Holy Envy

by Barbara Brown Taylor

  When too many students score lower on their finals than they have on any of their quizzes, I accept what the results are telling me: it was the experience of the class and not the content of it that was transformative for them. “This was the best class I have taken in college,” one student writes at the bottom of his exam, on which he has earned a D. That is why I dread giving final exams—because the grades so seldom reflect the process I have seen taking place.

  For fifteen weeks this student and others like him have lived with the kinds of questions that no textbook or teacher can answer. They have considered the often contradictory answers of five great religions, discovering more diversity within the religions than they ever imagined. Their vocabulary list has well over a hundred words on it, in five different languages. Their time line covers four thousand years. By the time they get to the final exam, they have learned so many new things about so many old religions that the lines between them blur.

  Do the Four Noble Truths go with Buddhism or Islam?

  Does Talmud belong to Hinduism or Judaism?

  These are such elementary questions that basic religious literacy depends on remembering the right answers to them, but students do not hang on to the right answers as well as either of us would like. When they leave my class, it is the relationships they remember.

  “How is Swami Yogeshananda at the Vedanta Center?” one of them asks me a full year after she has taken the class. “I still think he needs a cat.” Another alumnus of the class wants to know if he can go on this semester’s field trip to the mosque, since he has thought of another question he wants to ask our guide. A couple engaged to be married return to Drepung Loseling Monastery on their own time to learn more about Medicine Buddha practice. When I show up with a gaggle of students for a field trip one Tuesday night they are already there, sitting in the second row of the dharma hall on square pillows with their legs crossed impressively. Later they will write to let me know they have become Episcopalians and are very active in their church.

  Because of them and other students like them, I have added a question about holy envy to the final exam. It comes in the subjective section, where no one gets a D.

  A respected religious scholar named Krister Stendahl once formulated three rules for religious understanding that include “Make room for holy envy.” What has inspired “holy envy” in you this semester?

  “I have been ignited by holy envy in a lot of ways,” one student writes in response. “I love the notion that karma is not measured or judged by a higher power; you are responsible for your own actions. Whether I decide to believe in a religion or not, I will keep this moral code of self-accountability with me.”

  Another says she has been inspired by the writings of the Dalai Lama. “I envy his deep belief in compassion and genuine love for all humanity,” she writes. “I wish Christians would focus on being more compassionate instead of feeling like they have to correct everyone else.”

  One student recounts the same experience that inspired holy envy in me:

  When it comes to holy envy, one thing really sticks out in my mind. When we went to the mosque on our field trip, the imam spoke to us ahead of time, and what he told us is my holy envy. He told us how he doesn’t wish to convert us to Islam. He just wants us to be the best people we can be, regardless of religion. This was the most beautiful thing I have ever heard, and it’s my holy envy because I wish Christianity was this way.

  While the students are still finishing their exams, I look down at their names in my grade book. Some have already sold their textbooks back to the bookstore, replacing them with volumes on cellular biology, intermediate Spanish, criminal justice, or computer science. As soon as I post their grades, world religions will lose most of its color, fading in their memories along with world history and world literature. A few will keep the Buddhist mandalas they created for class or the bumper stickers I handed out before the unit on Islam (“Don’t Believe Everything You Think”). A few might even sign up for another religion class, but this one has come to an end. In a matter of weeks I will be greeting a new room full of students, welcoming them to Religion 101.

  It is a repeating loop that has inspired my best efforts for years, which means that my education has loops in it too. Every semester I tinker with the syllabus, searching for ways to simplify the content and deepen the engagement, to bring the world into the classroom and the class into the world. I have done it so often that I do not need the sheet music anymore. I can play it by heart. But that is the treble line of the course, which starts over again every fifteen weeks. The bass line is something else altogether—a low, insistent strain that does not stop when the class ends but is there when I wake up in the morning and is still there when I go to sleep at night. It is the sound of my own unknowing going forward like an underground current headed toward an ocean for which I have no name.

  Teaching the course has enriched my soul in so many ways. It has also shaken many of my foundations. Now when I explain to students why Jews do not believe Jesus was the messiah, the reasons make sense to me. When I tell the story of the night Muhammad received the first verses of the Qur’an in a cave outside of Mecca, I believe that the angel Gabriel stood in attendance. When I spell out the ways in which the Hindu concept of Brahman differs from the Christian concept of God, the Hindu concept strikes me as far more advanced. When I teach the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths, they sound perfectly true.

