Rabbi Max A. Shapiro Lectureship

          OUR JOURNEY OF FAITH
          April 27, 1999

                Dr. James P. Shannon

Logo used with thepermission of The National
Workshop on Christian-Jewish Relations.

Ladies and gentlemen, it is a great privilege for me to be with you tonight and to be able to speak from this distinguished pulpit and in this venerable house of worship. It has also been an occasion of considerable grace for me to have had the opportunity over the past few months to prepare the remarks I have to share with you this evening. As a young priest in Saint Paul after 1946 I became acquainted with Rabbi Albert G. Minda who by then had been Rabbi of Temple Israel for a quarter century. In 1949, the state of Minnesota celebrated the one-hundredth anniversary of its becoming a territory of the United States. In that year of celebration Rabbi Minda was named one of the One Hundred Living Great Persons in Minnesota, a graphic tribute to the role of this house of worship and to this man of God as community leaders in Minnesota. After 1955 I had the privilege of working with and learning from Rabbi Max Shapiro on a variety of worthy community projects that drew us together and that introduced me to the history of the abiding Jewish commitment to the art of-building healthy and humane commentates. More recently, since 1995 I have had the good fortune to work closely with Rabbi Barry Cytron, first as fellow-members of the Bishop David Preus Community Awards Council and since 1997, as fellow board members of the Jay and Rose Phillips Foundation. On November 16th of last year Rabbi Shapiro and Rabbi Cytron took me to Lunch and surprised me by inviting me to deliver the Rabbi Max Shapiro lecture this evening. I protested that I am neither a professional theologian nor a professional scholar of Sacred Scripture. They countered that they did not expect me to deliver a treatise on theology. What they wanted was a variation on a theme I had developed in a book published last year on my own journey of faith. A key chapter in that book focuses on the Second Vatican Council, which marked a dramatic turning, point in my life. In 1965 I had been ordained a bishop in the Catholic Church that year, from late September to early December, I was a voting member of the fourth and final session of the Second Vatican Council in Rome. My experience there, listening to world class scholars in a variety of disciplines, both sacred and secular, stands out as the most sustained intellectual and spiritual experience of my adult life. In recent decades many Christians describe themselves as religiously "born again." I am not sure that I understand precisely the elements of this process, or indeed whether it is the same process for everyone who claims to have experienced it. I can, however, say with confidence that during my three months in Pome in 1965 as a voting member of the Vatican Council I had a transformational spiritual experience, which profoundly altered my views on what it means to be a child of God and a believing Christian in the modern world. Seen in this light, the invitation to speak to you tonight about "our" journey of faith -- yours and mine -- was a most attractive opportunity. I readily accepted, with a mixture of eager anticipation and some trepidation. First, let me say a bit more about the Second Vatican Council, why it was convened, what it did, and what its results have been. Pope John XXIII, early in his brief tenure as pope, surprised the world, not to mention the College of Cardinals, by his sudden announcement that he would convene an ecumenical council, the first such council since 1870 and the twenty-first in the history of the church. In Catholic parlance international councils are called ecumenical because they assemble bishops from every part of the inhabited world. (oikos in Greek means a house. Oikumenos means any inhabited place). Hence an ecumenical council, in theory, should represent all the inhabited parts of the world. Almost four years were spent in preparation for Vatican II. It opened in St. Peter's Basilica in Pome on October 11, 1962.
James P. Shannon	In Pope John's words: "The principal purpose [of the council] would be to encourage the growth of Catholic faith, to renew the life of Christian people, and to adjust the norm of ecclesiastical law to the needs and thoughts of our time." Pope John was fond of the term aggiornamento to describe the purpose of the council. In Italian this word means an updating or a bringing into step with the times. On one occasion he used another metaphor which will probably be used forever to describe his tenure as pope. "We are opening the windows in the church to let the fresh air come in." Some of Pope John's vocal critics now think that he invited a hurricane. His admirers, including me, regard Vatican II as an overdue, necessary, and painful effort by the Catholic Church to re-examine its divine mandate, its human weaknesses, the sources of its legitimacy, and its current procedural options in the modern world.
