God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World (10 page)

A classic example of the intoxicated type, the great Persian poet Rumi (1207–73) is beloved today by Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Thanks to popular English translations by Coleman Barks, he is now one of the best-selling poets in the West, and his work has been performed by celebrities such as Madonna and Philip Glass. Rumi’s poetry is endlessly intriguing, and his admonition to “gamble everything for love” is a challenge of the highest order.
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Part of the attraction is the backstory: Rumi was a bookworm and a scholar when he was visited by a wandering Sufi named Shams, who, depending on the storyteller, either burned Rumi’s books or threw them into a pond. (“A donkey with a load of holy books,” Sufis now say, “is still a donkey.”
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) Either way, Shams turned Rumi’s life upside down, and for years the two were inseparable. Then Shams mysteriously disappeared, most likely the victim of murder. This tragic turn remade Rumi into one of the world’s most prolific and beloved poets.

Another name for Sufism is
ihsan
, or “doing what is beautiful,” and Rumi’s poetry does just that. His poems overflow with longing for his friend Shams. “There is no salvation for the soul,” he writes, “But to fall in Love.”
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Rumi insists, however, that the love between Romeo and Juliet, or Nicole Kidman and her latest leading man, is also love for and from the divine. When he writes, “In the house of water and clay this heart is desolate without thee; / O Beloved, enter the house, or I will leave it,” he is longing for God
and
Shams.
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Or, to be more faithful to Rumi’s faith, he is speaking of a God and a man who only
seem
to be different beings.

From a vantage point where only God is Really Real, it makes no sense to distinguish Sunni from Shia or Muslim from Jew. So Sufis generally affirm that all religions are paths to the divine. But they are only paths, clumsy gestures toward what is unspeakable. Of course, Sufis acknowledge differences between Islam and other religions. But such is outer, inessential knowledge. From the perspective of inner, essential knowledge, all such distinctions fall away. “There was a time, when I blamed my companion if his religion did not resemble mine,” wrote the Spanish philosopher Ibn Arabi (1165–1240). “Now, however, my heart accepts every form. . . . Love alone is my religion.”
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As Rumi once explained, intelligence comes in two forms. There is the secondhand intelligence of a child’s memorizing facts delivered through books and teachers—the sort of intelligence that will get you a job as a civil engineer or help you distinguish between the Five Pillars of Islam and the seven sacraments of Roman Catholicism. Wordsworth called this “our meddling intellect.”
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But there is another kind of intelligence, a “second knowing,” which springs from direct, personal experience of God—“a fountainhead / from within you, moving out.”
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This kind of knowing lies beyond the limits of everyday language and ordinary thought. So Sufis attempt to express it in other ways—in music and dance and in the elliptical language of mystical poetry, whose very words urge the reader to look beyond them to The Beyond.

One of the temptations of any religion is to mistake it for the Ultimate To Which It Points—to start to worship Christianity rather than Christ, for example. Sufis resist this temptation. What they crave is not Islam but Allah, not Paradise in the by-and-by but the presence of the divine here and now, not the secondhand report but the firsthand experience. When asked whether she even cared about Paradise, the Sufi poet Rabia of Basra famously said, “First the neighbor, then the house.”
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So what does it mean to be religiously literate when it comes to Islam? Is it about external forms or inner experience? Does Islamic literacy mean knowing the Five Pillars and the Quran? Or being conversant in the distinctions between Sunnis and Shia? Surely it is all of these things. To understand the role of Islam in the world today, you need to understand its view of the problem of self-sufficiency and the solution of submission. You need to make sense of the goal of Paradise, and how that goal motivates human behavior. But as the Sufis remind us, there is a fluency beyond this basic literacy, and perhaps beyond even language itself. Perhaps, as Rumi and his Sufi kin seem to say, what matters is not knowing Islam but knowing Allah. Or is knowing beside the point? Perhaps to understand Islam is not to know but to feel—to feel God moving inside you like the energy that animates a dance.

