Rabbi Alon Goshen-Gottstein is a well-known figure in the world of interfaith relations. He is the founding director of the Elijah Interfaith Institute in Jerusalem, a centre committed to peace and friendship among faiths. It offers educational programmes, organises regular meetings of religious leaders and regular prayers for peace. One of its most recent projects is the establishment of a Global House of Friendship and Hope in Assisi. It’s an ambitious and creative venture. The plan is to have a museum, situated in the heart of Assisi which will be the world’s first museum on prayer and spirituality. Its website sets out the vision behind it which is an attempt to go beyond interfaith relations that focus primarily on living together and working together for the good of all to “the core of the spiritual life and the life of prayer of faith traditions”.  Rabbi Alon hopes that there “the faithful can expand their sense of devotion, while broadening hearts and minds to other religions, recognizing deeper spiritual commonalities. Youth and adults alike can discover a spiritual experience and deeper appreciation of nature and of humanity. And all can return to their homes with broadened knowledge, fuller appreciation of the spiritual life and greater appreciation towards reaching out to others in friendship”.

Assisi is the ideal place for such a venture. Beginning with the initiative of Pope John Paul in 1981 when he invited leaders from the major world faiths to Assisi to pray for peace (the first meeting of its kind and one repeated by Pope Benedict and Pope Francis) Assisi has become associated with such meetings. It is also the birthplace of St Francis who has unofficially at least become a champion or, as we say in the Catholic Church, the patron saint of interreligious dialogue. This is based on a story from the life of Francis which recounts how in 1219 when Christian and Muslim forces were locked in combat in Egypt during the 5th Crusade, Francis crossed enemy lines hoping to meet Sultan al-Malik al-Kamil, perhaps hoping to preach the gospel and convert the Sultan and his army but certainly looking for peace. When eventually Francis is admitted to the Sultan’s presence the story goes that both recognised in the other a man of faith and spirituality and spent days if not weeks conversing with one another about God. The visit didn’t bring about peace, but the Sultan gave Francis his protection and the gift of a horn used for the Muslim call to prayer which can still be seen in Assisi today. Frances too was affected by the visit. Not only did he write Praises of God, based on Islam’s 99 names of God but he told his brethren that it was safe to enter the world of Islam and encouraged them to preach the gospel but only sometimes to use words.
 
Rabbi Alon Goshen-Gottstein is not the only religious leader to choose Assisi as a place of prayer and encounter. Sri Madhusudan Sai is a noted Hindu leader based near Bangalore with centres worldwide, including Assisi. In a recent interview or conversation between these two leaders Sri Madhusudan explained that he was drawn to Assisi because of St Francis’ commitment to poverty and the poor as well as his love for nature. For him the message of Francis and Assisi is universal and a source of inspiration for all, especially the younger generation. St Francis is a saint for our time but for Sri Madhusudan Sai reflecting on the life of saints in all our traditions is a good way of conducting interreligious dialogue. He believes that this is a window into the spirit of our faiths which ties in very well with the intention of the Global House of Friendship and Hope. Especially for young people it is important to give them something that will inspire them to live a meaningful and purposeful life and who better to inspire than the example of men and women who have lived from the heart of faith and not just from its externals. Sri Madhusudan Sai used the analogy of a piece of fruit. The skin and the pith keep the juice intact and when squeezed it is the juice that delights and what remains can be discarded. He is not suggesting of course that religion can be discarded but showing that the life, joy, spirit of the faith is what is important and that the externals are nothing if they do not give access to this inner inspiration.  And saints are shining examples of people who have done this.
 
I like this idea of using the life of saints as a window into a religion and giving an insight into its inner core. One of my earliest memories is of my grandmother, after whom I am named and who died when I was 4 years old, reading stories of the saints to me. They captured my imagination and I felt a real attraction to God, religion and to the adventure that many of them had in their work of service and of spreading the message of Jesus. This was  the beginning no doubt of an attraction that led to me eventually entering religious life. And that has been an adventure and one that has led me into the world of other faiths, sharing the message of Jesus, yes, but in an atmosphere of dialogue and mutual learning. For I have come to realise that there are many saintly and inspiring people in all faiths and I have been inspired by them, by their devotion and dedication as much as I have been by saints in my own tradition. I found  in their life and in their teachings echoes of my own faith, in spite of the different contexts in which they lived.
 
