16
February 3, 2015
commentary
T
he Valley Catholic
Spirituality: Looking for the One God inside our Denominational and Faith Divisions
By Rev. Ron Rolheiser
Christian de Cherge,
the Trappist Abbott who
was martyred in Algeria
in 1996, was fond of sharing this story:
He had a very close Muslim friend,
Mohammed, and the two of them
used to pray together, even as they
remained aware of their differences,
as Muslim and Christian. Aware too
that certain schools of thought, both
Muslim and Christian, warn against
this type of prayer, fearing that the
various faiths are not praying to the
same God, the two of them didn’t call
their sessions together prayer. Rather
they imagined themselves as “digging
a well together”. One day Christian
asked Mohammed: “When we get
to the bottom of our well, what will
we find? Muslim water or Christian
water?” Mohammed, half-amused but
still deadly serious, replied: “Come on
now, we’ve spent all this time walking
together, and you’re still asking me this
question. You know well that at the
bottom of that well, what we’ll find is
God’s water.”
There are important religious truths
couched inside that story. First off, all
religions worthy of the name believe
that the first thing we need to affirm
about God is that God is ineffable, that
is, God is beyond all human imagination, conceptualization, and language.
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Everything we think and say about
God, even within scripture and our
defined dogmas, is more inadequate
than adequate. It reveals some truth,
but, this side of eternity, never the complete truth. No dogma and no religion
ever provide an adequate expression
of God. If this is true, and it is, then all
religious truth is always partial and
limited in its historical expression and
cannot claim adequacy. All religions,
all dogmas, and all expressions of theology, irrespective of denomination or
religion, must humbly acknowledge
their incompleteness. Only God is
absolute, and an absolute knowledge
of God lies at the bottom of the well, at
the end of our religious journey.
That fact radically changes the way
we need to conceive of ecumenism and
interfaith dialogue. Since no one, us
included, has the full truth, the way
of ecumenism and interfaith dialogue
should not be conceived, as has been so
much the case up to the present, of one
side winning the other side over: We,
alone, have the truth and you must join
us! Rather the way has to be conceived
of precisely “digging a well together”,
namely, as each of us, with an open
heart, longing for those others who are
not at our table, refusing all proselyting, becoming engaged through our
own religious tradition in the search
for deeper conversion. That search is
precisely the search to get to the bottom
of the well, knowing that, once there,
we, as all other sincere, authentic religious searchers, will find both God’s
water and unity with everyone else
who is there.
The renowned ecumenist, Avery
Dulles, called this the path of “progressive convergence”. Eventual unity
among the various churches and various faiths will not come about by everyone in the world converting to one
denomination or one religion. Rather
it will come about, and can only come
about, by each of us converting more
deeply inside our own tradition. As
each of us and each faith move more
deeply into the mystery of God we will
progressively draw closer and closer to
each other. Christian de Cherge’s story
illustrates this wonderfully.
And this path, when correctly taken,
does not lead us into relativism and
the naïve belief that all religions are
equal. Nor does it mean that we do not
enthusiastically and openly celebrate
our own religious faith tradition, stand
ready to defend it, and stand ready to
welcome anyone into it. But it does