Theology, Thoughts & Coffee
Reading and Notes List:
Barbara Brown Taylor, Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others
- Introduction and Chapter 1, pp. 1-26
- Chapters 2-3, pp. 27-60
- Chapters 4-5, pp. 61-98
- Chapters 6-7, pp. 101-138
- Chapter 8, pp. 139-160
- Chapter 9, pp. 161-174
- Chapter 10, pp. 175-184
- Chapter 11, pp. 187-200
- Chapter 12, pp. 203-214
- Epilogue, pp. 215-224
Introduction and Chapter 1
Download Introducton and Chapter 1 notes
In this book, Barbara Brown Taylor explores the religious diversity and pluralism in our society by writing about her experiences teaching a class that introduces the religions of the world to undergraduate students.
She tells her story of leaving parish ministry after many years, feeling empty and unsure of her faith, and taking a position at a private liberal arts college in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains (Piedmont College). The class she taught most often was Religions of the World. When she recovered from “the shock of meeting God in so many new hats, she fell for every religion she taught.” It was only when teaching Christianity “that the fire sputtered, because her religion looked so different once she saw it lined up with the others.”
“She always promised her students that studying other faiths would not make them lose their own. Then she lost hers, or at least the one she started out with. This is the story of how that happened and what happened next.” It is also the story of a generation of young Americans who are growing up with more religious diversity than their parents and grandparents could ever imagine.
Rather than seeing religions as largely the same, held together by some common denominator, Taylor assumes religions are inherently different. They offer alternative ways of viewing reality. She understands world religions as wells in which we find the water of life and a lens by which we translate the landscape. She describes them as treasure chests of stories, songs, rituals, and ways of life that have been handed down for millennia—not covered in dust but evolving all the way—so that each new generation has something to choose from when it is time to ask the big questions about life. Where did we come from? Why do bad things happen to good people? Who is my neighbor? She suggests that a worldview is a wave, but not the entire ocean.
Unlike many scholars of religion who assert a common denominator of love and compassion, Taylor thinks each religion differs in significant ways. Each offers a unique set of perspectives on the world that gives rise to diversity, even in the confines of particular religious traditions. She resists the temptation to construct a customized religion using bits and pieces from other faiths that suit her needs and the needs of others that share her tradition. Instead, she looks for the wisdom found in each of them, hoping to build bridges not walls.
The basis for this approach for this approach is articulated in three guidelines offered by the Lutheran biblical scholar Krister Stendahl: 1) When trying to understand another religion, you should ask the adherents of that religion and not its enemies; 2) Don’t compare your best to their worst; and 3) Leave room for holy envy.
When describing her own holy envy, Taylor writes, “My spiritual covetousness extended to the inclusiveness of Hinduism, the nonviolence of Buddhism, the prayer life of Islam, and the sacred debate of Judaism. Of course, this list displays all the symptoms of my condition. It is simplistic, idealistic, overgeneralized, and full of my own projections. It tells you as much about what I find wanting in my own tradition as it does about what I find desirable in another.”
She supports her approach by noting that Jesus raises more questions than answers in the gospels. Unlike so many of his followers, Jesus refuses to define exactly what he means, and instead offers stories and ambiguous sayings when pressed for clarity.
Taylor suggest that today his Good Samaritan might be a Good Muslim or a Good Humanist, and the Golden Rule might include honoring your neighbor’s religion, as you want them to honor yours.
In this journey she notes, “I have discovered that I am Christian to the core. However many other religious languages I learn, I dream in Christian. However much I learn from other spiritual teachers, it is Jesus I come home to at night.”
From this perspective, she describes the approach she takes in her classes and in the book as her Christian duty, her way of being faithful to the way of Jesus. “I believe it is the neighborly thing to do, the Christ-like thing to do. Part of my ongoing priesthood is to find bridges between my faith and the faiths of other people, so that those of us who draw water from wells on different sides of the river can still get together from time to time, making the whole area safer for our children.”
