On my way back home from a recent business trip I picked up an airport novel for the long flight. I’ve long been a fan of spy thrillers and managed to find one set a couple of years ago in the Middle East.
A short way into the book I was intrigued to find a minor subplot involving a Muslim professor of religion in Iran. In a storyline otherwise driven by religious and political fanatics, this professor voices quiet doubt about the fundamentalists’ unrelentingly narrow and destructive certainty.
The professor has written a book, the fruit of lifelong study and reflection. Discussing the manuscript with his grandson, he notes that “all religions have problems.” Puzzled, the grandson asks: “What is the common problem?”
His grandfather replies, “The god that they worship is too small.”
Most contemporary novelists give religion a wide berth. The few that do incorporate faith in a plot rarely do so sympathetically. Yet just a few pages later in this novel, grandfather tells grandson that religion boils down to two things: “Love God” and “Be kind, compassionate, merciful to your fellow man.” Everything else, he says, is “just details.”
The tendency is for words to leap from our throat to argue the importance of those details. But is that a helpful response, I wonder? Is it not at least as important today to assess what different faiths have in common? And is this not especially true for Jews, Christians and Muslims, all of whom believe that there is but one God who speaks to all people in all times and places?
It’s interesting to look back 2,000-odd years to the religious marketplace of Jesus’ day. The Middle East under the Roman empire was a riot of voices of followers of different religions.
Canada’s religious landscape today is not dissimilar. Although we are still an overwhelmingly Christian population, all the world’s major religions are represented here in fairly significant numbers.
The professor of religion in the novel I read says that loving God and being compassionate towards others are the two key elements of faith. In fact, one flows from the other. If we love God, we cannot help but be compassionate towards others.
To some extent, the rituals and detailed beliefs of religions are expressed in formal worship. For Christians, this is primarily in Sunday worship. Our details are hardly under threat there and we can celebrate them with joy.
Compassion, on the other hand, is something that transcends those details in daily living. One of the consequences of the smaller world we live in is that the pain and suffering of other humans is brought to our doorstep on a daily basis.
We cannot have enough compassion for others.
As members of the dominant religion in this country, we should be joining hands with people of other faiths to help those around the world who through no fault of theirs go hungry and die early from disease and war.
In the meantime, the Presbyterian Church does join with other Christians around the world to carry out compassionate work through Presbyterian World Service and Development, and it deserves our generous financial support.
Compassion and the largeness of God are also the focus of this month’s cover story, Finding God. Prof. Pam McCarroll has compiled responses to a questionnaire sent around the church about how people experience God in their lives. The God revealed in the answers is not small but a large, generous God who only requires us, in the words of Micah to “To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with our God.”
We are approaching the season of the Incarnation, when God became small for us in order to point a way to the expansive greatness of the divine love. May you find a way to experience and celebrate God’s great love for you and your family. And may you be compassionate to others, sharing your riches with those who have none, just as God shares His riches with us.
All of us at the Record wish you a joyous and loving Christmas.
