The Birmingham Eight are mid-way through their study entitled Experiencing the Divine; Exploring How the Faithful Experience the Divine in its Many Facets. Ed Hurley, pastor of South Highlands Presbyterian Church in Birmingham, Alabama reports:
How to assess two and a half weeks in Bangladesh and India, countries and cultures and religions so vastly different from Judeo-Christian United States? This trip, part of a three-year Lilly Foundation Grant that a group of eight local clergy received through the Institute for Clergy Excellence, was an incredible, mind-expansive, spiritually transformative experience for me. And I feel certain it was equally so for all of our Birmingham Eight who made the journey.
Our overarching questions of all those we encountered of many different faiths were these:
- How do you experience God in your tradition?
- What helps you to experience God?
- What do you do as a result of your experience with God?
When talking with so many and varied individuals from Muslim, Sufi, Hindu, Buddhist, Jainist, Sikh and Christian traditions, including Roman Catholic, Mainline Protestant, and Evangelicals, and reaching out in the poorest state of India, Bihar, we found profound senses of God’s reality in lives. We were humbled at the devotion we saw in so many, as well as deeply disturbed at the poverty, the dirt, and lack of sanitation especially in the religious shrines of Hinduism. We all experienced varying degrees of personal discomfort, the worst being a potentially tragic head-on collision of our van with a bus on a mountain road out from Dharmsala, India.
The day we set out, July 8, I happened in my devotional reading to come upon Psalm 48:6-7: From now on I will tell you of new things, of hidden things unknown to you. They are created now, and not long ago; you have not heard of them before today. This verse spoke powerfully to me and is the verse I wrote across the top of my first journal entry.
My reflections here and in that journal are about as varied as the cultures we experienced. In Bangladesh and India there is a vast, seemingly chaotic, mixing and melding of religions and ethnicities. Experiencing the remnants of the caste system, which is outlawed, but still culturally alive across India with its family-arranged marriages and refusal to deal with certain castes (the Untouchables), was both shocking and yet familiar in terms of how we in this country tend to segregate ourselves, in spite of our best intentions. Our very study group brought together quite a diverse bunch- a Jew, a Roman Catholic, a black Baptist, a white “moderate Baptist,” and pastors from the United Church of Christ , the Presbyterian USA, and the Episcopal church. We learned lots from each other, were stretched, informed, irritated and, overall, enriched through our growing friendships along the journey.
Where else than India and Bangladesh, in a little over two weeks, could we encounter back-to-back: Islamic Immans and Buddhist Monks, Hindu Priests, Sikh Devotees, Protestant Evangelicals and Roman Catholic “Princes of the Church”?
A few transformative stories: We were especially blessed through the hospitality and welcome of the Papal Nuncio to Bangladesh, Roman Catholic Archbishop Joe Marino, a native of Birmingham, Alabama. He served as personal representative of the Pope and the Vatican State, and has the rank of an ambassador. He set up the entire amazing program for our three days in Bangladesh. Three evenings he hosted lavish, relaxed dinners with unique guests including Muhamid Zamir, a renowned Phd. elitist political and philosophical leader of Bangladesh, ambassador to several different countries from Bangladesh including Bosnia and Italy, author of 18 books, and currently the Chief Information Commissioner for Bangladesh, charged to see that people are provided with basic human rights information.
One day we spent in the outlying region three hours Northwest of Dhaka, in the region of Mymansing. There Archbishop Joe took us along as he made an official Nuncio visit to the Bishop there. We were welcomed at the Bishop’s residence by nuns and priests and school children who sang to us and presented us with flowers. After a meal we traveled 30 minutes further into the rural areas, where we came to a large Roman Catholic School. Joe had worked raising funds in the United States (almost two million dollars) to build a large new school building. As we drove through the gates of this school, there appeared before us no fewer than 1,000 uniformed, sharp-looking Bangladeshi students. They presented us with a wonderful program of welcome. We then traveled yet further and met with an Irish-American priest, Fr. Gene (from Indiana), who had been in this same little remote place since 1955, the year I was born. When he came there the entire area was pagan. Now there is a strong Christian presence.
Another amazing guest at Joe’s table was Dr. Les Morgan, Presbyterian Church USA medical missionary who has been in Dhaka, Bangladesh for 20 years. Here he and his wife, moving from his native Shreveport, Louisiana immediately after completing medical school, raised their three daughters. Cody and Talulah Watson shared in ministry with the Morgan’s during the years they were stationed in Bangladesh. Les described the challenges of raising children in a Muslim society where there was literally no school for them. He told how they had to spend their latter school years in boarding schools out of the country. Les, and also Joe, each in their own way, impressed me with the sense of “Presence” that they felt was their greatest gift to give to their host cultures. They gave many examples of the way the Bangladeshi people have come to appreciate Christianity, though few ever convert from Islam, and the virtual cultural suicide such conversions can be for those who do. They said they had learned the importance of ‘Relationship,’ Les telling how he would visit in a villager’s home, making a call to some of his patients whom he sensed needed that extra touch. Joe telling about how encounters through his diplomatic ministry sometimes enabled significant improvements to be made through, for example, the current Prime Minister, who has undertaken a number of positive changes for religious minorities, based on her encounters with Joe. She had good memories of being educated in a Roman Catholic school, and also of having her daughter educated in a Roman Catholic school. Joe and Les both said, in essence, that we have to decide if we are trying to change hearts or to change religion.
