you our dreams. Many thanks to those of you who have helped us say what we carry inside. Here is the statement of Mission, Vision, and Principles of our community. Pray for us, advise us, support us! Thank you!

MISSION:  To be a thriving inter-dependent community.

LEARN FROM OTHERS
We are a community that discovers “the other” (individuals or groups other than our own).

SHARE YOUR STORY
We honor and learn from the teachings, practices, sufferings, and joys of people from different faiths (religions, worldviews, philosophies, and belief systems).

HEAL THE WORLD
We come together to deepen our personal and communal journeys, learn to live with our differences, and contribute to the wellbeing of the world.

VISION: To participate in development of a holistic society where people from different faiths understand, respect, and protect one another, uniting to improve communities around them.  In order to achieve this vision, we are beginning and growing six aspects of our local community in New York City:

1. Living Room Gathering
At this weekly gathering, we learn from others, share our stories, and organize our community to serve the common good. Together we explore human experience, holy days, spiritual practices, current cultural and societal issues, and the lives of inspirational people from the past and present.

2. Study of Texts and Traditions
These sessions delve into the formative texts and traditions of a particular faith. People from all traditions are invited to participate so that all can learn through the eyes and experiences of the other.

3. Intergenerational Programming
Care and programs for the life cycle permeate our community. Infants, children, youth, adults, and seniors all contribute, bless, and benefit from our life together.

4. Service, Personal Wellness, and Ecological Sustainability
Separately or in synergy with other organizations, Faith House provides opportunities to serve and make a lasting difference in the lives of the poor, oppressed, and neglected in New York City and globally. Faith House also seeks to supports its members in living healthy lives, promoting sustainability, and caring for earth's resources.   

5. Community Building and Cultural Events
Periodically Faith House members or groups present and host events and activities outside our regular programming in order to connect with each other and with the life of our city.

6. Generous Giving and Financial Accountability
To support our community and its mission, we ask members and friends of Faith House to contribute regularly and generously. In turn, Faith House maintains mechanisms of financial accountability, and it pledges 10% of its income from individual donors to support religious or community organizations that help Faith House fulfill its mission.

PRINCIPLES: To guide our relationships and the life of our community, these principles of inter-dependence describe not what we hold as sacred or central but how we hold it.

1.    FIRST THINGS FIRST: We use our faiths to serve the life of the world.

2.    SHARING LIFE: Faith House is a spiritual home where we celebrate our friendships, life events, and accomplishments as well as grieve over our wrongdoings, disappointments, and losses.

3.    COMMON JOURNEY, DIFFERENT PATHS:  We are sojourners who acknowledge that every faith has its own story, calling, and mission.

4.    GENEROUS BELIEF: We believe that our faiths can always grow deeper and that none of our religions, worldviews, philosophies, or belief systems no matter how true, beautiful, or powerful, can ever contain all wisdom, blessing, or power.

5.    RE-INTERPRETATION: We continually seek deeper levels of understanding by interpreting and re-interpreting our texts and traditions.

6.    GRACIOUS COMMUNICATION:  We do not insist that others have to change their language or categories in order for us to hear them, while we seek to translate our concepts to those outside our traditions.

7.    GIVING THROUGH RECEIVING: We strive to learn more than to teach as we are called to receive, discern, and value what others have to give us.

8.    NEW MEMORIES, NEW HISTORY: We name and acknowledge the harm done to one another throughout history and move beyond into a future of healing and inter-dependence.

9.    FREEDOM FROM FORCE AND FREEDOM TO CHANGE: We do not believe in proselytizing; we believe in personal choice and transformation.

10.    POST-CYNICISM:  We believe a new kind of community is possible.

Talk to Your Enemy: A Wish for the New Year

~ by Amichai Lau-Lavie, Faith House Advisory Council member, and founder, executive, and artistic director of Storahtelling Inc.

Things got heated during the first televised presidential campaign when Iran was mentioned. Will the future president of the United States sit with the present president of Iran, whose hateful words towards the US and Israel just echoed in NYC? Does talking to the enemy legitimize the other’s views? 

 McCain and Obama probably didn’t know it but their debate on this issue touched on the core issue of the High Holy Days: the art of talking to the enemy.  In the classical Judaic liturgy for this season of reflection, the enemy is often described as a voice within--our personal demons, nay-saying selves that lead us into thought patterns and behaviors we later regret. How does one deal with these inner enemies? Meet them at the table, say the sages: confront, converse, come to terms--but do not avoid that which holds you back from becoming all that you wish to be in the world.

But the enemy is not just an internal voice. One of the demands this season is to confront real-life enemies and do what we can to amend conflict. Atonement with God is not possible until one is reconciled with fellow human beings, says the Talmud. Go through your address book, highlight those with whom you have unfinished business, then take the plunge and meet them at the table: initiate a conversation--no matter what. I know: easier said than done.

To give us inspiration and to make that point clear, our ancestors chose really challenging Torah stories to accompany these days.  On the first day of Rosh HaShana, we will meet Abraham and Sarah and witness as they deport Hagar and Ishmael, the no-longer-wanted-at-home surrogate mother and firstborn child. On the second day, we will accompany Isaac to the mountaintop on which his father expects to sacrifice him in the name of God. On Yom Kippur we will hear the silent scream of Aaron, the high priest whose two sons’ die while on duty, and we will spend three days inside the belly of a big fish, trapped with Jonah, a reluctant social activist.  None of these biblical tales are simple, and all point us in one direction: we need to show compassion for the other in our lives, to learn from and with the other, and even to reconcile with the other--both within ourselves, and within the full ranks of humanity. 

The Torah Service, invented by Ezra the Scribe in Jerusalem, 2,500 years ago on Rosh Ha’shana (Happy Birthday, Torah Service!)--was meant to accompany our lives with the values, found in stories, that will chart our growth and guide our way. The stories chosen for the High Holidays are no exception:  inside each and every one of them hides a coded call for awareness and action, potentially personalized by each one of us, if we pause to listen.

This year, the second day of Rosh HaShana, October 1st, coincides with Eid Al Fitr--the Holiday of the Sacrifice,  the festive conclusion of Ramadan. On this day, as Jews chant the Torah tale of Abraham binding his son Isaac, Muslims recall the Koran’s version,  in which the son bound is believed to be Yishmael. What a grand opportunity this can be for dialogue, for conversation--with preparation, but without pre-conditions--between the children of Isaac and the children of Yishmael, children in bitter conflict nowadays, but whose origin story and legacy of pain is one and the same: the raised knife of their father. How do we get beyond that pain and all those that followed and chart a peaceful and respectful co-existence?  Set the table: start with a conversation--on this New Year’s Day, and beyond. 

May this year bring us closer to having uncomfortable conversations with all respected others, inside ourselves and out in the world.  May we all have the courage to face the rage and hurt, pleas and passions, and invite ourselves to a table with our enemies, laden with nourishment for a well earned feast of peace.

Shana Tova & Eid – al - Fitr Said!

May Peace Prevail!

A New York Event: A Conversation on Muslims in the Media

Intersections is a wonderful new institution concerned with common ground and global social justice.  Together with Faith House they are co-sponsoring an event on Sept 25 in New York City.  Come for insight from the experts, new friends, and human stories that you can't hear on the network news!

The Cost of War at Home & Abroad:  Muslims in the Media
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2008 7–9 p.m.
A panel discussion by Muslim leaders, academics, and journalists on the media’s portrayal of Muslims since 9-11 and how it has affected the Islamic community.

DEBBIE ALMONTASER
Founding and Former Principal, The Khalil Gibran International Academy

DAISY KHAN
Executive Director, American Society for Muslim Advancement

ANISA MEHDI
Emmy award-winning journalist and filmmaker

HUSSEIN RASHID
Founder, www.islamicate.com

For a digital flyer click HERE.

All events will be held at Intersections
274 Fifth Avenue (between 29th & 30th Streets) New York, NY 10001
Space is limited; please RSVP at rsvp@intersectionsinternational.org

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Also in this series: The Cost of War at Home & Abroad

SEARCHING FOR AMERICA’S NEW FOREIGN POLICY
• OCTOBER 23, 2008 (Thursday) 7–9 p.m.
A moderator-led conversation of diplomats, academics, and practitioners on the political opportunities and challenges the United States will face in the coming years as a result of the War on Terror.

IRAQI VOICES
• NOVEMBER 13, 2008 (Thursday) 7–9 p.m.
A discussion with Iraqi-Americans and recently resettled Iraqis regarding their experiences in Iraq, their new lives in the United States, and their hopes for their country.

THE MENTAL HEALTH NEEDS OF RETURNING VETERANS
• JANUARY 21, 2009 (Wednesday) 7–9 p.m.
A conversation with the Executive Director and Founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, on the challenges veterans face upon returning home from combat.

Muslim Youth Organizes to Defend Baha'is

~ report compiled by Samir Selmanovic

How many times have you heard people ask, where are the Muslim voices against discrimination and oppression? Here is a group of Middle Eastern youth who have come together in defense of minorities within their communities. We (Faith House Manhattan) have already shared with you an interview with Arab atheist posted by this vibrant group of people from Mideast Youth (www.mideastyouth.com). Their most recent effort is the creation of a video to bring attention to the rights of the Baha'is, a religious minority that has often found itself persecuted in predominantly Muslim countries.

Nowhere is the persecution worse than in Iran and Egypt where they have been denied basic rights and seen their sacred places destroyed and vandalized. In Iran, where the Baha'i Faith first emerged, Baha'i schools are shut down, leaders of the faith are arrested, executed, or harassed, and Baha'is are denied the right to higher education. In Egypt, Baha'is are not given identity papers, thus preventing them from attaining the basic rights of citizenship.

A group of predominantly Muslim youth have banded together to speak out against the discrimination. They formed a website, www.BahaiRights.org, which catalogues abuses against Baha'is and have now released a video which uses images from the film Persepolis to make a powerful statement against the persecution of the Baha'is. "When minorities are not given their rights, how can we ever expect to exercise our own?" says Kawthar Muhaib, a member of the Muslim Network for Baha'i Rights.

Censeo Productions
Safeguard The Innocent: Video in Defense of the Baha'i Minority

When I was in Europe this Summer, Egyptian Tourism Ad was on CNN International and BBC all day long, after every news. Mideast Youth's first video, called "Egyptian Tourism Ad,"  edited this popular TV advertisement into an awareness campaign for the condition of Baha'is in Egypt. It has been written about in a prominent Egyptian paper, Al Masry Al Yowm.

Egyptian Tourism Ad (Remake)

So there you have it.  Muslim youth is inspiring us Christians and Jews, to act on behalf of Baha'is!  Thank you Jeeeesus! Hallelujah! It is wonderfully interdependent new world. May our efforts help bring freedom to our brothers and sisters in Iran and Egypt.

------------------------

To watch the video in Farsi: http://tinyurl.com/63kpze

For more information contact:
Esra'a Al Shafei, Director, www.MideastYouth.com, director@mideastyouth.com
Kawthar Muhaib, Project Coordinator, MideastYouth.com, kaw@mideastyouth.com

More about our efforts to defend the rights of the Baha'i minority:

BBC Persian:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/persian/iran/story/2007/07/070719_si-wkf-bahaiedefence.shtml

Muslim Arab Youth Defend Baha'i Rights:
http://tinyurl.com/6odhqw

MideastYouth.com in the Press:
http://www.mideastyouth.com/press-room/

Live Words: An Optical Delusion

A human being is a part of a whole, called by us a universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest ... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

                                    ~ by Albert Einstein

Preview Gathering 2.0: At Home in Manhattan, Heart of the Empire

~ by Bowie Snodgrass

“Web 2.0 is a term describing the trend in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aims to enhance creativity, information sharing, and, most notably, collaboration among users.” - Wikipedia

One goal for Faith House is to be a place where we root ourselves deeper into our respective texts and traditions while interpreting them for our particular context. The other goal is to have a gathering with a "living room" feel, a space where we can come as we are to encounter each other through sharing, listening, and finding God through our religious practices and experience.

We want to be a place where we can have community conversations about how we live our lives, including the realities of life in Manhattan. This second preview was designed along the lines of what Johny Baker calls “Worship 2.0 – creative, highly participative, valuing community as the content, open source, low control where the expert worship leader is replaced by teams self publishing creative content.” The title of our interactive conversation was – At Home in Manhattan, Heart of the Empire – a little like a Zen Buddhist koan (i.e. "a succinct paradoxical statement or question used as a meditation discipline" - Britannica.com).