The process of aggiornamento meant that the council fathers, in their wide-open collegial discussions, over a period of four years, would repeatedly grapple with the issue of how faith in the basic doctrines of the church has, over time, been eroded or compromised by cultural accretions or practices which are really not compatible with the faith. These are precisely the kinds of ongoing debates we see today between and among all religious denominations, including the spirited debates within the four branches of modern Judaism. Let me share with you one example of just such a debate in the Council. It concerned a sometimes-heated dialogue about whether or not the Catholic Church should discontinue its long-standing practice of forbidding Catholics to eat flesh meat Fridays. This venerable practice had started as a penitential discipline to commemorate, the death of Jesus Christ on the day before the Passover Sabbath. In this debate, Archbishop Angelo Fernandez, Archbishop of New Delhi in India, argued that the pious practice of abstaining from meat on Friday was meaningless and impossible for the poor people in his diocese in India to understand or to obey. First, they were so poor that they could rarely afford to buy fresh meat. On occasion they might snare or trap a bird or a game animal for their table, but even when they were so fortunate they had to eat it the day they caught it because they lacked any means of refrigeration. In his view the practice of abstaining from flesh meat once a week was a pious custom initiated by affluent Europeans but meaningless for indigent families living at the edge of poverty in the arid regions of India. Also speaking in favor of abolishing this pious practice, Bishop Dermot O'Flanagan of Juneau, Alaska, declared that substituting fish for flesh meat once a week in modern society was hardly an act of penance. To illustrate his point he cited his hosting a dinner for his extended Irish Family as he passed through Ireland enroute to the Council. He and his kinfolk gathered for dinner in Dublin on a Friday evening. The elegant entree for their dinner was lobster thermidor. He asked his brother bishops to tell him precisely what kind of a penitential practice that was for pious Catholics. Lobster thermidor! The Council fathers voted to eliminate the long-standing Catholic custom of abstaining from flesh meat on Friday. That practice, they said, was a cultural accretion, not a requirement essential to faith, and that it was a meaningless requirement for millions of Catholics who could not possibly obey it. The final work-product of the Second Vatican Council was the official promulgation by Pope Paul VI of sixteen separate documents ranging widely across the fields of theology, sacred scripture, liturgy, church history, canon law, seminary training, and church polity. One of these documents is called the Decree on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions. It is a serious attempt by the Catholic Church to re-examine its past and present relations with all non-Christian religions, to admit serious past errors in these relations, and to chart a new course of amity, courtesy, respect and love between and among all the religions of the world. Among Jewish scholars this document has been received politely and with respect but without thunderous applause. It is a halting first step that Jews, Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists and devout followers of all other religions have been waiting centuries to hear. I will say more about this document tonight. It is a well- intended invitation for persons of every religion in the world to link arms, to pray together, and to ask God to help us all find new and better ways of showing that we genuinely desire to love our neighbors -- all of our neighbors -- as we love ourselves. In 1965 all sixteen documents approved by the Council became the official teaching of the Catholic Church. They also became the occasion for serious polarization of opinion among Catholics around the world, most of whom were ready to accept the extensive changes in religious practices called for by the Council and some that were not ready. In his final days in 1996, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago, who had been an active and dedicated proponent of the council's reforms, pleaded with his fellow Catholics to spend more time stressing common ground in their belief and practices, and less time in their increasingly acrimonious dialogue about how to implement the decrees of the council. Although some of such polarization still exists, it is likely true to say that the changes called for by Vatican II have, essentially, been accepted, are now Deeply rooted and are growing steadily, worldwide. In the winnowing process of distinguishing between essential doctrines of Christian faith and non-essential cultural practices (like abstaining from meat on Fridays) the fathers of the council had developed a modus operandi, which is still at work striving to find a reasonable balance between faith and culture in our dynamic and rapidly changing society. I