Are You There God? 

“ ‘It’s me. You know who’. That’s what I said. And you know what I got back? Nothing. That’s when I asked you out for coffee. I need help; I am… swallowed up by anguish.”

After looking at each other, the Rabbi and Imam turned back to the Priest.

The Imam said, “But…”

The Rabbi said, “Well…”

“You first,” the Imam said with a smile. “You are first in history and in the love of Allah.”

“Thanks colleague; in history yes, but first in love does not mean preeminent. We are all loved by HaShem; think of a couple with more than one child. Do they love the elder more than the younger since he or she was born first?” The Imam nodded his head.

“So HaShem loves all faithful people, with no distinction, unless they spew, or act upon, hatred.”

“Salaam cousin.”

“And,” said the Priest, “some persons in our traditions have done, and are doing, things for which I can’t imagine he, or she, is in love with any of us right now.”

“Colleague,” said the Imam, “should we call out this near-pagan for his thinking Allah could be of a feminine disposition?” 

“No, he has a point.”

“Of course I do! Centuries ago, when you two were climbing out of the deserts and we Christians were appearing in the urban centers of the Roman Empire, the notion of God as male was a cultural assumption, as I have said before. It is an anachronism and therefore unhelpful.”

“But what pronouns should we use then?” asked the Rabbi. 

“I dunno,” the Priest said, “ ‘It’ seems blasphemous.”

“Then,” said the Imam, “perhaps it’s best to use the old designation, while remembering that any pronoun is inadequate. This way we will express how far above or how deep or how wide is the divine from us… and yet still loves us.”

“And how unhelpful it is to speculate overmuch,” said the rabbi, “but we have something more needful to discuss.” 

The Priest said, “Yes, but how did we get on this conversation?”

The Imam said, “You misdirected us off onto one of our well-travelled conversational roads…”

“Oh, right, sorry; distracted.”

“It’s alright,” said the Rabbi, “we know your heart, and it leads us to fascinating conversations.”  

“What then is the root of your anguish?” said the Imam.

He sipped his coffee, looked at them. “I am grateful that we have been able to build this relationship with one another. I still feel like I am the youngest of a three-child family. As the Hebrew texts describe a naif, young person: ‘I am but a little child; I do not know how to go out or come in’.”

“Not to worry,” said the Rabbi; “your wiser brothers will help you to paradise.”

“I, what?”

They laughed. “Thanks for that. To laugh lightens the spirit, at least for a while,” said the Priest.

“Now,” said the Imam, “as our friend asked, what troubles you? Why are you in anguish?”

“You ok with my reciting a list?” They nodded.

“Maybe it’s heightened by my old friend, dysthymia, but… the world is sliding.”

“Sliding?” asked the Imam with that smile again. “Do you mean the world is spinning off its axis?”

“No, hmm, let me put it more clearly. The civilizations we humans have created on this planet are becoming untethered from the very thing that keeps us alive. It is like Yeshua said of a man who built his house on sand with no concern for the morrow. In a wild storm, the wind howls, the heavens loose their water and the sea creeps under the house, making it totter, slide, collapse. You know what I mean?”

“Yes, I think so,” said the Rabbi, “but continue.” 

“Climate-wise, the world is teetering at the edge of a no-return point by what we humans have done. Alfred Wallace, a contemporary of Darwin, speculated this was possible, maybe even likely.”

“Two major nation-states are on the brink of catapulting us all into war, threatening not only people outside their borders, but their own people as well, and for what? The power and wealth of a few. Such an event has the potential to blast us all back to the stone age.”

“The world economic system is a mess. A small group of people in every nation controls much of the world’s assets, part of which they have done through acquiring government-supported research which they monetized, receiving bailouts from the same and not paying the same percentage of taxes on their wealth that their workers or their secretaries pay on theirs. Wealhy investors bet on the ‘market’ dropping, so vast amounts of money can be made upon others’ blood, spilt upon the streets. Smith’s ‘invisible hand’, a term that is shorthand for the market’s operation, does not work as he suggested it should; it only works for those who pull the strings tied to its otherwise opaque fingers.

“Above and in it all is our common need to deal with this pandemic, exacerbated by, albeit small and loud, irresponsible minorities who challenge the facts of science, the knowledge of medical people and the ignore the responsibilities of governments to protect their people from threats.”

“And of course, our kind of deep connection seems rarely to exist between our traditions; there are forces at work in them that condemn and consign others to whom they direct their suspicion and hatred to suffering and death, without a qualm of conscience; not a whiff of true faith.”

