I like having a calendar. Usually I get one for Christmas and enjoy the pictures or wise sayings that are revealed month by month.This year the calendar has been different. It has been produced by the British Jesuits to mark the 200th anniversary of the restoration of the Jesuits after they were suppressed by Pope  Clement XI in 1773.  Each month tells the story of a  Jesuit, all of whom have made a significant impact on the Church and the world.  This month the focus is on Fr.Tony de Mello.

Tony de Mello was only 55 when he died in 1988 though his influence is still felt in the stories he told and the spiritual direction he gave. It's possible to hear him for yourself on Youtube. He was from Bombay and integrated Indian thought, both Hindu and Buddhist, into traditional Christian meditation and practices. He was an example of someone who had passed over into another faith and returned to his own with new insights and strategies for prayer. He understood the power of conditioning whether that be from family, culture or religion. He was known to say ‘one of the biggest obstacles to truth is religion.’ Perhaps it's no wonder that Rome found his writings suspect for what can be a greater challenge to an institution such as the Catholic Church than someone encouraging Catholics to think for themselves. Fortunately this didn't happen until ten years after his death so didn't stop the flow of his teaching. 

Tony de Mello  wanted people to see the world with new eyes, to refrain from the labels and judgements that distort our  vision of reality. He wanted people to be their own person, to live from their own convictions, to  experience the reality of the Divine for themselves, to see reality as it is and not as we imagine it to be. And he did this by teaching meditation and telling stories. For him 'the shortest distance between a human being and the truth is a story'.

It's the stories I remember and I now regret getting rid of some of his collections of stories in an impulse of simplifying my life and emptying my bookshelves. Tony, I'm sure, sure would agree with this as  he felt we should live life unburdened by baggage.

One of my favourite stories is of a rat coming across an elephant bathing in a pond.  After much persuasion the elephant trundles out of the pond so that the rat can check if he ie the elephant has stolen the rat's bathing trunks.  A ridiculous image of course. But Tony's comment that it is easier for an elephant to get into the bathing trunks of a rat than it is for God to get into our images of him makes the point and reveals a truth which all religions might acknowledge but often seem to forget in their public teaching and prayers.  Religion doesn't seem to let God be God and I am sure that many atheists react against what appears to be a rather trivial and tame God without understanding what is at the heart of the Reality. In this they have a lesson for believers.

Another story is of the explorer who returning from  his expeditions, gives lectures, writes books, draws maps and generally enthuses people about the places he has been. People then begin to study these, even becoming experts in them, writing commentaries on them  without ever having traveled to the far off place and experienced the reality for themselves. How easy it is to miss the mark of what religion is really all about.

This weekend the BBC magazine had an article about three places of worship to be built under the same roof.  It's to be built in the heart of Berlin and the winning architectural design has been chosen.  It will be a brick building with space for a synagogue, a church and a mosque leading off a communal space for dialogue and social interaction.   Each space is the same size but a different shape and appropriate to the particular faith so that the mosque and synagogue have an upper gallery while the church doesn't and the mosque will have a space for washing and the church an organ. It's to be called the House of One.

This must surely be a first.  Religious buildings have often changed hands,  some churches becoming mosques, mosques becoming churches, temples becoming mosques and sometimes this has been the cause of continued tension and even violence in some parts of the world.  Initiatives to have three places of worship on the same campus are not unknown. Now, though, for the first time there is a deliberate plan to have three places of worship under one roof. And this is to happen in the heart of Berlin, a city tainted by the memory of the worst kind of religious hatred and violence.  This is religious history in the making and a sign of what relationships between the faiths could be.    

Rabbi Tovia Ben Chorin told the BBC   "From my Jewish point of view the city where Jewish suffering was planned is now the city where a centre is being built by the three monotheistic religions which shaped European culture,"  and the Imam involved Kadir Sanci, sees the House of One as "a sign, a signal to the world that the great majority of Muslims are peaceful and not violent". It's also, he says, a place where different cultures can learn from each other.  Christian pastor involved in the project, Pastor Gregor Hohberg, said  "Under one roof: one synagogue, one mosque, one church. We want to use these rooms for our own traditions and prayers. And together we want to use the room in the middle for dialogue and discussion and also for people without faith".

 The House of One is to be built on the site of the first Church in Berlin which dates back to the 12th century. It's right and fitting that in the 21st century plans to establish a place of worship should extend beyond the one to include others especially those that describe themselves as children of Abraham and recognise one another as brothers and sisters in faith.  It throws up exciting possibilities for future interfaith developments. Interfaith centres are not uncommon but an interfaith place of worship is something out of the ordinary and could be a wonderful witness to respect for the integrity of each faith as it worships in its own space and its own way, to cooperation between faiths as they maintain  and care for the building, to mutual understanding and friendship as they come to dialogue with one another and know one another as friends. What a wonderful vision for the future.

The plans have been made and money is now being raised to make the dream a reality. This in itself is an interesting interfaith project and one I hope interfaith groups throughout Europe might support. It's possible to donate on line at http://house-of-one.org/en

God knows the world needs interreligious dialogue but there's another dialogue that might be important for the future of religion and that's the dialogue with science.  Yesterday I joined forty people for a day at the Beald in Perthshire with Sr Ilia Delio. 

Sr Ilia is a scientist and  a theologian committed to reinterpreting the Christian story in the light of the new science. Expertly and clearly she took us through the history of science showing us how most of us operate in a mechanistic world that no longer exists. Past understandings of God as the Great Designer creating an ordered world in which everyone and everything has its place doesn't fit our present understanding of evolution and quantum physics.  Now we need a language which takes seriously God as a dynamic force at the heart of life, calling all the natural world, including human beings, into a future of infinite possibilities. It's rather mind blowing to think that our DNA goes right back to the origins of life, that the hydrogen in our bodies is that released at the moment of the Big Bang, that we contain within us the whole of evolution.  To be human is rather wonderful but the new science puts us firmly in our place.  We may be the highpoint of creation but we are intimately connected  with the universe and are able to influence it for good or for ill.  Language about God as Creator, Father. Lord or whatever seems so inadequate and it's easy to understand why some scientists, taking this language literally, reject any notion of God.  

All of this demands new language and new ways of thinking about God, new ways of interpreting traditional theology. But I'm also struck by the intuitions of religion which are supported by the new science.  Take the Trinity for example. The Christian world celebrates Trinity Sunday today.  The idea of three persons in one God is perhaps the most misunderstood doctrine of Christianity and separates it from its sibling religions of Islam and Judaism. It's hard not to think of it as three Gods which it's not.  What the Trinity says to me is that interrelationship, communion, love is at the heart of God.  And this is imaged in the interrelatedness of all creation, of the dance of life in which we all participate.  This insight of interbeing is also found in Hinduism with its image of Siva Nataraja and in Buddhism which teaches the connectedness of all things.  Similarly with eternal life. No matter what descriptions are used for life after death, whether it be Paradise, heaven or nirvana the intuition that life goes on is confirmed by our knowledge that mass and energy never die but are transformed in ways we can't imagine. And prayer too. It makes sense at a human level in a world where a butterfly's wing can affect the atmosphere at the other end of the world. if this is true at a physical level it must also be true at a psychological and spiritual level.  From the reality of morphogenetic fields we know what we do affects the world around us, another insight of religion. 

Yes all things are connected even religion and science, so often seen to be in conflict. Science has much to teach religion about the world in which it lives and religion has much to learn about how to express its deepest intuitions in a meaningful and life-giving way.