Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others

by Barbara Brown Taylor

Jesus seems to know more about the way of transformation than many of his followers do. If someone wants to learn more about God, he implies, it will involve more than believing someone else’s answers. It will involve thinking deeply about the questions you are asking and why. Then it will involve acting on the answers you come up with in order to discover what is true.

“You are a Jew?” the Dalai Lama asked him. When Kevin said yes, His Holiness said, “Judaism and Buddhism are very much alike. You should learn more about both and become a better Jew.”

finding these things attractive did not mean it was time for me to convert or—conversely—to start making a quilt of spiritual bits and pieces with no strong center. The third possibility was to let my attraction to other teachings transform my love for my own.

“if I worship You for fear of Hell, burn me in Hell, and if I worship You in hope of Paradise, exclude me from Paradise. But if I worship You for Your Own sake, grudge me not Your everlasting Beauty.”

What we have most in common is not our religion but our humanity,

In his book God and the Universe of Faiths, British theologian John Hick makes a compelling argument. Before Copernicus, he says, earthlings believed they occupied the center of the universe—and why not? Earth was the place from which they saw everything else. It was the ground under their feet, and as far as they could tell everything revolved around them. Then Copernicus proposed a new map of the universe with the sun at the center and all the planets orbiting around it. His proposal raised religious questions as well as scientific ones, but he was right. The sun, not the earth, holds the planets in our solar system together. Hick argues that it is past time for a Copernican revolution in theology, in which God assumes the prime place at the center and Christianity joins the orbit of the great religions circling around. Like the scientific revolution, this one requires the surrender of primary place and privileged view. Absolute truth moves to the center of the system, leaving people of good faith with meaningful perceptions of that truth from their own orbits. This new map does not require anyone to give up the claim to uniqueness. It only requires the acceptance of unique neighbors, who concur that the brightness they see at the center of everything exceeds their ability to possess it. The Franciscan father Richard Rohr had his eye on a different planetary body when he said, “We are all of us pointing toward the same moon, and yet we persist in arguing about who has th...

Other examples of redemptive religious strangers in the first testament of the Bible include Bithiah, the Pharaoh’s daughter who plucked the baby Moses from his rush basket in the River Nile and raised him as her own; Jethro, the Midianite priest who was Moses’s father-in-law and teacher; Ruth, the Moabite who became the ancestor of King David; and Cyrus, the Persian king who ended the Babylonian exile and allowed the Jews to return home—the only non-Jew in the Bible who is ever identified as God’s anointed one.

However you define the problematic present-day stranger—the religious stranger, the cultural stranger, the transgendered stranger, the homeless stranger—scripture’s wildly impractical solution is to love the stranger as the self. You are to offer the stranger food and clothing, to guarantee the stranger justice, to treat the stranger like one of your own citizens, to welcome the stranger as Christ in disguise. This is God’s express will in both testaments of the Bible.

there is a place where human knowing runs out.

The story of Jesus and Nicodemus freed me from believing I had to know the answer to every question about what it means to be Christian.

By revising the divine will and creating a world full of people who spoke different languages, God chose variety over uniformity. God created the conditions for multiple interpretations of everything that required speech to describe. There was no longer one right way to say a true thing. There were many ways to say it.

“Do unto others as they would have you do unto them (instead of thinking they are just like you).”

when my religion tries to come between me and my neighbor, I will choose my neighbor.

I asked God for religious certainty, and God gave me relationships instead.