Relating to other religions is like having a conversation with people in their own houses. In the past the questions of interfaith were conducted from a distance. A major question for the Church and theologians was how are non-Christian believers saved? Questions like these were answered without any meeting with the religions or their adherents. In today’s global culture these people have now come to live among us, and their children learn with our children in our schools. Also since Vatican II we are reclaiming the foundational text of 1 Tim 2:3 which says that God is not exclusive, and that God desires and effects the salvation of all peoples. More recently Pope John Paul II has taken interfaith dialogue further. Reflecting on the World Day of Prayer for Peace in Assisi in 1986 and marvelling at the bond of unity between the religious leaders there, he attributed it to the presence of the Holy Spirit, who as source of prayer in the gathering was ‘mysteriously present in the heart of every person.’ Thus, today our dialogue with other religions begins with getting acquainted with them, with entering their houses through their doors, knowing that here we will find God’s Spirit and Word in new and different manifestations. To find the Spirit’s voice in the religions is what I have been attempting to do in Understanding Differently: Christianity and the World Religions recently published. I present the four major religions – Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism – simply as theologies, as ancient and vibrant visions of God at work in the world and in peoples – each religion having its own particular radiance, rationality and spirituality. And since as a Christian I believe one cannot suppress the question of dialogue, I attempt to recount this story also in accompanying chapters. A Catholic theological perspective guides my responses throughout, and in the final chapter I focus on the question of Christ in relation to the religions. This short piece is simply a taste of what I have found in my study. Each religion has its own beauty and gift and I hope I can give voice to it.
My first encounter with interfaith dialogue was in the context of a spiritual search when I was exposed to Buddhism and made some Buddhist retreats in the US. The Buddhist tradition takes the human very seriously and I still remember it as a transforming experience. Later, while preparing a course for theology students I found that to be truthful in dialogue I must begin nearer home – with the Jews. To be Christian is also to be called to the faith of Abraham. To be Christian is to know, like the Jew, that God is Creator, that the Creator personally enters into our lives (makes covenant with us) and that the meaning of our lives is constantly given to us by a mysterious Other who reveals himself to us as the non-named one, YHWH. In short, to be fully human is to be guided by the self-revealing God in Word and Spirit. And to be fully human is also to respond to this guidance and go forth in faith as Abraham did. The Jews as a people are evidence of this primal divine revelation and of the human faith response. Their great philosopher, Abraham Heschel says they are ‘the track of God in the universe.’ We cannot afford to ignore them theologically or spiritually, and we still need the Jews today. Their obedience to Torah is a receiving in faith from God’s hands of the meaning of their lives. They believe that Torah, God’s Word to them, shapes every detail of their lives; that obedience to Torah makes them a priestly people whose vocation is to bring down God’s blessings (berakah) on the world. Through obedience to Torah they are also God’s co-workers. Their duty is tikunolam, the ‘mending’ of the broken world. All of life is ordered by Torah, and under its guidance they hallow the world through their work and through festivals which punctuate the liturgical year. Of particular significance is the Jewish festival of weekly rest – Shabbat. It is said to be the Jews’ greatest gift to the world. Shabbat teaches that in order to be human we must regularly withdraw from work and leave the Creator in charge. We must take time to wonder and give thanks for human existence, for the joys of family, of home life and good food. In the Jewish imagination, all the actions of Shabbat are about living as if the kingdom of God has come. And God’s kingdom is not exclusive. It is never a cosy dreamland, and to every Sabbath meal a stranger or needy person is invited, because biblical Jewish love never lets itself forget that all is not well with the world. Staying with the Jews has also meant I discovered the psalms in a new way. I began to pray them as Jewish prayers. With these prayers I came before God in all my humanness, fragility and tears. Like a good Jew I haggled with YHWH. Like Jacob in the haunting story of Gen 32:24-32, I wrestled with that ‘Someone’, begging his blessing and I became converted to a God of more colour and passion than the cool serene divinity of my Catholic theological formation. I also felt that this must have been how Jesus prayed to YHWH whom he called Abba.
Monsignor Dermot Lane – keynote speaker, Jo O’Donovan, Prof. Michael Hayes – President Mary Immaculate College, and Maura Hyland – Veritas at the launch
From this monotheism, with its sense of ‘God only’ and my relationship to him, it was easy to pass to Islam, which is even a more strict monotheism. The symbol of the minaret leaping audaciously to the sky reminds us of this. One can say that Tawhid, or the ‘Oneness of God’ in Islam, has three meanings. Firstly, ‘There can be only One God.’ Secondly, ‘Nothing can be associated with God.’ Here lies the ground for Islam’s difficulty with the Incarnation which implies the impossible truth for them that ‘God begets’ or that Jesus is God’s Son. While ‘association’ here is at the level of doctrine, there is also another ‘association’ which is forbidden: that the attachments or caprice which characterise us as human must constantly be purified so as not to take the place of God. Thirdly, Islam proclaims that it is Divine Oneness that sets the standard of unity, balance and equilibrium that should characterise the House of Islam. God’s unifying Lordship of all aspects of life is communicated variously through the Koran, the teachings of the Prophet and Shariah law. As we know, the majority of Muslims who adhere single-mindedly to the purity of Islamic faith are very modest persons. Theirs is a simple and austere faith in which they are ‘servants of Allah.’ Their faith allows them to live in a protected universe, a dar al islam ‘a house of Islam’ where meaning is given to them by a Merciful and Compassionate God. A cursory glance at the rich devotional life of Islam dispels any idea that it is a dry and anaemic religious tradition. While faith is obedience to the outwardly-given channels of divine revelation (the Koran etc.), it is also an inner movement of the human spirit. It is devotional Islam and it is called ‘doing the beautiful’ (ishan). Indeed the Koran says Allah ‘is closer to you than the jugular vein of your neck’. Muslims aspire to becoming more and more like God and Allah has ninety-nine Beautiful Names which are recited daily by devout believers on a beads. There is no sense in Islam of incarnation, or God entering the human as occurred in Jesus. God does not descend. But human beings ascend. Islam is a soaring religion. The empty interiors of the large beautiful mosques, usually decorated in muted blues and gold and Arabic calligraphy are meant to raise our minds above entanglements with matter and things of earth. Exposure to Islam and Judaism can indeed be a renewal in what I call the Abrahamic elements of Christian faith. These are its pure monotheism, its obedience to meaning as given in the Word of God, its sense that one’s life is shaped by that Word, whether Torah, Koran or Gospel; its invitation to faith, because the only response that is appropriate when the divine as Transcendent and Other calls to us is faith. There are many more of course, but naming these few identifying characteristics of the three great western faiths is necessary if we are to appreciate the difference of Eastern religions.