As people arrived at the SuBud Chelsea Center in mid-town Manhattan, they munched on berries and veggies, learned about Faith House, had time to mingle and check out various stations set up around the space. Rabia, our Muslim co-leader, called us to prayer with a gorgeous, traditional Muslim adhan. When she finished, I opened my eyes to see that people had come to sit in the circle of chairs and gathered together in the main space. Samir welcomed everyone and shared some of his personal journey towards Faith House and then we began with the Jewish Sh'ma, the Christian Lord's Prayer, the Muslim Al-Fatiha, and an inspiring reading from the Hindu Rig Veda.

I expressed our hopes for this time together – namely for people to have individual insights into their conceptions of home and empire (particularly as those two concepts relate to their relationship with NYC and the USA) and learn what these words might mean to others.

We began with fifteen minutes to explore six stations. There was no correct order or required number to visit. These stations were not about completing a checklist, but rather means to "check in" with yourself, encounter new ideas, reflect, or whirl like a dervish! One station was in fact called WHIRL: a room where Rabia was giving 1-minute whirling lessons, along with her friend Aishah, and an iPod hooked up to a set of speakers.

In the front hallway, was the WRITE station, asking people to share whatever words or thoughts came to mind. On a piece of paper with the word EMPIRE, people added: "scary and dehumanizing," "domination," "temporary," "every empire shall end." By USA: "a noble ideal too often compromised." Next to NYC: "my 1st love," "love hate relationship," "is my home… at the moment." And alongside HOME, people wrote: "acceptance," "growth," "happiness," "shelter," "safe," "a context in which I can express my whole self freely."

An ART station provided magazines and catalogues for collages. Our "home" collage featured Manhattan skylines, fancy home décor from catalogues, little kids jumping around, and pop-culture icons alongside eccentrically attired women. A second collage was assembled atop a map of the USA. One person pasted a red path from Southern California to NYC and someone else cut a yellow heart jaggedly in two, putting one half on Manhattan and the other in Washington State. Others added imagery or headlines that related to the wall along the Mexico border and the hope of getting past our racial and political divisions.

There was a station to READ: with a Jewish "Prayer for Our Country", Psalm 137:1-5 (Jewish Tanakh), Matthew 6:25-34 and Ephesians 6:10-18 (Christian Bible), Al-Baqarah 2:21-22 (Qu’ran), Tao Te Ching Chapter 54, definitions of "Empire" from Wikipedia and Merriam-Webster's Dictionary, and an insightful article by Reza Aslan called "The War for Islam" from the Boston Globe.

Near the food, there was a station asking WHO IS YOUR NEIGHBOR, with cards to fill out by introducing yourself to someone you don't know and asking their name and why they came to the gathering. Our final station was a place to PRAY by tying a strip of cloth onto a branch, a practice from Zen Buddhism.

After a quarter of an hour exploring the stations, we asked people to sort into four self-selected groups, based on shapes: circle, square, squiggle, and triangle. We had wonderful conversations for another twenty minutes and as might be expected… the circles embraced common ground, the triangles talked about change, the squiggles wandered through many topics, and the squares spent half their time discussing their discomfort with the lack of structure during the time for stations. People shared many thoughts about their notions of home and empire and this wild and wonderful city called New York.

When we came back together as a full group, a spokesperson from each small cluster shared some highlights from their small group, after which, we opened the floor. Although the afternoon began with people’s various responses to the idea of an American empire, it ended primarily with personal reflections on “home”… having multiple homes, being bi-national, being transient, the loneliness of New York City, and the freedom of home as a place where one can "sign and dance naked!"

As our time wound down, we transitioned from conversation to prayer. People prayed silently and shared prayers publicly, ending with the utterance, "this is my prayer." The group was invited to echo back, "this is our prayer."

We had planned to end our time together with a celebratory nigun, a wordless sung prayer from the Jewish tradition (a melody with consonants like lai, di, dai), and dancing. However, our Jewish co-leader's father had passed away the previous week and she was with her family during a time of mourning, so in respect and solidarity, we played a haunting recording of an acappella soloist singing the Alter Rebbe's Nigun while we sat, stood, or knelt together (listen to an alternate recording, piano version, on YouTube).

When the song ended, Samir gave announcements, and people mingled, ate, and helped break down the space. By 7 pm, we were all back on the street again, heading home, to city events, or out with friends.

Our evaluation forms asked people to share an insight they had from the day. One person commented that the "existential struggle with elements of [one's] self parallels the challenge of coexisting with community, as well as the struggle of creating home/empire on a more macro-level." Another person said, they realized that “other people feel ‘home-less’ in the way I feel.” And others said: "we find home in each other."

These are our prayers. Can I get an Amen?

Please use the comment area below (a Web 2.0 feature) to contribute to this conversation. What were your impressions of our second preview? What are your thoughts on being “at home in Manhattan, heart of the empire”?

The Other: The Origin and Meaning of the Term

~ Zane Yi was raised in the Christian tradition and is fascinated by the interplay of philosophical and theological thought through history. He teaches and studies philosophy at Fordham University, where he is a graduate student. Zane and his wife, Angela, live on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

If you’ve browsed this website, you’ve most likely come across the frequent use of the term “the Other.” You may have wondered, “What does it mean? Where does it come from?”

The term has been developed by European philosophers and came into usage through the work of Jewish/French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995), an extremely influential, some might call quintessentially “post-modern”, thinker. Levinas fought in World War II, taught philosophy at the University of Paris, and is also known for his Talmudic scholarship. Levinas’ extensive writings are permeated with this term, but are notoriously hard to digest. Here is a short overview of the meaning of the term.

According to Levinas, when we encounter another human being, the face of the Other speaks to us and ethically obligates us.

The innovative nature of this claim becomes more evident when Levinas’ thought is compared with the thought of a Frenchman that is more familiar to many people--Rene Descartes. In his quest for absolute certainty, Descartes infamously describes his method of radical doubt. One must doubt everything—the beliefs inherited from one’s parents and teacher, and even one’s own senses!  After demolishing this shaky edifice of beliefs, one can reconstruct a stable building of knowledge built from indubitable facts.

What is the indubitable and, therefore, foundational fact? Descartes claims that he cannot doubt the fact that he is doubting. “I think, therefore I am,” he purportedly claimed. Starting from this point, one begins to work one’s way to other certain facts.

Following Descartes’ lead, many philosophers seem to think that the primary task of philosophy is an epistemological or metaphysical one. What we desire most is absolutely certain knowledge. How do I know that the external world and others exist? (Believe it or not, philosophers have spent much time and energy trying to answer this question!) With the proper method of acquiring knowledge (epistemology), one can ascertain what is real (metaphysics).

Ethics, or “practical philosophy”, is a secondary concern; “knowing” (epistemology) and “reality” (metaphysics) take priority. Once we know what is real, we can find out what is good and right. Furthermore, figuring out the good and right is reduced to the derivation of principles or maxims from abstractions. 

In contrast to this, Levinas treats ethics as a "first philosophy."  According to Levinas, we are immediately aware of the Other through our encounters with him/her (and their "face") and the Other places obligations of care and respect on us, before we begin to theoretically speculate on things, people, life, truth, ourselves, or anything at all! This obligation towards the Other cannot be reduced to linguistic formulations and commands, and transcends race, gender, or religion.

Levinas’ innovative claim is powerfully illustrated by one of my professors, Merold Westphal, who uses an excerpt from Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front to help readers understand Levinas’ insight.

The following is taken from Westphal’s new book Levinas and Kierkegaard in Dialogue (p. 3-4). (The pagination is from Remarque’s book.) 

On a foray between the trenches, I have become separated from my comrades and have found refuge in a crater filled with water and mud. Suddenly a question occurs to me. "What will you do if someone jumps into your shell-hole? Swiftly I pull out my little dagger, grasp it fast and bury it in my hand once again under the mud. If anyone jumps in here I will go for him...stab him clean through the throat, so that he  cannot call out; that's the only way; he will be just as frightened as I am;  then in terror we fall upon another, then I must be first"  (184).

As suddenly as the question arises, a body falls on top of me. "I do not think at all, I make no decision--I strike madly home, and feel only how the body suddenly convulses, then becomes limp and collapses. When I recover myself, my hand is sticky and wet. The man gurgles....It sounds to me as though he bellows....I want to stop  his mouth, stuff it with earth, stab him again, he must be quite, but [I] have  suddenly become so feeble that I cannot anymore lift my hand against him"  (185).

Overcome by the desire to get away, I move as far away as possible in the shell-hole, watching and listening.  Morning comes, and the gurgling continues, drawing first my unwilling gaze and then my whole body is a crawling journey to the side of the dying man. "At last I am beside him. Then he opens his eyes. He must have heard me, for he gazes at me with a look of utter terror. The body lies still, but in the eyes  there is such an extraordinary expression of fright that for a moment I think  they have the power enough to carry the body off with them...the gurgle has  ceased, but the eyes cry out, yell, all the life is gathered together in  them....The eyes follow me. I am powerless to move so long as they are there" (187).

When I am finally able to move, I strain some muddy water from the bottom of the crater, give it to my dying enemy, and then dress his wounds as best I can. The gurgling resumes. After the passing of an eternity, the young Frenchmen passes into eternity at about three in the afternoon. "I prop the dead man up again so that he lies comfortably...I close his eyes. They are brown, his hair is black and a bit curly at the sides. The mouth is full and soft beneath his moustache; the nose is slightly arched, the skin brownish; it is now not so pale as it was before, when he was alive. For a moment the face seems almost  healthy;--then it collapses suddenly into the strange face of the dead that I  have so often seen, strange faces, all alike" (190).

Just as the compulsion to help had followed the compulsion to flee, now the compulsion to speak takes over. "Comrade, I did not want to kill you. If you jumped in here again, I would not do it, if you would be sensible, too. But you were only an idea to me before, an abstraction that lived in my mind. But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of you bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late...I will write to your wife" (191).

Who is the Other in a religious context? We have many terms for her. The unbeliever. The religious fanatic. The liberal. The fundamentalist. The pagan. The goy. The kafir.

Such labels are usually based on a theoretical understanding of the Other (often a misconception), but actually prevent us from a genuine encounter with her. Sadly, in the end, this only impoverishes our own humanity and our experience of the depth and power of our own religious traditions.

We know ourselves most fully in the presence of the Other.

It’s my hope and prayer that Faith House will become a place where encountering the Other, not thinking or talking about him or her or them, is “first philosophy.”

Live Words: One Body

Only when we see ourselves in our true human context, as members of a race which is intended to be one organism and 'one body,' will we begin to understand the positive importance not only of the successes but of the failures and accidents in our lives. My successes are not my own. The way to them was prepared by others. The fruit of my labors is not my own: for I am preparing the way for the achievements of another. Nor are my failures my own. They may spring from failure of another, but they are also compensated for by another's achievement. Therefore the meaning of my life is not to be looked for merely in the sum total of my own achievements. It is seen only in the complete integration of my achievements and failures with the achievements and failures of my own generation, and society, and time.             
   
                                                    ~ Thomas Merton

Burning Rage Meets Burning Grace

~ John Hubers is currently a PhD student at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago concentrating his studies on the history of Christian-Muslim relations.  Prior to this he served as the Director of the Reformed Church in America's mission program in the Middle East and South Asia as well as pastor of international congregations in the Arabian Gulf states of Oman and Bahrain.  I (Samir) met John in Boston at the meeting of Interfaith Relations Commission of National Council of Churches held at Harvard University this past June. He told me this story and later send it to me.  It first appeared in a shortened form in the Other Side Magazine, October, 1997.

It’s the summer of 1981. I’m sitting with my missionary mentor in the book- smothered office of a Coptic Orthodox bishop downtown Cairo, Egypt.  He is speaking of the riots still smoldering in a slum not far from where we were sitting. 

He tells us how it started. 

A fanatical faction of the Ikhwan al Muslameen (Muslim Brotherhood) discovered that a Christian landowner had not properly registered a piece of property in the local deeds office. Seizing the moment, they occupied the land, planted a flag on it and announced their plans to build a mosque.  The Christian went to the police to protest.  They made noises, but did nothing.  The stage was set for a drama that no one saw coming and few wanted. 

