Interfaith Friendships: Weekly Summary

Sunday
I am convinced that the biblical tradition is saying that the only absolute available to us is the faithful love of God, and not any concept or structure. God’s love itself is the center and the still point of the turning world.
—Richard Rohr

Monday
In my own life, going deep in the Christian religion of my birth has enabled me to see the same Spirit and Love in other religions as well.
—Richard Rohr

Tuesday
Eventually all people of faith must decide how they will think about and respond to people of other (and no) faiths. . . . I could speak from the heart of my faith, wishing others well at the heart of theirs—including those who had no name for what got them through the night.
—Barbara Brown Taylor

Wednesday
Talking together is important—but interfaith dialogue becomes much deeper in the context of multi-faith collaboration. Words are good, but actions are better—especially actions that bring us together solving problems that affect everybody.
—Brian McLaren

Thursday
Through a process of perpetual discernment and “prayer unceasing” we may dive into the well of each faith and emerge with the treasure that connects us all.
—Mirabai Starr

Friday
At the heart of each major religion is the vision of peace, the ideal of a reconciled humanity, the way of compassion and love and justice, the fundamental truth of nonviolence.
—John Dear

Present Moment, Wonderful Moment

I do not personally know of anyone more worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize than this gentle monk from Vietnam. His ideas for peace, if applied, would build a monument to ecumenism, to world brotherhood, to humanity. —Martin Luther King Jr., letter to the Nobel Committee, 1967

Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh (1926–2022) helped bring Buddhism and mindfulness to the West. His life offers an inspired example of the power of interfaith friendship. Here he gives instructions for a meditation to dwell in the present moment:

In our busy society, it is a great fortune to breathe consciously from time to time. We can practice conscious breathing not only while sitting in a meditation room, but also while working at the office or at home, while driving our car, or sitting on a bus, wherever we are, at any time throughout the day. . . .

We can recite these four lines silently as we breathe in and out:

Breathing in, I calm my body.

Breathing out, I smile.

Dwelling in the present moment,

I know this is a wonderful moment!

“Breathing in, I calm my body.” Reciting this line is like drinking a glass of cool lemonade on a hot day—you can feel the coolness permeate your body. . . .

“Breathing out, I smile.” You know a smile can relax hundreds of muscles in your
face. . . .

“Dwelling in the present moment.” While I sit here, I don’t think of anything else. I sit here, and I know exactly where I am.

“I know this is a wonderful moment.” It is a joy to sit, stable and at ease, and return to our breathing, our smiling, our true nature. Our appointment with life is in the present moment.

Experience a version of this practice through video and sound.

Reference:

Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life, ed. Arnold Kotler (New York: Bantam Books, 1992), 9–10.

Explore Further. . .

Read Thich Nhat Hanh on how “we are the earth.”
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image credit: Jeremy Yap, Untitled (detail), 2017, photograph, Unsplash. Dann Zepeda, Untitled (detail), 2017, photograph, Unsplash. Austin Kehmeier, Untitled (detail), 2020, photograph, Unsplash. Jenna Keiper & Leslye Colvin, 2022, triptych art, United States. Click here to enlarge image.

Image inspiration: Opening the door to difference—to include, rather than exclude—we see a beautiful beyond and receive the life water of new ways to see.

Prayer for our community:

God, Lord of all creation, lover of life and of everything, please help us to love in our very small way what You love infinitely and everywhere. We thank You that we can offer just this one prayer and that will be more than enough, because in reality every thing and every one is connected, and nothing stands alone. To pray for one part is really to pray for the whole, and so we do. Help us each day to stand for love, for healing, for the good, for the diverse unity of the Body of Christ and all creation, because we know this is what You desire: as Jesus prayed, that all may be one. We offer our prayer together with all the holy names of God, we offer our prayer together with Christ, our Lord, Amen.

Listen to the prayer.

Interfaith Nonviolence

Almost twenty years ago, Jesuit peace activist John Dear wrote in the CAC’s journal Radical Grace about the nonviolent impact that interfaith cooperation can make:

At the heart of each major religion is the vision of peace, the ideal of a reconciled humanity, the way of compassion and love and justice, the fundamental truth of nonviolence.

Mahatma Gandhi [1869–1948] was the first to point toward interfaith nonviolence. . . . When he moved to India, and saw again the deep hostility between Hindus and Muslims, he made interfaith nonviolence the core of his daily worship. Each day when his community gathered for prayer, they read excerpts from the Hindu and Muslim scriptures, from the Sermon on the Mount and the Hebrew Bible. Then, they sat in silence for forty-five minutes. They concluded usually with a hymn about the all-inclusive love that reconciles everyone, the love even for one’s enemies. Forty years of interfaith, contemplative prayer transformed him into a universal spirit, as all the major religious scriptures hope for all of us. . . .

