If parson lost his senses,
And people came to theirs . . .
Thus began, in the early 20th century, a moving
poem by Ralph Hodgson in defence of mistreated animals. The opening played
through my head in reading the news about the Middle East and new anti-terrorist
defences. ‘If leaders lost their senses, And people came to theirs . . .’ I
thought, what might happen? What might we construct? And in a John Lennon mood,
I began to Imagine.
Imagine three great monotheist
religions, living in mutual respect and affection. Imagine Muslims and
Christians according Judaism the respect due to the Eldest Brother, the one who
was first chosen by God, the one who received the Law, the one who, with the
self-confidence of his seniority, is still the only one who dares argue with
God. Imagine Jews and Muslims according to Christianity the affection due to
the Second Brother, the one who dared go further than the Nation and the Law,
to extend God’s love to all humanity and summarize the Law as absolute Love.
Imagine Jews and Christians according to Islam the respect and affection due to
the Youngest Brother, the one who lives a faith summed up in Obedience, who
keeps his Ramadan and, with the fire of youth, dares to believe in
unadulterated values.
Imagine the nations of a vast
region on the planet, recognizing that they all contain these three faiths and
their respective grandeurs, and that nevertheless they all have to live in a
modern world where many could not care less about religion. The vast reserve of
faith they contain acts as a leaven, of respect and affection toward
neighbours, and of a consciousness that there is a vertical dimension to life
as well as a horizontal one. The respect and affection will furnish one of
their peoples’ permanent needs, security. Meanwhile, the vast reserve of
ingenuity and honesty released by this peaceful coexistence turns bomb-inventors’
talent to creating clever irrigation schemes to make the desert flower, and
sees small-scale financing help the poor into trades both decent and profitable.
The peoples’ other great need, modest prosperity, becomes attainable also. The
three religions’ values, which tie in quite well with the secular ones of a
Bill Gates or a Warren Buffett, are now, combined, so powerful that beyond the
borders of the Middle East they restrain the inordinate greed of stock trading
and the corrosive political hatred that paralyzes polarized democracies. Bills
for the common good get passed, elections take on the cheerful variety of
football championships, prayer is no longer seen as a divisive group label but
as an act of primary value, all faiths can wear their distinctive attributes
openly and be respected for them, and boarding an aeroplane becomes as simple
and agreeable as it was sixty years ago.
Imagine – since Christianity is the
faith this blog is most concerned with – a Church that is one house with many
mansions, that has healed its great schisms, between East and West, between
Catholic and Protestant, and that attracts the intelligent young to serve in
it. It would have many churches, and many different forms of worship to suit
the various temperaments of the faithful. There would be cheerful family
churches with guitars, and tall, still churches of awe and Latin beauty;
churches that know the Bible by heart and churches that distil the finest
points of liturgical symbolism; churches that live in permanent prayer and
churches that help and defend the disadvantaged in their daily lives; churches
that study the history of the faith and churches that find joy in daily
conversation with synagogues and mosques, comparing ways of loving God.
None of this, says the Father we
all worship, is impossible.
The image above is take from an article on the House of One, a joint place of worship for the three faiths being built in Berlin.
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