It happened when the heated exchange reached a boiling point.  The spark was the squatters gathering a mob at the owner’s home with hostile intent.  The owner came to the door with a pistol in his hand.  He said, “leave!”  They said, “no!”  He fired a shot in the air.  Someone shouted:  “Christians are killing Muslims, Christians are killing Muslims.”  And the fires started burning.

For three days violent gangs bearing the name, but not the spirit of Islam, ran wild through the warren of streets targeting Christians and their shops.  A priest from Upper Egypt in Cairo visiting his brother had his head split open with an ax.  It was a low-level massacre.

At the height of the riots a gang approached the local church with gasoline cans in their hands and arson on their minds.  The parish priest saw them out of his office window.  And there wasn’t a thing he could do to stop them.  He had been praying for an end to the destruction and murder; now he prayed for a miracle. 

As they got closer he noticed another group of men gathering in the street; neighborhood shopkeepers, Muslims he knew as friends. His heart sank.  “Dear God, not them, too!”

Then he noticed that the shopkeepers weren’t joining the mob.  Instead they were forming a phalanx around the church.  He opened his window to listen to the exchange.  What he heard assured him that God is good . . . God and his neighbors.

“This is our church,” said the shopkeepers, “these are our friends.  If you want to burn it down, you’re going to have to kill us first!” 

Burning rage met burning grace.  And grace won.  The church was spared.

New Frontiers: The Act of Hyphenation

~ Kyle Fischer works with not-for-profit organizations (www.reserveinc.blogspot.com) and in music (www.endup.org). He will attend Union Theological Seminary in New York City in the fall of 2008.

In yoga class at the YMCA the instructor says, “Now reach forward, place your palms face down on your mat, and pull the floor toward you.” Contemporary thinking about space and time tells me I do not have to understand her instruction as metaphor. Standing outside the door of Faith House, I am cheered by the idea that parts of our theology could take similar forms, contemplative strategies along the lines of asking your yoga students to pull the floor towards them.

My girlfriend is a Hindu, definitely a polytheist. She is Australian, raised without religious affiliation of any kind, matrilineally Jewish (but non-practicing), mostly of English extraction, also Malaysian and Indian. But to all appearances, she is a white girl whose skin tone might indicate a passion for carrots, with striking red hair. She talked with me on our first date about her internal struggles with adopting a Hindu religious practice. At first it looked so aesthetically other, so foreign, that is was hard for her to get her head wrapped around something her heart already understood. She found it got easier with practice.

She was surprised, and moved, when I responded by asking her if she wanted to pray together. I would have been happy to adapt my prayer to her idiom. And in fact we didn’t, not then. We got to talking instead.

In sharing our practices since then, and listening to Hindu teachers explain their views on their own terms, I am beginning to feel comfortable with a multifaith religious identity of my own. This requires an act of hyphenation that baffles some. Those of us raised in a particular faith can be very resistant to this kind of plurality. I know because I feel it in myself sometimes, despite the repeated assurances of my parents to their inquisitive little boy that Buddhists and Hindus were not going to hell.

Since considering seminary, I’ve been thinking about my family background in the Disciples of Christ denomination. My dad was a Disciples minister, as was my grandfather, and my great-grandmother.

Dad always explained the denomination in two words, “mainline, liberal.” The Disciples story was explained to me in shorthand – as a frontier church, originally, the Disciples’ formation came out of a need for people of diverse Christian backgrounds to meet together under one tent. Therefore they adopted only very limited doctrinal beliefs.

Is there a lesson in the Disciples model to be applied to our multifaith discussion about religious practice without doctrinal borders, as love draws us out onto new cultural frontiers?

Is there a way to write that sentence in about a third as many words? And what do we call such a practice?

From a universalist Hindu perspective, I am a Jesus devotee. Y’all don’t mind if I call myself a Christian though, do you?

Jesus taught us to look for him in other people. I’ve felt his presence in teachings from other faiths. You never know where the One Love is gonna pop up.

Our First Preview Gathering: Breathing in ... Faith House

~ by Juliet rabia Gentile

Outside the lavender gray sky opened and a torrent of rain poured down, inside all who were gathered moved and swayed to the sound of the affirmation of unity, La illaha ilallah, there is no reality apart from God. This was the auspicious beginning of the first of three inaugural preview gatherings of Faith House Manhattan.

We began with a suggestion from life: breathe. What does it mean to breathe? In this frenetic place of paradox and contradiction, this city we call home: Manhattan, all those gathered collectively took a breath of fresh air, put aside our certitudes and concepts and moved towards a new vision of what it means to be:  Jewish, Christian, Muslim, or another sojourner. We all embarked upon a journey to find something new: the other.

The Stranger, the guest at the table, these are concepts that play a central role in the mystical traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. What does it mean to be a guest? What does it mean to open one’s home to the other? Islamic oral tradition relates that it was the practice of the Prophet Abraham to abstain from eating unless he had a guest at his table. At one time he even waited an entire month without food because no guest or beggar came to his house seeking a meal. In this way Abraham is an example of the most extreme form of hospitality, that which seeks the other in order to survive. Abraham, the father of monotheism, had a tent in the deserts of Arabia, a tent that was open on all sides. Under this tent he invited all to join him and to pray, to feast and to learn from one another. Each one of us has followed his example in answering the invitation of Faith House: by inviting each other to be guests at our house, to seek shelter under our tent.

Just one week ago we gathered and watched as this creation took form, as a modern tent of Abraham was erected in mid-town…

The day began at 4pm with a sound of shofar. The program began with Samir Selmanovic, our coordinator, extending an invitation to all those gathered. This invitation was to enter Faith House with an open mind, to experience “holy awkwardness.” By accepting this invitation, each one of us entered the “living room” of Faith House, a place where one can share a meal, a thought, a dream with friends. A place where one can share a concern, ask a question, ask for help. A place where everyone is welcome to be themselves, to live…

Reflecting this plurality, the three co-leaders, Jill Minkoff, Bowie Snodgrass and myself came forward to each recite the central prayers of our traditions (The Shema, The Lord's Prayer, and Al Fatiha). Lauralea Banks led the group in a moment of silence to honor the multiplicity of spiritual traditions that were not formally represented that day.

Following this prelude of unity, the afternoon progressed with a short guided meditation on ”breath” from the Islamic tradition. This prayer, known as dhikr kafi or silent remembrance, consists of sitting silently and focusing on the heart while repeating the name Allah with each breath, Al- on the in-breath, and -Lah on the out-breath. The goal of this prayer is to drop away from the mind-space, to leave behind the have-to’s and must’s of daily life, and enter the Heart. The Heart or qalb in the Islamic tradition, is a place one can enter at any time and be with the Lord and Beloved alone, a place of refuge, of silence. From this space of embodied prayer we moved into a brief explanation of the common types of prayer practiced in the Islamic tradition. This explanation flowed naturally into another experiential exercise. This time we plunged into the prayer known as dhikr jali or audible remembrance. Those gathered began chanting, La illaha ilallah or there is no reality apart from the One. As the intensity of the chanting increased I began to sing a kaside or traditional improvisational song. After the chanting finished we all sat in silence for one moment before Jill led us in the fun and spirited exercise of “breathing life into Faith House,” along with the children.

This concluded our experience of reflecting on the foundation of our community: Life. This experience opened up new horizons and questions about what it means to be connected to each other and to our common Source of Life, as the life-breath which sustains us without question, distinction or hesitation. 

We can only experience this community with your participation. Without the other, we cannot fully know ourselves. It is the goal of Faith House to invite everyone to this banquet table, to this tent of Abraham, to enjoy spiritual fellowship, to learn together, to grow together. There is so much yet to discover and to share.

Mevlana Jellaludin Rumi writes in his poem, The Guest House:

The human being is a Guest House
every morning there is a knocking at the door
a new arrival: joy, anger, sadness
some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor

Welcome and entertain them all
even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of all its furniture

Treat each guest honorably,
for He may be clearing you out for some new delight
The dark thought, the shame, the malice
meet them at the door laughing
and invite them in

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.

In this poem Rumi suggests that even what appears to be bitter may be inwardly sweet, may hold some hidden gold, some hidden wisdom for us. It is with this openness, with this sense of hospitality that we wish to invite you to be our Guest. We invite you to bring your hopes, fears, and questions to the door of Faith House, so that we may all learn together, the secrets that have been sent from beyond…

Thank you to all those who have brought Faith House into the world and to all those who will contribute in the future.

The doors are open. Enter in. Welcome to the adventure!

And Not But: Celebrating Contradiction in Relationships

~Nancy Shainberg-Colier was raised in the traditions of the East, primarily Buddhism, and is now most closely connected with the Vedanta/Hindu path, but always learning and seeking. She is also a psychotherapist, writer and Focusing practitioner.  With her husband Frederic and a five year old daughter Juliet, Nancy lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

I met Samir recently at an interfaith gathering and it was there that I first learned of Faith House.  At the ceremony he raised the question (and I am paraphrasing here) of how we could be alive, engage in dialogue as human beings, and not talk about God or meaning of life itself.  This comment resonated deeply within me. Having grown up and lived in New York City for many years, I have felt the great need for a place where people are talking about the real issues of being alive, of having been "given" life.  There is definitely a place in this city for an intergenerational interfaith community that includes the "all" without diluting the weight of the "each."  So too, I share the desire to participate in raising our particularly American consciousness out of its materialistic malaise and into something that includes our whole being and is ultimately more satisfying.  Here is my reflection about relationships between people and the role of contradiction.  This can be applied to relationships between groups or religions as well.

The Problem with Contradiction

Nature abhors a vacuum, or so they say.  Similarly, it seems that human beings abhor contradiction, particularly in the context of intimate relationships. People attempt to package their feelings as positive or negative, believing that contradictory feelings cannot and should not co-exist.  In approaching their relationships, people use the word but to connect their contradictory feelings, as if the positive wipes out the negative and vice versa.  In fact, for a relationship to succeed, and not but must be the approach we take when linking the inconsistent feelings that are at the heart of all relationships.  

All relationships resolve in contradiction. Why then is it so difficult for us to accept contradictory feelings inside ourselves?  First, we are trained to believe that consistency is the basic nature of all things, that there is an answer to all questions, one answer.  Human beings ask the question “Is it good or bad?”  Science asks the question “Is it true or false?”  Religion asks the question “Is it right or wrong?”   We like simple, clean, straightforward answers.  If it’s both simultaneously then we are in for a more complicated consideration, a more unsettling resolution. 

We seek to obliterate internal contradiction because it causes discomfort and pain.  As humans, we are always trying to grasp pleasure and avoid pain. It doesn’t make sense that we can feel both love and hate, appreciation and disappointment, relief and frustration, all at once.  In relationship, when we open to our full experience we must face the truth that all of these contradictory feelings exist in our experience of our partner.  Such an openness of vision means accepting that we are receiving certain joys and being deprived of others.  This can be quite painful and unsettling to live with. 

Celebrating Contradiction

And not but is perhaps the most important concept in relationship.  Contradiction is truth; there is always both positive and negative existing simultaneously.  When we recognize difficulty in our relationship, we must relate to that difficulty as an addition to the positive, as an and.  It is not a but, not something that eliminates the positive. 

When we operate from a place of and, we can stand back and look clearly at the entire landscape of the relationship, make room for the full spectrum of our experience.  From this place of clarity we can make free choices.  By laying out what we are receiving and what we are missing, we can choose if we want to stay in the relationship and/or how we want to stay in it.  We can determine if what we are receiving is that which matters most, and conversely if what we are giving up is acceptable to give up. Being able to allow the whole relationship to exist with all of its contradictions, all its ands, allows us to get to know ourselves, our truth, our priorities.  It helps us determine our “non-negotiables,” those aspects of a relationship or life that we are unwilling to do without. Further, in recognizing the places where we are sacrificing, we can more fully appreciate the places we are receiving.  We generate compassion and appreciation for ourselves when we are able to accept the whole picture that is relationship. It is a compassion borne of  awareness, recognizing the profundity of the choices we are making.  Free to acknowledge and experience our partner’s value in our life, we can now fully appreciate our relationship, which is ultimately what makes it work.