Those of us who are not Sufis must be content with knowing that Islam is the greatest of the great religions. In terms of adherents, this tradition of mercy and justice and forgiveness and submission is growing far faster than Christianity. In terms of influence, it is controlling the worldwide conversation about the virtues and vices of religion. Islam is a key player in the Middle East and Asia and a rapidly growing presence in Europe and North America. Assets in Islamic banks (which do not charge or pay interest) are, according to the International Monetary Fund, “developing at a remarkable pace.”
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Given the rapid development of Brazil, Russia, India, and China (BRIC), our oil-guzzling world seems destined, at least in the short term, only to be guzzling more, which means that the influence of the Islam-rich OPEC nations will only continue to rise. Meanwhile, Iraq and Iran and Afghanistan remain enigmas to anyone unable to reckon with the ancient division inside Islam between Sunnis and Shia. To presume that the conversation about the great religions starts with Christianity is to show your parochialism, and your age. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries may have belonged to Christianity. The twenty-first belongs to Islam.

Chapter Two
Christianity

The Way of Salvation

Every Christmas Eve when I was a boy, my family would gather around the fire to hear my father read
The Christ Child
(1931). This children’s book borrows its voice from the stories of Jesus’s birth and youth in the New Testament gospels of Matthew and Luke. It borrows its images from the husband-and-wife team of Maud and Mishka Petersham, illustrators whose watercolors seem to spring off the page with the power and poignancy of miracle. The cover depicts Jesus in a manger in Bethlehem just after His birth. Oddly, both His mother, Mary, and her husband, Joseph, have gone missing, so the baby’s only company is a drove of sheep and donkeys that seem to be hanging on His every breath with the sort of obsessive attention usually reserved for new parents (though apparently not these ones). This image is commanded by a bright yellow halo, which recalls an astronaut’s helmet from the 1960s (John Glenn style), or so I thought as a boy. Out of this bubble, which fits snugly over Jesus’s head, springs a series of bigger halos, bursting into the night sky with light like the sun.

Clearly there is something special about this kid, who doesn’t seem to object when the wise men come bearing gifts no child has ever heard of (except, of course, for the gold). Eventually He will learn to feed and dress himself, to swing a hammer and pound a nail. He will ride on a donkey into Jerusalem, eat one last meal with His disciples, pray in the Garden of Gethsemane, be betrayed by a friend, endure a show trial, and be scourged, mocked, and crucified. But this is a children’s book, so the scariest it gets here is talk of animals sacrificed at the Jerusalem Temple and an image of Mary, Joseph, and their baby fleeing King Herod into Egypt and a jet-black night. Otherwise Jesus seems to have a pretty cushy childhood. He waxes strong in Joseph’s carpenter’s shop and manages to shake loose from his parents for a few days in the Big City, where he hangs with rabbis in the temple, both listening to them and asking them questions. But this good Jewish boy cannot shake His halo, which sets Him apart, marks Him as chosen wherever He goes—an intangible reminder of the tangible Incarnation.

One of the lies of the so-called New Atheists is that the religions are one and the same, but the diversity inside Christianity alone is staggering. In the days before orthodoxy had the power to cast out heterodoxy, the early Christian movement was a willy-nilly affair with a laundry list of soon-to-be heretics that stretched from Montanists and Manicheans to Gnostics and Ebionites, Donatists and Docetics, Arians and Nestorians. If Christians today have largely forgotten the creeds and catechisms, Christians in the first few centuries had not yet written them. Then as now, writes theologian Harvey Cox, there was “no central hierarchy, no commonly accepted creed, and no standard ritual practice.”
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Christianity was up for grabs.

For the most part, early Christians defined themselves theologically, depending on how they viewed relations with the Jews, the mix of divine and human natures inside Jesus, and family relations among the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Early Christians also gravitated toward competing styles of monastic withdrawal—from peripatetic and solitary desert monks (the term
monk
comes from
monos
, Greek for “alone”) to the more settled and less ascetic monastic communities of the Benedictines. Among the many ways of being an ancient Christian was the extreme asceticism of Simeon the Stylite (390–459), the David Blaine of his time, who climbed atop a pillar in his twenties and stayed there for the rest of his life.

There have been efforts to rein in this diversity, to bring heretics to their senses and eccentrics like St. Simeon back to earth. The Roman emperor Constantine (272–337), who converted to Christianity in 312, convened the first church council in 325 in Nicaea in modern-day Turkey in an effort to impose uniformity on Christendom. But “the one true church” was as elusive then as it is today.