Chapter 2: Vishnu’s Almonds
and Chapter 3: Wave Not Ocean
In considering Hinduism, Taylor cites the quote from Huston Smith (whom she refers to as the “great god-father” of all the teachers of world religions: “Hinduism is the great psychologist of the religions, he wrote. It knows that people are different and offers them different paths to union with the divine. Some choose a scholarly path and others a path of service. Some choose a path of meditation and others a path of devotion. Some devote themselves to Vishnu and some to the Divine Mother. Some shun the worship of deities altogether, striving to realize God in themselves with no decoys. Others mix and match.”
This provides a very helpful perspective on this ancient Indian faith tradition. In the context of Taylor’s experiences, it takes on fresh relevance. The plurality of the Christian faith, expressed in numerous denominations and communities, reflects many paths of Hinduism. Contemporary Christians tend to choose even from their own traditions what they find to be acceptable and disregard teachings and practices that they do not find compelling. Christians are often critical of the diverse and pragmatic nature of Hinduism without reflecting on the notion that the diversity of Christian denominations are often perceived as different religions by outsiders (as well as some insiders).
The irony becomes even more obvious when many claim that Christianity is the only way to God. The different traditions offer numerous answers, leading to the quite natural questions, which version of Christianity is the right way. Taylor reports her experience shows other religions are not so concerned with converting the whole world to their way.
She describes significant incidents in visits to other religious sites where leaders and authorities from every other tradition assured her students they had no desire that they should convert but hoped their experience would make them better Christians. A Hindu professor confesses love for Jesus but declares that does not mean she cannot love Lord Vishnu as well. A Buddhist monk speaks of Judaism and Buddhism being very much alike and advocates learning more about both to become a better Jew. A rabbi emphasizes you do not need to be Jewish in order to be righteous in God’s eyes and wonders why anyone would want to adopt their strange practices. A Muslim imam expresses the hope that worshiping in his mosque will help the students practice their own faiths more devoutly.
On the other hand, she reports many Christians have attacked her for introducing her students to the “idol worship” of other religions. They warn the she might be responsible for some of them cut off from God and condemned to hell for eternity. Taylor repeatedly stresses that the vehemence of this idea that the Christian way is the only way is what embarrasses her most in the Church.
Taylor’s holy envy of Buddhism particularly extends to its commitment to nonviolence. The Buddha reminds us that human suffering is the major concern of religious thought and action. Interestingly, Jesus also addressed the underlying causes of poverty, illness, death, and hatred in his ministry and teaching. Like the Buddha, he warns violence promotes pain and suffering while solving nothing. Jesus’ call to love unconditionally even our enemies is certainly one of history’s best and most challenging expressions of nonviolence. A major issue in the Christian tradition has been the question of “just war” or “just violence.” Those who Christians who have adopted an exclusively and consistently pacifist approach are appreciative of the Buddhist tradition of nonviolence.
Questions for Discussion:
- After witnessing Padmavathi’s bath (p.37), Taylor writes “I have never seen anything like this mix of the sensual and the sacred, with no fireproof ditch between the two.” How do you feel about the sensual and the sacred being so intertwined?
- What are the tensions and overlaps between being culturally respectful and participating in a religion you don’t follow? Discuss Taylor’s questions: “Can anyone who visits a sacred space remain an observer, or does one become a participant simply by entering in? Does taking part in the ritual of another faith automatically make you a traitor to your own?” (pp. 43–44).
- Taylor quotes author Paul Knitter, who wrote, “The more deeply one sinks into one’s own religious truth, the more broadly one can appreciate and learn from other truths” (p. 48). Can you describe any instances where you’ve had this experience in your own life? How has maturing in your own faith helped you to appreciate other faiths?
Chapter 4: Holy Envy
and Chapter 5: The Nearest Neighbors
The perspective Taylor develops throughout the book, and the basis for here title, comes from the work of the Lutheran biblical scholar Krister Stendahl (a former dean of Harvard Divinity School). He suggested three guidelines for religious dialogue and understanding:
- When trying to understand another religion, you should ask the adherents of that religion and not its enemies.
- Don’t compare your best to their worst.
- Leave room for holy envy.
“In the eyes of God we are all minorities. That’s a rude awakening for many Christians, who have never come to grips with pluralism in the world.”—Krister Stendahl
“If God isn’t partial to Christianity, then what am I doing here?” In reflecting on this question, Taylor writes, “I wish ordinary Christians took exams, so I could put that question on the final. As natural as it may be to want to play on the winning team, the wish to secure divine favoritism strikes me as the worst possible reason to practice a religion.”