An Article by Martin Marty: Differentism

 ~ from Sightings (2/26/08), by Martin Marty, author of more than 50 books, speaker, columnist, pastor, teacher, and professor of religion at University of Chicago for 35 years. "Marty" is one of the most prominent interpretors of religion today. Martin E. Marty's biography, current projects, upcoming events, publications, and contact information can be found at www.illuminos.com. In this brief essay he looks at two women, one Jewish and the other Muslim, who received advanced degrees fro Chicago's Catholic Theological Union. Both sought to explore faith in the context of an institution of another faith.

"Women Blaze an Interfaith Trail: Two teachers become first Jewish female and first Muslim female to receive advanced degrees from Catholic Theological Union," and "She's First Jewish Graduate of Catholic Theological Union" were headlines in The Chicago Tribune and The Chicago Sun-Times on May 15. These are local news items, but they represent trends that are growing in the religious cosmopolis. At least two Lutheran seminaries have Islamic Study offerings. The presence of Jews on Christian faculties is common. Time to yawn and head back to presidential campaign obsessions for excitement?

What is going on is a revolution in theological education and inter-religious relations on a scale that a religious-warring world ought to cherish. The trend or revolution has its detractors. Some Catholics are building small but well-financed colleges in which Catholic truth is set in amber or hermetically sealed: non-Catholics or Catholics of other kinds are excluded or unwelcome. That's one way of fighting "indifferentism", which The Catholic Encyclopedia defines as "the term given, in general, to all those theories, which, for one reason or another, deny that it is the duty of man to worship God by believing and practicing the one true religion."

Two Poems That Will Stop You In Your Religious Tracks

~ by Samir Selmanovic

April is National Poetry Month. Here are two poems of war I recently came across (thank you Robert Darken for “Revenge” and Erica Wright for “The Diameter of the Bomb”). Read them and be prepared to carry them inside of you for weeks to come.  These are about you and me, no matter what our religion, race, or nationality. We fall within the diameter of every bomb and we all find solace in suffering of our enemies. And we have a say about the wars raging close and far away. No war is ever merely their war.

THE DIAMETER OF THE BOMB

(by Yehuda Amichai (1924-2000),
translated from Hebrew by Yehuda Amichai and Ted Hughes,
Selected Poems edited by Ted Hughes and Daniel Weissbort)

The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters
and the diameter of its
effective range –
about seven meters.
And in it four dead and eleven wounded.
And around them in a greater circle
of pain and time are scattered
two hospitals and one cemetery.
But the young woman who was
buried where she came from
over a hundred kilometers away
enlarges the circle greatly.
And the lone man who weeps over her death
in a far corner of a distant country
includes the whole world in the circle.
And I won’t speak at all about the crying of orphans
that reaches to the seat of God
and from there onward, making
the circle without end and without God.

                REVENGE

                (Nazareth, April 15, 2006,
                by Taha Muhammad Ali,
                translated from Arabic by Peter Cole,
                Yahya Hijazi, and Gabriel Levin)

                At times ... I wish
                I could meet in a duel
                the man who killed my father
                and razed our home,
                expelling me
                into
                a narrow country.
                And if he killed me,
                I’d rest at last,
                and if I were ready—
                I would take my revenge!

                *

                But if it came to light,
                when my rival appeared,
                that he had a mother
                waiting for him,
                or a father who’d put
                his right hand over
                the heart’s place in his chest
                whenever his son was late
                even by just a quarter-hour
                for a meeting they’d set—
                then I would not kill him,
                even if I could.

                *

                Likewise ... I
                would not murder him
                if it were soon made clear
                that he had a brother or sisters
                who loved him and constantly longed to see him.
                Or if he had a wife to greet him
                and children who
                couldn’t bear his absence
                and whom his gifts would thrill.
                Or if he had
                friends or companions,
                neighbors he knew
                or allies from prison
                or a hospital room,
                or classmates from his school …
                asking about him
                and sending him regards.

                *

                But if he turned
                out to be on his own—
                cut off like a branch from a tree—
                without a mother or father,
                with neither a brother nor sister,
                wifeless, without a child,
                and without kin or neighbors or friends,
                colleagues or companions,
                then I’d add not a thing to his pain
                within that aloneness—
                not the torment of death,
                and not the sorrow of passing away.
                Instead I’d be content
                to ignore him when I passed him by
                on the street—as I
                convinced myself
                that paying him no attention
                in itself was a kind of revenge.

Good Atheism, Bad Atheism

~ by Samir Selmanovic

Even though there haven’t been any new arguments against the existence of God since late 18th century, atheism is hot again. The enlightenment—a powerful movement in recent centuries that helped us question superstitious stories told by our grandmother as well as theology taught by respected university professors—has triumphed. One glance at the Google News page makes this abundantly clear. Religion is not in charge of the world anymore.

However, spurred by fear of religious fundamentalism, new atheists want to go further than their forefathers. Instead of arguing about the existence of God, they are fighting against the existence of religion itself, calling humanity to brace for an apocalyptic showdown between faith and reason. 

Religion does deserve to be challenged. “Deserves” has two meanings. First, religion deserves the pain of criticism and correction because of its failures to live up to its own ideals. Second, religion deserves the blessing of criticism and correction because it has often been a precious catalyst for justice, peace and beauty in the world. Recent challenges should therefore be welcome by religious people as a chance to see, to grieve, to repent, and then with renewed wisdom act for the common good.

Atheism at its best is crucial in this process of religious renewal. With its own set of beliefs, constructive atheism—often described as humanism—sees God as a human creation and not vice versa. It therefore locates the mystery of life in this world, this matter, this humanity, as the only one we have. It insists that all religion must land on the ground where we humans actually live. Religion must learn to live on earth. If religion is not valuable on earth, it is not valuable at all.

Constructive humanism’s contribution to our life together on this planet is its insistence that every religion ought to embrace, not just its adherents, but the whole planet as their ethical community. In our newly small planet, this is not a matter of humility or virtue any more, but of survival. In this way, these atheists are like the prophets of the Hebrew Bible, calling people out of their hypocrisy toward better faith and a better world.

However, attacks that fight against all religion, instead of bad religion, are bad atheism. It reinforces the suspicion of people who cling to the status quo in religion that atheists are on a power trip of their own, on a mission to strip the world of mystery, beauty and spirit—getting rid of anything and everything that humans cannot understand, control or subjugate.

The problem with anti-religionist atheism is not that it questions the existence or character of God. It is problematic because it embodies a contempt for any faith at all—any belief or practice toward creating value and meaning for ourselves. In a recent article in the Los Angeles Times, Lee Siegel writes,

“The leap of faith is really a very ordinary operation. We take it every time we fall in love, expect kindness from someone, impulsively sacrifice some little piece of our self-interest. After all, you cannot prove the existence of truth, beauty, goodness and decency; you cannot prove the dignity of being human, or your obligation to treat people as ends and not just as means. You take a gamble on the existence of these inestimable things. For that reason, when you lay scientific, logical and empirical siege to the leap of faith at the core of the religious impulse, you are not just attacking faith in God. You are attacking the act of faith itself, faith in anything that can’t be proved. But it just so happens that the qualities that make life rich, joyful and humane cannot be proved.”

Atheistic fundamentalism is a dogmatic expression of a worldview equally capable of destroying humanity with zeal and effectiveness as any fundamentalist religion. Shutting out the spiritual, mystical, metaphorical and transcendent, atheistic fundamentalism resorts to cleaning up the world of those who disagree and creating a naked public square, devoid of any options but its own.

While philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche rightfully observed that “Every truth is a tool in the hands of those in power,” atheistic fundamentalists have come to an irrational belief that they are an exception as they are trying to sell their ideas to those to whom they so openly condescend. What can be a greater power trip than believing everyone is on a power trip except oneself? Instead of promoting a secularization that fosters religious pluralism, these atheists impose secularism—a closed worldview, devoid of the windows and doors of self-doubt and hope.

To the end of his life, Sigmund Freud was an uncompromising atheist, describing belief in God in his book The Future of an Illusion as a “collective neurosis.” But his last book was titled Moses and Monotheism, in which he suggested a surprising view about religion, recognizing the poetry and promise of religion. He argued that Judaism and other expressions of monotheism helped free humanity from bondage to the immediate, empirical world, opening up fresh and renewing possibilities for human spirit and practice. He argued that people who can worship what is presented in symbolic terms, practice the ultimate exploration of the invisible inner life. For Freud, faith in God opened a gift of inwardness and imagination.

Both faith and doubt are opposites of certainty and therefore part of the same whole that refuses to see only the obvious. To end religion, would be to end imagination.

The stingy polemics of religionists who defend religion at all costs on one side and anti-religionists on the other seem like arguments fought in an attempt to justify closing one’s ears to hearing the Other and sharing the planet with others. Both of their identities depend on a divided world. Instead of leading us to generosity and great hope toward an unknown future, and instead of enlightening and inspiring us, religionists and anti-religionists are moving us into a new dark age, both using God to bring an end to imagination.

People will not stop looking into the past and mining religion for its spiritual treasures and hard-learned historical lessons. And they will not stop organizing themselves into new kinds of religious communities. For we have learned from human history that religion does not have to be the opium, but can be the poetry of the people.

(from Signs of the Times, Australia, March 2008, adapted by the author)

Encounter the Mystics: Julian of Norwich

~ Dr. Frederick Roden is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Connecticut and lives in New York City. He has published primarily on homosexuality and Christianity. He is a lay Associate of the Episcopal Order of Julian of Norwich (see www.orderofjulian.org) and the author of a commentary companion to her text which will be published by Liturgical Press later this year. He is currently working on a book on Jewish/Christian intersections and can be reached at fsroden@aol.com.

“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well…”  This familiar phrase of the 14th-century English writer Julian of Norwich inspired poet T. S. Eliot to look around his broken world—the devastation of twentieth-century war and genocide—and glimpse the power of the Unseen working in and through All Created Thing. We read these words and immediately assume that we should get what we’re asking for, that our prayers should be answered, that the outcome we crave is the outcome God will provide. In Julian’s theology, the answer is: yes and no. For her, as for all the great mystics and poets, the Divine is ever bursting through the material world. She maintains that we cannot know ourselves without knowing God; that God is nearer to us than our own souls. The depth of our human experience is firmly grounded in the Divine: the Divine is fully known in our material experience, not outside of it. Our deepest longings— our truest selves—are inseparable from God.

The problem comes with how things look on the outside versus inside. This question of separation versus inseparability defines Julian’s theology. She had prayed for a full experience of Jesus’s Passion. She wanted to feel the depth of human suffering her God knew. Her desire led to a vision that opened her awareness. Julian could not turn from the suffering human body of her God because there she found her heaven. Her God willed to know human suffering so deeply that it physically “one-ed” God with All Created Thing. Julian’s famous “all shall be well,” so often cited out of context, is God’s answer to her questioning of this eternal “one-ing.” How can all be well given the brokenness, suffering, and separation in the world? How can all be well given what she had been taught to understand as “sin”? In the theology Julian develops, “sin” is literally no-thing. It is separation: the wound that God constantly works to heal—the brokenness of our experience for which we can never be blamed. In and by our wounds (our divisions) we are healed and the world is made whole.

In Jewish terms, that opening is the space of tikkun olam, the repair of the world. In Julian’s words it is the work of “mercy” and “grace” dynamic and active in and through Creation. Julian’s God is a verb. This God’s sole purpose is healing separation. In a sense we have a choice whether to answer this call. Yet Divine Love (inseparable from Divine Reason) continuously works in and through us whether we like it or not, whether we cooperate or not! Julian’s Christianity understands this as the Incarnation, the Real Presence of the Divine acting through our material existence. This “Incarnation” isn’t limited to Jesus: there is no difference between God in Jesus the Christ and God operating throughout the material world. The degree and level of perfection (literally, as “fully realized,” “fully made”) may vary, but the Presence and call to be present is true for all of us in all incarnations.

Julian lived at a time of plague and war. Her society rigidly separated “saved” from “unsaved.” As much as she was a product of her culture, Julian challenged this view in claiming God as one: unity as the work, truth, and destiny of all Creation. She rejected a world-view that separated sheep from goats. While grounded in Christian Trinitarian theology, the singular experience of Divine Love working in and through the world defined that meaning Julian put forth as God’s message for all humanity. 

