...... I have a friend .......
I call him Paul Guernsey.
He lives there.
He works there.
Becoming there - and here too.
And Greenbelt - where we met.
L5 with him and Clare - is wonder.
He and I bounce things around.
We churn together.
Yearn together.
Become together.
Smoke a cigar together.
All to infrequent.
This item below is fantastic for me.
He has said I can reprint it for you.
It touches my reality .......
The Open Tent: the lost art of hospitality
There is a remarkable scene in the book of Genesis where Abraham and Sarah encounter three strangers in the desert. And rather than reach for a weapon, Abraham reaches for a loaf of bread and welcomes these strangers into his tent. This notion of opening our tent, our homes, our lives, our hearts if you like, to strangers; to people who are different from us; those we don’t agree with is a Biblical lesson I think we all need to learn.
My friend Pip Wilson says that long periods of well-being and comfort are in general dangerous to us all. After such prolonged periods, weak souls become incapable of weathering any kind of trial. They are afraid of it. Yet it is a fact that difficult trials and sufferings can facilitate the growth of our souls.
Last week many people gathered at Les Cotils to take part in the first conference of interfaith dialogue the Channel Islands has seen. Now one could be forgiven for suggesting that this whole arena is a dangerous path to travel. Some argue it shouldn’t even be on our agenda. Yet if peace, hope and general goodwill to humanity is to be safeguarded, then I do not see how we cannot walk this road less traveled, for as difficult a journey as it may be, the bridges it will help build will be an integral foundation for the growth of respectful and peaceful community rooted in the core values of our faith.
The Rev Garth Hewitt, Rabbi Niles Goldstein and Ibrahim Hewitt tackled head on big issues over the weekend: the common roots of the open tent and the call for hospitality (taking care of the poor, the marginalized, those who find themselves broken on the wheels of living, the down trodden) that all three Semitic faiths share: the differences we have and how we might in light of this seek to build bridges between our faith communities in a respectful way despite these differences: how religion has both a healing side and a killing side: Israel/Palestine: Zionism: Messiahs: The possibility of peace building initiatives. And more importantly, all these issues were addressed not so much with tolerance, but rather with respect.
The way in which the three panelists dialoged was an example to us all as we try and live out our professed faith, and as they did I was reminded of Leonard Swindler who said that dialogue ‘was not debate and that in dialogue, each must listen to the other as openly and sympathetically as one can to understand the other's position.’ One of the main reasons for pursuing interfaith in Guernsey was to draw our community to the need to recognize that differences certainly do exist and that the object of the conference is not to 'correct' but to hear and listen to the other parts of the mosaic.
As this particular conference drew to a close the wisdom of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks came to mind. He says that ‘when a human being makes many coins in the same mint, they all come out the same. God makes every human being in the same mint, in the same image, his own, and yet we all come out differently. The religious challenge is to find God’s image in someone who is not in our image, in someone whose colour is different, whose culture is different, who speaks a different language, tells a different story, and worships God in a different way.’
Niles, Ibrahim and Garth (along with all those who attended this conference) articulated a challenge of the heart concerning this initiative of dialogue (the open tent) that there is surely an inherent goodness within us all when we are humble and forget about our obsession about being ‘right’ and get on with the difficult act of unconditional loving. There was a sense as we journeyed together during the weekend, that if we embrace this kind of attitude we might just discover from our struggle (in context with the Genesis story of Abraham) that our own experiences advance understanding and sustain the promise that the racial and religious paralysis that cripples our community may yet be healed.
It reminded me that our Holy Scriptures are not hitching posts but rather sign posts that point on beyond themselves, and that ultimately we need to remember that it’s sometimes more important to love than to be right.
© Paul Chambers 2005
