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 centre, 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 neighbours 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.
