Interfaith Dialogue #1 or Channeling My Inner Pyro

When the subject of religion pops up at the dinner table, or a cocktail party, or a first date, most people will hold their breathe in hopes that it will quietly pass or nervously fold the topic into their lap napkin. It is flagged as a source of political controversy, or worse yet, a volatile time bomb of people’s most emotional, subjective, and inflexible beliefs. And you just don’t tamper with belief if you want to keep things civil.

As a student of ministry and theology, however, that is exactly where I am asked to begin. Temperamental religious perspectives are my occupational hazards. Religion is the burning building that I am bursting into as everyone else is running out.

I am running into the flames for a living, because religion has been the source of my most luminous joy and singeing discomfort. Some of it has breathed wisdom and consolation into my life, while other statements of belief have left me injured from the fierce licks of patriarchal language, dualistic conceptions of the flesh and spirit, and dangerously absolute statements about who God is. I am transfixed by the paradoxical flames of religious experience, and therefore, cannot seem to walk (or run) away like most.

But upon arriving at Harvard Divinity, the heated reality of religious pluralism has been turned up a notch. There is a wide spectrum of religious traditions lived out here- from Buddhism to Islam to Judaism to secular humanism to Catholicism to more Christian denominations than I could possibly remember. Yet, beyond these nominal distinctions there are even deeper differences in spiritual dispositions, that is, how people talk about their religious encounters with the divine.

I recently read the spiritual autobiography of a 19^th century black, Methodist woman, who recalls a childhood experience of lying, where she says, “the spirit of God moved in power through my conscience, and told me I was a wretched sinner.” In the margins, I simply wrote “guilt.” Of course I know that if God is intimately present to creation, and speaks through the movements of one’s heart, then the experience of guilt is not all that different from hearing the disapproval of God thundering in one’s soul. Yet, the dramatic, sensationally active God of Jarena’s account disturbs me for multiple reasons. Apart from lying, there are a number of things that people may feel guilty about that are not actually morally reprehensible. How many people, for instance, are conditioned by our homophobic culture and misguided interpretations of scripture to feel ashamed of their natural, God-given sexuality? Are they to read their emotion of guilt as the disapproving voice of God? I cannot, in good conscience, endorse that translation of “God’s word,” when it smacks of cultural constructions.

In and out of class, people are sharing very personal religious experiences with me and I am forced to grapple with their personal accounts in the same complicated way that I must read Jarena’s narrative. A postmodern scholar of religion would quickly advise me to consider how every expression of faith is inevitably colored by the cultural and political influences of an era as they interact with the intricate psychological landscape of an individual. Their words are not my words, and their inflecting worldview is not my worldview. And if my only task were to analyze these differences from the safe distance of an essay then I’d probably be sleeping a whole lot easier at night. But that would also mean I am just looking at the picture of a blazing building, instead of entering it.

One of my first commitments in ministry is to honor the lived experiences of others, no matter how much they may offend my own sensibilities, because I recognize that these are people, with involved life experiences and relationships that have informed their convictions and therefore, I can not reduce them to a walking theological argument.

Yet, the flames of their experience still tickle and occasionally burn against my own. Comparative religious studies does not call upon me in the same way that ministry formation does; it does not ask that I pray with someone, or enter into pastoral care or practice spiritual discernment with them. When one begins to engage the real differences, or the places of deep disturbance, it is hard to retain such composure. In these instances, I cannot deny how very hot and suffocating the air around me becomes.

And so, what do you do with a blazing fire that has the potential to be both life-giving and death-dealing? How do you tend to it?

Any response I offer this early in the interfaith experiment that is Harvard Divinity School, would be mere speculation. I cannot provide an exact formula for understanding, or a miracle cooling unction to relieve the discomfort that these religious conflagrations can bring.

However, last year my friend, Tyler, threw me a line that I am still clutching in my own smoky confusion: “You always have more in common with a person than you don’t,” he said to me. This idea gives me some serenity in an otherwise hysterical world because it insists that we notice what is really connecting us, rather than dwelling on apparent divisions and their disturbances. It also prompts me to cultivate the curiosity of a pyro. Yes, that’s right, a pyro. It happens to be the only image in my treasury of thought that conveys the disposition required to stand before waves of heat and look, with rapt attention, for the flicker of what we hold in common.