would hazard the opinion for this discerning audience that this process of review and renewal and accommodation among Catholics is not unlike the similar process followed late in the nineteenth century and early in this century by the Reform branch of Judaism seeking to reconcile traditional Jewish practice and belief with dramatically new economic, cultural, and social forces in a free, democratic, pluralist society replete with an abundance of new opportunities dramatically different from the milieu which they and their parents had known in Europe, Russia, or the Middle-East before coming to the United States. In making this comparison between Jews and Catholics facing similar opportunities and similar obstacles in the New World, I am reminded of Oscar Handlin's 1951 Pulitzer Prize winning historical study The Uprooted in which he coined the phrase "fellow-feeling" to describe the bonding experience between Jews and Irish Catholics in their respective ghettoes in New York City early in this century. They became friends and partners in business, in politics, in education and in families. As we enter a new millenium I would suggest that Jews and Catholics in this country have, or should have, an even broader base for their bond of "fellow-feeling" today than they did a century ago. As immigrant ethnic groups each of them has, for the most part, prospered beyond their wildest dreams. Each struggled to keep faith with their cherished religious traditions at the same time that they strove to accept the positive elements of a new and rewarding culture without allowing the less attractive features of that culture to dilute or diminish their cherished religious patrimony. As we reflect together tonight on our respective religious patrimonies, I would also suggest that a first step might be a retrospective of what a contemporary American writer, Thomas Cahill, describes in his impressive new book (1998) The Gifts of the Jews. The sub-title of this ambitious new study is: How a Tribe of Nomads Changed The Way Everyone Feels and Thinks.
Rabbi Max A. Shapiro, center, greeting the dinner guests at Temple Israel preceeding the program.			In the final chapter of his study Cahill summarizes his research on the origins of Judaism in these words: "The story of Jewish identity over the millennia against impossible odds is a unique miracle of cultural survival. Where are the Sumerians, the Babylonians, the Assyrians today? And though we recognize Egypt and Greece as still belonging to our world, the cultures and ethnic stocks of those countries have little continuity with their ancient namesakes....The Jews [however have] developed a whole new way of experiencing reality, the only alternative to all ancient worldviews and all ancient religions. If one is ever to find the finger of God in human affairs, one must find it here."
Cahill offers three separate premises for this sweeping statement: First, the Covenant between God and Abraham that there is but one God, not several; that God is the creator of the universe; that every human person is a creature of God, bound to obey, honor, and worship that creator. Second, the delivery of the Jews from slavery in Egypt. In Cahill's words: "Israel, a ragbag of runaway slaves led by a tongue- tied prince, has triumphed over all the might of Egypt...This incredible surprise, this permanent victory wrested from the jaws of expected disaster and predictable defeat, left a profound impression on the imagination of the whole people -- and no longer merely the children of Abraham or of Israel but of God. [There had never been in human history] any such encounter between God and any of his chosen interlocutors. This was their God, the God of Surprises, and they were his people. The story of deliverance is the central event of the Hebrew scripture.... Everything that happens subsequently will be referred back to this moment of astonished triumph." Third, the giving and the receiving of the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai. In the words of Cahill: "There is no document in all the literatures of the world that is like the Ten Commandments." These are not suggestions. They are not propositions for debate. They are not rhetorical challenges. They are commands! And again in the words of Cahill "They have been received by billions of people as reasonable; necessary, even unalterable because they are written on human hearts and always have been. They are always there in the inner core of the human person -- in the deep silence that each of us carries within....There is nothing to add, nothing to subtract." And in subsequent history this lean list of guidelines to help human persons actualize their human potential, sometimes called simply "The Ten Words," has been the underlying standard for the legal code of Hammurabi, King of Babylon, the Magna Carta of England, the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution. They are also the implicit standards for all human codes of conduct as embodied in the Torah and the teachings of the Hebrew prophets. What we have come to know as the Hebrew Bible is the