Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others

by Barbara Brown Taylor

the same Spirit that called me into the church called me out again, to learn the difference between the living water and the well. As surely as priesthood had given me a sturdy bucket for dipping into that well—and as clearly as I could smell the elemental depths of the divine mystery every time I bent over to draw some of it up—the well was not the water. It was a container and not the source.

A deep lesson that the Church must really listen to as a needed revelation. Do you think the Christian Church recognizes this today? Do other religions? How so or why?

Contrary to popular opinion, all religions are not alike. Their followers see the world in very distinct ways. Their understandings of the human condition proceed from different assumptions, leading them to propose different remedies.

Resistance to these developments took many forms, including legislation. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 prohibited virtually all immigration from China. The Immigration Act of 1917 expanded the banned zone by adding a wide swath of Asia that included India and the Middle East. The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 added a national-origins quota to the mix, effectively decreasing the immigration of Italians, Jews, and Slavs from Southern and Eastern Europe. The main purpose of the Act, according to the Office of the Historian at the US Department of State, “was to preserve the ideal of American homogeneity.”

Over the past few years, a great light has been cast upon the racial & prejudicial actions of the North American Christian Church in history. Under the false pretense of political right, Christians drafted laws preventing immigrants of other religious beliefs & traditions from entering the country. Do you think this is still impacting our social & political actions today? How might this harm our society & affect our social maturity?

God was too great and the world too wide to allow for so little curiosity.

All their lives, most of these students have looked out at the world through Christian glasses. They have learned to describe what they see in Christian terms and not to ask questions about what they cannot see clearly. Now, having tried on some glasses from other traditions—one or two of which have brought troublesome areas of their lives into sharper focus for the first time—they are suddenly aware of how many ways there are to view reality. The lens is not the landscape. It is a way of translating the landscape so that people can walk upright on it, making some sense of what happens to them.

Religions are treasure chests of stories, songs, rituals, and ways of life that have been handed down for millennia—not covered in dust but evolving all the way—so that each new generation has something to choose from when it is time to ask the big questions about life.

while every religion has its villains, each also has its saints.

Part of my ongoing priesthood is to find the bridges between my faith and the faiths of other people, so that those of us who draw water from wells on different sides of the river can still get together from time to time, making the whole area safer for our children.

Yet this was precisely the problem for some Christians I knew—not just the part about realizing God in the self, but also the part about endorsing more than one way to God. At a seminary where I once taught, I met a professor of Christian evangelism who surprised me by saying that the problem with American Christians was that they were all becoming Hindus. This was apparently the worst thing he could think of to say. “Americans want to pick and choose,” he said. “They think they can design their own way instead of following the one that Jesus has already laid out for them.”

When I think I see a Buddhist worshipping a statue of the Buddha, I yield to the Buddhist when he tells me that he is not worshipping the Buddha but honoring the Buddha’s example. When I think I see a Muslim woman constrained by her headscarf, I listen when she tells me how hard she fought to wear it against her family’s wishes. As natural as it may be to try to translate everything into my own religious language, I miss a lot when I persist in reducing everything to my own frame of reference.

At the same time, it seems possible that knowing my own language of faith in depth may help me recognize similar depths in other traditions.

That first field trip opened a whole new folder of questions for me, both as a person and as a teacher of young persons. Is it better to read about a religion in a textbook than to risk actual contact with it? How would I feel if a group of students visited my church and treated the holiest things inside it like oddities? Can anyone who visits a sacred space remain an observer, or does one become a participant simply by entering in? Does taking part in the ritual of another faith automatically make you a traitor to your own? The most troubling question of all was why my religion seemed so much less gracious than Dr. Acharya’s religion did. She seemed to be an exemplar of it, and her hospitality was impeccable. She welcomed all of us to join her at the high altar in her temple without asking what we believed. She enlisted the priest to offer special prayers for us. She did not distance herself from those who snickered. She did not take anyone to task for refusing the prasad. She opened her arms to us from beginning to end. If there were any problems with the visit, they came from the religious worldview of her guests, who had been taught to be very careful about who and what they embraced. I stewed about it all the way home in the van. Why was my crowd so defensive? Who had convinced us that faith was a competitive sport and that only one team could win for all eternity? With an attitude like that, who could blame a neighbor for sensing that Christian love was mostly charit...

“The more deeply one sinks into one’s own religious truth,” Knitter says, “the more broadly one can appreciate and learn from other truths.”

For many years I began the unit on Buddhism by writing a quote from the Buddha on the board: “Believe nothing, no matter where you read it or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.” Then I found the saying listed on fakebuddhaquotes.com. That was a bit of a blow. But even if the Buddha never said it, it still led me back to something Jesus said—not once but in many ways—when someone tried to get a definitive answer out of him.

“Concepts create idols; only wonder grasps anything.” — Gregory of Nysa

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.

At a press conference prior to the dedication of the building, Stendahl aimed to defuse tension by proposing three rules of religious understanding, which have by now made the rounds more often than any of his scholarly work on the apostle Paul. Here is the most common version of what he said: When trying to understand another religion, you should ask the adherents of that religion and not its enemies. Don’t compare your best to their worst. Leave room for holy envy.

