State of Formation fellow-contributor, Brad Bannon, has posed this question to which my post responds, at least in part: Do religious persons “own” their forms of prayer and practice? Granted, adaptations should be done carefully and respectfully…but are there limits to which practices can and cannot be performed? Are there dangers of religious syncretism here? If there are, then can these dangers be negotiated – and to what end – or should we just stick to “our” traditions and practices? If religious traditions are an amalgamation of history, doctrine, and praxis, then can we come to know and understand our religious others without knowing – or perhaps even practicing, on occasion – “their” traditional practices? What do you think? (See: http://goo.gl/W8Djf)

Religions, as we encounter them today, are synthetic and syncretic current manifestations.  For example, there is no aspect of the Christianities (and I suspect we should use the plural when we talk about what we normally refer to as a religion—since there is no such thing as a religion with one expression, so Buddhisms, Islams, Judaisms, Hinduisms, etc.) that is not laced with accretions and borrowings from Greek philosophy, pagan practice, and Jewish (Semitic) imagination, etc.  If Christianities are anything at all they are syntheses of many other pre-existing worldviews; they are syncretisms of other religious perspectives.

Christianities, as we know them today, are evolving, ever-becoming, and living realities.  To live means to become something new.  To live also means that the old form must perish, must pass away, to make room for the new form. (Masao Abe calls this, in Buddhism, ‘living-dying’—though I prefer perpetual perishing-birthing.) To live means combining the gift of the past with some new gift of the present, cutting away what is irrelevant, and forging into the future as a new creation.  If Christianities live, then they must be pressing on into the future in this way.  Or else Christianities have died.  The same is true with the other religions.

It is contrary to good sense to imagine that Christianity (though I prefer the plural it is admittedly cumbersome), for example, is a static something that comes into contact with other static somethings.  No religion is a reified, finished thing. More saliently: we must be reminded that a Christian is not a static someone coming into contact with other static someones!  No person is a reified, finished person. The living manifestation of the religion “Episcopalianism” in me comes into contact with the living manifestation of the religion “Pure Land Buddhism” in my friend.  If we are in any kind of authentic relationship (which means any relationship at all!) we cannot help but become something new by virtue of our relationship!  A unique and unrepeatable form, will arise in me, and a different unique and unrepeatable form will arise in my friend.  In other words the very nature of the becoming of creation, the very nature of me, of each of us, is synthesis and syncretism!

(In this regard, I am convinced that there are as many Christianities as there are Christians, as many Buddhisms as Buddhists, Judaisms as Jews, etc.)

I think it is all of our responsibility to learn the other religious languages, whether to speak or merely to understand, to the best of our ability.  To do that requires a kind of shared experience, shared practice.  If the experiences, and practice of the other religions are forbidden territory, then how can we ever learn to speak one another’s language from the heart?  All we will be left with is a dispassionate accumulation of facts about other religions in their historical manifestations.

In another post, http://goo.gl/HVCX3, I called the other religions and quasi-religions “our true inheritance as members of the human race.”  Because of our new situation, the gift of so many religious Others are available to us in a way that was forbidden even for my grandparents— who were prohibited to mix their Catholic lives even with the Lutheran lives of their neighbors.  These religious Others are not resources to be mined.  They are living, breathing, loving persons with whom we are challenged by the irrevocable divine invitation to enter into the beautiful risk of real mutually transformative relationship.

If ‘dialogue’ is restricted to interscriptural hermeneutics (interpretation) and the comparing of doctrines and dogmas—while these are invaluable activities and important scholarly efforts— dialogue will be bereft of genuine lifeblood.  The practices must be open to us since they are an important means by which we actually speak with our religious selves- and learn to listen (a sometimes neglected aspect of dialogue). Do we want to gather up lots of ideas about other religions, like a DVR— do we want to become encyclopedias of religions— or do we want religious lives that are mutually enriched, mutually transformed?

Thanks for the question, Brad!

Let’s become a new creation together.