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!