In describing her own holy envy, Taylor writes, “My spiritual covetousness extended to the inclusiveness of Hinduism, the nonviolence of Buddhism, the prayer life of Islam, and the sacred debate of Judaism. Of course, this list displays all the symptoms of my condition. It is simplistic, idealistic, overgeneralized, and full of my own projections. It tells you as much about what I find wanting in my own tradition as it does about what I find desirable in another.”
Taylor writes that her unit on Judaism brought the most embarrassment to her regarding her own faith. She had to acknowledge all the horrible ways the Church persecuted the Jews down through history, even accusing them of being god killers. She tells of her own coming to terms with the ways in which she used language and maintained views that implied contempt when speaking of Judaism. She tells of a letter from a Jewish psychiatrist who had been reading her sermons. While he found much to appreciate, he also and pointed out that she was still using the “language of contempt” for Judaism when she suggested the Judaism had been “replaced” by Christianity. This idea is known as supersessionism or replacement theology.
In this regard, Christians can benefit from examining some of the common stereotypes that denigrate the Jewish tradition in relation to Christianity. An honest reading Law and the Prophets corrects ideas about the deity in the Old Testament being violent and the God of the New being loving and gentle. It also makes it impossible to base the difference between the New Testament and the Hebrew Bible on a contrast of law and love. It is important to remember that Jesus is Jewish and stands firmly in the Jewish tradition. His teaching affirms that tradition and seeks to extend it for his followers.
Taylor expresses holy envy for many Jewish practices, especially for the Jewish observance of the Sabbath. She also appreciates the acknowledgement that God’s covenant with Noah offers a universal promise to all the nations.
She wonders, why the teaching of Jesus became, by the end of the first century, a religion about him.
Questions for Discussion:
- Taylor laments the Christian doctrine of original sin, saying, “It drops the bar on being human so low that you have to wonder why we don’t all just stay in bed” (p. 74). At the same time, many Christians embrace this doctrine because it makes clear that humans cannot work their way to salvation, but must accept salvation as a gift of sheer grace. How important is original sin to your understanding of faith?
- Rather than see religions as competing for the one and only place of truth, Taylor presents a view where “absolute truth moves to the center of the system, leaving people of good faith with meaningful perceptions of that truth from their own orbits” (p. 78). She also shares the metaphor of religions as different rivers having the same heavenly source. How do you respond to these images and why?
- A Jewish psychiatrist writes Taylor about the latent “language of contempt” he has found in her published sermons (p. 87), in which she reinforces the idea that God’s covenant with Abraham has been supplanted by a new covenant with Christ. Is that idea new or old to you? How might a compelling challenge to that idea change your reading of the New Testament?
- Taylor contrasts the Christian emphasis on right religious belief with the Jewish emphasis on right religious practice. What is your answer to the question on page 95, “How does being Christian change the way you live?”
Chapter 6: Disowning God
and Chapter 7: The Shadow-Bearers
Taylor deals with personal questions that were coming up for her in the classroom:
- What does it mean to be a person of faith in a world of many faiths?
- If God is revealed in many ways, why follow the Christian way?
- Is Christian faith primarily about being human or becoming truly human?
- How does loving Jesus equip me to love those who do not love him the way I do? What do religious strangers reveal to me about God?
Her experiences in church and in the classroom deepen her awareness of the basic interpretive character of religious traditions. “The problem with every sacred text is that it has human readers. Consciously or unconsciously, we interpret it to meet our own needs. There is notion wrong with this unless we deny that we are doing it. As when someone tells me that he is not ‘interpreting’ anything but simply reporting what is right there on the page.”
This approach to reading the Bible, or other ancient texts for that matter, is highly problematic. We are already reading texts in translation. This means that the texts we read have already been subject to considerable interpretation. Just think of the differences among translations. In addition, we are so distant from the social and cultural contexts of the times in which these texts came into being. But perhaps the most significant concern to Taylor is because it is “such a short distance between believing you possess an error-free message from God and believing that you are an error-free messenger God.”