Others who came to Dinner at Joe’s included Brother Guillain, a Protestant monk with the Taizé Community of France, who is one of a small number of Brothers who were led to establish an outpost in rural Bangladesh. A group of Sufis, a mystical branch out of established Islam that emphasizes an intimate relationship with God through the teaching of the Guru, came one afternoon and visited with us before dinner.
I experienced a very different Christian expression at the end of our trip when I made a side trip from Delhi to Patna, Bihar State, India. There I visited BORN, the Bihar OutReach Network, a missionary group that our congregation has a supportive partnership relation with. Led by Rev. Ponraj, who is educated theologically and ordained a Priest of the Church of South India, and whose mentor was the renowned British Missionary, Leslie Newbigin, Ponraj has a vision for spreading Christianity across the state of Bihar (population of 100 million, the third largest and the poorest state in India). He has developed an effective outreach there to the poorest of the poor. I spent 28 hours with him and his pastors and program leaders, some 15 or so individuals who are scattered across this large state and came in to spend the time with me-one of them making a six-hour train trip from an extremely remote area. They are sharing Christianity in small remote villages with lower-caste Indians. I experienced two baptismal services while there, a total of 74 young adults receiving Christian Baptism by immersion in the Ganges River as they professed their faith in Jesus Christ and renounced “all other gods.” These missionaries have established more than 1,000 house churches and currently have some 30,000 members among them. They are becoming virtually a new denomination, and currently are petitioning the Church of North India to establish them as a separate diocese within that denomination.
Moving to India from Bangladesh, our encounters with persons were not nearly so deep because we were now working through a tour company that set up our journey as we traveled by overnight train across central and north India rather than with leaders like Archbishop Marino. We did have excellent guides, however, who helped us understand and appreciate varied religions from Hinduism to Buddhism to Jainism to Sikhism. We really did not have much opportunity to engage deeply with many of the other practitioners of these varied faiths. Yet we did get to see and receive a blessing from the number two Buddhist monk behind the Dali Lama when we visited his Temple near Dharmsala.
The high point spiritually for me of the whole experience was a visit we made at the Sisters of Charity Mother House in Calcutta. This is the house from which Mother Teresa began and conducted the order’s more than 700 worldwide missions to the poor. Here Mother Teresa is buried. We had a 45-minute visit with Mother Teresa’s colleague (since 1949), Sister Gertrude. Mother Teresa died in her arms. I was amazed at the selfless dedication of these sisters. They practice a deep life of prayer, which we experienced with them, but also a selfless outreach to the poor.
I come away from the experience eager to care for my congregation with renewed appreciation for the variety of human beings on this earth and the ability of God to reach each one at their point of need. I come away asking God, in the words of a prayer the Sisters of Charity pray, (They actually pray this to Blessed Teresa of Calcutta, in a way that I as a Protestant cannot do, but it’s still a powerful prayer), Teach me to allow Jesus to penetrate and possess my whole being so completely that my life too may radiate his light and love to others. Father Ray of our group helped me at least to appreciate the Roman Catholic sense of praying to saints when he said it is really similar to the way a hospital patient asks a chaplain visiting them to pray to God for them about a particular need.
This trip has been a profound spiritual and cultural blessing for me. I do not know the full ramifications of how it will affect my ministry, but I know it will. I come back with a sense of wanting to see our own congregation become committed to “Radical Discipleship” and transcend the dying cultural Protestant churchmanship that really has no power to transform. I come away with a sense of the Call upon us as followers of Christ to really bear our share of Christ’s cross. I seek bigger eyes, mind, heart and ears to encounter the other and sense God’s mysterious working with people whose outward experience of God is different from my own, but whose sense of the power of faith to enable each to experience forgiveness, moral and ethical integrity, purpose and hope for this life and the next, are very similar.
I close these reflections with a journal entry I made July 24.
This is one of the few occasions I’ve had time and energy to reflect on these fast-paced whirlwind days that have taken us to the heart of Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, Islam, Sufism and Christianity. It was a vast whirlwind view of all these faiths, hearing from so many learned believers and seekers, especially in Bangladesh. I watched the prayers of Hindus bringing their floral offerings, Buddhists chanting, and Sikhs venerating their Holy Book. I have not been particularly personally touched spiritually by these scenes, though I have found profound respect for the devotion these believers have in their faith. I do believe God is at work in the lives of these sincere people we have met. Personally my most spiritual moments have been the early Sunday morning Mass with Archbishop Joe Marino at the Papal Nunciature, attended also by the American Ambassador to Bangladesh and his wife. Also moving to me was the visit with Sister Gertrude in Mother Teresa’s Mother House. I cannot see any who have made more of a sacrifice than Mother Teresa in the utter and total commitment she demonstrated in solidarity with the poorest of the poor in Calcutta and all the fruit that has emerged from her efforts … These other religions and devotions have shown me tangibly the vast variety present in humanity’s approach to God and the origin and destiny of life and the amazing difference Jesus Christ can make upon people coming from such different backgrounds.
