The Elephant and the Friend: Discovering God in All Traditions

This month I wanted to write a bit of my own experience around being in interfaith settings, perhaps as much to discover some of what it has been as anything else. My family and extended family is interfaith and of no faith at all. Both Illuman as a whole and my brothers who comprise it hold a wide variety of understandings of the Divine Mystery.  This has always been well with me. For me, these spaces have generally served to both broaden my appreciation for God’s creativity and deepen me into my own tradition in a way that couldn’t have otherwise happened. I’ve discovered that the most important things can never be lost or diminished, that God was always present regardless of how God was or wasn’t named. I’ve discovered that my aims to help are often more for me and not for others, and that God was always more wild, liberated, generous, ubiquitous, loving, diverse, holy, present, and more, more, more, more than I will ever conceive.

The Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas taught that God is better known by observing the plurality of species, rather than focusing on any single one of them. As a collective they reveal aspects of God that can’t be seen by simply summing up what all the individual species say on their own. I suspect we can extend this to say that observing all of the world's religions as a whole shows aspects of God that can’t be seen by looking at all of them individually. And it is not only in what they affirm in common, but also in their distinctives, that they give a fuller sense of the Divine Mystery.

Some say that when it comes to spirituality and religion, it's better to be a mile deep than a mile wide. Rather than dabble in a lot of spiritual practices, choose a couple and practice them. Rather than explore all the world religions, plunge into the depths of one. There is some wisdom in prioritizing depth over breadth, though we are not in a binary either/or world where we must choose just one or the other. However—and somewhat ironically—I’ve found that spending time with the breadth of other faith traditions has made me able to go even deeper in my own tradition than would have been possible otherwise. For example, the Buddhist practice of Tonglen, in which we breathe in suffering, metabolize it within our body, and breathe and return the antidote back into the world, has radically deepened for me what it means practically to follow Jesus onto the cross and allow the Christ within me to work. 

The initial way interfaith dialogue changed me, was spending enough time with folks from other traditions that broke my “God is here, not there” illusion. Conversations with an Islamic Imam, a Hindu Yogi, a Native shaman, Jewish brothers, and numerous others outside my tradition, humbled me as I saw that these particular folks had far more sacred longing for God, displayed far more “fruits of the Spirit” in their lives, and lived holy lives of far deeper faith than I or many of my Christian friends. My judgments dropped and my theological categories were smashed. God didn’t need the names for God to be the ones I used in order to be present, known, and active. Not that Christianity’s names and ideas for God were wrong, they just were incomplete, and to the extent that theologies handcuffed God, they were unhelpful.

The classic parable of the blind men describing the elephant by feeling him with their hands gets at this. The one holding the tail says, “An elephant is like a rope!” A second man touching the trunk observes, “An elephant is like a snake!” Yet another touching the side relates, “An elephant is like a wall.” These weren’t untrue observations, they just weren’t true enough. All the while the poor elephant was probably wondering, “What’s an elephant!?” Our language is a system of labels, symbols, and signs that can only point to—and never perfectly capture—a larger reality. Our ideas are constructs that are as small as our limited perspectives, revealing things in part but never in their entirety. As Richard likes to say, the Divine Mystery “isn’t unknowable, rather it is endlessly knowable.” What we articulate to be true about the Divine Mystery usually says more about us (such as where, when, and to whom we were born) than it says about God.

The challenge with names is that they hide even as they reveal, and often they hide more than they reveal. When I see the night sky, I am apt to see the big dipper or Orion’s belt far more than I’m likely to see the wonder of the individual stars that make up the constellation. In fact, my brain is so trained to look for patterns that it takes immense effort to see the stars themselves, as my mind keeps snapping back to seeing the mythical and simplified maps I’ve made of them. 

I’ll never forget as a young adult when I realized my parents were not just my mom and dad, but humans, spouses, children, real people who had so much more going on than the parental roles and projections I had mapped onto them. So too with God. Names, words, and symbols—such as elephant, Aquarius, mom, dad, Jesus, Jehovah, Allah—all hide and reveal that to which they point. All the freight these words carry must be held with a beginners’ mind (yet another Buddhist teaching that has helped me as a Christian) and recognized as provisional and incomplete. 

Given our common proclivity to project, it is no surprise that as a teenager and into my early twenties I took my theological beliefs about the Mystery so seriously and literally that I conflated my maps of reality for Reality itself. I was spellbound under the illusion that my beliefs fully and accurately described the Divine Reality. It is ironic that I turned my “Jesus” or my “God”—and certainly the bible itself—into an idol, but that is what I had done, and what I think many do in the first half of life. But wherever there is rigid certainty, there is little room for faith, and idolatry is close by.

I like to say that I’m still a Christian, but I’m pretty sure God is not—or at least not exclusively. It now seems like a bit of a no-brainer, as even Jesus himself was clearly a Jew, not a Christian. So while God has always transcended and included this religion, I’m not sure I have. Christianity is still the language for God in which I am most versed and can speak with the most nuance; it is still a primary way God has revealed God to me. And God keeps showing up in and letting us use many of the beautiful and distorted forms, theologies, and love languages that Christians have made for God, even while clearly showing up outside this tradition as well.

In men’s work, spirituality and faith is a live nerve for us all, as it touches our deep cravings for control, for belonging, and for our own beliefs to be mirrored and supported rather than challenged. Religious fragility is a real thing, especially for men who have been in the majority when asked to include and make space for other traditions to fully belong as well. This is the work of radical belonging, and nothing essential will be lost in the midst of it. The paradox is that we can know God more fully and plunge deeper into our own traditions, as we broaden out and anticipate and honor the presence of the Friend within, without, between, before, after, under, and above all of the great traditions.