Samir Selmanovic on right Friday, December 04, 2009
Huntsville Times
Ready or not, Christian or not, for the next few weeks, Christmas will cookie-cut the shape of existence for all Americans. Attempting to avoid Christmas in the United States is as impossible as it would be to avoid Ramadan in Egypt or Passover week in Israel.
The Christian Christmas blankets everyone.
It used to be that under this comforting blanket of sameness, or, at least, near-ness, we could wish each other "Merry Christmas" reflexively - perhaps even thoughtlessly.
One of the gifts of our shrinking world is that, unless we actually know our neighbor, we will not know if that greeting will come across as a heartfelt, faith-full celebration of a belief in Jesus or as an attempt to impose a faith perceived as bigoted and superstitious, as an innocent expression of joy or as a strident, exclusivist declaration, as the sharing of tradition or as an admission of cultural ignorance.
I got to thinking about this aspect of Christmas as I read Samir Selmanovic's "It's Really All about God: Reflections of a Muslim Atheist Jewish Christian," and Eboo Patel's "Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation."
Both are coming-of-faith stories written by men now both engaged in being, respectively, devoutly Christian and devoutly Muslim, as they work to also appreciate and understand those of other faiths.
Both base their own understanding of God on only one certainty: God is bigger than their human belief systems.
Selmanovic is, surprisingly, a Seventh-day Adventist minister. Adventists are careful about their doctrines. They are people who know what and why they believe with far more detail than, say, us Presbyterians.
But both Selmanovic and Patel have glimpsed the unmistakable signs of God moving in faiths outside of their own. Both have come to the dizzying awareness that God is as present outside Christianity or Islam as inside. And both have found that this does not tempt them to leave their own traditions, but, in fact, deepens their commitment to their own faith home - while they, as the Hindu Gandhi advises, leave "the windows open so that the winds of other traditions can blow through and bring their unique oxygen."
Source: http://www.al.com/religion/huntsvilletimes/news.ssf?/base/living/1259921743156200.xml&coll=1
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