I do like this approach and believe it could be a good way of engaging people in interreligious dialogue. It’s something I must pursue. 

I often think that religions can be divided into catholic and protestant traditions. The catholic traditions are ones like Hinduism that have a lot of images, smells and bells and the protestant ones are like Islam and Judaism that reject such an approach. Within Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism would fall into the catholic category and Zen into the protestant one. Today is the feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus which is a very catholic devotion that seems to be making something of a comeback. It was popular when I was a child and every catholic home had a picture of the Sacred Heart above the mantelpiece. It is an iconic illustration and shows Jesus with his heart either exposed in his body or being held in his hand. The heart has a crown of thorns around it and fire coming out of it. Often the hands of Jesus have the marks of the nails which nailed him to the cross on which he died. As an icon it is not meant to be taken literally but seen as an illustration of the love that God in Jesus has for humanity, a love that led to his death and of course his resurrection.
 
The devotion has a long history and is associated with saints and mystics over the centuries but perhaps above all with St Margaret Mary Alacoque, a 17th cy French nun who had visions of Jesus during which he revealed his heart to her. In one apparition he told her “My Divine Heart is so passionately in love with humanity, and with you in particular, that it cannot keep back the pent-up flames of its burning charity any longer. They must burst out through you.” These apparitions took place at a time when Jansenism, a heresy that accepted predestination, was puritanical in its approach to morality and instilled fear into the hearts of believers, “turning a religion of faith and love into one of pessimism and scrupulosity” was spreading throughout Europe.  Devotion to the Sacred Heart was an antidote to this and was promulgated by the Jesuits after Margaret Mary’s Jesuit spiritual director Claude de La Colombiere saw her experiences as an expression of God’s infinite love, mercy and forgiveness. It is no wonder then that the first Jesuit pope, Pope Francis has let it be known that he intends to write a document on the Sacred Heart of Jesus to “ illuminate the path of ecclesial renewal, but also to say something significant to a world that seems to have lost its heart" as part of the ongoing celebrations in the catholic church marking the 350th anniversary of the first apparition of the Sacred Heart of Jesus to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque.
 
Devotion to the Sacred Heart declined after the Second Vatican Council when it was considered to be rather pious and sentimental and belonging to an age of outmoded and anachronistic practices. Now pictures of the Sacred Heart are not found in catholic homes and believers can be quite conflicted about it. In 1972 Fr Pedro Arrupe, the saintly General of the Jesuits reconsecrated the Society to the Sacred Heart and explained the reason for this saying, “We find ourselves then in an historic moment of contestation, of criticism, even of rejection, of traditional attitudes. This entails great dangers, but it also has the advantage of compelling us to go to the very heart of things.” He concludes that Jesuits have “the duty of reflecting seriously on what is essential in the Sacred Heart devotion and of finding ways to channel and present it to the world of today.”  In doing this he admitted that he found it difficult because of conflicting opinions regarding this devotion and hoped that he might help “resolve the ascetic, pastoral and apostolic problems which the devotion to the Sacred Heart presents today”.
 
 One of the problems in any religion is that we can fail to get to the heart of things. We can fail to read our scriptures, prayers and images symbolically which often results in misunderstandings. I once had to reprimand a class of students that laughed at images of the Hindu Gods, simply not seeing the symbolism of the iconography or realising the meaning there might be in their many arms of their infinite capacity to help and support believers.  When I asked the class what an outsider might think if they were to see a picture of the Sacred Heart in a catholic home, the answer was that Jesus was a human being – with a heart outside his body, really? Familiarity had simply closed their eyes to seeing the meaning in their own icons. Part of the interfaith journey is to see our own images through the eyes of others for good and for ill. I was helped by comments of Adyashanti, an American Buddhist teacher on the notion of the Sacred Heart. He speaks of his encounter with St Therese and how through her found his heart was being opened to the beginning of the transmission of the Jesus story which is the transmission of the love of the sacred heart, of the deep, open, unguarded intimacy of love. In this he was beginning to experience, he said, the heart of sacred love. Is this not what is going on in devotion to the Sacred Heart? Is it not to follow the way of the heart?  Does it not call us to a love that is willing to pour ourselves into life so that our lives become expressions of love and compassion?  Is it not to recognise the sacredness of life and our responsibility for trying to make the love of our own hearts an expression of what we do with our one wild and precious life? Does our world not need such love and forgiveness? And does not such a love bring its own share of sadness and suffering which we hope might be redemptive? 

