God of Love: A Guide to the Heart of Judaism, Christianity and Islam

INTRODUCTION

The Interspiritual Quest

All those who love you are beautiful;

they overflow with your presence

so that they can do nothing but good.

There is infinite space in your garden;

all men, all women are welcome here;

all they need do is enter.

The Odes and Psalms of Solomon

God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God,

And God abides in them.

1 John 4:16

O Marvel! a garden amidst the flames.

My heart has become capable of every form:

it is a pasture for gazelles and a convent for Christian monks,

and a temple for idols and the pilgrim’s Ka’ba,

and the tables of the Torah and the book of the Quran.

I follow the religion of Love: whatever way Love’s camel takes,

that is my religion and my faith.

Ibn ‘Arabi , O Marvel

I profess the religion of love,

Love is my religion and my faith.

My mother is love

My father is love

My prophet is love

My God is love

I am a child of love

I have come only to speak of love.

Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi, I Profess the Religion of Love

EVER SINCE I was a little girl, I have been drawn to the living heart of every spiritual tradition I have encountered. Like a night wanderer who comes across a sanctuary in the woods, I peer through the stained-glass window, aching to enter and bow down at the altar I see blazing within.

My eye catches the eye of the man or woman who keeps the fire there, a person properly attired in the vestments of their creed. We smile and nod to one another in wordless agreement: their task is to tend that hearth; mine to move on, map the terrain, marking each resting place and blessing the wilderness between.

This powerful attraction to religion makes no sense. In fact, for much of my life it embarrassed me. I grew up in a secular Jewish family, in which my parents made a compelling case for renouncing organized religion on the grounds that religious institutions have been responsible for the most horrendous violations of human rights—and of the planet herself—in the history of so-called civilization. Their indictment was especially aimed at the Judeo-Christian traditions and their glorification of an abusive Father-God who is forever punishing His children in fits of divine fury.

As I began to study and practice Eastern spiritual traditions with Western-born teachers—refugees from their own Jewish and Christian backgrounds—I found the God of my ancestors being similarly dismissed. Yet these same spiritual guides could not seem to resist the impulse to winnow the Testaments, Old and New, and emerge with vibrant wisdom teachings that transcend dogma and make their way directly to the heart. My Buddhist and Hindu teachers wove these shining Western threads into their talks and books.

In solidarity with my nontheistic family, I tried to cultivate a general attitude of condemnation toward all religious institutions for being naïve, patriarchal, and potentially dangerous. Yet, a single line from the Song of Songs, the Gospel of John, or the poetry of Rumi would make my heart fly open and soar, arcing toward a God I could not bring myself to believe in. What I found irresistible was the essential unity at the core of all that diversity; each faith tradition was singing the same song in a deliciously different voice: God is love.

Eventually, the inner conflict between skepticism and devotion melted. I became reconciled to the paradox: I could acknowledge the tragic misuses of religious authority in history and current affairs, while falling to my knees in awe of the stunning beauty at the heart of the mystical poetry in each tradition and the redeeming power of its teachings on peace and justice.

I left home in my teens and moved to the Lama Foundation, an intentional spiritual community in the mountains of Northern New Mexico, where Ram Dass created Be Here Now, the groundbreaking book that translated three thousand years of Eastern thought into a contemporary American vernacular and turned an entire generation on to a journey of awakening.

At Lama I was exposed to the world’s primary spiritual traditions and several lesser-known ones. I chanted the name of God in Arabic with passionate Sufis, in Sanskrit with ecstatic Hindus, in Hebrew with Kabbalists, and in Latin with Christian mystics. I participated in Native American sweat lodges and silent Buddhist meditation retreats. I met yogis and swamis, lamas and roshis, sheikhs and murshidas, progressive rabbis and radical priests. I took initiation in at least four different lineages that have traditionally wished to eradicate each other from the face of the earth. At Lama, all faiths were welcomed as equally valid means for building a relationship with the Divine. Lama ruined everything for me. How could I commit to a single way after having seen the holy beauty shining from the heart of every one of God’s houses?