Julian never stopped asking questions of her God. Although professed as a hermit, her hermitage was attached to a church in a busy market town. Hers was no escape from the world but a way of living deeply in it, fully present to the experience of All Created Thing. With a literal window open to her society (who viewed her as a spiritual director) Julian conveyed her God’s ultimate message: one she spent over twenty years contemplating—the final answer to her question.  At the end of her visionary text (written in a time and place where few men and fewer women read, let alone wrote), she concluded that “Love was His meaning.”  In the end, all shall be Love. Julian did not intend that we await the end of time for realization of this Love. Rather, we are called to awaken to it in our lives as we glimpse the Divine—our truest self—in the face of The Other.

Blessed Julian of Norwich (1343-1423)

THE DAY OF

my spiritual awakening

    was the day I saw

    and knew I saw

       God in all things

       and all things in God.

River of Maybe

~ by Rabbi David Ingber

INTRODUCTION (by Samir Selmanovic)

Last Friday night I visited a wonderful Jewish congregation on the Upper West Side, Kehilat Romemu. In the spectrum of Judaism from classical to experimental, this congregation firmly holds on to both, reassuring and challenging at the same time. Rabbi David Ingber and I had met a week earlier in David’s apartment, where we passionately conversed about our dreams. No words can convey to you the warmth and depth of this community. I can only offer you a slice of my experience in hope that those of you who live in New York area will visit and see for yourself.

The service took place in a rented gym, Romemu’s new regular gathering place, with one wall of windows, many of them open, all the sounds of the street coming in. During the time of the service when we all turned towards Jerusalem (which happened to be turning our back to the windows), and when we were quietly vocalizing a Hebrew melody full of longing and hope, we were all interrupted by a woman’s voice singing on the street. 

The strong voice seemed to sing in Spanish, a melody that could be from South America or the Middle East. One could not tell. As her voiced entered the gym and overpowered ours, Rabbi David said, “let’s sing with her.”  So, we did. We all started improvising as one voice and wove our Hebrew melody into her song. Someone from the congregation shouted, “everyone, come to the window.”  We all turned around and came.  Soon, there were a hundred or so heads, all men wearing yarmulkes, looking out the windows.  Right in front of us was a Christian Easter procession, with eleven large black and white art pieces depicting the traditional stations of the cross and twelve young men dressed in white robes following a priest who was carrying a cross in the front.  They all stood in front of the building absorbed in their song. Apparently this part of Spanish Harlem was one of the stations.  The Jews started waving their hands above their heads, a motion of blessing, and many who saw us at the windows waved back.  We all got blessed!  What an awkward and sweet moment!

Then Rabbi David talked about Purim, and to illustrate his message he mentioned a video, “Stroke of Insight.”  His teaching about Purim was fitting and fascinating, so I asked him to send me his comments as well as the link for the video. Here they are:

ABOUT THE VIDEO “STROKE OF INSIGHT”:
Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened -- as she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding -- she studied and remembered every moment. This is a powerful story of recovery and awareness -- of how our brains define us and connect us to the world and to one another (Recorded February 2008 in Monterey, California. Duration: 18:44.). To watch this powerful testimony to the spiritual aspect of our lives, click HERE.

COMMENTS BY RABBI DAVID INGBER:
It was an interesting Friday night, without a doubt. So many surprises, so much that spontaneously arose from the collective heart of all those present. Purim lends itself to non-normative or even anti-nomian practices, and what transpired Friday evening certainly qualifies as that. So many memorable moments from that prayer service, but without a doubt standing by the window, waving and blessing our fellow worshipers on the street, sticks out in my mind as special. Samir, may the day soon arrive where all that unites us as children of G-d outshines all divisions. 

Here is a brief rendition of my comments Friday evening:

The story of Purim takes place in a city called Shushan. Interestingly enough, we find two Shushans mentioned in the Bible. One is called "Shushan Habirah" or Capital Shushan and the other is called just "Shushan."  Apparently, according to many commentators, there was an inner city the capital—and an outer city, the area known as Shushan. Elsewhere in the Bible, in the book of Daniel, we find an interesting remark.  We are told that in order to enter the inner city of Shushan, Shushan Habirah, one had to cross a river. The river was called "Ulay". In Hebrew, "Ulay" means “perhaps” or “maybe.” The symbolic significance of this is profound. What emerges is the assertion that in order to enter the inner city of Shushan, the location of the King, where "liberation" and "transformation" can occur, one must cross over or enter into the great not-knowing, the mysterious realm of uncertainty where all things dissolve and all edges are rounded. This to some degree is hardwired into our very biology as you will see in the video. The video clip is a prayer, a plea for us to choose that part of our brain (right hemisphere) that blurs divisions, that allows for a melting of tensions that arise in the mind that divides. This is the mystery of the statement of the Rabbis that one is obligated on Purim to "imbibe until one cannot distinguish between ‘cursed is Haman’ and ‘blessed is Mordechai’". One day a year we allow ourselves to commit fully to the notion that all the lines we draw are functional, not ontological, instrumental means to essential ends.

Rabbi David Ingber studied Philosophy and Psychology at NYU, and has learned at a wide range of yeshivot in Jerusalem and New York, from the ultra-orthodox Yeshivat Chaim Berlin, through to modern orthodox institutions such as Beit Midrash leTorah and Yeshivat Chovovei Torah. Major influences include Rav Moshe Weinberger, David Goshen, and Rav DovBer Pinson. David received his smicha from Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi.  He promotes a renewed Jewish emphasis on meditative practices and is working for the integration of sacred body practices into mainstream Judaism. For more about Rabbi David click HERE.  To read New York Times article about him click HERE.  For learning more about congregation Kehilat Romemu and for the schedule of their services click HERE.

From a Novel "Life of Pi"

~ by Samir Selmanovic

I have been reading Life of Pi, a novel by Yann Martel that deserves all the praise it has been getting since it came out in 2001. I could not resist sharing this passage with you, even at the risk of doing so without checking whether I need a permission from the publisher. 

Main character, boy named Piscine Patel, grew up with his non-religious and pragmatic parents in India. Without their knowledge he developed a relationship with the local spiritual leaders and became a Christian, a Muslim, and a Hindu. The problem was that the priest, the imam, and the pandit did not know about the other two. Until Piscine's father invited all three of them for a meeting in Patel home (p. 66):

    My parents, the priest and the pandit looked incredulous.
    The pandit spoke. “You’re both wrong. He’s a good Hindu boy. I see him all the time at the temple coming for darshan and performing puja.”
    My parents, the imam and the priest looked astounded.
    “There is no mistake,” said the priest. “I know this boy. He is Piscine Molitor Patel and he’s a Christian.”
    “I know him too, and I tell you he’s a Muslim,” asserted the imam.
    “Nonsense!” cried the pandit. “Piscine was born  a Hindu, lives a Hindu and will die a Hindu!”
    The three wise men stared at each other, breathless and disbelieving.
    Lord, avert their eyes from me, I whispered in my soul.
    All eyes fell upon me.
    “Piscine, can this be true?” asked the imam earnestly. “Hindus and Christians are idolaters. They have many gods.”
    “And Muslims have many wives,” responded the pandit.
    The priest looked askance at both of them. “Piscine,” he nearly whispered, “there is salvation only in Jesus.”
    “Balderdash! Christians know nothing about religion,” said the pandit.
    “They strayed long ago from God’s path,” said the imam.
    “Where’s God in your religion?” snapped the priest. “You don’t have a single miracle to show for it. What kind of religion is that, without miracles?”
    “It isn’t a circus with dead people jumping out of tombs all the time, that’s what! We Muslims stick to the essential miracle of existence. Birds flying, rain falling, crops growing—these are miracles enough for us.”
    “Feathers and rain are all very nice, but we like to know that God is truly with us.”

The Community of More

~ Bill Ashlock is a seasoned business executive, writer, and want to be wood turner with a passion and calling to tend God’s trees.  Bill works out from Singapore, lives in California, and is often found in New York. His tools include innovation, excellence, and compassion with an unending view of community.

It was in India, the land of my birth, that I first found the desire to be in relationship with the Divine. I cannot recall a particular moment or event, when I came to accept the “truths” that influenced me in my early years. Looking back, one of these truths became particularly important to me: spirituality was not singular. My God-connection was more than my personal relationship with the Divine, for God always exists in community. My being is to be found in belonging to both God and humanity. 

I watched men publicly demonstrate their devotion to God. I saw some whip themselves as they walked to a temple, their lashed induced blood dripping with each stride. Others embraced extended periods of silence and withdrew from the world. Leaders of different religions, including the Christian religion of my upbringing, highlighted acts of dedication, fasting, and penitence, reminding their followers that they should do likewise. As I matured I found myself looking for something more.

Less Anti-theism, More Humanism

~ Greg Epstein serves as the Humanist Chaplain of Harvard University. He recently agreed to write his first book, Good Without God, for William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Epstein was the primary organizer of “The New Humanism,” an international conference in honor of the 30th Humanist Chaplaincy of Harvard University, which drew one of the largest and most diverse audiences of any Humanist gathering in North American history. He blogs for Newsweek magazine and The Washington Post, and his work as a Humanist rabbi and Chaplain has been featured by National Public Radio, BBC Radio, Newsweek, The Boston Globe, The Jewish Daily Forward, and more. 

Endorsement of Faith House Manhattan:

"Faith House Manhattan is a really intriguing idea, and quite possibly a necessary one. I would encourage my fellow Humanists, atheists, agnostics and the non-religious to check it out, and to consider getting involved. Samir Selmanovic should be commended for reaching out earnestly, in respect and friendship, to our community. We secularists and freethinkers should do the same to him and to theistically-oriented Christians, Muslims, Jews and other religious people everywhere. Global warming doesn’t care what we believe or disbelieve about a god, and that’s just one of the many dangers that may doom us if we can’t figure out how to work together and care about one another despite differences. I’m hopeful this project can help build common ground and enable us to learn from one another in New York City and beyond."

Following post is adapted for Faith House by Greg Epstein, originally posted on On Faith, an online conversation about religion facilitated by Newsweek editor Jon Meacham and Washington Post journalist Sally Quinn.

Christopher Hitchens, author of the bestselling book God Is Not Great writes that "Religion is violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children."

In this quote, Sally and Jon identify a classic example of the way in which Christopher Hitchens’s approach to religion goes far beyond atheism and is really better understood as anti-theism.

While atheism is the lack of belief in any god, anti-theism means actively seeking out the worst aspects of faith in god and portraying them as representative of all religion. Anti-theism seeks to shame and embarrass people away from religion, browbeating them about the stupidity of belief in a bellicose god.

Anti-theists are often brilliant scientific thinkers. The ones I know tend to be passionately ethical in their personal lives. And as in the case of Hitchens, they can be ferociously eloquent. So why hasn’t anti-theism ever gained any real political or social power?

In most people’s minds, “religion” does not just stand merely for belief in an unseen, all-seeing deity with a baritone voice and a flowing beard. It stands for the things we hold most dear: family, tradition, and community. Memories of lost loved ones and consolation in the face of death. The organized pursuit of social justice. Not to mention music, art, architecture, and I could go on and on.

These things are all good. If you take a rhetorical blowtorch to religion without acknowledging the way it provides them, you get precisely what we have today: a nation and world where despite all our scientific knowledge, 80 to 90 percent of people say they are religious.

Now let me be perfectly clear about myself. I have zero belief in god, gods, goddesses, or any other manner of supernatural spirits. I affirm that there is one and only one world: this natural world. As far as any human being will ever know we get only one life, from womb to tomb.

My conviction that this life is all I have, however, is precisely why I don’t want to spend my days focused on the worst in religion. I prefer seeking the best in each of us. I am not an antitheist, and not simply an atheist, but a Humanist.

Humanism is the non-religious pursuit of all that is best in human life. It is based on reason, compassion, and creativity, and promotes loving and ethical connections with family, community, all human beings, and the natural world surrounding us. It is a progressive lifestance that, without supernaturalism, affirms our ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment, aspiring to the greater good of humanity.

Simply put, Humanism is being good and living well without god. And that is no small matter, because it is hard to live a good life in this world regardless of what you believe. We human beings are all so imperfect—we are hurt so easily and too quick to hurt others. We get sick and die just when it is least fair and most painful.

Ultimately, we are social animals. We need each other. Our lives are best when we take part in an ethical community that extends far beyond ourselves; for thousands of years, religion has been the best human institution at providing that community. So if all we stand for is anti-theism, we will get nowhere, even though Hitchens is right -- partially -- about the evil religion can do.

Today, the billion of us around the world who are not religious can and must join together to create a humanistic alternative to religion. And let us do so while honoring the good in those of our religious sisters and brothers who are trying to live well according to a belief system we cannot share.