“The minute I believe I know the mind of God in the minute someone needs to sit me down and tell me to breathe into a paper bag.”
“Once my holy envy led me to ask more of my tradition than the narrative of exclusive salvation and everlasting triumph, I began to search for counternarratives that sounded more like Jesus to me. In particular, I looked for stories that supported Christian engagement with religious strangers—not as potential converts but as agents of the God who transcends religion and never met a stranger.”
For Taylor, the deeper message in the events of Jesus visit to Nazareth in Luke 4 is that no one owns God. “This is how far my holy envy has brought me: from fearing that Jesus will be mad at me for smelling other people’s roses to trusting that Jesus is the Way that embraces all ways.”
For Taylor this belief does not diminish her devotion to Jesus or her commitment to his teaching.” In every circumstance, regardless of the outcome, the main thing Jesus has asked me to do is to love God and my neighbor as religiously as I love myself. He minute I have that handled, I will ask for my next assignment. For now, I have my hands full.”
The relationship between religion and culture has reemerged as a problem in our time, most particularly in the terrorism practiced by some Middle Eastern groups. Politicians on both sides have used religion to justify their military actions. Taylor reports this situation made teaching Islam the most difficult. When she introduces Islam and asks students to write what they (think) they already know about it, terrorism will inevitably lead the list, followed by other, often similar ideas.
Some the problems and difficulties she identifies for understanding other religions and particularly Islam are:
- Recognizing the entanglement of politics, economics, history, and religion
- Noticing how religions change from culture to culture
- Vetting the viewpoints of your news source
- Resisting the tendency to judge the many by the actions of the few
- Understanding the dynamics of your own fear
“The biggest surprise for everyone is that Christian and Muslims both revere Jesus. Muslims call him Isa, believing him to be both prophet and messiah. Christians believe he shares divine status with God, which neither Jews nor Muslims can affirm, but Muslims honor him as an exemplar of what it means to truly surrender to God.”
“Letting this sink in for the first time, I am struck by the realization that Christians do not own Jesus any more than we own God. He has other sheep who do not belong to our fold, and when he is walking with them, they see him very differently. Hindus may see him in the saffron robes of a holy man or as an avatar who manifests the divine. Buddhists see him sitting in the lotus position as a bodhisattva, a compassionate being who works for the benefit of all beings. Jews have every reason to see him as the shepherd of a murderous flock, though there are a few who can see him as a liberal Pharisee of his day or a passionate rabbi who died for his vision of Judaism.”
“Jesus may not have been a Christian, but Christians do not like anyone claiming to know him as well as we do.”
Questions for Discussion
- Taylor persists in reading the Bible because “it is my baseline in matters of faith—something far older than I am, with a great deal more experience in what it means to be both human and divine. . . . I return to the Book—not to find a solution, but to remember how many possibilities there are” (p. 106). How do you approach the Bible? How has your approach changed, and—if you still read it—why do you persist?
- Taylor recounts some stories of religious strangers in the Bible—from King Melchizedek in Genesis to the wise magi of the Gospels—who enter the sacred story of a particular tradition in order to deliver a blessing and then leave it again without ever becoming a member of the tradition (pp. 108–110). What do you think of that idea? How does it challenge common understandings of how God works?
- What is your response to Taylor’s interpretation from Jesus’s first sermon at Nazareth (pp. 111–17)—that no tradition has privileged access to the divine and no religion owns God? How would accepting this conclusion change how you practice your faith or how you relate to other faiths?
- On page 129, Taylor says that September 11 changed the way Americans view Islam, resulting in what President Bush called “a quiet, unyielding anger,” (p. 129), that continues today. What fears do you have around terrorism? Where do they come from? How do they affect your perception of everyday Muslims?
- Referencing author Jonathan Sacks, Taylor identifies “groupishness” as the source of our violence, more than religion or secularism (p. 131). Where do you see “groupishness” in your own community? How can we maintain a positive sense of group identity without diminishing the value of those who do not belong to it?
Chapter 8: Failing Christianity
Taylor tells the story of students failing the quiz on Christianity: “I think I just did the worst on my own religion.” The only student who makes an A+ is on orthodox Jew, “perhaps because he is the only one who knew he had to study for it.”