Most religions have an alternative calendar by which they live apart from the one they follow as citizens of the world. This calendar remembers important dates, persons and stories from the religion’s tradition and history that gives believers an identity and unites them as a community. The Christian community has just celebrated the festival of Pentecost which ends the Easter season. The feast as the name suggests takes place 50 days after Easter and often at the same time as the Jewish festival of Shavuot that takes place 50 days after Pesach. This year it’s different and doesn’t take place until June 11th because the Jewish religious calendar is based on a lunar calendar which gives an extra lunar month every two or three years so that the long-term average year length closely approximates to the actual length of the solar year which forms the secular and civic calendar. For the Christian churches that have a set liturgical form of worship according to the Roman Rite it is now ordinary time. Liturgically this means the time that falls outside the two great seasons of Christmastide and Eastertide, or their respective preparatory seasons of Advent and Lent. It is defined as the common season which does not belong to a proper season.
 
The word ordinary suggests something rather dull and commonplace, with the need for festivals to break the monotony of it. But the interval between feasts and festivals is an opportunity for believers to live out the lessons learned and to keep alive the values of their faith. In a way the joy and celebrations of festivals and the ordinary times are two sides of the same coin. As I write this the Buddhist community are celebrating Vesak which commemorates both the birth and death of the Buddha as well as his enlightenment. By remembering these significant events Buddhists re-member themselves as part of the Buddhist community and commit themselves to living his Dharma. The last words of the Buddha, according to the tradition were ‘work hard to gain your own salvation’, often explained as meaning do not rely on the person of the historical Buddha but find salvation by following the path to enlightenment, a path set out by the Buddha. In the ordinary and in between times Buddhists are keeping alive the person of the Buddha and his wise message by the way they live and the example they give in living out the values of Buddhism. The authenticity of the Buddha and his teaching is judged by the example of his followers, and it is ordinary time that gives them the opportunity to do this. And if they do this well the Buddha will continue to exist, not, as Tich Nhat Hanh would say, in a historical form but as a living Buddha, always available through his teaching.
 
This is also true for Christianity. The major festivals of Christmas and Easter keep alive the memory of Jesus and celebrating them renews and confirms believers in their membership of the Christian community. They keep alive a way of life that is to be lived out in ordinary time and in the ordinary events of life. In so far as Christians do this, they make Christianity and the life and message of Jesus credible. The recent feast of Pentecost underlines this. This is the festival that remembers how the followers of Jesus, discouraged by his death, no longer having his physical presence amongst them are transformed from fearful men and women to people ready to face the world and share the message and way of life they had learned from Jesus. The images of wind and tongues of fire are used in the scriptures to illustrate the coming of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples, a Spirit which they identified as God’s Spirit and the one that had energised Jesus so that he was understood to be still with them, not in a historical or physical sense but in a spiritual and real sense. The historical Jesus had become what Christianity calls the Risen Jesus or the Cosmic Christ, associated with the power and energy that had created the universe.  Inspired by the Holy Spirit Christians now have the power to live lives of love, reconciliation, openness, generosity, courage, representing in their own daily lives the qualities that Jesus displayed in his. And the authenticity of Jesus’ life and teaching is judged by how they do this.
 
There would have been a time when Christians thought that the Holy Spirit was given only to them as followers of Jesus but in this age we now recognise the presence of the Spirit in all people who are made in the image and likeness of God and animated by God’s spirit whether they choose to live by that Spirit or not. It is a power that we all have to live a good and wholesome life, contributing to the common good of all including the cosmos in which we all live and in which we are all interconnected. It is a power that gives hope at a time when the future of humanity and our planet is in crisis. It is a power and a presence that transforms what we have called ordinary time into something sacred and grace filled.  If only we had the eyes to see it!                        