For a Humanist, it is not enough to simply rage, rage against the dying of the enlightenment. Let us get involved in Humanism and make this world, though it will never be perfect, a better place.

Links to explore:

The New Humanism
American Humanist Association
Institute for Humanist Studies
International Humanist and Ethical Union

While atheism is the lack of belief in any god, anti-theism means actively seeking out the worst aspects of faith in god and portraying them as representative of all religion. Anti-theism seeks to shame and embarrass people away from religion, browbeating them about the stupidity of belief in a bellicose god.

Anti-theists are often brilliant scientific thinkers. The ones I know tend to be passionately ethical in their personal lives. And as in the case of Hitchens, they can be ferociously eloquent. So why hasn’t anti-theism ever gained any real political or social power?

In most people’s minds, “religion” does not just stand merely for belief in an unseen, all-seeing deity with a baritone voice and a flowing beard. It stands for the things we hold most dear: family, tradition, and community. Memories of lost loved ones and consolation in the face of death. The organized pursuit of social justice. Not to mention music, art, architecture, and I could go on and on.

Islam: Three YouTube Videos to Begin

~ by Samir Selmanovic

The more deeply people know about religions and cultures other than their own, the less perturbed they are be about the idea of Faith House. Our recent Sabbath poem by William Stafford begins with the words:

If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star

The chasm of ignorance about our religions as well as our cultures at times seem insurmountable, even to those who are eager to learn. Those of us in the west might know more about the fantasy worlds of reality shows, Lord of the Rings, or Desperate Housewives than about real communities that surround us.

However, to love our friends, family, neighbors, enemies, anyone at all, we have to know them. One cannot respect what one does not know. So it is with our religious worlds. We fear what we don't understand, and what we fear we avoid. This isolation is a form of spiritual laziness, a failure to become fully human by learning about humanity through humans other than ourselves, it is subsistence really. When we don’t know the Other, we fear the Other, and when we fear the Other, even their words of blessing sound harsh and their words of peace threaten us.

This chasm between cultures is so huge that for many of us this learning task that comes with globalization seems too daunting to start.

But a start is much more than just a beginning. I realize this every time I find the courage to step into an experience with the Other. Most of the time, awkwardness quickly gives way to kindness, generosity, laughter, and blessing. So when I found a saying from Horace (65 B.C.E.) printed on a tea bag paper tag, I tore the tag and put it into my wallet to remind me that entering the experience of a relationship with the Other goes much farther than merely crossing a starting line. Wise old Horace wrote :

    "He who has begun has half done. Dare to be wise; begin!"

The beauty and depth of our individual lives, cultures, and religions is so vast, I don't think we will ever be anything but beginners. But again, to begin is to make a great progress. If you have never begun learning about Islam (or any of our religions) and people who embody it, reject fear. I invite you to take some time to begin by seeing these three short videos. They are not expensive productions designed to wow you, but simple samples of spiritual, social, and global experience of the Muslim members of our human family.

VIDEO 1: One of the ways we learn about the Other is through their songs. Congregational hymns tell us about the heart of a congregation. Popular songs tell us about the heart of a population. Here is a song video I got from Lauralea Banks, titled Al Mu'allim, which means Teacher, by Sami Yusuf. The video is followed by the lyrics. As you listen and read, feel free to enter a new experience. You don't have to agree with everything you hear in order to feel empathy, get inspiration, and thus finally begin to know!

VIDEO 2: In December 2007, over 2,000 American Muslims were asked what they wished they could say to the world and this is their reply. This informative and at times humorous production is an unofficial music video for Kareem Salama's A Land Called Paradise, produced and directed by Lena Khan.

VIDEO 3: This is a song by Yusuf Islam, known as Cat Stevens. This grand performance of Peace Train was recorded at the Nobel Peace Prize Concert in Oslo, Norway, December 11, 2006.

AL MU'ALLIM

Al-Mu'allim (Teacher)

We once had a Teacher
The Teacher of teachers,
He changed the world for the better
And made us better creatures,
Oh Allah we’ve shamed ourselves
We’ve strayed from Al-Mu'allim,
Surely we’ve wronged ourselves
What will we say in front of him?
Oh Mu'allim...

He was Muhammad salla Allahu 'alayhi wa sallam,
Muhammad, mercy upon Mankind,
He was Muhammad salla Allahu 'alayhi wa sallam,
Muhammad, mercy upon Mankind,
Teacher of all Mankind.
Abal Qasim [one of the names of the Prophet]

Chorus:
Ya Habibi ya Muhammad
(My beloved O Muhammad)
Ya Shafi'i ya Muhammad
(My intercessor O Muhammad)
Khayru khalqillahi Muhammad
(The best of Allah’s creation is Muhammad)
Ya Mustafa ya Imamal Mursalina
(O Chosen One, O Imam of the Messengers)
Ya Mustafa ya Shafi'al 'Alamina
(O Chosen One, O intercessor of the worlds)

He prayed while others slept
While others ate he’d fast,
While they would laugh he wept
Until he breathed his last,
His only wish was for us to be
Among the ones who prosper,
Ya Mu'allim peace be upon you,
Truly you are our Teacher,
Oh Mu'allim..

Chorus . . .

He taught us to be just and kind
And to feed the poor and hungry,
Help the wayfarer and the orphan child
And to not be cruel and miserly,
His speech was soft and gentle,
Like a mother stroking her child,
His mercy and compassion,
Were most radiant when he smiled

Chorus . . .

Lyrics and Composition: Sami Yusuf
Producer: Sami Yusuf

FOR VIDEOS 1 AND 2 CLICK THE LINK BELOW

In Their Own Words: A Talk With Samir (AUDIO)

There’s something about hearing it firsthand – without the barrier of ink and paper (or a computer screen) and a need to wonder about tone and meaning. And with the delicate first steps of Faith House Manhattan, and it’s commitment to listening deeply and speaking authentically, people associated with Faith House here in New York have a desire to build the dialogue in clear tones. In Their Own Words seeks to hear from voices on all sides of the issue; those looking on, those deeply involved, those unsure of where all this is taking us. Every voice is important and we invite you to join in by leaving a comment or contacting us directly at info@faithhousemanhattan.org.

Length of the interview: app. 20 minutes

Click here to LISTEN "A Talk With Samir" ...

Click here to DOWNLOAD "A Talk With Samir" …

Interview conducted by Stacey Antoine Savariau, JD, CHHC, AADP, a Certified Holistic Health Counselor, creativity coach, workshop leader and an evolved attorney. After working for years as a litigator she retired from the courtroom to pursue her other passions. Stacey is devoted to coaching, teaching & facilitating workshops & women’s wisdom circles for creating vibrant health, awakening creativity, restoring passionate and balanced living & discovering the work we were born to do. She reaches a global audience through her site, www.OneWorldWellness.com. Stacey lives in a brownstone on a tree-lined street in Brooklyn, N.Y. Where else?

Four Stories of God

~ by Samir Selmanovic

For more than 20 years since my baptism (a ritual by which one signals publicly that one has become a follower), people have often given me the opportunity to “tell my story”—to “give a testimony,” as we Christians like to call it. Despite the fact that my life with God was not only passionate but also conflicted and complicated, the story itself was easy to tell. It was all one story. One life. One song. 

But it is not that easy anymore. Today, as early Hasidic Rav Kook did long ago, I find myself wondering which song I should sing. Should I look into my own soul and sing the song of the struggles and joys I encounter within? Or should I move beyond myself and sing the song of my people, my religion? Or maybe I should rise above my Christian story and sing a song of all songs of humanity? Or should I spread my heart still wider and sing a song with all creation?

Is the story of God a story of my own soul, a story of my religion, a story of humanity or a story of all that is? To accept all these stories as the stories of God is to imply that my religion then becomes only a part of the ultimate story of the world, not the ultimate story itself.

Orthodox rabbi David Hartman, concerned with the perennial conflict in Jerusalem, insists that different melodies of one God must be cherished: “Each group feels that its way is the only way: there is one God, therefore there has to be one truth. Christians build their story on the Jewish story and therefore feel they are inheritors of Judaism. Muslims built their story on the Bible, and therefore they feel that they are the perfect expression of monotheism. Now, we’ve got to get out of each other’s story. We can’t feel that in order for me to tell my story, your story has to end. . . . In other words, affirmation [of my story] does not require that I demonise those who are different from me. I don’t have to build conviction out of hate and fear.” If my identity depends on annihilation of other stories, I cannot really sing all four songs of God.

What if God measures our religion by the way it contributes to stories other than one’s own? What if our religions will be judged by the good they bring to their non-adherents? Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel says this succinctly: “When in the afterglow of religious insight I can see a way that is good for all humans as it is for me—I will know it is His way.”

In the same vein, The Quran reads, “Had God willed He would have made you into one religious community; but it was his will to test you in what He gave you. So compete with each other in doing good works” (Quran 5:48). Seyyed Hossein Nasr of George Washington University contends that “there’s no more crucial problem for our day than to be able to cross religious frontiers while preserving our own integrity. In fact, I think this the only exciting intellectual adventure of our times.”

So I find it hard to “give a testimony” today without offending people of my own religion whose identity depends on a divided and conflicted world. As a follower of Christ, I have grown to believe in a world that is larger than Christianity. Jesus called this larger world the kingdom of God. It is the symphony made of all stories, individual and communal, our magnanimous God is involved with in this world.

Only God is God. And Christianity is not. Nor Judaism. Nor Islam. Paradoxically, this realization about the greatness of God is a deeply Christian, Jewish and Muslim teaching.

When I pray the Lord’s Prayer, I begin with the first word, “Our . . .” (see Matthew 6:9) and I stop and ask myself, “Who do I include in this Our?” I remind myself that the story of God is bigger than my personal story, bigger than the story of my religion, bigger than the story of all humanity, and bigger than the story of all creation. In the kingdom of God, these four stories are all really my stories—all at the same time—woven together, giving meaning and life to each other.

(from Signs of the Times, Australia, September 2007, adapted by the author)

Reflections: The World We Want to Live In

~ by Rathi Raja

Rathi Raja is president of the Arsha Vedanta Center of Long Island and executive director of the Young Indian Culture Group. She has been featured extensively on PBS in their “Asian Indians in America” and in The New York Times. She is an active member of the Herricks Clergy Coalition, an interfaith group based in New Hyde Park, engaging in educating through programs in the community, schools and colleges. She has been a Hindu spiritual teacher for the past 17 years, sharing the teachings of the Vedic vision with youth and adults. She is an ethnographer and storyteller of Asian Indian heritage, and a founding trustee of Young Indian Culture Group, Inc. Rathi served as a panel member of the New York State Council on the Arts for 2003-2005, was named the Long Island Traditions’ Honoree of the Year, and received the Nassau County Community Service Award in 2000. (Recently we had the privilege of sitting down with this effervescent woman, and found her views most insightful and energizing as we continue to make plans for Faith House. Here is her contribution to our blog.)

Healing starts by knowing ourselves and then allowing the powers of desire and action to do their work. Inter-religious or inter-group dialogue without self-reflection takes us nowhere. That vital first step of knowing oneself facilitates every other progress. Without self-awareness, a dialogue is a nonstarter.

Our relationships should be far more than tolerant, but a true spirit of tolerance matters. Not one based on law, for that will be short lived, rather one rooted in compassion. Tolerance without compassion is barren.

Every religious tradition builds on the cornerstone of compassion, because this is a key aspect of what it means to be truly human. No matter what our religious tradition, we can find compassion there. It may be buried under layers of distrust, anxiety, hatred, anger and jealousy, but when we rediscover this compassion, tolerance will happen!

And out of these two—tolerance and compassion—will come trust in each other. Lack of trust is the most eroding thing in our lives today, at a personal level, in our families, community, and country. Without getting that trust back, we will never know how to speak of and live out peace.

Faith that comes from restored trust, when expressed through our personal lives or organized religion, can douse the flames of hatred and anger, and dismantle the rigid boundaries we sometimes erect for self-protection. In contrast, a faith that encourages its followers to draw rigid boundaries will lead to deepening distrust and fear, and a sense of hopelessness about ever being able to establish peaceful human relationships.

We spend so much of the world’s resources on biological diseases, but what about the spread of hatred? Unfortunately distrust and hatred spread as fast as biological diseases and are most destructive in terms of loss of human life. Like restoring human health, restoring human trust will bring with it unmeasurable good.

