Holy Envy

Barbara Brown Taylor

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780062406583
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Comparative Religion

New York Times Bestseller

The renowned and beloved New York Times bestselling author of An Altar in the World and Learning to Walk in the Dark recounts her moving discoveries of finding the sacred in unexpected places while teaching the world's religions to undergraduates in rural Georgia, revealing how God delights in confounding our expectations.

Barbara Brown Taylor continues her spiritual journey begun in Leaving Church of finding out what the world looks like after taking off her clergy collar. In Holy Envy, she contemplates the myriad ways other people and traditions encounter the Transcendent, both by digging deeper into those traditions herself and by seeing them through her students' eyes as she sets off with them on field trips to monasteries, temples, and mosques.

Troubled and inspired by what she learns, Taylor returns to her own tradition for guidance, finding new meaning in old teachings that have too often been used to exclude religious strangers instead of embracing the divine challenges they present. Re-imagining some central stories from the religion she knows best, she takes heart in how often God chooses outsiders to teach insiders how out-of-bounds God really is.

Throughout Holy Envy, Taylor weaves together stories from the classroom with reflections on how her own spiritual journey has been complicated and renewed by connecting with people of other traditions—even those whose truths are quite different from hers. The one constant in her odyssey is the sense that God is the one calling her to disown her version of God—a change that ultimately enriches her faith in other human beings and in God.

1

Religion 101

There is no one alive today who knows enough to say with confidence whether one religion has been greater than all others.

ARNOLD TOYNBEE

Today is the first day of class. Every chair is full. Religion 101 is always full, though I never know what to make of this. Do students sign up because they have heard about the field trips followed by free meals or because they have heard I am an easy grader? Are they here because they want to know more about the religions of the world or because the course meets one of their general education requirements? I never know, but today is the day I have to give them every reason to stay in the class, or they will drop it and shop for something else. How can I convey how important it is that they stay?

When I began teaching this course in the last millennium I billed it as a world tour. “How many of you have been to India?” I asked. No hands went up.

“How about Israel?” Still no hands.

“Saudi Arabia?” One girl raised her hand.

“My dad served in Desert Storm,” she said.

“I’d like to hear about that,” I said.

Then I told her and the others how this course would take them to all of those countries and more, at least in their imaginations. They would hear the call to prayer from the Great Mosque of Mecca and listen to a cantor sing the Kol Nidre on the eve of Yom Kippur. They would see the inside of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and sit in the shade of the Bodhi tree in northeast India where the Buddha achieved enlightenment. By the end of the course, they would be able to tell a stupa from a synagogue, a mandir from a minaret. They would know a few words in Sanskrit, Hebrew, Arabic, and Greek. Those who were religious would learn more about their own faith, and those who were not would learn how other people answer the big questions of human existence: Why are we here? What are we supposed to be doing? When we die, is that it? Whether the students agreed or disagreed with other people’s answers to those questions, taking them seriously would help them ask better questions of themselves.

“Where else can you get all of that without a passport?” That was my pitch in the last millennium, when most people thought of world religions as religions that existed somewhere else in the world. Even the textbook conspired with that illusion, supplying glossy photos of Hasidic Jews in Jerusalem and Buddhist monks in Thailand. The VHS tapes I used to keep things lively featured a British guy in a pith helmet who tramped through the jungles of Southeast Asia, the deserts of Egypt, and the slums of Calcutta in search of true Buddhism, Islam, and Hinduism. Although the series had an appealing Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom edge to it, the clear message was that world religions were exotic flowers that bloomed elsewhere, among people who were not as fortunate as we.

Even then, the truth was quite different from the perception. By many accounts the first Muslim in America was Estevancio of Azamor, a Moroccan guide for a Spanish expedition in 1528 that landed in Florida.¹ A couple of centuries later, as many as a third of the African slaves in the United States were Muslim. After the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, they were joined by immigrants from the Middle East, Europe, and India. The earliest mosques in the United States were established in Maine, North Dakota, Michigan, and Indiana between 1915 and 1925.²

The first Hindus on American soil may have been the six Asian Indians, employees of the East India Marine Society, who marched in the annual Fourth of July parade in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1851. After Swami Vivekananda addressed the first World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, he received so many invitations to speak in the United States that he stayed for another two years—founding the Vedanta Society of New York in 1894 and another in San Francisco during his second visit in 1900. The California community built the first Hindu temple in North America in 1906.³

Buddhists came during the Gold Rush of the mid-1800s, working not only as miners, but also as loggers, fishermen, farmers, and construction workers who were indispensable to the building of the Central Pacific Railroad. In 1860, 10 percent of the population of California was Chinese. In 1870, the same was true of Montana. By the turn of the century, hundreds of shrines and temples had sprung up along the West Coast and in the Rocky Mountains, including the historic Temple of the Forest Beneath the Clouds in Weaverville, California, built in 1874.⁴