 I recently came across a book by John Capito, a catholic philosopher with an interest in religion and theology and now professor emeritus  at Syracuse and Villanova Universities. The book’s title is ‘What to Believe, Twelve Brief Lessons in Radical Theology’ and the first chapter is entitled ‘God Does Not Exist’. I was intrigued because so often when I read or hear the word God, especially in liturgy, it sounds as though we are praying to a kind of superman somewhere outside the cosmos. This notion of God has become increasingly dissatisfying so to hear a catholic academic declare he was an atheist was refreshing and intriguing.
 
In the book he  explains exactly what he means by this. He is an atheist if by God we mean “ the supreme being who sees all, knows all, can do all, who is watching every move we make and is coming to get us if we do not behave ourselves and to whom we turn when things take a turn for the worst”. His atheism is what he calls  theological atheism.  Capito is more accepting of Tillich’s understanding of God as the Ground of our Being or the Apostle Paul’s as that Reality in which we live and move and have our being. He sees  this as an expression of panentheism in which God can be found in all thing but thinks it is only a stage in our understanding of God and that we have to make the next evolutionary step to what he calls radical theology.
 
For Capito there are two kinds of theology – that of bridge- builders, seeking a connection between humans and a supernatural being and ground- diggers who are trying to unearth the truth of what it means to say God is the very ground on which we stand. Radical theology is an example of ground-digging theology, at the heart of which is the question“what is really going on?” This is a discerning of the depth dimension of things or the dearest freshness deep down things as Gerard Manley Hopkins would put it. This is to be looked for in religion but also in art, music, philosophy, human history and relationships. Everything can reveal this dimension if we have eyes to see it but he warns that if in this digging “you see a binary opposition, look more closely and it will break down for one side is always inhabited by the other” for distinctions such as the separation of religion and the secular are false.  
 
When it comes to God Capito takes up Tillich’s notion that God is unconditional but he stresses the unconditional is not God. The unconditional is in fact prior to God. He uses a phrase of Schilling who says, “God is the absolutely un-pre- thinkable, that which is present before thought so how are we to speak of it. We can only do so in thought  and speech that is conditioned.“  The unconditional is not something we can meet because there is no-thing or person to meet or unite with. Rather it is the underlying support of the things we do meet, it is their underlying condition. Caputo tells the story of an old fish encountering two young fish and asking ‘ how is the water today boys’ and the younger fish asking once the older one has swum away ‘ what the hell  is water’? Although the unconditional is always and everywhere, we cannot meet it directly and can only think of it in terms of symbols. It’s up to us to find worthy symbols and avoid unworthy ones.  
 
Capito sees the word God as a symbol in which the unconditional is mediated and imaginatively constructed. He thinks that  what is going on in the name of God is an event, an event which reaches back to an un- pre-thinkable time and will end in an axial age when this universe as we know it will have died and we know not what will be, if anything.  At the heart of this event in which we are all participating is desire and Capito reflects on the first half of the famous phrase of St Augustine, ‘ you have made us for yourself and our hearts are restless …..    There is within us a structure of expectation, of openess to what is coming. He uses the illustration of a desire for a hat, once bought, can lead to a desire for further purchases, something we all know so well.  So he asks, what is really going on in this desire?  It is acting as a lure.  It is calling me, attracting me and demands a response. So too the name of God  is the name of a call that acts as a lure that calls for a reponse.  And how we respond to this will determine whether God is a worthy symbol or not. We are responsible for what is going on in that name. How we live is the basis for arguing for and against the existence of God.
 
There’s a lot I like about this theology. I like the idea of the word God being a symbol for what Caputo calls the unconditional. It allows me to use the word, to accept other people’s use of it without trying to translate  or dismiss it and not to confuse the symbol with the reality. I like the idea of the name of God as an event which is open to future possibilities. For me the best image of God I can think of is of God as a magnet because I do feel an attraction to spirituality, to commitment, to service, all that is part of being a christian or religious. This fits well with Caputo’s theology. And perhaps above all I like the question, “what is really going on”, a question which is intriguing and challenging an one that will accompany me into the future.  

