“But often what is most helpful is to be authentically human.” I highlighted that. When I got to class the next day, I found that most of the students had highlighted it too, so we spent the rest of the hour talking about what it means to be authentically human. It was a lot like trying to define spirituality, or God.
“I think empathy is key,” one young man said. “You have to be able to imagine yourself in another person’s place, no matter how different they are from you.”
“I think it has more to do with touching people than talking to them,” said a young woman who had spent a lot of time as a hospital patient herself.
“I think you have to ask permission first,” a third person said. “What’s comforting to you might not be comforting to someone else.”
We went on for a full hour this way, which gave me plenty of time to notice how many kinds of human beings were sitting around the table. There were only seven of them, but they included majors in mass communication, criminal justice, history, nursing, and psychology as well as philosophy and religion. They had roots in Vietnam, Puerto Rico, Mexico, the United States, and Brazil. The youngest was in her twenties, the oldest in her forties. One was a military veteran. One was a mother. Two were in Twelve Step programs, which they referenced frequently. Three more were recovering Catholics. They all identified as Christian, though their beliefs covered the gamut and often canceled each other out. I could not have asked for a better panel of experts on what it means to be authentically human.
We did not try to reach full consensus. We knew each other too well for that, but we also knew each other well enough to allow for differences—sometimes significant ones—in how we viewed ultimate matters of life and death. When someone said he wanted his ashes to be tucked in the ground around the seed of a great tree, the person who wanted a full funeral with a wooden casket nodded. When someone said she did not want to be embalmed, someone else remembered how pretty her grandmother had looked after the undertaker had gotten done with her. Maybe you had to be there, but it seemed to me that the way we were talking and listening to each other said volumes about what it means to be authentically human. Even if we never reached agreement about the things that mattered most, we could still lean toward each other instead of away.
That was the day I decided to make peace with my own religious language, for at least two reasons. In the first place, no one can speak all the religious languages in the world, and there is no spiritual Esperanto. None of us can speak “language.” We have to speak a language before we can learn anyone else’s, and the carefulness with which we speak our own can make us better listeners to others. In the second place, my religious language is quite excellent at speaking of what it means to be authentically human.
In Christian terms, it means being made in the image of God—not just you, but everyone. It means tending the neighbor’s welfare as religiously as you tend your own. It means letting the splinter you see in the other person’s eye alert you to the log in your own. It means opening the door to the soldiers when they come, so your friends can get away. It means crossing all kinds of boundaries to meet people where they are and arguing with people on your own side who want to call you out for that. It even means “losing it” from time to time, because being authentically human can be so effing exhausting, especially with people who want you to be God. Who knows that better than Jesus?
In my religious language, there is no loving God without loving other human beings—or, as a disciple named John said more forcefully in one of his letters, “Those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.” You will have your own interpretation of this teaching and others like it, but here is what they reveal to me: the same God who came to the world in the body of Jesus comes to me now in the bodies of my neighbors, because God knows that a body needs a body to make things real, and the real physical presence of my neighbors makes them much harder for me to romanticize, fantasize, demonize, or ignore than any of the ideas I have of them in my head.
If I could make my neighbors up, I could love them in a minute. I could make them in my own image, looking back at me with deep gratitude for how authentically human I am being to them—and they to me!—reading poetry to each other, admiring pictures of each other’s grandchildren, and taking casseroles to each other when we are sick. But nine times out of ten these are not the neighbors I get. Instead, I get neighbors who cancel my vote, burn trash in their yard, and shoot guns so close to my house that I have to wear an orange vest when I walk to the mailbox. These neighbors I did not make up knock on my front door to offer me the latest issue of The Watchtower. They put things on their church signs that make me embarrassed for all Christians everywhere. They text while they drive, flipping me off when I pass their expensive pickup trucks on the right, in spite of the fish symbols on their shiny rear bumpers.
But if you stop and think about it, what better way could there be for me to actively pursue the God I did not make up—the one I cannot see—than to try for even twelve seconds to love these brothers and sisters whom I can see? What better way to shatter my custom-made divine mosaic than to accept that these fundamentally irritating and sometimes frightening people are also made in the image of God? Honest to goodness, with a gospel like that you could empty a church right out.
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.”
It took my husband, Ed, and me years to make peace with that truth. I keep thinking he likes cities, but that is me, not him. He keeps thinking I like power tools, but that is him, not me. When he is hurt, he likes to be held. When I am hurt, I like to be left alone until the urge to bite someone passes. Now Ed and I operate by our first amendment to the Golden Rule, which is not “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” but “Do unto others as they would have you do unto them (instead of thinking they are just like you).”