“The first time this happened, I did not see it coming. I knew the unit on Christianity would be different for students, since it was the religion they knew the most about. I just did not think it would be so difficult for them to approach their faith the same way they had approached the others: from the outside, not the inside.”
“Over the years I have met students who could recite the sixty-six names of the books of the [Protestant] Bible in order, but had no idea how or when those books were assembled into a sacred library.”
“What happened in the centuries between Jesus’s resurrection and their own profession of faith is of little relevance in the churches where most of them grew up. They were raised to take their places in line directly behind the disciples, picking up the proclamation of the gospel where those simple fisherman left off.”
The importance of history and its consequences: “Christians are as divided from one another as we are from people of different faiths.”
“Unless I want to separate myself from everyone who does not see things the way I do—which my faith urges me not to do—then I have to admit that there are mutually exclusive views of what it means to be a Christian and that God alone is smart enough to decide which is best. This frees me to be with Christians who are not like me as well as those who are.”
The only sensible answer to the many questions concerning what Christians believe about various questions begins with another question: Which Christians? “There are a lot of waves in the Christian ocean. When you have met one Christian, you have met exactly one.”
Gandhi on evangelism to a missionary to India: “Do they spread the perfume of their lives? That is to me the sole criterion. All I want them to do is to live Christian lives, not to annotate them.”
Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except by me.” What does this mean? “He was sitting around the Last Supper table when he said it, and I am pretty sure the subject was not interfaith relations.” The subject was his imminent arrest and almost certain death and the real possibility that his disciples would be next since they had chosen to follow him. “To my ear at least, he is reassuring them that they have made the right choice.”
“Even if this interpretation does not move you, perhaps we can agree that Jesus’s saying puts him in charge of deciding who is on his way and who is not. If there is no other way to God, there is no other gatekeeper. Jesus alone is the arbiter of salvation in his name.”
“I understand the anxiety of mainline Christians who are watching congregations age and sometimes close, especially since I am one of them. It is hard to watch the wells from which you drew living water dry up.” In the face of this, it is natural to look for something to blame: the “world,” secular culture, false gospels, etc.
“At the same time they obscure the last truth any of us wants to confront, which is that our mainline Christian lives are not particularly compelling these days. There is nothing about us that makes people want to know where we are getting our water. Our rose has lost its fragrance.”
“The students in my class may be failing Christianity, but Christianity is failing them too. If the Spirit is doing a new thing, I wish it would hurry up.”
Questions for Discussion
- Have you ever looked at your faith from the outside, as Taylor did, through the eyes of historians and religion scholars? What has that lens revealed to you?
- What do you think of Taylor’s idea that Jesus alone is the arbiter of salvation in his name” and that his saying about being the way, the truth, and the life “puts him in charge of deciding who is on his way or not” (p. 153)? Is that comforting or discomforting, and why?
- At the end of the chapter, Taylor tells the story of how she refrained from taking Communion one time because it was painful to her Jewish companion (pp. 157– 59). She asks, “Am I really meant to choose between [Jesus] and my neighbors of other faiths?” What do you think of her decision in that instance? What does it mean to you to love your neighbors of other faiths?
Chapter 9: Born Again
“Do not be astonished that I said to you, ‘You must be born from above.’ The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” Nicodemus said to him, “How can these things be?” Jesus answered him, “Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?” —John 3:7-10
Taylor chooses this text for a baccalaureate address as a piece of “distinctly Christian wisdom” to demonstrate that it was possible to speak from her own Christian tradition “without sounding triumphal or exclusive.”
This story of Jesus and Nicodemus appears only in John’s Gospel and is often told as a story about the inability of Nicodemus “to grasp the truth that Jesus reveals to him about the Kingdom of God.”
She notes that Nicodemus leads with praise, “Rabbi, we know that you are a n their from the presence of God.” She emphasizes this because the story has evoked so much anti-Jewish teaching over the years. She wants her readers to set this aside long enough “to listen in on a very important conversation between two rabbis about the way of life.”
In her reading of the story, the response of Jesus is to let Nicodemus know “that he does not know the first thing about who has come from God and who has not. He cannot see one millimeter into God’s kingdom.” Rather than rebuking him, Taylor wonders if the purpose of Jesus is “not to enlighten Nicodemus but to endarken him, establishing the limits of what humans can know about God and what we cannot?” Nicodemus say to Jesus “We know,” Jesus responds, “You do not know.”