I have been religious all my life. I was brought up to believe in God, to go to church, to pray, to learn my catechism. One of my earliest memories is of my grandmother, after whom I am named and who died when I was 4 years old, reading stories of the saints to me. They captured my imagination. To be holy, to be a saint was an ideal that was put in front of us in school and I loved going to church, not quite knowing what was happening but caught up in the mystery of it all. In secondary school the ideal of religious life was put before us as was the sense of being called to spread the gospel. I remember the words, but not the tune, of one hymn that appealed to me, “ On high adventure I am set to win souls back to Thee, O gird me with that steadfast faith that leads to victory”. This was an adventure that I was happy and ready to engage in and led eventually to me entering religious life, something I have now been living for nearly sixty years. 
   
Central to this interest in religion was a belief in God and I loved God with all my heart. It’s not that I had no theological questions  but to accept a loving God came easily in spite of theologising about suffering and death. This sense of a relationship with a loving God was developed and deepened by daily meditation, reflection on the gospels and the teaching of Jesus, spiritual reading and the annual retreat that as a religious I am obliged to make. Eventually this notion of loving God expanded to believe that God loved me at the very core of my being and accepted me totally for who I am, strengthening me and supporting me as I struggled with life as we all do.
​
It took some time before I began to feel dissatisfied with the word God.  The way people talked about God or addressed God in prayer made God into a superman or a Santa Claus- like figure. This was an interventionist God, who had created a world out of nothing and was able to oversee, control the world of humans. This was a God who made demands on people seeking that they do his will and able to intervene in all kinds of suffering from ending war, poverty and hunger to providing answers to more specific requests for healing or even good weather for the parish outing. This was a God that more and more people claimed not to believe in and a  God that did not reflect my own experience. So my image of God began to change. Not only could I not accept that God was male but that God also had to reflect the feminine as both men and women were made in the image and likeness of God.  And I could not believe in a God that was an all powerful being somewhere outside the bounds of the universe. Rather I believed that God was that Reality in which we all live, move and have our very being as the apostle Paul explained to the Greek philosophers on the Areopagus or the Ground of Being as Paul Tillich suggested. This was a God intimately involved in life and the best image I could come up with was that God was a kind of magnet, powerfully drawing us towards love and the fullness of life. This was a God whose power of attraction I had experienced throughout my life.

My interfaith journey has helped me see that this power of attraction is present in all faiths – and none.  Buddhism is well known for not believing in a creator god and some people would go so far as to say that it is not a religion but rather a philosophy of life. One of the deepest and most significant dialogues that I have experienced was a Buddhist – Christian dialogue led by a Tibetan Buddhist nun, Ani Lhamo and myself. It began with a week on Iona and lasted about 15 years when we would meet annually in Samye Ling, Holy Isle, a  Carmelite monastery as well as more ‘secular’ places. The week on Iona that began the dialogue remains in my memory as one of the most  meaningful that I have experienced.  Ani Lhamo and I spent the week talking, sharing our faith and preparing the sessions we were offering in the Abbey while enjoying the sun and beauty of the island. We became good friends, with a real sisterly connection and I for one recognised the common attraction we had to spirituality, an attraction that had led both of us to a lifetime of commitment in a religious community. I could relate this attraction to God but it did not seem to be so different from that of Ani Lhamo’s who did not believe in a creator God but did believe in a Reality that we participate in  and draws us to itself. In Mahayana Buddhism this is called Tathata which is often translated as “suchness” and is seen as the true and essential nature of reality that is beyond description and conceptualisation and cannot be adequately expressed. This is the God of the christian mystics such as Meister Ekhart who famously said ‘ I pray to God to rid me of God’ realising that the word God can not only be off putting but obscure the truth of reality.  
​
 Hinduism has also taught me a lot about the Reality we call God. The vedic phrase ‘the Real is one though known by different names’ makes sense. The stories of young women being attracted by the Lord Krishna’s flute to dance the night away, believing that each of them had a unique and special relaionship with Krishna has resonance in my own experience and the notion of God with attributes and God without attributes allows for the  tension between a personal God and an Impersonal Reality which is perhaps all I can hope for at this stage of my life. 

