“If you want to draw water you do not dig six one-foot wells. You dig one six-foot well… I recognize that the water I am drawing is the same water that every other well around me is drawing. And no matter the well, the water is just as sweet” The scholar of the history of religions and Muslim writer about the life of Jesus, Reza Aslan, thus explains the importance of going deep into one’s own faith tradition with respect for the experiences of the Divine in other religious traditions.
I like the term, “interspirituality,” because it emphasizes the experiential aspect more than the religiously doctrinal aspect of interfaith work. My experience is that in the process of committing oneself to love over fear, oneness over separateness, and contemplative living, that one can have a deeper respect of a variety of religious traditions and be empowered to dismantle discriminatory systems including systems that favor one religion over another. After all, as Archbishop Desmond Tutu teaches, “God is not a Christian.”
Reza Aslan, Zealot, The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth
Ken Wilbur, The Religion of Tomorrow