What is key in this process of rediscovery of what we can be? Forgiveness! We must forgive ourselves first, for our past fears and for our hatreds. And we must forgive others for the pain and sorrow they have caused us. We must forgive society for our collective ignorance and forgive history for its wide swath of painful, violent events. Justice without forgiveness is an empty vessel that will not quench our thirst or heal our social ills.

The only antidote for this epidemic is to realize there is a larger force, a bigger order to this universe, and to take the journey forward to re-learn to trust this grace for all and this order. That is how people change—true trust, one person at a time. And when these individuals find one another and become friends, the movement can multiply exponentially.

Just as our physical environment needs immediate attention if we are to avoid catastrophic consequences, our social and religious environments need immediate attention if we are to quell the spirit of violence, mistrust, and hatred engulfing so many areas of our world. The path away from the brink begins with the steps of self-exploration, compassion, forgiveness, and trust. These are the essential healing qualities we must share with every person we meet.

Thank you for Faith House dream. Your enthusiasm and openness is based on strength and a desire to reach beyond the tried, tested and failed sequence of steps. You are curious and will surely discover that people are waiting for that spark to know they have nothing to fear, only something to gain!

Count me in friends!

________________________________________________

Truth is one: sages call it by different names
It is the one Sun who reflects in all the ponds;
It is the one water which slakes the thirst of all;
It is the one air which sustains all life;
It is the one fire which shines in all houses;
Colors of the cows may be different, but the milk is white;
Systems of Faith may be different but God is One.
As the rain dropping from the sky finds its way towards the ocean,
So the prayers offered in all faiths reach the One God, who is supreme.

    —Rig Veda

What's in the House?

~ by Samir Selmanovic

When I came back from a trip couple of months ago, I found a sheet of paper, “a surprise for dad,” on my desk. My daughters Leta, who is 10, and Ena, 12, drew Faith House as an actual house, with rooms, an attic, a yard, and a basement. This is how they imagine the future. 

- for a larger image: click on the picture -

 
They latter asked me to give them the password for my computer. “What if you die?" they said.  "If something happens to you, we want to work on it."  I was startled. My wife Vesna and I have thought them to pursue a life of loving God and belonging to a real community, but I did not know they so quickly understood that these ideals are larger than any one of us.

If you want to read more about their relationship to Faith House, you can click at the following two posts:

Not a Believer Yet (April 3, 2007)

Her Prayer (July 10, 2007)

Enough in Common

~ by Roy Naden, an author and Professor Emeritus (Andrews University, MI) who lives, gardens, and writes in Seattle area

It’s Thanksgiving Day 2007, a beautifully warm, sunny day here on the North West Coast where I write.  Today I had to call a cab for a friend and her two little children newly arrived from Africa.  They are coming to have their first traditional American meal with us.  I called Tony’s cell phone.  He’s been taking me to and from Seattle-Tacoma airport for over a decade.  He seems to work 365 days a year.

An unrecognizable voice answers.  “Is Tony there?” I ask.  An Indian-accented male voice says, “No.”  I repeat the number I thought I had dialed and ask, “Do I have the right number?”  “Yes,” he confirms, “but Tony isn’t here.  He’s dead!”   

I stammer out the first words that come from the tip of my tongue:  “But he took me to the airport a couple of months ago just before he left for India on a business trip!”—as if that comment had any relevance.  “What happened?” I continued.   “It happened on his trip.  Someone gave him the poison.  He died.”  The conversation also seemed to die at that moment.  I had no idea who this man was, or what to say to him, or what to comment about the circumstances of his death.  What do you say to a total stranger when someone you both know has died?

Pictures of Tony began floating through my memory.  He was such a dapper Indian.  Impeccably dressed, his cab immaculately kept, and like a crown he proudly wore the turban common to all men of the Sikh religion, holding their long hair.  The practice of allowing one's hair to grow naturally is a symbol of respect for the perfection of God's creation.  He seemed to have an endless supply of brightly colored cloth with which he wove his head gear, from brilliant yellow to rich purple, and very occasionally he picked me up wearing a black turban.  But the drabness didn’t suit him.  He was always so talkative and helpful.  We got to know each other’s families over the years.  He followed my various trips around the world by taking me to my departing flight and being the first one to welcome me back to Seattle.  And when he was about to leave on an annual business trip to India, he would tell me all he hoped to accomplish.

The man on the line gave me the contact information for Tony’s family. As I sat looking at the number I had just written down on a post-it pad, I didn’t know what to do.  I had never actually met Tony’s wife; didn’t even know her name.  But I thought I should call her and express my sympathy.  That seemed like an awkward conversation.  If she had been a Christian, it would have been easy.

I’m a slow thinker.  I said to myself, “Tony was a sincere believer and spoke of his faith often.  But his beliefs were vastly different from mine.  I was accustomed to comforting Christians. What could possibly sustain a conversation with his wife?”  I called the number anyway.  Tony’s wife answered.  I told her my name, that we had never met, but that I had learned quite a lot about her and her two children from Tony.  Before I could continue, she exclaimed, “You must be the man from Australia!  Tony spoke about you often.”  And from there the conversation flowed easily.  Without hesitation I told her of my sadness at Tony’s passing, and I told her I would pray that God would comfort her and sustain her in her loss.  We talked for a quite a while. 

Afterwards, as I thought about the call, the more I realized how much we held in common.  Two human beings.  We knew about each other simply because her husband and I had been friends.  We both new the deep sadness of a loss in our families.  And we both believed in God.  The differences may have been more numerous than the likenesses, but the basics that really mattered we held in common: relationships, feelings, and desire to understand the other.  It was enough to allow meaningful conversation.  It almost always is.

Binding In Jordan and Manhattan

~ by Lauralea Banks, a new Program Coordinator of Faith House Manhattan

After deciding my life in Washington, DC, was not fulfilling or taking me where I wanted to go, I decided to seize the moment and pursue my wildest dream. 

Three years ago, I moved to Jordan for nine months to study Arabic.  I had visited Jordan twice on archeology digs in a little village close to Amman. But moving there was something different. In part, I wanted to experience how deep Jordanian hospitality went.  My earlier visits had revealed the kindest, most giving people I had ever met.  But I wondered if the red-carpet treatment had been brought out just for a guest.  And if their hospitality was really as deep as it seemed, I wondered what driving force lay behind it?  Was it culture, religion, heritage?

After living in Jordan for a few months, I began to figure out how to navigate social interactions. I learned for example that people might offer things, but you only knew they were serious if you declined their offer three times and they still insisted.  Many times I found they meant what they said, but just as often they changed the subject after the first invitation.

Throughout my nine-month stay, one group of people inspired my passion for interfaith dialog and this prepared me to capture the vision of Faith House.

I felt fortunate to have friends in Jordan before I moved there.  They emailed advice prior to my arrival, and only later did I learn they had spent hours knocking on doors trying to find me an apartment.  Through their military connections, they obtained special passes so they could meet me at the gate of my plane.  At every turn, they were there to help me.  And yes, they found me an apartment, and then shared information about jobs in which I might be interested.  They took me shopping.  For my first week, they arranged for one of their cousins to meet me everyday after school to make sure I settled in OK.  It became a habit and for nine months I spent every afternoon surrounded by people eager to help who wanted only friendship in return. Over time I felt a degree of skepticism about such kindness and pressed a friend on the subject.  He responded that that they wouldn't be good Jordanians or Muslims if they didn't take good care of me.  Then he paused, looked at me and said it was partly my fault.  I had been so interested in them, and had been so non-judgmental of our differences that it had been hard for them not to reciprocate!

We spent hours talking about religion: each of us explaining why we belonged to our respective faiths.  It proved to be quite a challenge because there were irreconcilable differences between us that we could only begin to understand by seeing the world through each other's eyes.  A few months after I arrived, we had a long conversation about women in Islam.  They explained why women in the Middle East utilize a different “space” than women in America.  It took all nine months of my stay to begin to wrap my brain around the different ways Jordanians define female agency and empowerment.  I'm still trying to understand it.  But our friendship only deepened in these conversations and made me recognize the arrogance I brought with my worldview.  My friends began to feel the same way about their perspectives as well.

As we dismantled misunderstandings and arrogance, something else happened to our friendship: I spent more time in the village with my friends.  Invitations were always extended three times and after awhile, merely mentioning an event meant I was expected to show up.  And when some guys at school approached my friends and asked about me in a suggestive tone (implying the stereotypical assumption that all Americans are like Britney Spears) they were told I was a sister.  These young guys protested, but were firmly informed I was their sister and would be respected as such.  Their willingness to defend me as their own blood deeply affected me and proved to be a monumental step in our friendship.  They insisted I was not like other Americans, that the thoughtfulness I brought to my religion and spirituality made me more like them than if I had converted to Islam. It’s true they often expressed the wish that I would convert, but respected that I had a different path to walk.  As a result, our friendship created a strange new family of different religions but similar mandates for living.

When Samir approached me about Faith House Manhattan, it resonated with my experience in Jordan.  Imagine Muslims, Jews, Christians, Atheists, Buddhists, and other religions coming together, staying rooted in their faith but recognizing that their religious journey can be strengthened by learning about other religious traditions!  From my experience in Jordan I can say this process is powerful and binds people together in a unique way.  Imagine taking that powerful connection and using it to touch the lives of neighbors in your community.  I've already lived the dream of Faith House and the outcome is miraculous and beautiful.  For me it is the true and complete picture of God.

(read more about Lauralea soon on this website)

Don't Hurry Through This One

~ by Samir Selmanovic

I am at an airport right now. 

If you travel a lot, I am pretty sure you cannot escape the magic of watching people every once in a while, imagining their journeys, their stories, studying their body language, their faces, thinking about what they are really like. What is her life like? Where is she coming from? Where is she going? If you look at a person long enough you are bound to realize that, without exception, they are your very own flesh and blood. You realize we are all coming from the same origin, the same womb, we are all living under the same sky, going into the same dirt. 

Here is a poem by a contemporary poet I discovered recently. Her name is Naomi Shihab Nye. Naomi was born to a Palestinian father and an American mother and grew up in Jerusalem and San Antonio. Her books of poetry include 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East, A Maze Me: Poems for Girls, Red Suitcase, Words Under the Words, and You and Yours.

I suggest, don't hurry through this poem. Let yourself be there.

WANDERING AROUND AN ALBUQUERQUE AIRPORT TERMINAL 
(by Naomi Shihab Nye)

After learning my flight was detained 4 hours,
I heard the announcement:
If anyone in the vicinity of gate 4-A understands any Arabic,
Please come to the gate immediately.

Well—one pauses these days. Gate 4-A was my own gate. I went there.
An older woman in full traditional Palestinian dress,
Just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing loudly.
Help, said the flight service person. Talk to her. What is her
Problem? We told her the flight was going to be 4 hours late and she
Did this.

I put my arm around her and spoke to her haltingly.
Shu dow-a, shu-beduck habibti, stani stani schway, min fadlick,
Sho bit se-wee?

The minute she heard any words she knew—however poorly used—
She stopped crying.
She thought our flight had been canceled entirely.
She needed to be in El Paso for some major medical treatment the
Following day. I said no, no, we’re fine, you’ll get there, just late.

Who is picking you up? Let’s call him and tell him.
We called her son and I spoke with him in English.
I told him I would stay with his mother till we got on the plane and
Would ride next to her—Southwest.

She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for the fun of
It. Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and
Found out of course they had ten shared friends.

Then I thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian
Poets I know and let them chat with her. This all took up about 2 hours.

She was laughing a lot by then. Telling about her life. Answering
Questions.

She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies—little powdered
Sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts—out of her bag—
And was offering them to all the women at the gate.

To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a
Sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the traveler from California,
The lovely woman from Laredo—we were all covered with the same
Powdered sugar. And smiling. There is no better cookies.

And I noticed my new best friend—by now we were holding hands—
Had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing,
With green furry leaves. Such an old country traveling tradition. Always
Carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.

And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought,
This is the world I want to live in. The shared world.
Not a single person in this gate—once the crying of confusion stopped
—has seemed apprehensive about any other person.

They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women too.
This can still happen anywhere.

Not everything is lost.