I believe that increasing numbers of young Christians are coming to grips with pluralism—embracing it, even—though they are getting very little help from their elders as they think through what it means to be a person of faith in community with people of other (and no) faiths.

As natural as it may be to want to play on the winning team, the wish to secure divine favoritism strikes me as the worst possible reason to practice any religion.

An old story is told about Rabia of Basra, an eighth-century Sufi mystic who was seen running through the streets of her city one day carrying a torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other. When someone asked her what she was doing, she said she wanted to burn down the rewards of paradise with the torch and put out the fires of hell with the water, because both blocked the way to God. “O, Allah,” Rabia prayed, “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.”

Although I am allowed to admire what is growing in the well-tended fields of my religious neighbors, I am not allowed to pull off the road and help myself. The things I envy have their own terroir, their own long histories of weather and fertilization. They do not exist to serve me, improve me, or profit me. They have their own dominion.

Across all our differences, we come into the world more or less the same way, through the body of another human being. We breathe the same air and depend on the same earth for our sustenance. We all weep salty tears and bleed red blood. Though we find different things funny, we laugh (and sneeze) in amusing ways. Up to a certain age we are so curious about each other that someone has to teach us to fear each other. None of us is born with a belief system or a worldview. We acquire those from our elders, along with our DNA. This does not diminish the importance of our religion, but it does establish a certain priority. What we have most in common is not our religion but our humanity, which is recognizable across class, continent, and color—unless someone goes to great pains to blind us to one another.

Eventually all people of faith must decide how they will think about and respond to people of other (and no) faiths. Otherwise they will be left at the mercy of their worst impulses when push comes to shove and their fear deadens them to the best teachings of their religions.

How does this statement make you feel? What responsibilities does it reveal to you in your humanity?

This is the kingdom of God, the kingdom of danger and of risk, of eternal beginning and eternal becoming, of opened spirit and of deep realization, the kingdom of holy insecurity. MARTIN BUBER

By the end of the first century, the religion of Jesus had become the religion about him, so that even he might have been alarmed by what his followers had done. When had the faith of his ancestors become the adversary? When had people turned his lifelong faith in the one and only Father to a new faith in the one and only Son?

With kindness and clarity, he showed me how I used stock phrases such as “the burden of the law” or “the righteousness of the Pharisees” to make my points without the slightest idea how they sounded to Jewish ears. He helped me see how I perpetuated the Gospels’ portrayal of “the Jews” without drawing attention to the imprecision of the phrase or the reasons why it was used so venomously.

Our shadows are often behind us, where others can see them better than we can. If we want to hear and see more—even the parts that expose our scornfulness—we need partners from outside our in-groups to keep telling us how we sound. Some of them get tired of doing this, I know, since those of us in the mainstream are not particularly fast learners. The people who stick with us seem to understand that they can benefit as much as we do, since one of the best ways to learn more about your faith is to engage people who do not share it. The more we mix it up with others, the more we find out about who we really are.

Depending on which rabbi you ask, sending potential converts away three times is meant to remind them that there is nothing easy about being Jewish. Having to pester an uncooperative rabbi may be the smallest obstacle a convert ever faces. But the more important teaching is that a person does not have to be Jewish to be righteous in God’s eyes.

What must it be like, I wondered, to put hearing God ahead of being heard? So many of the prayers in my own tradition are about beseeching God to hear us. So much of our worship involves listening to each other talk and then going out to proclaim the gospel to others. What do we think will happen if we stop talking? The Jewish emphasis on hearing and doing are both curative for me. “Hear, O Barbara! The LORD is your God, even when you are mute.”

God speaks to us in three places: in scripture, in our deepest selves, and in the voice of the stranger. THOMAS MERTON

Scripture has its own voice—sometimes more terrible than wonderful—but it has never failed to reward my close attention, either with a fresh hearing or with the loud slamming of a door that tells me to come back later.

When religious arguments based on the perspective of a single century or culture reach a high pitch, or when people who seem to have read only excerpts of the Bible use it to propose legislation, I return to the Book—not to find a solution, but to remember how many possibilities there are.

For reasons that will never be entirely clear, God sometimes sends people from outside a faith community to bless those inside of it. It does not seem to matter if the main characters understand God in the same way or call God by the same name. The divine blessing is effective, and the story goes on.

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.

God anoints prophets to speak and act on God’s behalf, freeing those who are locked down by poverty, tyranny, lack of vision, or broken hearts. Whatever is holding people down, God means to lift up. Whatever is tearing people apart, God means to mend.

When Christians act instinctively and self-sacrificially on behalf of those outside the tribe, you can almost hear the angels sing, because someone got the sermon.

The great religions may possess genuine revelations of God’s nature and purpose. Their most gifted listeners may truly have discerned a divine call to special purpose, both for themselves and for their communities. Traditions that do not speak of God have certainly perceived truths about the human condition and have conceived inspired ways to transcend it. But whatever we mean when we say “God” is not fully captured by any of these traditions. If it could be, it would not be God.