“Religions are different roads converging to the same point,” Gandhi once wrote. “What does it matter that we take different roads, so long as we reach the same goal?” [1] . . . [and] “There will be no lasting peace on earth unless we learn not merely to tolerate but even to respect the other faiths as our own.” [2]

As we learn from each other’s religion, Gandhi discovered, we can help each other deepen in the faith of our own personal tradition. His critique of organized Christianity—that it rejected the nonviolence of Jesus and has become an imperial religion based on the Roman empire—has helped innumerable Christians return to the core teachings of Jesus, beginning with the Sermon on the Mount. The Baptist Martin Luther King, Jr. testified that the Hindu Gandhi helped him more than anyone else to follow Christ.

Since the early 1980s, Dear has worked as an author, activist, and peacemaker, deeply influenced and inspired by interfaith friendships.

For the last twenty [now almost 40] years, I have experienced the deepest multicultural and interfaith connections through my work in the peace movement. I have developed many friendships across cultural and religious boundaries because of our shared vision of nonviolence. This interfaith peacemaking sprang from the Civil Rights Movement, when Dr. King called religious leaders to march with him to Selma. The friendship modeled between Dr. King, Rabbi Abraham Heschel and Thich Nhat Hanh still bears good fruit in our world and exemplifies the journey we must all make.

As the world hangs on the brink of nuclear and environmental destruction, as we wage war in the name of religion, we need to explore the religious roots of nonviolence, just as Gandhi did. Perhaps then, we will hear the call to disarm, to embrace one another as sisters and brothers, and welcome the gift of peace that has been already given.

References:

[1] M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj and Other Writings, ed. Anthony J. Parel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 53.

[2] M. K. Gandhi, In Search of the Supreme, vol. 3, ed. V. B. Kher (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing, 1962), 10.

John Dear, “The Common Ground of Interfaith Nonviolence,” Radical Grace 16, no. 2 (April–June 2003): 3.

Explore Further. . .

Read about Howard Thurman and the first interracial, interfaith congregation in the United States.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image inspiration: Opening the door to difference—to include, rather than exclude—we see a beautiful beyond and receive the life water of new ways to see.

Story from Our Community:

A dear friend of mine’s favorite flowers are ones that most would overlook—dandelions and common tansies. The other day, I set out on my daily retreat onto a wooded trail when I spotted my friend’s flora —a common tansy affectionately and elegantly leaning into Queen Anne’s Lace. I wanted to take a picture but I told myself I’d capture it later. When I returned the next day, the tansies had been trampled and the poetry of the day before was totally gone. I didn’t get the photo, but I did, however, gain a new perspective. I realized how quickly things change in nature (and in life). It occurred to me how easily the natural world accepts the reality of new circumstances—something that we humans struggle to do. I wanted to say thank you to the CAC Staff and faculty, for all that you do; most of all for illuminating beautiful, sublime mysteries like this one. —Irma D.

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

Our Collective Wisdom

Author and spiritual teacher Mirabai Starr writes of the collective spiritual wisdom that is necessary for the healing of ourselves and our planet:

While there is much to be learned from teachers—both past and present—the time of the awakened guru is giving way to a collective awakening. . . . We forget that the path to God is bound up with our life in the world. Evidence of our spiritual mastery lies in our ever-deepening, continuously expanding humanity. The trick is to be as fully present as possible to the holiness of each moment. We are challenged to embrace, yet not identify with, all that is. This requires practice: meditation practice, relationship practice, social action practice. . . .

Waking up is a community affair. Jewish wisdom suggests that the Messiah will not be an extrasmart, radiantly beautiful, superpowerful human being who will descend from on high to resolve our differences and repair the damage we have inflicted on one another and on the planet we share. . . . We each need to bring the best of who we are to the spiritual table and offer our own imperfect selves as the medicine for the critically ill spirit of humanity. This includes our despair and our ecstatic insights, the shadow we are most ashamed of and the crazy wisdom with which we astonish even ourselves.

Starr cautions that although our individual gifts are important, so too are the gifts of our religious traditions:

In a fit of iconoclasm, many of us have been tempted to toss out the traditions of organized religion as we try to make our own way home to Spirit. Many gifts have emerged from this revolution: liberation from patriarchal dominance, increased awareness of the importance of psychological health along the path of awakening, and an abiding regard for indigenous wisdom ways. But we have also found ourselves spiritually bankrupt in some crucial spheres. The world’s religious traditions have collected a series of vital tools to help us build a life that includes heightened consciousness of the sacred and a shared sense of accountability to all beings, and we would be foolish to reject them out of hand.