Since that time, my task has felt clear: to help build bridges between the world’s faiths. As a spiritual writer and translator of the Spanish Christian mystics, a religious studies professor, and a practitioner of many spiritual traditions, I have spent my life responding to the call to honor diversity and celebrate unity among all paths that lead us home to love.

I can identify with almost every religious orientation on the planet (including agnosticism). I have embraced my Jewish heritage more fully as I grow older, observing the weekly Shabbat (Sabbath) and carving out sacred time each fall to celebrate the High Holy Days with my community. I have been connected with Sufism since I first encountered the teachings of Murshid Samuel Lewis and Hazrat Inayat Khan as a teenager and experienced the ecstasy of dances of Universal Peace and zikr. The philosophy of Buddhism makes more sense to me than any other path, and I have been practicing mindfulness meditation for over thirty years. I believe that Jesus Christ was more than just a very wise rabbi and a nice guy: I feel in my heart that he was a true vessel for the Divine and continues to hold that light in this world, so I guess that makes me a kind of Christian. I have been devoted to the Indian saint, Neem Karoli Baba, whose lineage was Hindu, from the moment I first saw his picture in 1972, and I feel that he has guided my steps throughout my life; he is the one who first exposed me—a Jewish-Sufi-Buddhist—to Christ and Mother Mary, the primary subjects of all the books I have written and translated!

America is the Land of the Consumer. Not only do we help ourselves to the largest portion of the earth’s resources while the rest of the world struggles to scrape together the next meal, but we are a culture of dilettantes : We dabble in this religious tradition and that one, chanting om at the end of yoga class, ordering the latest book on how to cultivate prosperity through positive thinking, signing up for a weekend workshop on tantric sex or shamanic journeying. We are conditioned to treat the spiritual life as another commodity, rather than as a discipline of inner transformation with a corresponding commitment to alleviating suffering in the world. Yet, authentic engagement with the perennial wisdom that lies at the heart of the well means we must leap from the lip of the vessel and dive into the unknown.

The late Brother Wayne Teasdale coined the term interspiritual to describe the shared mystic heart beating in the center of the world’s deepest spiritual traditions (The Mystic Heart, 2001). This perspective encompasses a much broader scope of shared religious experience than does its predecessor interfaith movement, which focuses more on the dialog between the established institutionalized religions than on an intermingling of their common heart. Genuine interspiritual dialog demands that we draw deeply on our inner knowing and show up for the hard work of understanding. It requires that we not only study and discuss religions other than our own, but that we commit to a disciplined practice in more than one tradition, immersing ourselves in the well of wisdom they offer, allowing these encounters to change us from within.

The sacred scriptures of all faiths call us to love as we have never loved before. This requires effort, vigilance, and radical humility. Violence is easier than nonviolence, yet hate only perpetuates hate. The wisdom teachings remind us that love—active, engaged, fearless love—is the only way to save ourselves and each other from the firestorm of war that rages around us. There is a renewed urgency to this task now. We are asked not only to tolerate the other, but also to actively engage the love that transmutes the lead of ignorance and hatred into the gold of authentic connection. This is the narrow gate Christ speaks of in the Gospels. Don’t come this way unless you’re willing to stretch, bend, and transform for the sake of love.

God of Love pays homage to the mystical and social justice teachings at the common core of the world’s three great monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Rather than skimming the cream off the surface of each faith and homogenizing them beyond recognition, we are looking for those teachings and practices that unify, rather than divide us. In a world fractured by an ever-renewed demonization of the other, and fueled by age-old misunderstandings between the Children of Abraham, it is my hope that this book will serve as a reminder of their mutual dedication to lovingkindness as the highest expression of faith. The eleven chapters explore the issues I see as most essential to this quest.

Each chapter is divided into four parts. The first part serves as a kind of invocation, in which I invite the reader into a personal relationship with the subject. You may or may not identify yourself as the second person I refer to, but my goal is to be as inclusive as possible, so that even people who do not consider themselves to be religious in any way can find a relevant point of access to these wisdom streams.

The second section is an overview of the subject from the perspective of the three Abrahamic faiths, in which I identify their respective positions and attempt to find the common ground between them. It is important for the reader to know that I have not made an effort to be comprehensive in my selection of material. I may have excluded biblical teachings and Quranic references that you would see as essential. I am looking at these issues through my own lens, by definition colored by my own experiences, biases, and wishful thinking.