I know that my Jesus mosaic is as much my own creation as my God mosaic is, but when I follow him through the Gospels it seems like he is always pouring himself out in one direction or another—into God or into other human beings—and without taking adequate safety precautions, I might add. He does not stop to think about what might happen to him if he keeps whirling between the two like that, with one hand pointing up to heaven and the other down to earth.
If he had, he might have been more careful about who he helped. He might not have ventured so far outside the tribe, engaging all kinds of people who could have made him sick, dirty, or suspicious simply by association—people who showed up out of nowhere asking for his help, though many of them did not know the first thing about what he believed or whom he asked for help when he left his disciples by the fire at night and went off into the hills to pray.
A disproportionate number of the famous Bible stories about Jesus involve religious strangers—Romans, Samaritans, Canaanites, Syrophoenicians—people who worshipped other gods or worshipped the same one he did in an unorthodox way. These were often the same people who blew Jesus’s mind, opening themselves up to what God could do in ways that escaped the people he knew best. When a centurion came seeking help for his servant, Jesus said he had never seen such faith. When a foreign woman came seeking help for her daughter, he praised her faith too. When a Samaritan returned to thank him for a healing, Jesus told him that his faith had made him well. Most Christians who hear such stories assume it is their faith in him that he praises, but that is not what the stories say. “Your faith,” Jesus says to them over and over again. “Your faith has made you well.” If anything, the strangers seem to change Jesus’s ideas about where faith may be found, far outside the boundaries that he has been raised to respect.
Have you ever wondered how he knew people were strangers from a distance? If we can take omniscience off the table for a minute, it was probably the same way you do: by their hair, their skin, their clothing. Before you even get to the gas station clerk who is wearing a turban, you know he is going to speak with an accent. When you are stuck in the pre–happy hour traffic jam at your favorite mall, trying to get out of there before the gridlock on the expressway starts, the fact that the three young men who saunter in front of your car are wearing baggy shorts and backward baseball caps makes you crazy. They only hold you up for a couple of seconds. You still make the light. If it had been a mother with three children, you would not have thought twice about it, but it was not. It was three young men who seemed to be acting out the same antipathy toward you that you feel toward them.
If these are obvious stereotypes, then that is because clichés zoom to the fore when we are deciding who is in our group and who is not. Remember what Jonathan Sacks said about groupishness? According to Michael North, an assistant professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business, stereotypes in general—both negative and positive—serve us because they help us take cognitive shortcuts. By giving us a way to “automatically categorize people into social groups,” they let us “free up mental energy to” live our lives.2 Left unquestioned, however, they harden into bias that can quickly become a substitute for reality.
Anytime you hear yourself thinking or saying something about “those people,” you know that your stranger Geiger counter has just gone off. Without saying a word, simply by being there, the stranger reminds you that you may not know the world as well as you think you do—a world that is full of different people with different claims on its resources, different notions of right and wrong, and different understandings of God. Without even thinking about it (stereotypes free up mental energy, remember?), you may conclude that people like you stand to lose something if people who are not like you become too powerful, too fearless, or too numerous. Most of the time it only takes one to trigger the problem of the stranger.
This takes me back to Torah, which has far more commands to love the stranger than it does to love the neighbor. The reasons behind those commands range from imitating God to doing what God says, but the reason that comes up most often is remembering what it feels like to be a stranger yourself. “You shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the feelings of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt,” God says in the book of Exodus. 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.
A few summers ago I agreed to meet a friend in the French countryside for a couple of days. I made my first flight, missed the second one, had the next one canceled due to weather, and finally landed at my destination close to midnight. The car rental agency was open for another fifteen minutes, which gave the clerk time to ask me if I could drive a stick shift, hand me the key to a compact car, and wish me, “Bon voyage.” Then she locked up the office and left, while I sat in the dark parking lot trying to figure out how to get the voice on the GPS to speak English instead of Czech. When I could not do so, I used my cell phone instead, though I had not signed up for international coverage and would pay dearly for it later.
It seemed like a miracle when my American phone led me directly to the French road that I needed to be on. Then I came to the toll plaza. Since it was after midnight, the only lanes that were open were the automated ones requiring euros I did not have. There was no credit card option. My only two choices were: (1) back up on the expressway, pull over to the side of the road, and wait until morning; or (2) crash through the barrier and see what happened next. While all of the blood in my body pooled in my feet and a high whine picked up volume in my head, I saw a shadow move in the far left booth.
