9-11

I marked the anniversary of 9-11 last week by making a contribution to the Cordoba Initiative. In case you don’t know what that is because of the very sloppy media coverage of the last month, the Cordoba Initiative is what has been called the “Mosque at ground zero.” Of course it is not really a mosque (it is a community center with a planned prayer room for Muslims as well as ones for Christians and Jews) and it isn’t at ground zero (it is in a very mixed neighborhood a couple of blocks from the edges of the World Trade Center site), but I won’t get into that here.

I wanted to express my support for the project because I strongly believe in what Imam Feisal Rauf is trying to do. He wants to create a center that can promote a vision of Islam as a faith tradition that works for peace, love and understanding. And he wants this center to be a place where Jews, Christians, and Muslims can come together to learn from each other, support one another and celebrate their common ground and common heritage. The Cordoba project has at its heart the commandment common to all of our scriptures to “love God with all your heart, soul, and mind and love your neighbor as yourself.”

This kind of leadership in the Muslim community in the area of interfaith understanding and cooperation is just what all Christians and Jews should be hoping for and praying for. Here are Muslims extending their hands to us and I, for one, will eagerly and thankfully grasp those hands.

In each of our separate faith traditions, we are trying, with God’s help, to find truth and wisdom and a meaning for our lives that embodies God’s love and grace. Each of our traditions are limited and flawed. Each of us have histories with ugly chapters that should rightfully embarrass us. Each of our faiths have some radical and fundamentalist followers that espouse our faith in ways that cause division and violence and promote hatred. Each of our precious scriptures have stories or ideas that run counter to the whole and strain our abilities to interpret them in ways that honor the beauty of the central ideas of our traditions. Each of our faiths are incredibly diverse and no one can take any responsibility for their thousands of parts. All three are considered “revealed” religions depending upon the ways in which we have experienced God’s reaching out to us and our forbearers. But all three faiths have grown a myriad of different ways in which we interpret and reinterpret those revelations in our limited, self-centered, and flawed human ways.

Because none of us can claim that our limited minds and hearts can comprehend the whole of the mystery that we call God; because none of our interpretations of our faith traditions are without error and prejudice; we need each other. We need the wisdom, beauty and truth embodied in the other great religions to help us to better understand our own. We need the breadth of God’s grace breaking forth in other cultures, in other languages, in other times, in other lives and minds, to even begin to give us a sense of the wholeness and grandeur that is the God we worship. We each have a central revelation of God that informs and shapes the way we understand the world, but the universal spirit that we worship has been revealed in other ways, in other places, in other lives. Shouldn’t we want to hear those stories? Shouldn’t we want to learn from those other moments of God’s grace? Shouldn’t we celebrate the way in which God has spoken among us even when God wasn’t just speaking to our culture?

Our religions all have God’s love and grace at their hearts. Nothing based on that love and grace should ever become a divider between peoples. It should never create hatred or misunderstanding. It should never spawn violence. We should be able to celebrate each other’s ways. Our faiths are not in competition with each other, they are part of one another. They compliment each other. They complete each other.

What happened on 9-11 was a tragedy that grew out of the hatred that sprouted in the cracks of misunderstanding and distrust in one tiny segment of one of our faiths. That kind of violence has, at times, also found expression among followers of each of our traditions. To allow distrust of Muslims among us, to foster more misunderstanding, to sow more seeds of chauvinistic hatred between us, is simply to promote more 9-11's. If we want to honor those who died, if we want to fight the enemy that created that tragedy, then let us take up the weapons of the heart against hatred. Let us wield the power of love that God has taught us. Let us banish the sources of misunderstanding and ignorance that separate us from brothers and sisters who worship the same God of love. That is what, I believe, the Cordoba initiative is all about. I will join hands with them because there is no better monument that can spring up near ground zero or anywhere than this.