“But I hear nothing. I see no sign we have a divine partnership. I feel like God has gone on a long journey, maybe gotten lost, or fallen asleep or has given up and started a new project somewhere else in the universe with creatures that are more responsive to his intentions.”

His colleagues were silent for a few minutes. They sipped and considered.

The Rabbi said, “I understand. The world seems at multiple inflection points. In my tradition we are required to honour HaShem by following Torah and doing mitzvot. Thereby helping to make the world a place the messiah would like to find when he returns. And we are to do what we can to repair the world to the limits of our reach and our influence. A young man in the first century came to Hillel the Elder, seeking advice from him standing on one foot, about what it means to be faithful to HaShem, ‘the Name’. You know the answer, for its meaning is in both your traditions: ‘do not do to others what you would not have done to yourself.’ He then said: ‘This is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary. Go, and study.” 

“I know… But I just… can’t see or feel God anywhere.”

“You cannot?” asked the Imam. “One must trust that it is so, and act.”

“But don’t Muslims (Jews and Christians as well) believe that God is all-knowing? That he wills the future?”

“Allah is all-knowing and all-wise. A genuine believer submits his or her entire being to His will and, like our Jewish cousins, names him as the only ‘object’ for worship. And we are to be grateful for the blessings he gives humanity and follow the commands and guidelines in the Qur’an received from the Prophet (PBUH) who said, ‘Faith is that which resides in the heart and which is proved by actions’.”

“I understand by ‘all-knowing’ that God knows what will happen everywhere, all the time, from past to future. If so, then why would anyone bother to try to change anything?”

“My friend, you mistake my meaning and misunderstand how a Muslim functions in the world. Say my daughter is being bullied at school. I accept, for whatever reason, it is Allah’s will, but I do not know what Allah’s will is in the future. So I intervene, which I trust is also Allah’s will. I can show to the bully, my daughter and others what it means to be a muslim. For me to assume that I should sit and wait for Allah’s will to be worked out without my participation, then I am committing an error in reason or even a sin. The past is what Allah willed. From our limited human perspective, the present is in flux and the future is unknown. My responsibility is to trust that I am acting upon Allah’s will when I do so.”

“And,” added the Rabbi, “Hillel said something else that fits this discussion. He said, ‘If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But being only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?’ ”

“Gentlemen, you have reminded me of something. Since Gentiles took over Yeshua’s Jewish sect, we have learned we only have to sit at the foot of Yeshua’s cross and wait for miracles because God is so all-powerful and all-knowing we don’t have to do anything. This teaching has done two things to our character. It has infantilized some persons by leading them to believe avid prayer is enough. And it has given us validation to evade our responsibilities to others. Of course, there have been those who would not kneel at the foot of the cross while the world was burning. They acted. They stood up, walked away, bearing their own crosses to remind themselves whose they are. One of my favourite Jewish teachers wrote, ‘you must work out your own salvation with fear and trembling’.”

“What does that mean?” said the Imam.

“A saint once said, ‘Preach the Gospel. If necessary, use words’. We have too often adopted a passive mien, usually as a means for our own preservation or for advantage within the culture. Like both of you, we have to accept the dangerous and scary responsibilities as faithful people to act when we can, thus demonstrating that our worship of God is not proof that God has left us to our own devices.” 

“And remember,” said the Rabbi, “aside from HaShem, we are not alone. There are millions of good people in the world who feel the same anxiety and the same hunger for stability and who want to live their lives in peace and raise their families without fear whose motivations are not greed, fear and violence. By the sheer number of us, we have to trust we can move those who are fearful of losing their power and wealth to act now with better intentions for the creation of, perhaps, a new golden age.” 

“And,” said the Imam, “we are not responsible for the whole of these complex problems. Our responsibility is to do what we can, not what is beyond our reach. What a burden it would be to have such power! I would not wish it.”

“Nor I,” said the Rabbi. “How long would it take any of us to become tyrants?”

“Not long, and,” said the Imam. “We are here together, supportive of each other, argue with each other, maybe even get a little angry now and then, but what binds us together? It is certain we respect each other, but more than that we, in the deepest sense of the word, love one another. Each of us are servants of the Holy One doing our best with the challenges of life and the complexities of theological assertions… such as that nagging minor problem of the Trinity.” He smiled.

“Colleagues, friends, you hearten my soul and remind me that once we see past the things that divide us, the bedrock of our being children of God is mercy, love and kindness. But I will not try again to defend that ‘nagging minor problem’; it is how we Christians have experienced the Holy One. But I refuse to use it as either a whip or a wall.”

“Amen,” they said.