However, the point of this from Taylor’s perspective is not to judge Nicodemus for his lack of knowledge but to suggest to him that his problem is that he thinks he ought to about the Kingdom of God. Jesus statement about the wind is one of fact, not judgement. Jesus say this is the way with everyone who is born of the Spirit. “The only thing that sets Nicodemus apart is that he is so uncomfortable with his unknowing. His problem is that he thinks he ought to know.”
“This is difficult teaching for those who want to feel secure in their relationship with God, especially if their security depends on knowing how things work.”
Jesus response to Nicodemus is not, you do not know “because you are stupid, but because you are not God. So relax if you can, because you are not doing anything wrong. This is what it means to be human.”
“The story of Jesus and Nicodemus freed me from believing I had to know the answer to every question about what it means to be Christian…I could also stop worrying about whether I was Christian enough to stay in the room with Jesus. Thanks to his conversation with Nicodemus, I gained new respect for what it means to be agnostic—such a maligned word, so often used to mean distrustful or lackadaisical, when all it really means is that you do not know, which according to Jesus is true of everyone who is born of the Spirit.”
“The greatest gift of my second birth, however, was being reunited with my birth mother—not the first one, who bore me in the labor and delivery suite at Lafayette Home Hospital in Lafayette, Indiana—but the second one, who bore me from above.” The Holy Spirit. Her.
“Even if Christian will not go higher than three, the case is made: unity expresses itself in diversity. The one who comes to us in more than one way is free to surprise us in all kinds of ways.” Just like the wind that blows where it will.
Our “best ways of thinking and speaking about God are provisional. They are always in process—reflecting our limited perspectives, responding to our particular lives and times, relating us to our ancestors in the faith even as they flow out toward the God who remains free to act in ways that confound us. If our ways of thinking and speaking about God are not at least that fluid, then they are not really theologies but theolatries—things we worship instead of God, because we cannot get God to hold still long enough to pin God down.”
“Lately I have begun to notice how my holy envy of friends in other traditions [Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim] moves the circle back to me.” In many ways, Taylor notes that she learns “positive things about my tradition from people who do not belong to it, which triples the value of their praise…When I consider their gifts to me, I decide that being born again is looking for ways to return the favor, like the imam who sent my students away with the express wish that they could be the best Christians, the best Jews, the best human beings they could be. Once you have given up knowing who is right, it is easy to see neighbors everywhere you look.
Questions for Discussion
- In Taylor’s rereading of the story of Nicodemus coming to Jesus in the night (pp. 163–68), being “born again” means acknowledging all that you don’t know about God and being freed by that unknowing. Are there things you were once certain of that you don’t know about anymore? How does Taylor’s understanding of being “born again” compare to yours?
- Taylor suggests we should keep our ways of thinking and speaking of God fluid, lest our theologies become “theolatries—things we worship instead of God, because we cannot get God to hold still long enough to pin God down” (p. 171). How important is orthodoxy (correct theology) to you?
- Though Taylor has moved away from the traditional center of Christianity, she has learned from friends in other religions to see the good in her tradition (pp. 171–73). If you have experienced a similar shift in your religious perspective, what new views do you have of your tradition?
Chapter 10: Divine Diversity
“In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?”—Jesus of Nazareth (John 14:2)
“One of the greatest gifts that holy envy has given me is the ability to reimagine my own tradition. I would like to tell you that it is the product of gaining wisdom, insight, and perspective through the study of other religions, but that would not be true. Instead, it is the product of losing my way, doubting my convictions, interrogating my religious language, and tossing many of my favorite accessories overboard when the air started leaking out of my theological life raft.”
Jonathan Sacks taught Taylor how important it is for people of faith to “make space for difference at the heart of our tradition.” He said that common human values are great, but when “groupishness sets in and we are looking for excuses to wipe each other out, we need stories from deep within our tradition that show us another way.” He believed this to be especially important for monotheists, “whose focus on one God can so easily lead us to believe we are the only apple of God’s eye. What we need instead are new understandings—each of us based on our own scriptures and traditions—that the unity of the Creator is expressed in the diversity of creation.”