 

Celtic Trail: A Better Way to Believe

~ by Danut Manastireanu, Romania

Whatever our deeply held religious beliefs or worldviews, there are different ways to communicate it to others.  How we believe is equally important as what we believe.  Recently I had the extraordinary opportunity of a study trip on Celtic spirituality, following in the footsteps of St. Patrick, Columba, and Aidan.  Sharing cherished convictions and practices in a way that honors the others is the true test of our faith and character. 

The trail began in Downpatrick in Northern Ireland the origination point of the magnificent story of St. Patrick. In the fifth century, Irish raiders abducted the boy Patrick and made him a slave in Celtic territory.  There he had a personal encounter with God that changed his life. After a miraculous escape, Patrick returned to Britain, became a priest, and felt God's call to return to Ireland and become an apostle and prophet among the Celts.

Missions and missionaries do not always have a good name these days. Patrick, however, was a different kind of missionary. He did not have a faith to sell, but a story to tell. And his incredible personal life gave authority to the story. He did not try to uproot the druidic traditions of the Celts, but reconstituted them and incorporated them into a creative, courageous Christian faith. At the end of his life, one chronicler observes, Celtic lands knew a long-lasting peace unprecedented in the history of this most temperamental nation.

From Ireland, we moved to Iona, a tiny island south-west of Scotland, where Columba, a Celtic monk from Ireland landed in 563 AD with twelve of his disciples. Columba’s arrival changed the face of the island. He established a monastery, and taught the community to read and write.  They were known as "people of the Book" and brought the Christian faith to the Hebrides and Britain, and to the feared Picts that inhabited Scotland at the time. Columba’s version of Christianity, inspired by the vision of Pelagius was:  a rural community, close to nature, democratic, gender balanced, optimistic about the goodness of humanity, poetic and passionate.  This community stood in striking contrast to the Roman version of the Christian faith rooted in the vision of Augustine: an urban community, imperial, hierarchical, institutional, pessimistic about the human nature, and somewhat impersonal.

The last leg of the Celtic trail took us to Lindisfarne, the "holy island" in the north of England, where Aidan, a monk from the Iona community, came at the request of Oswald the king of Northumbria and established a Christian mission to the population in that territory in 631 AD. Aidan served the poor and liberated slaves with the riches he received. He established schools, challenged the powerful about their abuses and preached the love of God in Christ to this troubled generation. Not long after Aidan, the Roman version of Christianity became prevalent, and Celtic Christianity faded into the background, surviving only as an undercurrent in a world dominated by Rome.

Who knows what the history of the world could have been if the faith of Patrick, Columba and Aidan had prevailed?  Who knows what the future of the world can be if our religions would learn to follow the trails like these?

Danut Manastireanu is an economist and theologian who lives in Iasi, Romania. Danut is married to Mihaela and they have two grown up children and five grand children.  He holds a PhD in theology from Brunel University, London and works as Director for Faith & Development for the Middle East & Eastern Europe region of World Vision International.

Spiritual Discipline of Receiving

~ by Samir Selmanovic

On a steamy hot summer day, after our Christian worship gathering, a group of us went to one of the New York city parks with gallons of homemade ice-cold lemonade, offering it to anyone who wanted it—for free. But people did not want it. That is, until we asked them to pay for it. Only then they would take it and happily guzzle it down.

People know that a gift is almost never just that, a gift. Philosopher Jacques Derrida argues that what we have historically regarded as a gift was actually never a gift. We give to gain. In return, we covet a favor, thankfulness, a sense of satisfaction in seeing ourselves as a giving person or simply the warm sensation of buying something for someone we love. Our gifts are a form of exchange. We give something obvious, to receive something subtle.

Sensing this dynamic, people who stand to lose anything don’t easily accept free help, advice, favors or money from others. To receive means to lose control. Gifts change relationships.  The recipient becomes a “weaker part” in the transaction.

Accordingly, receiving anything associated with someone else's religion is far more difficult than receiving a glass of lemonade.  That's why this reluctance to receive has become a grave problem among religious people today. Yes, we have learned to tolerate one another to some extent. Jews, Christians, Muslims and atheists have learned to live parallel lives and have parallel monologues, like toddlers who enjoy parallel play. But in order to make progress toward peace and justice in the world and in order to increase joy and beauty of human life, we must learn to appreciate, and at times receive what others have to give us. 

For many, this amounts to recanting of one’s own faith. Religion is an expression of what we hold as true, valuable and beautiful. Because religion—or any other worldview (including atheist varieties)—holds the meaning of our life together, accepting a gift of insight, truth, or beauty from other groups feels like losing face, control or power over life we think we have mastered through our religion. It potentially exposes the weaknesses of our faith structure, casting us as weaker and therefore dependent on the relationship with others.

That’s why many people who are sure about everything don’t know how to recognize their needs or receive a blessing from others.  Even within groups that want to learn to love others, we say to each other, “Love people, in your school, in your neighborhood, in your workplace. And then give them the truth.” We call each other to ministry, which always means serving people, caring for their needs, teaching them what they need to know to live better lives. Giving, giving, giving. Giving keeps us in control, subtly communicating the superiority of our worldview not only to others, but to ourselves as well.

And we like to be in control—even of God, goodness and love.

Our giving is actually becoming a way of taking.  We exalt the virtue of giving, saying, “It is in giving that we receive.” This is true and the world would perish without people who understand this law of life of any human community. But, how about giving up the role of being the sole giver of truth to the world?  That would be the ultimate act of giving, expressed (paradoxically) through receiving. In the relationship between religions, the attitude of being a sole dispenser of the blessing is becoming terribly counter-productive.  When it comes to God and truth, every group wants to teach and no group wants to learn. Everyone wants to stay in control by giving and nobody wants to seem weak by receiving. That’s why, for example, religions often don’t know how to repent of their historical failures. Repentance means one needs to receive forgiveness. And receiving means our religion is not as perfect as we think it must be. 

Religion (or a worldview) that will matter in the future will not pretend to be faultless, self-sufficient and above the frailties of human existence. In my Christian tradition, for example, concept of sin revolves around self-sufficiency. And this should include matters of spirituality. To grow spiritually should mean to journey to a place where we get better and better at receiving goodness, grace, and God from others. God is in others, even in the enemy. God is in a stranger. That’s why in the Bible hospitality is of such value, not just as a custom of the day but as a way God visits us, unexpectedly.

Love knows how to take what others have to offer even when that is something we think we are in charge of! That’s why evangelism—sharing the good news of Christianity—at its best is primarily a process of receiving, in humility, before the mystery of God, thus acknowledging our creaturehood to other creatures, becoming their sojourner.  When we receive from others, we celebrate the wisdom God has given them, we affirm grace in their experience, and we find footsteps of God in their life. Rewards are far greater than a cup of lemonade. 

It is often by giving that we control or take and by receiving that we actually love and give. In the matters of God, only learners can be safe teachers. “Teachers of others” who are not “learners from others,” will sooner or later lose their authority. It is already happening. And the world will be better for it.

(from Signs of the Times, Australia, September 2007, adapted by the author)

Who Is My Neighbor?

~ by Ryan Bell, the Senior Pastor of the Hollywood Seventh-day Adventist Church, currently completing his Doctor of Ministry in Missional Leadership at Fuller Theological Seminary. To read more from Ryan go to his blog Intersections.

One of the most familiar and enduring stories from the Christian scripture is known as The Good Samaritan. This story has achieved popular status in the form of “Good Samaritan laws,” which in the United States and Canada, protect from prosecution bystanders who help a person in need. In some countries you can actually be held responsible if you don’t at least call for help. But in spite of the popular recognition of this story, its basic message still eludes us.

The story is found in New Testament of the Christian Bible, Luke 10:25-37. Jesus tells a story of a Jewish man who was traveling the dangerous road from Jerusalem to Jericho when he was attacked by robbers and left for dead. Two religious men came along and saw him lying in a pool of his own blood and then passed by on the other side of the road, each for their own religious reason.

As in all good stories, the third man to walk by is the central character in the story – a Samaritan. In a shocking twist, the Samaritan does what the Jewish religious elite was unwilling to do. He stops, bends down, bandages the man’s wounds, and takes him to a house where he can get rest and care, promising to return and pay all the bills.

There are so many ways this story speaks into our human situation, but over the years I have missed one central observation. At first, Jesus is asked a question about how a person could obtain eternal life. When he puts the question back to the clever lawyer who asked it, he answers correctly, “love God and love your neighbor.”  But because the lawyer lives in a divided world, he inquires of Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?” And it is this word “neighbor” that becomes a central teaching point of Jesus.

For the listeners of the time, using a Samaritan as the protagonist of the story and a hero was not merely radical. It was repulsive. Centuries old hatred between Jews and Samaritans resulted in a belief that God cannot possibly be engaged with Samaritans. They were the worst kind of apostates – using half-truths to twist the truth into a lie. Samaritans were not only wrong.  They were enemies of God and therefore worthy of all contempt.

It’s an ancient blood feud that finds its way into our living rooms in the form of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict of today. Both Jews and Samaritans claimed to be the true descendents of Abraham and Moses, and therefore the rightful inheritors of the land. Sound familiar?  This ancient hostility is also similar to the way that Protestants and Catholics have vilified each other through the centuries. Protestant churches often refer to the Catholic Church as “the beast” of Revelation. On the other hand, the Pope recently issued a statement saying that non-Catholic “churches”, while not being totally rejected by God, are still not, in the proper sense, “churches,” because they have left the mother church.  While Protestants and Catholics may have many legitimate disagreements, excluding one another from belonging to God has a history of massive bloodshed.

So, when Jesus finishes telling the story and asks this religious lawyer which of these men was neighbor to the man in need, he cannot even utter the word “Samaritan” and so he says, “The one who had mercy on him.”

In the story, Jesus brilliantly strips this elite man of his power and prestige by making him a victim of a roadside mugging, and then makes him the recipient of mercy and hospitality at the hands of someone he despises. Then Jesus, in a moment of rhetorical brilliance, presses home the central question: Can this Jew experience the grace of God through a Samaritan?

What was so shocking for the listeners was not that Samaritan was merely a good person.  It was the fact that Jesus used a Samaritan to teach them a lesson about God!  Jesus taught about the commandments of God by embodying his teaching through the actions of a “wrong person.” 

It’s easy to love our neighbors when we get to decide who our neighbor is.

The real test of our love comes when we stand face to face with “the other” – the one who is different from us in every way. It is only as we are stripped of our power, prestige, and arrogance about being right all the time (like the lawyer) that will we be able to rightly discern God coming to us from “those people” whoever “those people” might be for us.

Are neighbors only those who live in my neighborhood? My literal neighborhood, my socio-economic neighborhood, my ideological neighborhood, my religious neighborhood.  Can we be the recipients of God’s blessing at the hands of someone we do not consider to be our neighbor at all?  That was the surprise Jesus had for the lawyer that day.  That is the surprise lesson for our world.  And the lesson I need to learn and re-learn all of my life.

I ... if You

         Among the Shona people of Zimbabve,
         this is how they greet one another.



   "Marare hare?"
   Did you sleep?
               "Ndarare kana mararawo."
               I slept well if you slept well.
   "Ndarare."
   I slept.

                                                "Makadii?"
                                                How are you?
                        "Ndiripo makadiwo."
                        I am here if you are here.
                                                "Ndiripo."
                                                I am here.

(from Turning to One Another, by Margaret J. Wheatley,
Berret-Koehler Pub. Inc., 2002)

The Grace in Being Outnumbered

~ by Nathan Brown, author, Editor (Signs of the Times, Australia / New Zealand)

The rainy season has come to Cambodia and the oppressive heat is punctuated with regular downpours that flood the fields, roads and marketplaces. Ploughs drawn by cows, water buffaloes or small engines churn the mud in preparation for the rice planting. And the sugar palms stand like tall exclamation marks amid the patchwork of ploughed mud, small lakes and vibrant green.

The roads are more difficult than usual, with the usual clinging dust replaced with brown puddles and sticky mud. But the traffic is no less frenzied, as animals and animal-powered carts share the roadways with large trucks, buses, hordes of small motorbikes and cyclists, and school children in the standard pristine white shirts and dark trousers or long skirts. In some places, the rain washes clean; in others, it collects all the rubbish into polluted pools. A wet fug adds to the spectrum of smells that emanate from the many roadside markets. And when the sun next breaks through the clouds, the humidity rises from the rain-soaked ground and thickens the air until is can almost be tasted.