Composing a Further Life

wonderment and turning points for me. That was really the beginning of my conversion to an interfaith practice that is not in violation of who you are in your own tradition but is an opening to the experience of another tradition. That, I suppose, has been the major fulcrum in my professional life, but it started with a response on my part to their request to come and be a Christian inside of a Shinto shrine as they were being Shintos inside of a Christian shrine, and neither one of us died.”
    “No lightning struck,” I said.
    “No lightning. So my commitment to interfaith understanding really came out of that. That’s also when I started having Sufi dancing at the cathedral. That was through Pir Vilayat Khan. People raised their eyebrows, but Paul Moore was very supportive.”
    Jim’s first encounter with Hinduism had actually happened in Chicago, where he and Pamela and their daughters had an Indian graduate student living with them. “Mira asked me if I would do her wedding. I was still in my tight-assed Episcopal mode, and I said, ‘You’re Hindu, and that’s fine, but I can’t,’ and she said, ‘Oh, that doesn’t matter to me, I can become Christian if you like.’ I said, ‘No, no, no. It doesn’t work that way.’ I got C. T. Vivian—Martin Luther King’s right-hand person—to do the thing. Mira said to Pamela, ‘The wedding will be in January, and it’s very, very simple, all we need are palm trees and strings of marigolds.’ We said, ‘Well, yeah, but this is January in Chicago, there aren’t any marigolds, let alone palm trees.’ And she said, ‘Oh, that’s all right, just get some flowers,’ so the entire apartment had chains of flowers, which were not marigolds but chrysanthemums. Then she said, ‘We need fire,’ so the hibachi was brought in, and the fire did indeed rise in the hibachi. They hang up a veil, you know, between the two getting married, and it’s only after they’ve done their vows and so on that the veil is lowered. So that was marvelous, and the wedding was full of Jesuits because she was in a class with a lot of Jesuits.
    “When Pamela and I went and stayed in India, seeing all the Indian theology at play in terms of the temples and the gods, that was the beginning of my fascination with the theology of a totally other religious tradition. The only other thing I had done was, when I was the counselor at a Jewish camp in my sophomore year at Harvard, I read all of [Abraham] Heschel’s stuff and the Hasidic stuff and was deeply fascinated by the spiritual, almost Sufi-like aspect within Judaism. So there were these intriguing experiences with other religions. Hinduism through Mira, no Buddhism yet, no Islam until I got to the cathedral and met Pir Vilayat Khan and we started the Sufi dancers. The critical point was when the Japanese came back and said, ‘Come and do the Christian ritual in our shrine,
our house.’
That was what blew me away. Just the possibility and the tremendous compassion on their part, and then doing it in Japan and realizing that there is something else.”
    “It seems to me,” I said, “that most people assume interfaith communication starts from theologies and belief systems—”
    “Which it did not for me.”
    “Maybe the key thing is not the language but the doing,” I said, “the doing together mutually, the forms of worship.”
    “And at a very basic level, we begin with respect for the difference, as opposed to the denigration of difference,” Jim said. I described the memoir of Leila Ahmed, who writes about what Islam meant to her as a child. She came from a fairly wealthy, elite Egyptian family, and what Islam meant to her as a child was the musical sound of chanting the Koran and the things that her mother said and modeled about giving to the poor. All that was linked in her mind with home and relationships and what she was learning about being a good person. “The theology isn’t there,” I said. “The authority structure isn’t there. Islam is what is experienced by Muslims, young and old, male and female, literate and nonliterate. That’s the door that has to be opened, I think.”
    I took us back to the narrative with a further question. “So Mira’s wedding was the beginning for you, even before you came to the cathedral, and then you came pretty close to getting into trouble with all those offerings on the high altar? Not the last time you got in trouble.”
    “The other big turning point for me