Jews had been living in the United States for 250 years by then. In 1654, when twenty-three Sephardic Jews from Brazil arrived in the Dutch port of New Amsterdam, the first thing they did was to form a congregation for worship. The second thing they did was to apply for permission to create a Jewish burial ground. Although Peter Stuyvesant, the governor of the colony, did not make things easy for them, the port passed to British rule in 1664 and the first synagogue in America was established in the newly named city of New York. By 1820, the largest Jewish community in the United States was in South Carolina, where Jewish men had been given the right to vote and hold office in 1790.⁵

Resistance to these developments took many forms, including legislation. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 prohibited virtually all immigration from China. The Immigration Act of 1917 expanded the banned zone by adding a wide swath of Asia that included India and the Middle East. The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 added a national-origins quota to the mix, effectively decreasing the immigration of Italians, Jews, and Slavs from Southern and Eastern Europe. The main purpose of the Act, according to the Office of the Historian at the US Department of State, “was to preserve the ideal of American homogeneity.”⁶

Repeals of various aspects of these laws followed in 1943 and 1952, with a sweeping revision in 1965. After Lyndon Johnson signed the Immigration Act of 1965 into law at the foot of the Statue of Liberty in October of that year, the United States welcomed a spate of newcomers from Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. By 2005, their grandchildren were roughly the same age as the students in my class.

The textbook for Religion 101 had changed by then. The VHS tapes were long retired. If I wanted students to see true Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, or Islam, all we had to do was get in the college van and drive seventy-five miles south to Atlanta, where we could visit the North American seat of the Dalai Lama’s Tibetan Buddhist monastic lineage or the $10 million mosque near Georgia Tech. During the unit on Hinduism we had so many choices that I alternated between large and small, taking students to the thirty-acre Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Sanstha (BAPS) temple complex in the suburbs one semester and the homey Vedanta Center of Atlanta the next. Once, on a field trip to the old Hare Krishna Temple near Emory University, several students mistook a statue of the founder for a living person and marveled at how quietly he sat during the entire service.

As hard as I work to keep class interesting, it is the field trips the students remember. To be fair, they are what I remember too—especially the first ones, when I was still finding my way around an Atlanta I did not know existed. Though I had gone to high school and college there and returned from seminary to work at a downtown church in the 1980s, the only religious diversity on my radar involved varieties of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. I passed many of their landmark buildings every day, almost all of them on Peachtree Road. The Episcopal Cathedral of Saint Philip, the Roman Catholic Cathedral of Christ the King, and Second Ponce de Leon Baptist Church were next-door neighbors. Peachtree Road United Methodist Church was a little farther north; Covenant Presbyterian, Redeemer Lutheran Church, and the Reform Jewish Temple were a little farther south.

I am already in trouble for not naming the other big churches along that stretch, but the point is that none of them was a meditation center, a gurdwara, or a mosque. In the 1960s and 1970s the economic capital was not there for those buildings yet. The communities that would eventually create them were still meeting in homes and storefronts, which made them invisible to people like me—not just physically, but also psychologically. We do not see what we do not expect to see. The first time I passed the Hindu Temple of Atlanta south of the airport, I thought it was a water park. The first time I passed Al-Farooq Masjid near Georgia Tech I thought it was a Greek Orthodox church. The communities that funded those buildings were two of the earliest to build impressive worship spaces in Atlanta. Neither of them was on Peachtree, though more than one tourist has mistaken the gold domes of the historic Fox Theater on Atlanta’s main street for those of a grand mosque.

When I began teaching world religions, I had to relearn the city I had grown up in, not only because it had changed, but because I was changing too. Though I had long been drawn to the study of other religions, I was so surrounded by my own that there was no reason to think very deeply about how the faith of others might affect mine. There was also no pressing need to think about how the exclusive truth claims of my tradition affected people who stood outside of them. I was on the world tour I had advertised to my students, and I was enjoying it very much.

The second year I taught world religions at Piedmont, a student asked to see me before the last day of the drop-add period. When he showed up at the door of my office, he stood there a moment as if he were still deciding whether to come in. Maybe it was the three-foot-tall statue of the Buddha that did it or the framed Arabic calligraphy on the wall. My office has four generous windowsills, each holding objects from one of the religions we study in class, so without even stepping into the room he was faced with a brass Hanukkah menorah; an Ethiopian icon of St. George painted on goat skin; a large statue of the elephant-headed Hindu god Ganesha; and another of Guanyin, a feminine embodiment of compassion in Mahayana Buddhism.

“Are you a Christian?” he asked me.

“I am,” I said.

