This Sounds Like a Joke

A Baha’i, a Christian, and a young woman of no particular faith walk into Mees Hall at Capital University.

It sounds like the start of a joke.

The Baha’i, the young woman of no particular faith, and I visited Capital University Sept. 27 to hear Eboo Patel’s lecture on interfaith dialogue. His fearless approach to the subject contrasted with the deer-in-the-headlights expressions of my fellow students when I asked them to sign up for my interfaith mission trip. These students remembered their relatives saying, “Never discuss politics or religion in polite company.”

But interfaith is comical at heart, and can be a source of laughter rather than terror. When discussing our religions, we make our beliefs vulnerable, both to the interpretations of others and to our own new perspective. As anyone who has been laughed at knows (and as anyone who has learned to laugh at themselves knows), vulnerability is at the heart of comedy.

In Common Texts interfaith discussions at OWU, beliefs become vulnerable and laugher results. Christians learn from Muslims that when Jesus comes back, he will be an Imam, and Christians will have to go to the mosque to worship him. I find this funny because many Christians, including me before I ventured into interfaith study, assume they own Jesus as a registered trademark.

Then a Jewish student says, “When the Messiah comes…,” pointing out that Jesus plays different roles in different faiths—and he is not always the Messiah. The pagan students in the room say they do not feel inclined to follow any deities at the moment, but if that changes, they’ll let you know. The Christians sit stunned, minds still spinning over the mosque pronouncement—and then the atheist in the room pipes up and says, “Thank you everyone, those were all very nice stories.”

It’s a good way to spend a Tuesday night.

Admittedly, a theologically conservative Christian and a theologically conservative Muslim may find it difficult to have polite conversation about the afterlife.

But polite conversation isn’t the point, after all. A better understanding of each other’s lives and recognition of each other as neighbors is infinitely more important. In his lecture at Capital, Patel advised us to set aside the afterlife and have the courage to focus on our time together on Earth.
“Earth is the best place for love,” Patel said.

A willingness to laugh and embrace our differences rather than fear them can help us work toward the larger goal of a safe society for all. In the satirical novel Candide, Voltaire describes El Dorado as a paradise in which everyone believes the same thing and no one ends up burned at the stake. Voltaire’s point, of course, is that human beings are incapable of living together in harmony unless they all believe the same thing. I, personally, would like to live in a society where we can all hold different beliefs and still no one gets burnt.

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