Overcoming an Exclusionary Faith
Sikh activist and author Valarie Kaur recalls an experience of a childhood friendship ending because of a difference in faith:
I was in eighth grade, sitting in the library with my very best friend in the whole world. Her name was Lisa. We were working …, but we were really giggling and passing notes to each other and messing around, when Lisa gets really quiet for a moment. She has this far-away look in her eyes and she says, “Valarie, I just can’t wait until judgment day.”…
I said, “What do you mean?” She said, “Well, then it’ll just be us. It’ll just be us. I can’t wait until it’s just us who are left.” I said, “Well, where will everyone else go?” Then she looked at me, very uncomfortable. She said, “Well, you know, down there.” It was that moment that I had to break to my very best friend the fact that I was not Christian…. I could see the blood drain from her face…. How could her very best friend not be saved? Not be good? Not be Christian?…
She had inherited a theology that divided the world into good and bad, right and wrong, saved and unsaved. Her theology severed her from her own deep knowing that her best friend was good and beloved. It’s like her theology stole me from home. She was trying to make it all make sense, try to hold both, but she couldn’t hold both. She had to let me go. [1]
In the wake of that loss, Kaur visits a church where she can confront a Christian about the belief in a God who discriminates against people of other faiths. There, she meets a church organist and recalls saying,
“I just can’t believe that there could be a God who would send me to hell,” I said. There was a pause as she looked at me. I was ready to fight.
“I can’t either,” she said. She saw my shock and explained. “I think that there are many paths. It just doesn’t make sense otherwise….” Her name was Faye and she was the first Christian I had ever met who did not believe I was going to hell. I would go on to meet many more people like her and learn that there are many ways to be Christian, just as there are many ways to be Sikh. Our traditions are like treasure chests filled with scriptures, songs, and stories—some empower us to cast judgment and others shimmer with the call to love above all….
Fifteen years after I thought our friendship was over, Lisa would reach out with an apology. She would still be Christian and I would still be Sikh, but she would have long abandoned the particular theology that had tried to sever us from one another. She had gone on her own journey … and had eventually come back to our friendship. In the end, we learned that love was the way, the truth, and the life.
An Excerpt from Here Comes the Sun by Bill McKibben
The central role of the sun in the religious life of humans has faded in most places over the millennia. Look to the Middle East, for example, the place we sometimes think of as the cradle of civilization. The sun was pre-eminent for the Sumerian civilization; Utu, the sun god, and his Akkadian successor Shamash could see, as they traversed the sky, all that happened on earth, making them the arbiters of justice and equity (Shamash gave Hammurabi the famous law code that served as the model for so much that came after). Sun worship may have reached its apogee next door in Egypt, where Ra, with his sun disk on his head, was numbered the king of the gods, sailing the sky in his solar boat. Pharaohs were considered his sons; the great temples at Karnak and Luxor captured the sunrise at the solstices, and many of the tombs in the Valley of the Kings were aligned toward the setting sun. The shape of the pyramids themselves is likely symbolic of the rays of the sun as they spread down from the heavens.
This region no longer belongs to these gods, of course. Instead it’s firmly in the grip of the various religions of the book — Judaism, Christianity, Islam — which frown on anything even resembling sun worship. And yet, as Freud argues in Moses and Monotheism, there’s a sense in which “modern” religion comes in a direct line from that earlier era — that monotheism really originated in Egypt and that Judaism just dropped the sun. Moses, he insisted, was not Hebrew but an Egyptian follower of a monotheism based on the sun, “who chose the Jewish people to keep alive an advanced ethical and religious belief which the Egyptians were abandoning.”
Scholars don’t accept this version as historical truth, but those of us who grew up with the Bible understand Freud’s deeper reasoning — the sense of light as a metaphor for the divine, the idea that God, like the sun, is a source of life and energy. Yes, the Bible is harsh on idolators: “beware lest you lift up your eyes to heaven, and when you see the sun and the moon and the stars, all the host of heaven, you be drawn away and worship them and serve them.” And yet “Sun of Righteousness” is the name that the Hebrew prophets used to forecast the Messiah.
Though I’m not a preacher, I lead the Christmas Eve services in our tiny Vermont church, and I always make sure we sing “Hark the Herald Angels Sing,” in part for those lyrics:
“Hail the Sun of Righteousness! Light and life to all He brings, Risen with healing in His wings.”
Christmas, in fact, is the reminder that none of our meaningful traditions are ever pure or disconnected from the past. Was Jesus born on the 25th of December? The Bible doesn’t say, and early accounts — Clement of Alexandria, say — suggest April or May; but there was an existing Roman solstice feast (Saturnalia) and as Constantine was baptized into the new religion customs began to be absorbed. (Cultural appropriation!). In 354 Liberius, bishop of Rome, picked December 25, and for many centuries Christmas continued pretty much as the drunken feast around the darkest days of the year that it always had been (even in the new world the Puritans frowned on Christmas, which they called Foolstide.) It’s taken two thousand years to wring most of the old sunlight out of the day.
But hey, what do you know, the Roman Sun Day became the Christian day of worship. There’s no escaping it. I’m a Christian — a Methodist, the least excitable of all denominations. That means I worship the Son, not the sun: the radical code that Jesus laid out, with its insistence above all on caring for the poor and vulnerable, works for me. But my form of the faith (increasingly remnant in modern America where a cultish and brutal Christianity is now the norm) is perfectly compatible with some low-key reverence for the sun. I am reminded constantly of Francis of Assisi and his Canticle of the Sun.
Praised be You, my Lord, with all your creatures;
especially Brother Sun, who is the day, and through whom You give us light.
And he is beautiful and radiant with great splendor,
and bears a likeness to You, Most High One.
It’s worth noting, in fact, that the last Bishop of Rome took his papal name from that earlier Francis. And when he wrote his overpoweringly radical 2015 encyclical on climate change, Laudato Si, he took that phrase (Praised be You) straight from the Canticle.
As the author of Ecclesiastes (Solomon, at least by legend) put it:
“What has been will be again
What has been done will be done again.
There is nothing new under the sun.”