fundamentum, the basic premises of the Christian Scriptures and of the Islamic Koran. Taken together these three treasuries of sacred writings are the most widely published, the most widely read, and the most universally practiced handbooks of religion in all of human history. And all three take their origin from the sacred Torah, the Mosaic Code, the font of Jewish theology and tradition. In countless ways the Torah also specifies the correlative duties which follow from our allegiance to the Mosaic code. In the Book of Deuteronomy we hear again that acceptance of the First Commandment also obliges us to love God "with all our heart, with all our soul and with all our strength." How is it possible for fallible human beings like us either to comprehend or to practice such an exalted standard? Fortunately other passages in the Torah assure us that we fulfill this obligation by our faithful and habitual observance of the Commandments. In the Book of Leviticus (19:18) in what one scripture scholar has called the "most celebrated passage" in this basic text, we are given an expanded definition of the term "neighbor" to mean all the human persons in the world; and in Leviticus we are further reminded to show special consideration to the aged, to strangers and to aliens in our midst (19:32-34). In the Christian Gospels of Saint Matthew (22:37-41) and Saint Mark (12:29-31) Jesus tells us that these two commandments summarize all the teachings of the Law and the Prophets. Hence we -- you and I -- are called by our Faith to love God with our whole heart and to love all other human persons as we love ourselves. These duties are easy to say, but difficult to perform, habitually, day after day. Nonetheless, your Faith and mine tell us quite clearly that these are the standards by which our lives will be judged, by God, by our neighbors and by our own conscience. My remarks this evening deliberately focus on "our journey" -- yours and mine, and on "our faith" -- yours and mine. This journey, for each of us is a lifelong venture, based on our common commitment to our faith in the one God of Abraham and Sara. Faith in this sense is a bedrock theological virtue rooted in our common belief that every human person in the history of the world, male and female, of every nation, rich and poor, urban and rural, educated and uneducated, is a member of one human family, and that every one of these persons is loved by God with an unqualified and benevolent love. In our daily popular usage, "faith" has another and a lesser meaning. In this usage it means confidence or trust in some person, some institution, or some thing. This is the kind of faith we have in our family physician, in our city council and in the several mechanical devices we use and trust every day. We depend on these persons, or institutions, or things to act habitually in a predictable, helpful, and dependable fashion. In one sense such social trust on our part, is based on our knowledge from past experience with these entities, rather than true faith in the sense that we are using this term tonight. Since we cannot rationally prove the existence of God, our belief in the existence of God is a trusting act of faith on our part. It is not knowledge. It is belief. Belief in the words of the Christian letter to the Hebrews (11:1): "Faith gives assurance to our hopes, and makes us certain of realities we do not see." In the daily practice of our religion we also use our natural intelligence to analyze the human culture which surrounds us and to devise prudent codes of conduct for ourselves to accept the benefits of this culture and to reject its dangers. This is the lifelong process called by Pope John XXIII aggiornamento-- finding a prudent balance between our faith and our reason. It was also Pope John's opinion that in this process "The church is always in need of being reformed." Given his early years of priestly ministry in Bulgaria, and Turkey, and Greece, on the geographic borders between a European culture, largely Christian, and Balkan and Middle-East centers of Jewish, Muslim and Orthodox religions, the Pope's statement means that in his view the religious practices of every religion are in need of periodic review, adjustment, and modification, guided by its religious faith and by its members' best human judgment about what is to be accepted and what is to be avoided in the human culture which surrounds them.
Temple Israel, Minneapolis, Minn.		Make no mistake. It is much easier to talk about this ideal balance between faith and reason than it is to find it. At any given time, in any religious denomination there are members who think that every change is a mistake, and conversely members who think that every change is necessarily good. As I mentioned earlier Cardinal Joseph Bemardin, writing in 1996 shortly before his death, publicly lamented that the debate between Catholics who favor Vatican II and those who do not had actually become "venomous." What all of our churches, temples and mosques need today is more patient, low-keyed, moderate, collegial dialogue among their members and their leaders.
