Interreligious Dialogue and the Need for Tender, Courageous Curiosity

In June I spent a week at a Jewish retreat center in Maryland participating in an Emerging Religious Leaders event with the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies. Six Christian scholars, seven Jewish scholars, and seven Muslim scholars gathered for five days of learning how to have difficult conversations about challenging topics while committing to stay in relationship with one another.

I am still processing the experience. We talked about Gaza and Israel, LGBTQIA+, missionaries, Christian Zionism, religious rituals, our perspectives on orthodoxy and orthopraxy. On the last night there, Israel attacked Iran. I came home on Friday and woke up Saturday morning to an assassination and a manhunt ten minutes from my house in Minnesota. The world was, and still is, on fire.

We didn’t solve anything that week. Even in our “co-religionist” groups there were a lot of different opinions and complexity. But we didn’t devolve into factions and divisiveness, either. There were hard conversations followed by teary hugs and commitments to stay in relationship, to honor the dignity of the other, to respect another opinion even while strongly disagreeing and even potentially feeling wounded by that other opinion. There were disagreements while standing firm in the value of listening to the others’ story.

The point wasn’t to seek agreement or to change minds. The goal, in my opinion, was to increase empathy, to experience how my convictions land on someone else, to hear and observe the beauty in other traditions. There was holy envy (Barbara Brown Taylor) and holy discomfort. The conversations felt sacred, even while they sometimes stung.

What does it feel like to be a queer Jewish rabbi, listening to the traditional Islamic perspective on gender?

What does it feel like to be a Christian, listening to the history of how the religion I identify with has done deep damage in its pursuit of political power?

What does it feel like to be a Palestinian American or an Israeli American when your phone lights up with messages that people you love have been ordered into bomb shelters?

What does it feel like to love people holding a green card during ICE raid protests in LA and the government crackdown?

What does it feel like to cherish your religious tradition and heritage and to have an Evangelical say you will burn forever in conscious torment in hell?

The week was the opportunity for a bunch of religious nerds (we were all students of one form or another, guided by two leaders from each religious tradition) to ask anything of the others, and to expect to be asked anything by the others. There was a session of anonymous question-asking but also every meal or break time or roommate conversation was rich with curiosity.

We each came with the explicit posture of openness, encouraged to remain steady in our convictions while hearing the perspectives of others. This was not an attempt at forming theological unity. It was not a simplistic, “we’re all the same” or “let’s just get along” event. It was faith seeking understanding. Faith seeking to listen. How does my theology sound to someone else? What looks strange or confusing to an outsider? What questions do others have about my tradition? What do Christians from across denominational commitments share and not share? How do we manage to still come together, within the boundaries of my religious tradition and by crossing boundaries?

It was intense.

It was exhausting.

I’m still not totally sure what the practical outcome might be.

Personal transformation. Fresh commitments to interfaith engagement. New ideas about what interfaith engagement can entail and must require. Better understanding of what interfaith engagement isn’t. Exposure to communities I’ve not had deep conversations with previously.

I do know that I have a fresh and (hopefully) abiding tenderness toward my religious footprint. Often in my life abroad, we referred to American expatriates as the proverbial elephant in a China shop. Meaning, American expatriates tend to stomp around unaware of our size, our noise, and our impact on the beautiful aspects of other cultures. The result can be breakage and harm, as though an elephant tried to be gentle with your grandmother’s set of China teacups.

American Christians can behave in the same way. Unaware of our size, our noise, and our impact. Unaware of how we are being received or understood. Unaware of our lack of gentleness, humility, respect, and tenderness.

I also know that I have a fresh appreciation for story. It is far too easy to look at someone and see only a headscarf or body or skin color or style of clothing or to hear an accent or to see a religious symbol or to learn someone’s name…

…and to judge. To jump to conclusions. To make assumptions. To compare.

It takes much more work to get curious and to ask questions, to seek to hear the story of what has formed that person. What experiences and ideas and influences have shaped them? What brings them joy and what breaks their heart?

Learning the others’ story is the necessary and good work of being a person of faith and of seeking to love God and to love my neighbor.

May we (I) continually learn to love mercy, do justice, and walk humbly (tenderly) with our God (Micah 6:8), especially as we attempt to engage across religious difference.

How do you navigate hard conversations across difference? What are some guiding principles?