Where the Rainbow Touches the Ground

My blogging career (ha!) began when I was knee-deep in social activism.  I had a point, a purpose, a focus.  Since then, I've been morphing and bending and twisting into what, I don't know.  With Michael's diagnosis, the need to spend a lot of time with Mom, and other assorted chocolates, I am less active in the world out there.  Still, I stand in silence for peace every Saturday, as I have for many years, and I participate in an interreligious group.  I feel that the interreligious group contributes to world peace as much or more as any vigil or march or letter to my congressperson could.  Maybe I don't know what I'm talking about when I say that.  How can anyone know?

One of the members of our interreligious group asked me to write something about the group.  I had no clue about what he wanted from it, but as I stared at the blank canvas of the page, this is what came out of me:

A Jew, a Muslim, and a Catholic walk into a bar…

No, actually, they walk into a room where they meet with a Sufi woman, along with a man whose spiritual path is a smorgasbord of varied, but, on many levels, interrelated beliefs. 

Every two or three months, I join a handful of men and women from different spiritual traditions in coming together to deepen our own spiritual paths while learning about the paths of others.  None of us are clergy or any other type of leader in our faith community, and our meetings are not focused on the academics of the teachings.  Instead, we speak to how our spiritual paths inform our personal experiences.  Over the last two years, we have investigated numerous topics ranging from holidays to prayer to death. 

Why would we take our commitments to this group so seriously?  I can only speak for myself when I say that these gatherings have made me a better human being.  The more I participate in our group meetings, the more I learn about myself and the more I can understand just a little of what others see as they practice in their spiritual traditions.  I find the many ways that we are alike and the few ways in which we see the world differently.  I do my best to set aside judgment while noticing that these friends are doing the same for me.

Each time this interreligious group meets, we use a different topic as a starting off point.  The topic keeps us focused, and it ensures that we cover a variety of aspects of our lives.  At our last meeting, our topic was “pain and suffering”.  At the time, I had been experiencing a lot of sadness and confusion over the recent cancer diagnosis of my husband as well as the even more recent death of my dad.  The opportunity to delve deep into the teachings of my tradition regarding pain and suffering, and then to share those and hear the view of others, was a salve on my perceived wounds.   

We humans tend to gravitate to “our people” – either family members or people who align with our views of the world.  That is normal and comfortable.  But our growth comes from either the stretching that life asks of us or our willingness to choose to go beyond the comfortable.  I believe that by making the effort to connect deeply with people who we consider to be “other”, we become more of ourselves and we help to create peace in this world for our children and their children.

Through finding the Divine behind our facades of differences, the above joke may evolve until it becomes, “A person of the Jewish faith, a person of the Muslim faith, and a person of the Catholic faith walk into a room where they find people of every faith that exist on Earth.  There, a woman from the Buddhist tradition asks the host to “make me one with everything”, and every mind in the room suddenly recognizes that, no matter what path we travel, we all come from the same creator.

May it be so.