Prays Well
Image Courtesy of Jim Burklo
Years ago, I organized an annual event called Pluralism Sunday, on the first Sunday of May – for progressive Christians worldwide to celebrate the idea that other religions can be as good for others as Christianity is for us. And to discover more about our own faith by comparing and contrasting it with others.
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At an interfaith gathering I attended, the subject turned to the question of what people of different religions do when they lose things. A Muslim spoke up right away. “When we lose our keys, or something else, we repeat the phrase “yaseen” forty times. And then very often when I do it I find what I lost!” I couldn’t help asking: “What does ‘yaseen’ mean?” The woman answered “We don’t know. In the Koran there are three words for which there is no known meaning. Yaseen is one of them. It's from the Surah Yaseen, a passage in the Koran.” “You mean even Arabic speakers don’t know what it means?” “Yes,” she answered.
So I speculated. “So you use a word that has lost its meaning to find things that you have lost?” I asked. “Hmmm,” she said. “Maybe that’s it!” The group thought about it some more and we made another guess. Repeating a mysterious couple of syllables over and over and over may have the effect of distracting one’s mind from obsessing about where the lost item was left. You know how it goes: you think about something else for a while, and then, unbidden, out of nowhere, the answer bubbles up on its own, and you remember where you left your keys.
(Later I read the Surah Yaseen, and at least in English, it appears to have nothing to do with losing or finding things.)
And then a Catholic Christian spoke up to inform us that in his tradition, one prays to St. Anthony for divine intervention in finding things that are lost. I asked why Catholics don’t pray to St. Jude, patron saint of lost causes, to find lost things. He shrugged. Another religious mystery.
It’s mystery all the way down, folks! Because if I’ve learned anything about world religions, it is this: the more you know about the religions of the world, the more keenly aware you are of your ignorance about them. You start praying to St. Jude in earnest, because really understanding all the world’s religions in any depth is a lost cause. I’m a Christian pastor, not a real scholar but with a scholarly bent. I’ve steeped myself in the history and spirituality of Christianity. But I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface of my own tradition.
So many lost keys to religion, so little time! “Yaseen, yaseen, yaseen, yaseen, yaseen….”
My acute awareness of my ignorance of so much of the world's religions, including my own, makes it especially boggling for me when I hear Christians claim that Christianity is the only true faith, that nobody can get right with God except by accepting Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior. To someone who says that, I want to say: “Woah, dude, you know all there is to know about all the world’s religions? You’ve read all the uncountable pages of even the most obscure scriptures of the most obscure sects of all the faiths of the world? You’ve prostrated in submission to Allah, not just with Sunni Muslims but also with Shias and Alawites and Ismailis and Sufis? You know what is in the heart of a Sikh woman as she closes her eyes in the gurdwara and listens to the soulful kirtan music of praise to God, to the beat of tablas and the reedy sound of the harmonium? You know enough about the spiritual status of a Hindu bowing reverently as waves the smoke of the aarthi flame over his head with his hands, enough to know that God will condemn him to eternal hellfire for following the wrong religion? You’re really quite sure that the devout Jewish nurse who sings sweetly to her elderly patient while very carefully changing the dressings on her decubitus sores is a lost soul until she believes Jesus is the only begotten Son of God?”
Thomas Jefferson, celebrating religious diversity in an 1820 letter to a Jewish leader in Savannah, Georgia, wrote: “the maxim of civil government being reversed in that of religion, where its true form is, “divided we stand, united we fall.” The differences among religions offer countless windows through which to contemplate the endless mystery of the Ultimate Reality. Peering through those many windows on Pluralism Sunday, among other occasions, grows us in our separate faith traditions, while bringing people of all religions closer together.