 I was invited to take part in a radio programme on Easter Sunday. It was a magazine programme and the producer was hoping to have a slot on the Resurrection and hoped I might be interested in talking about it. I wasn’t free so unable to do it but it got me thinking about how I might explain the Resurrection or what kind of questions I might be asked.  Growing up I took the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection at face value and gave little thought to it.  My first real challenge to understanding it came when, as a young sister,  I did a summer theology school and the learned Jesuit who was taking the class asked if a photographer had been present when two of Jesus disciples encountered him on the road to Emmaus would there have been two or three figures in the photograph. The idea that there might only have been two figures was rather startling. And yet all that I had been taught about the resurrection was that it was not a resuscitation. In John’s gospel there is the story of Jesus bringing Lazarus, the brother of  Martha and Mary back to life and it was always impressed upon us as children that the resurrection of Jesus was in a different category. Jesus was alive, we were taught,  in his community, in his word contained in the bible and through his spirit present not just in his disciples but present where ever people showed forgiveness and love and worked for justice and peace. 

What actually happened at the moment of resurrection as it is told in the christian gospels is not known. What is known is that a group of disciples who were distraught and afraid after his death were transformed into a believing community prepared to continue Jesus ministry of teaching and healing in the face of opposition and persecution. There are contradictions in the story of Jesus’ appearances. When Mary Magdalen first encountered Jesus when she went to visit the tomb she took him for the gardener until, in the story, he called her name and she realised that the relationship she had with Jesus in life had survived beyond death.  When the two disciples were on their way to Emmaus, talking over the events that had happened in Jerusalem, they only recognised that they were accompanied by Jesus when they broke bread together. The apostle Thomas was doubtful about talk of resurrection until he came to terms with the reality of Jesus suffering and death, described in the gospel as him touching the wounds on Jesus hands and side. There was something familiar yet different about these encounters with Jesus. Even Paul who did not know Jesus in the flesh came to believe in the resurrection when he had an experience on the road to Damascus during which he heard a voice ask, ‘why are you persecuting me?’  and, having asked who the ‘me’ was, being told that it was Jesus whom he was persecuting. This revelation rendered Paul blind for a time when no doubt he wrestled with what could be taken as a kind of koan or a riddle that has no rational answer.  How can he be persecuting Jesus of Nazareth when he was dead?  The identification of Jesus with his community, a community he was persecuting,  was an aha moment, an insight that transformed his life and led him to see the life, death and resurrection of Jesus as transformative for all and the focus of his preaching.

​For me Jesus is alive in his community when it keeps alive his memory and puts his teaching into practice. Often this community distorts his memory and obscures rather than reveals his message. But there are many good and even heroic examples of ordinary people struggling to live a life of love and compassion, suffering for what they believe in, opposing injustice, walking the way of peace, trying to make their place in the world as life-affirming as they can. When we see incidents such as these on a large and small scale we see  that Jesus is indeed still living, in the spirit if not in the flesh. These are truly signs of the Kingdom of God that was so central to Jesus’ teaching and is all around us if we have eyes to see. For Christians the belief that Jesus is risen  is a sign of hope that death, destruction, tragedy, evil will not be final, that in spite of evidence to the contrary life and love will triumph. But above all  I believe that death and resurrection which is so central to the story of Jesus  and often taught as doctrine is in fact the basic Christian practice.  We Christians are called to die to selfishness and greed, to let go of this moment to welcome and engage in the next, to let go of resentments and conflict to be open to forgiveness and reconciliation, to let go of our abuse of the earth to treat it with reverence and respect – the list in endless. We are called to stand up for what is true and just even when it’s difficult.  It is not an easy practice but in so far as we can live by it – or try to live by it- we too can offer hope to our world and can share in the  resurrection of Jesus. Easter is a time of rejoicing for Christians but also an invitation and  challenge on how to live and keep alive the memory and presence of Jesus.