A lesson from visiting a Muslim home

by Sarah-Leah Pimentel · March 3, 2014

Several days ago, I drove into the Bo Kaap neighbourhood of Cape Town to pick up a foreign exchange student at her host family’s house.

Conversations with a Muslim colleague showed that the core values and life lessons of our two faiths were very often the same.

Arriving at the house, the host father invited me into the lounge to wait for her. As I looked around and saw the outward signs of the faith that clearly had a prominent place in that home, I realised that for the first time in my life I was sitting in a Muslim home.

This simple act of entering the home of a person who practises a different faith seems such a natural thing in South Africa, when in so many other parts of the world such an encounter would be considered taboo.

It made me realise how fortunate we are to live in a country where so many different religions inhabit the same spaces and communities, and often work together to strive for a more just and equal society.

I contrasted this to some of my experiences in other parts of the world, where interactions with people of different religions drew very different reactions.

On a work trip to England a few months ago, I met up with a priest friend of mine. As we were chatting about my life and my friends in South Africa, he was genuinely horrified to discover that one of my closest friends is a (female) Anglican priest. In Germany, some of my Catholic friends refer to the Lutherans as those evangelicals who are still seen as betrayers of the faith. Imagine my surprise when I encountered a liturgy that almost mirrored ours when my godson was baptised by his Lutheran grandfather!

I think of the many afternoon conversations with a Muslim colleague, which often would begin with a question: I heard that in your religion This would inevitably lead to explanations, more questions and a realisation that the core values and life lessons of our two faiths were very often the same. It was just our expression of that faith that differed. We’d leave for the day, both enriched and refreshed by what we’d learnt and shared.

So often we hide behind our religion, using it as a shield for our fears.

In his book Begin With the Heart, Fr Daniel O’Leary quotes the well-known British theologian Bishop Lesslie Newbigin: If the only faith we know is our own, then we don’t even know that!

Fr O’Leary goes on to explain that our fragmented understanding of the Divine is enriched and enlightened by the sharing of our insights and stories in trust and love.

Too often we fear that taking a genuine interest in the way people of other faiths experience their journey towards God will in some way rob us of our Catholicity. That same fear often has us sticking doggedly to the Catechism while simultaneously denying others the chance to speak about their faith.

I’m not saying that we should not be living and professing our Catholic faith. On the contrary, we should be proud of our rich Catholic heritage and we should seek to deepen our understanding of the Church’s teachings and to share this with others. But we must do so always with compassion and respect.

This is what Pope Francis describes as a culture of encounter. He explains this idea by saying that to dialogue means to believe that the other has something worthwhile to say. […] Engaging in dialogue does not mean renouncing our own ideas and traditions, but the claim that they alone are valid or absolute (January 24, 2014).

When we create the space to engage in these courageous conversations, we find not only that we can share stories of faith, irrespective of creed, but that these moments also become opportunities to be enriched by other views of God, much like the different faces of a diamond.

In fact, without these shared stories, then our own faith becomes impoverished, stunted by a lack of stimulation and imagination.