By Cosmas Odoemena
“Mankind is a great, an immense family. This is proved by what we feel in our hearts at Christmas.”-Pope John XXIII
Reza Aslan, the author of, most recently, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, writes about an experience one Christmas. Aslan is a Muslim from Iran. His wife is a Christian from western Pennsylvania in the United States. He and his wife had hosted a first Christmas in their home, and for 10 or so minutes their two families stood around the dinner table arguing on how to thank God for the meal they were about to eat.
His mother, a born-again Christian, wanted the prayer addressed to Jesus. It was Christmas time, and not any other celebration; and they were celebrating the birth of Jesus, she thought, so “shouldn’t we at least pray to him?” Aslan’s mum had asked innocently.
His sister was a devout Muslim who “loves and admires Jesus as a prophet and messenger of God. But she had no intention of praying to him. “She just readjusted her hijab and murmured the Shahada under her breath (“I confess there is no god but God”) perhaps as a way to protect her against their mother’s “heresy”.
On the other hand, his middle sister, “a militant atheist,” was piqued by what she saw transpiring. She found it absurd that they could be arguing over a phantom deity to pray to before eating while the meal was getting cold. “Why don’t we just pray to Santa Claus?” she said. But no one was amused.
His wife’s family, evangelicals from Pittsburgh in the United States too were, on their own part, very much confused about why the meal had to be rice and shish-kebabs to go with the Christmas turkey and mashed potatoes.
Eventually, his wife thought of something. “Why don’t we let Reza decide?” she asked, hopefully. It was Aslan’s home at least, and perhaps he could be a middle ground of some sort, since they all knew he was a religious scholar “who has dedicated his life to studying the faith traditions of the world and then teaching those traditions to people who do not share them.”
Aslan saw that Christmas dinner as a place to further his research. As he watched these people from different religious and cultural backgrounds saying their religion how they understood it, he was even tempted to pull out his notebook to jot down some points.
Aslan’s family is a microcosm of Nigeria and, by extension, much of our world: “multiethnic, multicultural and multi-religious.”
A Christian Nigerian ambassador wrote about Islam from his own purview. There is a difference between what people want you to believe and what you knew. Many times we are preached certain things by others who are not really a “part of us,” but what has been ingrained over the years as we grew up, handed over by our parents and our elders and maybe our teachers, and those we revere are the ones we hold firm to. Books may be stirring, but may not change us.
Now, since that ambassador wrote, he has been heavily “bombarded” by Muslim “defenders” writing from their own “vantage point”, about their faith. They have also been groomed over the years by a different thought from the ambassador’s. But only that they are on the other side of a common wall with the ambassador! Aslan said when he first met his wife, they had realised that they “shared the same values and world view,” but they expressed those things “in a different spiritual language.”
He said indeed “that’s all religion is, really: a language made up of symbols and metaphors that allow people to communicate, to themselves and to others, the ineffable experience of faith.” He said he already spoke his wife’s spiritual language (Christianity); he taught her his (Islam). And that they were now a spiritually “bilingual” household. Actually, he noted that they were multilingual, since they were committed to “teaching their children all the spiritual languages of the world so that they can choose for themselves which ones, if any, they prefer in communicating their own individual faith experience.”
That is why our different faiths seem to tear us apart. We have difficulty understanding one another’s spiritual languages. An example is given of a Sufi parable about four travellers from different countries who were hungry and they were trying to decide what they should buy with the one coin they held in common. The Persian wanted the money spent on angur; the Turk, wanted uzum; the Arab said it should be on inab; and the Greek, on stafil. Confusion now became anger as the four of them argued among themselves. It took a passing linguist to make them understand that they were all, as a matter of fact, asking to buy the same thing: grapes.
After all the argument over the form of prayer, Aslan instead said “Let’s skip the formal prayer and just tell each other what we are grateful for. What we are anxious about. What we hope for in the coming year.”
They took turns going around the circle: Muslim, Christian, atheist. And, as he expected, they ended up “expressing similar dreams and aspirations” for themselves and their loved ones, “similar fears and anxieties, similar gratitude for all that they have been given.” As with the poor travellers in the Sufi parable, they realized that they were all having the same feeling, that they were just “expressing that feeling in different spiritual languages.”
As a Christian who has lived in the north, I have most of my friends to be Muslims. It was from them I knew that if a Muslim prayed on his prayer mat you should not walk across their face, unless you see a Tasbih (prayer beads) placed on the mat in front of them. We shared many things together. I identified with their Ramadan season and broke the fast with them. They also identified with my Christian seasons. Perhaps, the most significant day for us was the year Christmas and Sallah fell on the same day.
My prayer for us, whether Christian, Muslim, traditionalist or atheist, is that this Holy Season and always, may there be goodwill among all of mankind, and may there be peace and prosperity in our dear country Nigeria. Merry Christmas season and a happy New Year!
Dr Odoemena, a medical practitioner, writes from Lagos