Aimee Moiso

In recent years, many public schools have altered their standard program in an attempt to honor the cultural and religious plurality of the students. The newly-titled “winter” concerts now often include Hanukah, Kwanzaa (an African-American holiday) and even Ramadan traditions and songs alongside the customary Christmas fare.

Such changes in school concerts are usually motivated by a sincere desire to be inclusive. The typical result, however, is that all the holidays represented are likened to one another under a universal “spirit of the season” umbrella. Specific religious expression is avoided or watered down to generic themes of love, charity and peace. The across-the-board message is that in December we all celebrate the same thing: our common humanity.

Generalities such as these are normal in American culture. As someone born and bred in the United States, I have been culturally conditioned to find the bottom line, the lowest common denominator, the single underlying meaning. We are uncomfortable with multiple solutions or the possibility that there might be more than one explanation. We prefer generalizing statements that gloss over particularities in favor of broad inclusion.

So in December, our children’s winter concerts celebrate our common humanity.

The problem is that Christmas, Hanukah, Kwanzaa and Ramadan is more than celebrating humanity. To reduce any of them to a generic common theme is to deny the tradition, history, faith, flavor, richness, depth – in sum, the meaning – that the holiday and its faith tradition have to offer. The concern is not with seeking common ground, which is and will continue to be critical to dialogue, conflict resolution and peace in our globalized world. The concern is that generalizations homogenize the world’s diversity rather than finding meaning and value in its varied traditions. In an effort to be inclusive and amicable, nothing of substance is said at all.

I arrived at the Bossey seminar on Interpreting Sacred Scriptures in Pluralist Contexts with an awareness of the complexities of international, interfaith dialogue and my social biases toward the generic. The first day of the conference as I sat tired, jetlagged and sweating through the hottest June since Switzerland started keeping records, my cultural inclinations had the upper hand. I would have been perfectly happy to reduce the sacred texts of various religions to basic commonality and retire to the lakeshore. Even without record temperatures, it was tremendously tempting to make quick, sweeping generalizations: that the Koran is to Muslims what the Bible is to Christians, or that Jews and Christians have a common faith understanding because they both use the Hebrew scriptures.

Any such oversimplifications I might have brought to the table didn’t last long. It was quickly apparent that oversimplifications about sacred texts are not only naïve, they are negligent of the independent integrity of the texts and the individuals who use them.

Sacred texts are used in many ways for various purposes in different traditions. Some texts are regarded as the direct revelation of God, others inspired by God, others illustrative of the nature of God. In some traditions, texts are central to religious experience and expression; in others, texts are marginal or have been divisive, destructive and rejected. Some adherents use sacred texts as part of their daily ritual; in other traditions the text is reserved for scholars, teachers and leaders. Some groups regularly use the texts of more than one tradition; still others would find it offensive, abhorrent, or even sacrilegious to seek wisdom from the sacred text of another group.

The idea of sharing sacred texts raises myriad theological and ethical questions. What constitutes a sacred text, and how should such a text be approached by someone outside the tradition? Does one religious body have the right to examine, interpret or use the text of another? Can a text be spiritually significant to more than one religious body simultaneously, even if the bodies disagree about its meaning? Can God’s voice be heard by one religious group through the sacred text of another? If so, should religious groups seek God’s word through whatever sacred texts they can, regardless of the traditions from whence they came?

I didn’t find universal, definitive answers to any of these questions at Bossey, because none of the questions can be answered universally or definitively. Questions without definitive answers go against my cultural predisposition – I want to find the single answer, the one solution, the overarching truth that will make everything clear.

But international ecumenical and interfaith dialogue is rarely so simple. During one of the Bossey sessions, Dr. Ghelong Thubten Rinchen, a Buddhist monk from Italy, presented a perspective on the possibility of inclusive readings of sacred texts. The abstract concepts he presented were not easy to follow, in part because of what was for most of us an existential gulf between Buddhism and Christianity. In addition, translation was problematic at times because Dr. Rinchen’s first language was Italian. Following the presentation, the participants found it difficult to come up with vocabulary from their Christian experience with which to ask questions about Buddhist thought, and Dr. Rinchen struggled for English words to explain his answers.

I didn’t come away from the presentation with any sort of clear, illumined picture of Buddhism and the possibility of shared readings. What I did gain from the interchange was a sense of the complete, genuine otherness of the Buddhist experience, and its distance from my own was a gentle reminder that my tradition and I don’t have a monopoly on divine encounter.

It is for precisely this reason that interfaith encounter cannot be reduced to merely an expression of our common humanity. In ecumenical and interfaith dialogue, we learn from and are enriched by that which is different, and in so doing we are reminded of the immeasurable height, depth, width and breadth of God. It is a profound, humbling realization.

Deep engagement with the religious experiences of others is both complicated and involved. It requires humility and reverence for what is sacred for the other even though it is not shared or understood. As we approach each other, we tread on holy ground. And there is nothing common about it.

Aimee Moiso is a student at San Francisco Theological Seminary in California, U.S.A. She attended the Bossey Ecumenical Institute’s seminar on “Interpreting Sacred Scriptures in Pluralistic Contexts”.

Next article: Seminar on Hermeneutics: Interpreting Scriptures in Pluralist Contexts:
Finding established meanings or God's Hidden Will - Ghelong Thubten Rinchen
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