In spite of the undeniable history of abuses committed in the name of religion, the monotheistic faiths [Judaism, Christianity, and Islam] offer innumerable points of access to the realm of love. We would do well to revisit the teachings and practices so carefully engineered over millennia to invoke the God of Love and bring [God] into our midst. By saying yes to the best of our own heritage and entering the holiest grounds of one another’s faith traditions, we may be able to usher in an age of love within our own lifetime. We can only do this together. Through a process of perpetual discernment and “prayer unceasing” we may dive into the well of each faith and emerge with the treasure that connects us all.

Reference:

Mirabai Starr, God of Love: A Guide to the Heart of Judaism, Christianity and Islam (Rhinebeck, NY: Monkfish Book Publishing, 2012), 217–218, 218–219.

Explore Further. . .

Read Episcopal priest Adam Bucko on the spiritual quests of young people outside of religious traditions.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image inspiration: Opening the door to difference—to include, rather than exclude—we see a beautiful beyond and receive the life water of new ways to see.

Story from Our Community:

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

Our Shared Values

Interfaith leader Eboo Patel founded the Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC), which brings together youth of different faiths through cooperation and shared service. When a skeptical questioner asks, “What’s the IFYC approach?” Patel explains:

“We call it shared values—service learning,” I said. “We begin by identifying the values that different religious communities hold in common—hospitality, cooperation, compassion, mercy. We bring a group of religiously diverse young people together and ask them, ‘How does your religion speak to this value?’ One kid will say, ‘Well, I really admire how the pope [John Paul II] embodied mercy when he forgave the man who tried to assassinate him.’ A kid from a different religion will say, ‘There is a story like that in my religion: when the Prophet Muhammad returned to Mecca, he extended mercy by forgiving many of the people who had waged war against him.’” . . .

“Are you trying to teach the kids that all religions are the same?” he asked, again growing suspicious.

“Not at all,” I responded. “We are showing young people that religions have powerful things in common, but they come to those shared values through their own paths. . . .”

“The IFYC always gives young people the chance to actually act on the religious value they are talking about through a service project. It’s amazing how many faith stories of compassion kids remember when they are building a house together for a poor family, or what their insights into hospitality are when they are tutoring refugee children.” [1]

CAC teacher Brian McLaren writes about the sense of “with-ness” that arises when people of different faiths join in service, justice, and solidarity:

Another friend . . . went to a Muslim-majority country specifically to convert Muslims to Christianity. After some time there, he got a sick feeling: he felt he was serving neither God nor the best interests of the people around him, but was instead serving the colonizing agenda of the religious clan that sent him. So he changed the direction of his work. He started mobilizing Christians and Muslims to work side by side in helping the poor. “Something happens,” he told me, “when we work together for the poor. We all change. I know that both the Christians and the Muslims feel they are encountering God in one another, and together we are encountering God as we join God in serving the poor.” He discovered that witness led him to with-ness. . . .

Talking together is important—but that interfaith dialogue becomes much deeper in the context of multi-faith collaboration. Words are good, but actions are better—especially actions that bring us together solving problems that affect everybody. . . . [What] so many other people are doing is a lot like what Jesus did: bringing together unlikely people to serve and heal together, to liberate the oppressed and their oppressors together, and to model, in their collaboration, the kind of harmony and human-kindness the world so desperately needs. [2]

References:

[1] Eboo Patel, Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2007), 166–167.

[2] Brian D. McLaren, Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed Cross the Road? Christian Identity in a Multi-Faith World (New York: Jericho Books, 2012), 245–246, 246–247.

Explore Further. . .

Read Richard on interspirituality and solidarity.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image inspiration: Opening the door to difference—to include, rather than exclude—we see a beautiful beyond and receive the life water of new ways to see.

Story from Our Community:

Over the years, I have enjoyed the friendship of both Greek and Russian Orthodox Christians. Through our friendship, I was introduced an ikon that I have come to see as an ingenious way to describe the nature of God and the Trinity. The ikon shows the Holy Trinity as three simple people seated around a small common table and enjoying each other’s company! Thank you to the Daily Meditations, which have reminded me of the sacredness and importance of this image in my spiritual journey. Alleluia! —John L.

