Each Tuesday this September we'll be discussing themes from The Faith Club, an interfaith journey between three women friends -- a Muslim, a Jew and a Christian. It's an easy, engaging and rich read -- if you're busy, keep it in the car and read at stop lights, or a sneak in a few minutes before bed. If you haven't started yet, come join the conversation and share your reflections and experiences.
The beginning of the learning year is a good time to look out into the world, as well as into our own hearts to discover what it means to understand, appreciate and grow in relation to people, faiths and experiences very different from our comfort zone.
This week I invite you to share your experiences with people from different faiths, both positive, negative and whatever ambiguous feelings lie in the spaces between these poles.
1. When was the first time (if ever) you had a close friendship with someone of a different religious background?
2. On page 28, someone is quoted saying, "'I never liked that word "tolerance." It's too passive. Think about it. To tolerate someone? That doesn't sound very positive. It's not a call to engage and understand someone else. I like the phrase "'mutual appreciation.'"
What do you think of the word "tolerance?" Do you have any alternatives that you find have more to offer?
3. Why is interfaith friendship and conversation important?
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Labels: Book Discussions, Culture, International Experiences, Resources, The Faith Club, Theology, Women in Ministry
1. My first close friendship with a person of another faith occurred the summer before my sophomore year of high school when I attended a college prep camp at Wellesley College. I became very good friends with a young women from Bahrain named Sahar, and a young man named Abdullah. Sahar told me stories of getting up early and going to the mall in jeans before the older adults got up and the young people had to don the traditional veils. She told me of the difference between the relatively progressive Bahrain and the ultra conservative Saudi Arabia. Sahar was a critical, deep thinker like me and I enjoyed our conversations. These were my pre-fundamentalist Christian days, so we enjoyed conversations about different paths to the same God and I loved getting to know her culture.
Abdullah was sweet, shy and possibly had a crush on me. I had a little crush on him. We had conversations about how he wasn't allowed to date, and how he wasn't going to have sex until marriage, and I teased him alot about it, in an affectionate way. I thought it was admirable that he was foregoing dating and premarital sex, but I wasn't so sure about the arranged marriage thing. I respected his faith, which seemed genuine. He liked me name, which in Arabic means 'beautiful'
2. It was interesting for me reading about tolerance as a negative word, because I have intuitively felt this, and heard someone say something similar in an interfaith lecture last week. In medicine, to build up a tolerance to something means to become resistant to it, or get to the point where the thing tolerated no longer causes an effect. To say that something is tolerable, to me connotes something which one would prefer to be rid of, which one puts up with out of resignation.
I like the term "mutual appreciation" because it fosters positive engagement and learning, without requiring anyone to necessarily alter their beliefs or commitments in order to genuinely appreciate another's context, culture, spiritual perspective and theological process of interpreting scriptures and life.
A few others: Creative engagement, Life Affirming Co-existence, Person-honoring engagement, spiritual sibling dynamics
:)
My therapist advocates transforming judgment into curiosity when we approach aspects of ourselves or others that normally we're prone to reject or condemn. I think this applies to interfaith communication as well.
A wise teacher once said, 'the measure of a man (or woman) is the amount of contradictions he (she) can hold.'
I think it's an amazing act of genuine spiritual love to honor one's own beliefs and spirituality and simultaneously truly open to the experiences and understandings of another person.