The third section is memoir. This is the riskiest part for me. All my previous books have been translations of or reflections on the wisdom teachings of others, and I have avoided sharing episodes from my own life or exposing my personal beliefs. Yet what I crave when I read about the spiritual path is stories about real people who, like me, have wrestled with the Divine in the effort to break through to the ultimate. And so this time I offer glimpses from my own journey, not as someone who has arrived somewhere, but as a fellow traveler immersed in the ongoing adventure. I also include stories of people I know and love, who represent a particular aspect of the question at hand.

In the last section, I have selected exemplars I feel embody the primary qualities of the spiritual value the chapter illumines. I have chosen biblical characters and historical figures, rather than contemporary beings, because living people are still works in progress. These narratives are hagiographic, rather than strictly factual. The word hagiography refers to accounts of the lives of saints and other holy women and men who are considered to have been specially imbued with the sacred. As such, they are often elevated and set apart from the rest of us, and their function as guides on our own path backfires because we cannot relate to them. So I have tried to make these luminaries as accessible as possible while upholding what was most holy, impeccable, and revolutionary about their lives.

If I have been overly reverential in these pages, let me assure you that it is not only an attitude I take with established holy people; I see almost everyone I know as extraordinary in some way. My husband calls it Mirabai’s Master Syndrome. I am always introducing people as a brilliant poet, a gifted painter, the finest meditation teacher I have ever met, the mother of that amazing child I told you about, the most influential animal rights activist west of the Mississippi. Something in me recognizes something in the other as important and beautiful, and I mention this attribute so that they know that at least one person perceives and acknowledges the light in them. If I were to meet you, I would bow at your feet too.

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with

all your soul and with all your might.

Deuteronomy 6:5

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away.

1 Corinthians 13:4–8

God is love, from love the world became,

And back to love does everything return;

Love binds the different atoms into forms,

Love holds the cells of bodies as a unity,

Makes possible the marvels of growing life,

Turns man into a miniature universe,

And congregates all people in brotherhood;

From love, the complete panorama of life–

Its absence leads to death, to war, to fratricide.

This is no mystery to the awakened heart;

Peace on earth to men of universal will,

Who rise above their selfish limitations

And see the world as God would have them see.

Murshid Samuel Lewis, The Jerusalem Trilogy:

Song of the Prophets

TOWARD THE ONE

The Unity of the Divine

Hear, O Israel: YHVH is our God, YHVH is the One and

Only. You shall love YHVH your God with all your heart,

with all your soul, and with all your resources.

Deuteronomy 6:4–5

And Jesus said, The first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God is one Lord: And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment.

Mark 12:29–30

Say: He is Allah,

The One and Only;

Allah, the Eternal, Absolute.

Qur ’an 112:1–2

My house shall be called a house of prayer for all people.

Isaiah 56:7

The Nameless Has a Thousand Names

YOU HAVE THE urge (yet are unable) to catch hold of the One and tether it to the altar, where you have been taught to believe the One belongs. You cannot name the One (though you try, calling it God or Goddess, Allah or Cristo, Mother or Lord). You discover that the One cannot rightfully be referred to as He (though tradition requires that you assign a symbolic gender to the formless). You are incapable of wrapping up the Holy One and presenting it to yourself like a toy or a sandwich, a list of rules or a reward.

You may have been conditioned to claim the One for your people alone, but then you see Him everywhere (everywhere !) : in a corner of the airport where a man unrolls a small rug and bends to press his forehead, nose, both his hands and all his toes to the ground in submission; in the storefront church of the inner city where poor people sing and weep at the same time; in the grandmother lighting the Sabbath candles and welcoming the Bride of Israel. You recognize your God as everyone’s God.

And not only among Jews and Christians and Muslims do you see the reflected face of the One. When the climber reaches the summit and gazes out at a thousand miles of mountains and valleys, there is the One. When the mother pushes through shattering pain to give birth, and the infant sucks in his first breath and expels his wild wail, there is the One. When the father drops to his knees