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

The Holy Water We Share

Author and preacher Barbara Brown Taylor writes about what she calls “holy envy,” befriending followers of different traditions, and allowing such friendships to enrich our own faith. She summarizes an insight taught by inter-spiritual theologian Raimon Panikkar (1918–2010):

Raimon Panikkar . . . spent a lot of time thinking about what it might mean for Christians to focus on contributing to the world’s faiths instead of dominating them. Born in Spain to a Catholic mother and a Hindu father, he used the analogy of the world’s great rivers. The Jordan, the Tiber, and the Ganges all nourish the lives of those who live along their banks, he said. One flows through Israel, one flows through Rome, and one flows through India. If he were writing today he might have added the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, which flow through Turkey, Syria, and Iraq.

None of these rivers meet on earth, Panikkar said, though they do meet in the heavens, where water from each of them condenses into clouds that rain down on all the mortals of the earth. In the same way, he said, the religions of the world remain distinct and unmixed on earth—but “they meet once transformed into vapor, once metamorphosized into Spirit, which then is poured down in innumerable tongues.” [1]

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.

Taylor recalls a trip she took with her students to a local Islamic center, and the inspiration it provided:

Once, at the end of a field trip to the Atlanta Masjid of Al-Islam, the imam ended his meeting with students by saying, “Our deepest desire is not that you become Muslim, but that you become the best Christian, the best Jew, the best person you can be. In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful. Thank you for coming.” Then he was gone, leaving me with a fresh case of holy envy.

I could do that, I thought. I could speak from the heart of my faith, wishing others well at the heart of theirs—including those who had no name for what got them through the night. It might mean taking down some fences, but turf was no longer the reigning metaphor. I was not imagining two separate yards with neighbors leaning over a shared boundary. I was imagining a single reservoir of living water, with two people looking into it. One might have been a Muslim and the other a Christian, but there was nothing in their faces to tell me that. All I saw were two human beings looking into deep waters that did not belong to either of them, reflecting back to them the truth that they were not alone.

References:

[1] Raimundo Panikkar, “The Jordan, the Tiber, and the Ganges: Three Kairological Moments of Christic Self-Consciousness,” in The Myth of Christian Uniqueness: Toward a Pluralistic Theology of Religions, ed. John Hick and Paul F. Knitter (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1987), 92.

Barbara Brown Taylor, Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others (New York: HarperOne, 2019), 79–80.

Explore Further. . .

Read more about Raimon Panikkar and Hindu-Christian mystic Bede Griffiths.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image inspiration: Opening the door to difference—to include, rather than exclude—we see a beautiful beyond and receive the life water of new ways to see.

Story from Our Community:

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

Learning from Others

If something is true, no matter who said it, it is always from the Holy Spirit. —Thomas Aquinas, De Veritate

Father Richard reflects on how his commitment to Christ and the inspiration of the Holy Spirit have continually helped him recognize God in other traditions:

In my own life, going deep in the Christian religion of my birth has enabled me to see the same Spirit and Love in other religions as well. It’s been quite a journey from growing up in a Catholic “ghetto” in Kansas, and hardly even knowing any Protestants. And yet, at age fourteen, I was sent to study with the Franciscans in Cincinnati, Ohio, and they gave me a very ecumenical theological education.

One of the best courses I had was on the Hebrew Scriptures, which gave me a great love for Judaism. It’s probably why I emphasize the prophets so much, because I realized the prophets really weren’t about what we call today retributive justice. They were about restorative justice. When we stay with their message, there will be these magnificent passages toward the end of their books that invariably point toward love. God eventually says through the prophets: “I’m going to love you anyway. I’m going to redeem you by my perfect love. I’m going to love you into wholeness” (see Isaiah 29:13–24 and Hosea 6:1–6).

In 1969, when I was sent as a deacon to the Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico, I had only a basic introduction to Indigenous religions. I observed how mothers in the pueblo would show their children how to silently wave the morning sunshine toward their faces, just as we learn to “bless” ourselves with the sign of the cross. Indigenous peoples here had contemplative prayer long before we Franciscans ever appeared.

The rediscovery of Christian contemplation opened my eyes to Buddhists and Sufis—their teachings and practitioners. Buddhism taught me the phenomenology of perception—what’s going on in our brains. Every world religion at the mature levels discovers some forms of practice to free us from our addictive mind, which we take as normal. Starting in the 1960s, our increased interaction with Eastern religions in general, and Buddhism in particular, helped us recognize and rediscover our own very ancient Christian contemplative tradition. The Sufis’ deep love of mysticism, especially as expressed by their poets Rumi and Hafiz, often captures the stirrings of my own heart.