  Spending extended amounts of time inside other religious worldviews has loosened the screws on my own, which is beginning to seem like a good thing. Disowning God has been a great help to me. Owning my distinct view of God has helped me understand it much better. Although I can see the places where religious truth claims collide, this does not bother me as much as it could. I am far more interested in how people live than what they believe. When other Christians threaten or disappoint me, I work as hard to see God in them as in people of other (or no) faiths. It helps to remember that these are often the same Christians whom I threaten and disappoint in equal measure. 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.

  There are losses as well, of course. For as long as I can remember, I have been on the lookout for a solid place to stand with God. Sometimes that search has taken me to a literal place, such as a church, where people seem confident in the way they speak of and bow down to God. Other times the search has cost me a fortune in books. When I was sure the answer to my predicament was in the Bible, I invested thousands of dollars in commentaries and theories of interpretation. When I was sure the answer was in the medieval mystics, I filled my shelves with their works and those of the scholars who knew them best. For a while I thought the answer might be in process theology, or the poetry of R. S. Thomas, or the regular practice of morning and evening prayer.

  All of this has been very helpful, but none of it has delivered me to a solid place with God. If anything, it has increased the squishiness underfoot, by offering me so many different ways of seeing the divine that I feel like a fly with compound eyes. When I began teaching world religions, I gained so many new lenses that it was a wonder I could walk in a straight line. Is God one or three or thirty-three thousand? Do people suffer more from sin or from ignorance? Is God a divine being who moves human beings around or a field of cosmic consciousness in which all things align? What do I mean when I say “God”? When this becomes too much for me, I remember what I tell the students. “If it is God you want, look for the light and not the diamond. There are so many facets, and yet the light is not in any of them. Their beauty lies in their ability to reflect what is beyond them.”

  When I first began teaching Religion 101, students would sometimes tell me they were scared to study other religions for fear of losing their faith. It was an odd concern, on the face of it. Would studying Spani
sh make them lose their English? Would traveling to Turkey cost them their US passport? I had a stock response to their concern: engaging the faith of others is the best way to grow your own.

  Now, years down the road, I have greater respect for their unease. To discover that your faith is one among many—that there are hundreds of others that have sustained millions of people for thousands of years, and that some of them make a great deal of sense—that can rock your boat, especially if you thought yours was the only one on the sea. If your faith depends on being God’s only child, then the discovery that there are others can lead you to decide that someone must be wrong—or that everyone belongs, which means that no religion, including yours, is the entire ocean.

  The next time I teach the course I will try to be more honest. “Engaging the faith of others will almost certainly cause you to lose faith in the old box you kept God in,” I will say. “The truths you glimpse in other religions are going to crowd up against some of your own. Holy envy may lead you to borrow some things, and you will need a place to put them. You may find spiritual guides outside your box whom you want to make room for, or some neighbors from other faiths who have stopped by for a visit. However it happens, your old box will turn out to be too small for who you have become. You will need a bigger one with more windows in it—something more like a home than a box, perhaps—where you can open the door to all kinds of people without fearing their faith will cancel yours out if you let them in. If things go well, they may invite you to visit them in their homes as well, so that your children can make friends.”

  After I say good-bye to this semester’s students, I go home with their papers under my arm, thinking about the final exam Jesus proposed near the end of his life. He too seemed more interested in how people lived than what they believed. When his death was before him and he knew it, Matthew says, he told his disciples what to expect when the Son of Man comes in his glory and all the angels with him.

  It will be as if he were sitting on his throne looking out at all the people of all the nations in the world, Matthew says—still a shepherd, though now also a king—faced with the final duty of separating the sheep in the flock from the goats. They will have grazed together for ages by then—eaten the same grass, drunk from the same streams, slept under the same stars—but at last it will be time for the metaphorical goats to go one way and the sheep to go another. If you can remember the “metaphorical” part, the story is easier to hear.

  Surprisingly, none of the people standing before the throne will know which one they are, perhaps because this is the first time they have heard the Son of Man lay out the criteria for their separation. Some may have thought that what they believed about him would make all the difference. Others may have hoped that being with him from the start would mean that they had tenured positions in the flock.

  Whatever they think, he will surprise them. Sheep and goats, he will surprise them, because in the end the criteria for telling them apart will have nothing to do with their beliefs or their allegiances and everything to do with how they have treated the least important people in their lives—the ones who were shoved so far to the side that no one even saw them anymore; the ones who had been treated as if they were guilty of something for so long that acting guilty had seeped into them like smog; the ones who were too sick to return the favor, too old to say thank you, too strange to feel safe around, too hard to help.

  It was me you ignored, the king will tell the unsuspecting goats. It was me you passed by. This will come as a huge shock to those who thought they knew for sure what he looked like (blond hair, blue robe, right?), who kept tabs on his whereabouts and stayed as close to him as they could, once they suspected who he was. “Lord, when was it that we saw you?” That is what they will not be able to figure out. Had he been wearing a red wig, a fake nose, a hoodie? How had they, of all people, failed to recognize their Lord and come quickly to his aid?