I backed up the car and drove straight over there to see if my eyes were playing tricks on me—but no! It was a real person, sliding back the glass panel of his dark little booth to look down at me with utter disdain. He said something that almost certainly meant, “What is your problem, lady?” but since I stopped speaking French in high school, I could not answer him. I held out a handful of US quarters instead, piled on top of the hundred-euro note I got from the airport ATM, making the most universal sounds of distress I could manage. It was all my fault, and we both knew it, but he still took pity on me, sliding the hundred-euro note out from under the quarters and coming back moments later with all the change I would need for this toll booth and the others that lay ahead.
“Thank you!” I said. “God bless you!” I said, forgetting that France is a secular country.
“De rien,” he said, nodding his head toward the open lane in front of me.
“You go now,” he said, while I was still trying to find first gear, making a motion with his hand that meant “shoo” in any language, and I did—though I will never forget the kindness of this particular stranger.
There was nothing remotely life-threatening about my situation. There was so much privilege embedded in it that I should be ashamed to tell you about it at all. The only reason I do is because even something that slight, that frivolous, can come back to mind in some other place, at some other time, when you see another stranger who appears to be lost and in need of help. When that happens, the power of your memory can trump the power of your stereotype, which may include your fear for your own safety. You can decide to pull open your sliding glass door and do what you can, however small a gesture it may be, though there are never any guarantees. Your offer of help may be misguided or rebuffed. You may even get hurt, just as you feared, but there is such liberation in that moment of choosing that the result matters less than the impulse to reach out. When the stranger turns to you with a look of disbelieving gratitude on his face, it matters very much.
“The supreme religious challenge,” says Jonathan Sacks, “is to see God’s image in one who is not in our image.”3 If he is right, then the stranger—the one who does not look, think, or act like the rest of us—may offer us our best chance at seeing past our own reflections in the mirror to the God we did not make up.
I think it is no mistake that the New Testament never offers a physical description of Jesus. Although most Christians imagine him as the perfect specimen of their own physiognomy, there is nothing in scripture to support that. He might have been short, balding, or bow-legged, more Danny DeVito than Denzel Washington. He almost certainly had bad teeth. Of course, there is nothing in scripture to support that either. All scripture says is that when he appeared to his disciples after his resurrection, few of them recognized him at first. One thought he was the gardener. Others thought he was a fisherman. A couple thought he was a stranger on the road. Even when most of his disciples recognized him, a few still doubted.
That seems just right to me. How wonderful of him to come back undercover, so that even the people who knew him best had to look, then look again, before they got the crawly feeling that they had seen him somewhere before. It was the perfect setup for people who wanted to know what made him different from anyone else they had met: his ability to reflect their humanity back to them, both familiar and strange, so that they never got tired of searching each other’s faces for some sign of him. The Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour, he had told them earlier, so be ready. Little did they know how many hours there were in his day, or that he never rang the bell.
12
The Final Exam
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, s
ome profane? We listen.
HUSTON SMITH
Fifteen weeks are gone just like that. As often as I have led this guided tour through the world’s great religions, I am never prepared for it to end. There has been so little time to explore any of them in depth. There have been so few opportunities to leave the main path. Some days we have covered thirteen hundred years of history in a single class period. Every time someone has pointed down a compelling side road, I have looked mournfully down it and said, “I wish we could, but we don’t have time.” The Potala Palace in Tibet, the Qumran Caves by the Dead Sea, the Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City, the Mother Mosque of America in Cedar Rapids, Iowa—all disappear in the rearview mirror as we speed toward the finish line. The course is designed to offer students who will only take one course in religion the widest possible exposure, even if that means churning up no more than one inch of topsoil as we go.
Now it is early December, and we are back at the metaphorical parking lot where we began, wondering where the time has gone. I hand back the quizzes students took on the first day of class, so they can see how far they have come.
“I was so wrong,” one of them says, looking at the paper in her hand.
“I can’t believe that’s all I knew,” says another. As much as I want to think that the rest are stunned into silence by how much they have learned, the truth is that they are simply ready to go. They have preregistered for the spring semester. They have made plans for the long winter break. They are eyeing their getaway cars, eager to hit the road. The only thing standing in their way is the final exam, which I dread almost as much as they do.
In the beginning, I did unto others what had been done unto me in college: I gave two-hour final exams with multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank, and matching questions for objective content followed by short-answer questions for subjective responses. Sometimes, when I stayed up too late the night before, I resented having to come up with questions that had right or wrong answers. How could I produce a grading rubric that measured courage or empathy? Where did “increased ability to tolerate existential ambiguity” or “significant gain in spiritual maturity” belong on my bulleted list of course outcomes? It was just as well they were not there, since it was not possible to imagine giving them a letter grade. So I came up with questions that had right or wrong answers instead, though I knew they would cause nothing but misery. Enlightenment was not on the syllabus.
Holy Envy Page 18