My latest discovery was really Hinduism, which is considered the oldest world religion. In the early 1980s, I gave a retreat in Nepal; between talks I would just walk the old streets and walk into temples and try to remain invisible. I remember these lovely Indian women coming in wearing saris, so gracefully, and paying no attention to anything else except maybe the flame or the oil they were holding. With what reverence they would bow! What do we think they’re bowing to except God, the Mystery?

Like the wind, the Spirit blows where it will (see John 3:8).

Reference:

Adapted from Richard Rohr, Living School faculty conversation with CAC staff members, October 23, 2017.

Explore Further. . .

Read Richard on discovering the common Source of Love for all religions.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image inspiration: Opening the door to difference—to include, rather than exclude—we see a beautiful beyond and receive the life water of new ways to see.

Story from Our Community:

For more than 15 years, the Daily Meditations have been a part of my morning spiritual routine. My dear friend, Debby, introduced me to Fr. Richard Rohr through his book “Falling Upward.” Today, I’m reflecting on my gratitude for Debby’s presence in my life as she recently passed away peacefully after a year long struggle with a brain tumor. Through sharing and practicing contemplative wisdom with each other and others we’ve met through the CAC, both Debby and I shared an experience of profound spirituality for which I’m very grateful. —Donna B.

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

Only Love Is Absolute

This week’s Daily Meditations explore the fruitfulness of interfaith friendships. We begin with Father Richard reflecting on Jesus’ inclusivity, which has allowed Richard both to affirm and critique his own religious tradition—and invites us to do the same.

In no other period of history have humans had such easy and immediate access to people of other cultures and other religions, often as friends. Once a person has developed any “discernment of the Spirit” it becomes clear that God’s holiness exists all over the place.

The Second Vatican Council gave Catholics some fine official guidelines and freedoms. Nostra Aetate, the 1965 Catholic document on non-Christian religions affirms, “For all peoples comprise a single community, and have a single origin . . . one also is their final goal: God. [God’s] providence, manifestations of goodness, and saving designs extend to all [people].” [1] Such an affirmation rightly places us all inside the same frame of history and allows no foundational distinction between us. We are clearly from the one God, tending toward the one God, and as the mystics of all religions teach, Reality itself is one.

It is strange that it took us almost all of our two-thousand-year history to get back to the “ecumenical” attitude Jesus had at the very beginning! He goes out of his way to make non-Jews the heroes of many of his stories and teachings. He is quick to point out the failures and fallacies of his own religion, Judaism, while still remaining faithful to it. Jesus held a very critical stance toward his own religion, but for some reason few of us think we can do the same.

On the other hand, sadly, many people think that if they no longer believe in the absolute primacy of their own religion, then it has no absolute call on them and they often give up on it entirely. But I am convinced that the biblical tradition is saying that the only absolute available to us is the faithful love of God, and not any concept or structure—even our religious traditions themselves. God’s love itself is the center and the still point of the turning world. But if we have never actually experienced this love, we will most assuredly look for absolutes in other ways.

What is unique about Jesus is his inclusivity itself! He is so grounded in the absoluteness of the Divine relationship that he is quite free to relativize the Law, simplify the Prophets, and find God outside of his own tradition. He is constantly and consistently inclusive—without denying his Jewish foundation and faith. I believe we can only be inclusive when we have a deeply held and shared experience that we can include people “into.” We have to have a “home” to bring people home to.

What the world wants, and people need, are people who believe in Something—Something that will lead them to the good, the beautiful, the true, and the universal.

References:

[1] Second Vatican Council, “Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions, Nostra Aetate, October 28, 1965,” sec. 1, in The Documents of Vatican II, ed. Walter M. Abbott (New York: Herder and Herder, 1966), 660–661.

Adapted from Richard Rohr, “Why Jesus?,” Radical Grace 16, no. 2 (April–June 2003): 4.

Explore Further. . .

Read Richard and scholar Marcus Borg on the parallel teachings of Jesus and Buddha.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image inspiration: Opening the door to difference—to include, rather than exclude—we see a beautiful beyond and receive the life water of new ways to see.

Story from Our Community:

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

Interfaith Friendships: Weekly Summary

Interfaith Nonviolence

Our Collective Wisdom

Our Shared Values

The Holy Water We Share

Learning from Others

Only Love Is Absolute

Category Archive

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Interfaith Friendships: Weekly Summary

Interfaith Nonviolence

Our Collective Wisdom

Our Shared Values

The Holy Water We Share

Learning from Others

Only Love Is Absolute

Category Archive

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