To his credit, he decided to come in. To my relief, he did not ask me what kind of Christian I was, since that is always hard to explain. When I first moved to Clarkesville, where there is still only one Episcopal church in the whole county, people trying to pronounce the name of my denomination sometimes landed on “Espicopal” (rhymes with “despicable”). When I went to the grocery store in my clerical collar, people would sometimes mistake me for a nun. But this young man was not interested in denominational distinctions. After he had taken a seat with his back to the Buddha, he told me he was concerned about the content of my class. He had come to a church-related college for a reason, he said. His faith meant a lot to him, and he did not want to put it at risk.

“If you really are a Christian,” he said, “then are you going to help us see what is wrong with these other religions? From what you have said so far it doesn’t sound like it, and if that’s the case, then I don’t think I can stay in the class.”

Bees started buzzing inside my head when he said that. I was not angry, exactly. There was nothing belligerent in his tone to warrant that. I was dumbfounded instead, spiritually concussed from my sudden collision with such a solid wall of conviction about what it meant to be Christian. As hard as I had worked to create a course that spotlighted the wisdom of the world’s great religions, I had not imagined that someone might take it in order to unplug all of them but one. Yet there he sat—a reminder not only of my short-sightedness but also of a whole different way of being Christian.

I remembered meeting people like him when I was in college. They had fallen in love with Jesus and set out to prove their loyalty by dismissing any truth that did not hinge on him. Their job, as they saw it, was to come up with solid Christian answers to every important question and then to defend those answers against all rivals. When I fell in love with Jesus, I thought that was the only way to do it. Then, after about two weeks of being told I could only attend Bible study with other girls, not boys, and that if I wanted to argue about anything, I should be prepared to offer solid scriptural support for my view, I began yawning from lack of oxygen. I dropped out of Bible study and found another group of Christians, who were more interested in talking about the right questions Jesus asked than in giving the right answers about him. Although I sometimes missed the fevered certainty of the first group, I never missed their constraint. God was too great and the world too wide to allow for so little curiosity.

So, yes, I looked down on Christians who were not like me, including the student who sat in front of me returning the same look. Our standoff reminded me of so many other encounters since my college days: the steely confrontation between true believers, each needing the other to be wrong in order to be right. In this regard, it was difficult to discern what made the confrontations between Christians any different from the confrontations between Christians and people of other faiths.

In the present moment, however, the difference was that I had thirty years on the young man in front of me. He was the college student; I was the teacher. Remembering that, I asked him to tell me a little more about himself, though we both knew where the conversation was going. The Bible was his guide to Christian living, he told me. It said very clearly that Jesus was the only way to God. If the course was not going to support that truth, then he would be forced to drop it. I thanked him for coming and said I hoped I would see him in class on Thursday.

He did, in fact, drop the course. While I was sorry to lose him, he taught me two important things. The first was that my practice of Christianity was pretty specialized. I was used to standing in front of a bunch of Episcopalians, not a classroom that included Jehovah’s Witnesses, Missionary Baptists, Seventh-day Adventists, Mormons, and Pentecostals, along with a wide range of Christians from mainline denominations. Semester by semester they reminded me how limited my experience of Christianity really was and what a tiny slice of it I knew well. My full immersion in my own religion was about to take an entirely new turn, and it was going to call for a level of theological humility that I had not practiced in quite some time.

The other thing the student taught me by dropping my class was that I needed better answers to his question. Why should someone like him take a course in world religions that highlighted the best and not the worst? Where were the Bible verses that supported my point of view? Surely there was something in Christian scripture, history, or tradition that might set someone like him at ease. It was not enough for me to feel certain about the wideness of God’s embrace. If I wanted to stay connected to the roots of my tradition, which I did, then it was time for me to make better connections with more traditional Christians, or at least with the sources they hold dear. My alternative was to become one more polarizing Christian who looks down on those who do not love Jesus the way she does.

It was the beginning of my education in teaching world religions, which would have been hard enough in a static world. Since I taught them in a world that was always changing—the media, the headlines, the skyline, the students—my syllabus changed every semester. The one I handed out on my first day of class would be a great embarrassment to me now, with its false confidence and clear parameters. The one I used last semester is fifteen pages long, with dozens of hyperlinks, field-trip opportunities, and elective assignments featuring religious holidays, rituals, art, music, dress, and dance.

The “world tour” speech is gone now, replaced by one that highlights the more practical benefits of religious literacy. Whether students intend to become teachers, nurses, police officers, or businesspeople, I tell them, religious illiteracy is a luxury they can no longer afford. This is a new idea for them—that illiteracy might be a problem in religion as well as English—or that a religion class might have life applications beyond going to church.

A nursing major was the first to break this seal in my class. Three weeks into the unit on Hinduism, she told me she wanted to do her elective on Hindu views of illness and death. “I ...