Reinterpretation of the story of the Tower of Babel: “For reasons no one may ever understand, God decided it would be helpful for people to be different instead of the same, if only because it would slow us down a little bit.”
Jonathan Sacks: “The single greatest antidote to violence is conversation, speaking our fears, listening to the fears of others, and in that sharing of vulnerabilities discovering the genesis of hope.”
“There are plenty of times I want to go back to Babel, where everyone speaks the same language and we are all on the same page. My own church feels that way sometimes, like a safe city with a tower that has a cross on top, making a name for its builders by how far it reaches into the heavens. It is a beautiful place to rest, but it is not the best place to stay. If God’s revised will for Babel is any indication, then the clamorous world outside is the best place for human beings to stay—to stay on the move, that is, entering into conversations with neighbors who are as different from one another as they can be.”
Why take the risk of conversation if the chances of agreement are so slim? “My sole hope is to give God one more chance to work on me, by coming to me in the guise of a stranger who does not speak my language, asking me questions I cannot answer, until I become so interested in what can and cannot be said that the stranger and I go off to find lunch, leaving our half-built tower standing silent in the sand.”
Questions for Discussion
- In Taylor’s reading of the Tower of Babel story, God decided it would be good for humans to speak a diversity of languages, slow down, and work harder to understand one another (p. 181). Though it feels safer to go back to Babel, where everyone speaks the same language, Taylor believes it’s important to live in spaces of diversity even if they include the potential for misunderstanding and require more intentional communication. How do you feel about living among differences and trying to have conversations with people who think differently than you? What kinds of diversity are valued in your community and what kinds are not?
- Do you think it’s possible to have a real conversation with someone if you are unwilling to entertain the idea that you could be wrong, or at the very least the idea that there could be more than one way to see a given issue? How willing are you, at this point, to take on new perspectives (religious, political, or otherwise) and surrender the primacy of your own?
- Taylor admits at the end of the chapter that having holy envy, and entertaining a variety of religious visions, might require a level of maturity in one’s faith tradition. At what point in the religious journey is it appropriate to begin reimagining the stories of your tradition? If you are in a position of passing your faith onto children or those new to the faith, how do you give them truths to hold on to without being rigid about those truths?
Chapter 11: The God You Didn't Make Up
“Spirituality is the active pursuit of the God you didn’t make up.”
“I could not argue with the part about making God up. All you have to do is dust my Bible for fingerprints to find my favorite parts and the ignored ones—or follow my tracks on Google, or check my book purchases on Amazon, or poll my friends. I stick very close to sources that support my view of reality.”
“My view of God is my own creation, made from bits and pieces of received or perceived knowledge about divine reality that I hope or fear are true. My mosaic has my fingerprints all over it. Ask anyone what she means when she says ‘God’ and chances are that you will learn a lot more about the person than you will learn about God.”
“So how does one get beyond that? How do any of us pursue the God we did not make up?”
“There is no way to overstate the importance of what I have learned from studying the world’s great religions, but here is what I noticed: I was still drawn to the teachings that I liked.”
“I make my own mosaic. Whether the resources at my disposal come only from my own tradition or from a wide array of traditions, my ego stays very active selecting the ones that please me most.”
“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?”
This is the “monumental 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.’”
According the Jonathan Sacks, “The supreme religious challenge is to see God’s image in one who is not in our image.”
“If he is right, then the stranger—the one who does not look, think, or act like the rest of us—may offer 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…All scripture says is that when he appeared to his disciples after his resurrection, few of them recognized him at first. 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.”
Questions for Discussion
- Think about your own spirituality. How do you filter what new information to include in your picture of God? Whom do you trust to speak to your faith, whom don’t you trust, and why? When your spirituality has shifted, what has caused those shifts?
- Taylor concludes that what can help most in getting beyond her own limited perspective is not trying to be proficient in all religious languages (p. 190) or giving up speaking her own (p. 193), but being authentically human in how she talks and listens to others. What does it mean to you to be authentically human? Who are your best role models?