  His answer to their questions will come too late for them. It was a case of mistaken identity, yes, but not the way they had conceived it. Their mistake was to think that he lived in one body, not all bodies; that he lived behind one face, not all faces; that he saw them through one set of eyes, not all sets of eyes. But what is terrible news for some will be wonderful news for others:

  Then the king will say to those at his right hand, “Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.” Then the righteous will answer him, “Lord, when was it that we saw you . . . ?” (Matt. 25:34–37)

  If you know this passage as well as I do, you may have to slow down and count all of the king’s disguises as they go by: hungry person, thirsty person, strange person, naked person, sick person, imprisoned person. How many did you get right? I do not know why so many people skip over the strange person, but they do. Yet there it is. One of the ways the Son of Man smuggles himself into our midst is by showing up as a stranger in need of welcome. Welcome is the king’s solution to the problem of the stranger. Always has been, always will be.

  That is where I have ended up anyway. Just like my students, it is not the facts I remember but the relationships: the Hindu swami who calls me some Sunday afternoons just to ask how I am getting along; the Muslim imam who came to church to hear me talk and helped me with my Arabic pronunciation when I faltered; the Buddhist monk who sends me Christmas cards every year; the Reform rabbi who wishes me a blessed Advent. This is about them, not me, but the joke is definitely on me.

  I asked God for religious certainty, and God gave me relationships instead. I asked for solid ground, and God gave me human beings instead—strange, funny, compelling, complicated human beings—who keep puncturing my stereotypes, challenging my ideas, and upsetting my ideas about God, so that they are always under construction. I may yet find the answer to all my questions in a church, a book, a theology, or a practice of prayer, but I hope not. I hope God is going to keep coming to me in authentically human beings who shake my foundations, freeing me to go deeper into the mystery of why we are all here.

  Meanwhile, it helps to remember that neither the sheep nor the goats in Matthew’s parable knew which one they were. They were all on the sacred way of unknowing. The sheep were as surprised to learn they had done something right as the goats were to learn they had done something wrong. None of them had recognized the king in their midst. His clever disguises had fooled them all. The only thing that set them apart, in the end, was that half of them had made a habit of treating everyone they met with kindness and respect—even the ungrateful ones, even the ones that scared them—and that made all the difference.

  The God I believe in does not send half the flock to slaughter for bad behavior (though the Jesus I believe in is not above telling a story like that to shock his listeners awake), which is why I like to ride the metaphor all the way. If the sheep and the goats in the story are really people, then why can’t the people in the story be part sheep and part goat? Does anyone behave the same way all the time? Is anyone purely good or bad?

  The Russian novelist and Nobel Prize winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn did not think so. In The Gulag Archipelago he wrote:

  If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?1

  The key phrase here is “every human being.” That is my baseline for becoming Christian, anyway—to extend the same care to every human being that I wish for myself, to treat every human being as if he or she were Jesus in disguise. I will surely flunk this exam, but I am also willing to be surprised. Who knows? Maybe a day will come when the shee
p and the goats lie down together, purring like cats at the feet of the divine stranger who has put all their fears to rest.

  Epilogue: Church of the Common Ground

  It is a great mistake to suppose that God is only, or even chiefly, concerned with religion.

  ARCHBISHOP WILLIAM TEMPLE

  In the middle of writing this book I decided to retire from teaching religion. During the months that followed, my feelings mimicked those of empty nesters suddenly faced with a quiet house and no young energy to govern. Students of all ages had brought me so much delight through the years—such real questions, such uncensored reactions, such spontaneous humor and natural affection—that there was no substitute for them in my life. I kept waiting to tire of teaching them, but it never happened. To the very last, they called forth my best efforts and repaid them by being thoroughly themselves. They forgave me my bad days as I forgave them theirs. On our good days, there was no better place to be than the classroom, where we changed each other in ways that still matter.

  At the same time, I was ready to let someone else teach the world’s great religions. The longer I did it, the more dishonest I felt. Fifteen weeks was not enough time to do justice to even one of them. The only way to get through five that fast was to desiccate them, reducing each to its skeletal outline with enough names and dates to anchor a ten-point quiz. In my effort to present the best of each tradition, I often sent students away with positive stereotypes that served them no better than negative ones. Every time we went on a field trip to a place of worship or devotion, I wondered how wise it was to split religion off from the rest of life. Why didn’t we go to a girls’ basketball game at a Muslim high school instead, or invite an entire Hindu family to class? Even the textbook treated religions like sealed compartments that could be kept separate from one another, each with its own glossary at the end.