No one owns God. God alone knows what is good. For reasons that will never be entirely clear, God has a soft spot for religious strangers, both as agents of divine blessing and recipients of divine grace—to the point that God sometimes chooses one of them over people who believe they should by all rights come first. This is a great mystery, but it does nothing to obscure the great commandment. In every circumstance, regardless of the outcome, the main thing Jesus has asked me to do is to love God and my neighbor as religiously as I love myself. The minute I have that handled, I will ask for my next assignment. For now, my hands are full.

Since most of us need to feel good about ourselves while we are acting aggressively toward others, we develop psychological mechanisms such as splitting, projection, and scapegoating, which allow us to assign goodness to our group and badness to the other group. This not only relieves us of having to deal with the goodness and badness inside our own group; it also frees us to believe that our violence against the other group is essentially altruistic. We bond best with our group when we confront an external enemy.

Unless I want to separate myself from everyone who does not see things the way I do—which my faith urges me not to do—then I have to admit that there are mutually exclusive views of what it means to be Christian and that God alone is smart enough to decide which is best. This frees me to be with Christians who are not like me as well as those who are.

It was not until I began meeting people of other faiths in their most sacred spaces that I learned how bruised some of them were by Christian evangelism. Worshippers at the Hindu Temple returned to the parking lot after one of their major festivals to find Christians by their cars with pamphlets demeaning their holiday. Muslims were used to Christians saying malicious things about the Qur’an. Native Americans were tired of being asked what God they prayed to. The shared consensus is that Christian evangelists are not very good listeners. They assume they are speaking to people with no knowledge of God themselves. They are disrespectful of other people’s faith.

The New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine has told a particular story so often that I can hardly get it wrong, but you need to know that she is Jewish in order to appreciate it. Here is how it goes. When someone asks her for her interpretation of John 14:6, she says that she imagines herself at the pearly gates after a long and happy life. While she is waiting in line with everyone else to see whether St. Peter will let her into heaven, she makes a list of everything she wanted to ask him while she was still in the classroom. “Can you speak Greek? Where did you go when you wandered off in the middle of Acts? What happened to your wife?”4 When it is finally her turn to talk to Peter, she starts pelting him with so many questions that he just waves her through. This concerns the next person in line, who has heard of Dr. Levine and knows she is a Jew. “Excuse me,” the guy says to St. Peter, “but I don’t think she’s supposed to be here.” That is when Jesus sticks his head through the gates and says, “It’s fine, Peter. I know her, and she’s okay by me.” Get it? “No one comes to the Father but by me, and she’s okay by me.” Levine’s point is that no one enters the presence of God except by God’s grace. No church, no church doctrine, no individual gets to referee that. Where the Way of Jesus is concerned, he is the Decider.

As variously as people describe it, they all discover that if you are determined to walk the way of Jesus, there comes a time when you must leave the lower altitudes for the heights. This will involve lightening your pack and heading into parts unknown. You will have to leave your bags of spiritual sweets behind, along with the heavy devotional books you use to take your mind off how bad your feet hurt. Sooner or later you will have to leave all your soothing props behind, entrusting yourself to the God who cares more about your transformation than your comfort.

Whatever your grade point average, whatever your relationship to religion, whatever people tell you about how the sky is the limit and you can achieve anything you put your mind to, there is a place where human knowing runs out. Strong winds really do blow through people’s lives, and the Spirit does not hand out maps showing where the wind came from, where it is going, how you are supposed to handle it, and how everything will turn out in the end.

To walk the way of sacred unknowing is to remember that our best ways of thinking and speaking about God are provisional. They are always in process—reflecting our limited perspectives, responding to our particular lives and times, relating us to our ancestors in the faith even as they flow out toward the God who remains free to act in ways that confound us. If our ways of thinking and speaking of God are not at least that fluid, then they are not really theologies but theolatries—things we worship instead of God, because we cannot get God to hold still long enough to pin God down.

The Spirit arrives incognito, bringing the indwelling love of God. Those who do not refuse it become lovers of the only God there is, because the only God there is has loved them first. CHARLES HEFLING

Yet this, in a nutshell, is the monumental spiritual challenge of living with religious difference—and more centrally than that—of living with anyone who does not happen to be me. “Love God in the person standing right in front of you,” the Jesus of my understanding says, “or forget the whole thing, because if you cannot do that, then you are just going to keep making shit up.”

If you get into a situation where you do not have the luxury of thinking about what it means to be authentically human, in other words, all you have to do is remember a time when you were a stranger yourself—when you were on the receiving end of both the derision and the surprising kindness of people who did not look, think, or talk like you. Once it has happened to you, you do not easily forget.

“The supreme religious challenge,” says Jonathan Sacks, “is to see God’s image in one who is not in our image.”

So what do we do? This is our final question. Whether religion is, for us, a good word or bad; whether (if on balance it is a good word) we side with a single religious tradition or to some degree open our arms to all: How do we comport ourselves in a pluralistic world that is riven by ideologies, some sacred, some profane? We listen. HUSTON SMITH

The only clear line I draw these days is this: when my religion tries to come between me and my neighbor, I will choose my neighbor. That self-canceling feature of my religion is one of the things I like best about it. Jesus never commanded me to love my religion.