Jo O’Donovan with members of the Mid West Interfaith Group at the launch of her book Understanding Differently
Eastern religions are highly experiential in that they pay more attention to the role of the self in the journey of faith.
From the unreal lead me to the Real
From darkness lead me to Light
From death lead me to immortality.
In this text from one of the Hindu Upanishads the believer prays that the Real, the Light and the Immortal One should take over his / her life. God becomes real when God is experienced. We are also learning this from pioneering western spiritual seekers in India such as Benedictines, Bede Griffiths and Henri Le Saux, who say that God is found in the ‘cave of the heart’. Citing the Chandoga Upanishad :
The little space within your heart is as great as this vast universe.
The heavens and the earth are there.
And the sun and moon and the stars;
Fire and lightning and winds are there;
And all that now is and all that is not:
For the one universe is in Him and He dwells within your heart.
Bede tells us that this is the great gift of India – the evocation of the inner shrine or guha, the cave of the heart, where the meaning of life and all human existence is to be found. As we know meditation is the way to this depth of meaning where within the reaches of the self one finds ‘That thou art’ – meaning ‘God and self are one.’ But this is a sacred journey that requires guidance and not many are called to it. The majority of Hindus find their way to God through devotion to deities who are popular manifestations of the One Divine Reality – Brahman. Despite the diversity of deities, Hinduism is not a polytheism. It is a monotheism – a belief in One God, yet different from the Judaeo-Christian monotheism in that the divine Brahman is primarily a cosmic immanence. Hindu worship and spirituality find God at many levels, the deepest being the oneness of God and the self.
Prof. Eamon Conway – Mary Immaculate College, Mark Patrick Hedderman OSB – Glenstal, Josepha O’Shea and Mairead Kelly at the launch of Understanding Differently
If Hinduism purges the self through the purification of union with God, then Buddhism makes a direct onslaught on the human self as this text of the Dhammapada teaches:
Now thou art seen thou builder of the house,
Never again shalt thou build me a house.
All my rafters are broken, shattered my roof-beam;
My thoughts are purified of illusion;
The extinction of craving has been won.
This text actually describes the state of Buddhist enlightenment. A radical onslaught on the self and yet it is not a purely negative state. More truly it is a way of ‘emptiness’ (sunyata), an emptying out of the false self, vitiated by fear, avarice and illusion – ‘the three fires’ of human existence which Buddhists say keep us in chains. As a positive state, emptiness is a resting in wisdom and compassion. Furthermore the Buddha implies that the Absolute (God for us), of which he rarely speaks, is also Emptiness. He was a Hindu and regarding the question of the absolute, he distanced himself from the Hindu heaven of gods and goddesses and from the rituals with which priests mediated liberation to people that was by right the people’s own prerogative and within their power. He maintained a silence about God. Not a silence of denial, but what has been called – ‘a roaring silence.’ A pregnant and inviting silence that implies that the Absolute is beyond dualism; that it is not an object of our thought (our words fail us here); and that it is not a reality we can use and manipulate. It is obvious here that Buddhism is more at home with the apophatic tradition of Christian spirituality.
Book signing for Margaret Greene and Josie Davis
That said, one has also to accept that there are vast cultural and doctrinal differences between Christianity and Buddhism. The Dalai Lama once discouraged a Christian group from thinking that one can totally espouse Buddhism and remain a Christian. ‘You cannot’, he said, ‘put a yak’s head on a sheep’s shoulder’. This does not mean, however, that the gap between them is unbridgeable. R. Pannikar has said that the way through for the Christian to Buddhism is the prayer experience, not thought. We truly meet it when we experience it as a sacred therapy of the human that leads us to touch the ground of being. Here it is a ‘a skilful means’ that crosses borders into religions and cultures, because the one ground of being unites us all as human. Its greatest gift has been its practical one of methodic meditation which we know has influenced the Centering Prayer and Christian Meditation movements. It brings to Christian prayer a ‘can do’ practicality, a groundedness in the body and an awakened capacity to be there in the divine presence with one’s whole self. Here prayer is learnt by plunging into the act of praying itself; indeed being from the beginning an act of contemplation, which spiritual writers, since Vatican II say, is the perogative of everybody.
Speaking of conversation, the American theologian David Tracy once said: ‘To understand is to understand differently.’ And to understand another or what is other and different is to be changed somehow. His words always stayed with me and I never wavered from my choice to have them as title for this book. All these conversations have changed me, I hope. I have also discovered that the appreciation of difference – the moving out – returns one to the difference of one’s own faith. That return has been for me a real homecoming and the greatest gift the religions gave me.
Jo O’Donovan rsm
South Central Province