- As difficult as it may be to love those who look, think, and act differently from us, Taylor notes that it is perhaps the best way to get close to the God we didn’t make up (p. 195). Can you share an instance where you were called upon to show kindness to a stranger, or when you were a stranger who received surprising kindness from someone else? What did these experiences teach you about your own humanity, and about God?
Chapter 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, some profane? We listen.”—Huston Smith
Final exam question: “A respected religious scholar named Krister Stendahl one formulated three rules for religious understanding that include ‘Make room for holy envy.’ What has inspired ‘holy envy’ in you this semester?”
For Taylor, teaching Religion 101 “is a repeating loop that has inspired my best efforts for years, which means my education has loops in it too…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.”
“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 in what they believe.”
“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.”
“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.”
Matthew 25: “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, 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 way 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.”
“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.”
“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 recognized the king in their midst…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.”
Questions for Discussion
- Taylor discovers that her relationships with complex, surprising religious strangers have benefited her faith more than religious certainty and solid ground (p. 213). In your own spiritual journey, what kind of certainty has remained important to you and what kind has not? How do you feel about standing on changing ground? What relationships have shaken your spiritual foundations and what has the outcome been for you?
- Taylor’s baseline for becoming Christian is “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” (p. 214). What are your thoughts about this? What is your definition of what it means to be Christian?
Epilogue: Church of the Common Ground
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“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…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.”
“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 is was to split religion off from the rest of life.”
“Something I learned in college came back to me with force. There is no such thing as religion. There are only religious people, who embody the scripts of their faiths as differently as dancers embody the steps of their dances. Until someone grabs a partner and heads to the dance floor, the tango is no more than a list of steps on the wall. The same is true of faith. We have inherited a sacred pattern, a series of artful steps meant to lead us closer to God and each other, but until someone finds a partner and gives it a try, it is an idea and not a dance.”
“What this means is that it is not possible for a generic group of Christians to meet with a generic group of Buddhists to discuss a generic issue on which they differ. If you have met one Buddhist, you have met exactly one—and the same is true of the followers of other faiths as well. Although we may be tuned to the teachings of our distinct religions, our religious experience is not singular but plural. This is as true within our religions as it is between them.”
”That was the key insight for me, back when I was failing Christianity. Once I fully accepted that there are mutually exclusive views of what it means to be Christian—that Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant Christians of good faith can disagree about a great many things without being forced off the dance floor, and that God alone is competent to judge their performances—it was only a short step from there to accepting that there are mutually exclusive views of the divine mystery as well, among which I am not competent to judge.” All I can do is dance my heart out, finding as much to admire in the other dancers as I do in those in those who dance with me.”
“I often find myself at what Richard Rohr calls ‘the edge of the inside’ of my tradition…Rohr explains that being on the edge of the inside is not a rebellious position any more than it is an antisocial one. ‘When you live on the edge of anything with respect and honor,’ he says, ‘you are in a very advantageous position. You are free of its central seductions, but also free to hear its core message in very new and creative ways.’”
The warning of David Brooks: “You never lose yourself in a full commitment. You may be respected and befriended, but you are not loved as completely as the people at the core, the band of brothers. You enjoy neither the purity of the outsider nor that of the true believer.”
In spite of these challenges, Brooks says that best reason to stay on the inside of the edge is because reality looks different from that vantage point. “People who are all the way in or all the way out tend to think in terms of ‘us’ versus ‘them,’ but from the perspective of the edge it is possible to see how the two may actually be in relationship with each other and with some larger process, even when it does not look that way to either of them.”
Questions for Discussion
- Though Taylor spent half a lifetime near the center of her religion, she now finds herself on what Richard Rohr calls “the edge of the inside” (p. 217). Where are you in relation to the center of your tradition? What benefits and drawbacks do you experience in this position? How do you feel about where you are?
- When Taylor visits the Church of the Common Ground, which meets outdoors in a public park in Atlanta, the bishop’s words strike a new chord with her: “As different as we are, whatever concerns we bring, we are all one” (p. 222). Having chewed on this book, what do the words “we are all one” mean to you? What do you affirm in them? What do you question in them?
- How has this book challenged your understandings of what it means to practice true religion, to be a good person, to be on the right spiritual path? Has anything changed about how you relate to people of other religious traditions or how you practice your own faith? If so, what do you think you will do about it?