Christianity is now so elastic that it seems a stretch to use this term to cover the beliefs and behaviors of Pentecostals in Brazil, Mormons in Utah, Roman Catholics in Italy, and the Orthodox in Moscow. Unlike Muslims, who have always insisted that the Quran is revelation only in the original Arabic, Christians do not confine God’s speech to the Hebrew of their Old Testament or the Greek of their New Testament. In fact, while Muslims have resisted translating the Quran (the first English translation by a Muslim did not appear until the twentieth century), Christians have long viewed the translation, publication, and distribution of Bibles in assorted vernaculars as a sacred duty. The
Jesus
film, distributed by the evangelical student group Campus Crusade for Christ International, has been translated into over a thousand languages and viewed in more than 220 countries.
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But Christianity has not just adapted to local tongues. It has taken on local beliefs and practices—from Confucianism in East Asia to spirit possession in Africa. Members of the popular Kimbanguist Church of Congo celebrate Holy Communion with sweet potatoes and honey rather than bread and wine. This strategy of accommodating local cultures is one of the keys to Christianity’s global success, and one of the sources of its dizzying diversity.

I was raised in St. Peter’s Episcopal Church on Cape Cod. Recently I have attended services at Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Boston’s Jamaica Plain neighborhood. Though separated by only sixty miles, these two congregations are worlds apart. St. Peter’s is lily white and quiet piety. Bethel AME is African American and irrepressible ecstasy. You can set your watch by St. Peter’s services, which never run over one hour, but worship at Bethel
AME
doesn’t stop running until the Spirit gives out. At St. Peter’s, bodies stay in pews and hands stay on laps, even when the organist tries to rouse them with a black spiritual. At Bethel
AME
, parishioners are more rousable. They get up and go as the Spirit leads them, raising their arms to heaven as a live band plays praise songs. Yet both are Christianity. So is the Quaker meeting a few miles from my home in East Sandwich, Massachusetts—a dozen or so Friends (as Quakers are called), sitting in silence in old plaids and practical wool, warmed (sort of) by a wood-burning stove, trusting in what silence says as their predecessors have since this congregation formed in 1657.

But the Christianity of
The Christ Child
, and of my childhood, did not trust in silence. It was all about the doctrine of the Incarnation, which to me was as mysterious as adult life in general. According to this core Christian teaching, at the fulcrum of world history God took on the form of a helpless baby, born of a frightened young woman and held in the rough hands of a carpenter. “What if God was one of us?” asks the Joan Osborne pop song. Christianity responds, “He was!” One day He humbled Himself and became a human being, as if Pele or Michael Jordan had decided at the peak of his career to give up his power, prestige, and prosperity for a new life of swaddling clothes among mere mortals. Through the Incarnation, God creatively confused the sacred and the secular, investing the mundane comings and goings of everyday life with sacred import. So while Christianity has always been about salvation from sin, it is also about hallowing ordinary things.

Soft Monotheism and the Trinity

Every Sunday, in millions of churches around the world, Christians affirm this doctrine of the Incarnation by reciting the statement of belief carved out at Constantine’s request at the Council of Nicaea in 325. Still accepted today by all three major branches of Christianity—Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and Protestantism—the Nicene Creed is organized around the doctrine of the Trinity, with sections on God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.

Christians are monotheists, but theirs is a soft monotheism compared to the hard monotheism of Jews and Muslims, who refuse not just to petrify God in graven images but even to imagine God in human form. The Christian tradition is replete with Jesus sculptures and Jesus paintings, which shout to the rooftops the good news that God has taken on a human body. So Christians see God as a mysterious Trinity: three persons in one godhead, or as novelist J. C. Hallman brilliantly put it, “triplets perched on the fence between polytheism and monotheism.”
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In the Nicene Creed they affirm “one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth”; “one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God”; and “the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life.” Of these three divine persons, Jesus gets the most ink. “For us and for our salvation,” He comes down from heaven and is born a human being from the Virgin Mary. He is crucified, dies, and is buried. But after three days He rises from the dead and ascends to heaven. Some day He will return to earth “in glory to judge the living and the dead.” This creed concludes with an appendix of sorts that affirms the divine inspiration of the Christian Bible, the unity of the Christian church, and the importance of the Christian initiation rite known as baptism. Its last line affirms the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead and looks forward to “the life of the world to come.”