Recently in Rochester, New York, a much-admired and charismatic young Catholic priest, Father James Callan, and some of his parishioners, unhappy over what they considered the slow pace of implementing Vatican II, broke with their bishop, rented a vacant Protestant church, and took a significant part of the congregation with them to establish a new "breakaway" church that would be free of the control of a local bishop or of the Vatican. In effect Father Callan and his followers were setting up a new denomination. One thing we absolutely we do not need in our day is a multiplication of denominations. What we do need is more faithful, loving, gracious, patient, committed members who believe deeply in the tenets of their faith and who are also critical lovers or loving critics of the churches we already have. In this continuing dialogue it is salutary for us to remind ourselves periodically of the wisdom of the English Cardinal John Henry Newman, addressing the heated debate about change among Catholics in the aftermath of the first Vatican Council a century ago. In his words, "Anything that is alive is growing and if it is growing, it is changing." The only alternative to this process is death. Earlier in my remarks this evening I cited the Vatican Council's Decree on theRelation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions. In the press and in scholarly journals this document is now often referred to simply as Nostra Aetate, the first twowords of its official text in Latin. In English, these words mean "In our time."Please bear in mind that this document, like each of the other fifteen documentsissued by the Vatican Council is, essentially, a committee report hammered out bymore than 2000 thoughtful but independent committee members. Reflect on that factfor a moment. Never in the history of the human race has there been a universal,worldwide, collegial representative assembly like the Vatican Council. EveryCatholic bishop and every monastic abbot in the world who was physically able to doso was ordered to attend that assembly in Rome for almost three months in each offour successive years from 1962 through 1965. Every bishop and abbot, young or old,had one vote. It was my good fortune to be a voting member of that assembly in itslast year, and in that process I came, slowly, to understand that a final and decisivecollegial vote by such a large, polyglot assembly on every one of sixteen separatedocuments was truly a moral miracle. Not one of those documents passed with 100%of the vote. There was always at least a handful of dedicated traditionalists whosaid "no" to each of the sixteen documents. Nostra Aetate passed by a vote of 2308to 70. That whole process reminded me at times of a marathon, worldwide, facultymeeting in which the tedious democratic process might forever bar us from reachingclosure on issues that had to be decided. But the moral miracle is that we did, finally, reach closure, with massivelypositive votes on all sixteen documents. The downside of this unwieldly processis that the diction of our worldwide committee meetings often sounded just like thework products of other committee meetings. They often lack crispness, precision,brevity, sometimes even clarity -- precisely because they had to be qualified, modified,and amended endlessly in order to reflect the full range of the disparate opinions of more than 2000 voters. Given this background, it is small wonder that many Jewishand Christian scholars did, and do, feel that Nostra Aetate fell far short of their expectations. At no point in this text is there an explicit apology from the CatholicChurch to the Jews of the world expressing regret for specific official Catholic wordsand actions that were offensive or injurious to Jews over past years. That is why, as I said earlier this evening, that among Jewish scholars Nostra Aetate has been received politely and with respect but without thunderous applause. They were expecting morethan they got from this long-awaited statement. Understandably. In spite of mycontinuing and genuine respect for Vatican II and its work-products, I must admit that each of its final documents can reasonably be faulted by thoughtful critics who think that some of them did not go far enough, or that some of them went too far, in "opening the windows of the Catholic Church to let in fresh air." Let us remind ourselves that not everyone in every worldwide religious congregation is in favor of fresh air. One reason why Nostra Aetate was debated in each of three sessions of Vatican II, and why its drafters reviewed, in sequence, more than 2000 proposed amendments to it, is that, implicitly, it raised the delicate issue of the development of doctrine. Serious theologians in every religion accept the fact that doctrine does develop, over time, in every religion, as the devoted members of that religion seek a prudent balance between their religious faith and the forces of the dynamic human culture which surrounds them. These cultural forces are not, by definition, always bad, as some rigidly determined traditionalists assume. Nor are they, by definition, always good, as some rigidly determined change agents think. Therein lies our opportunity and duty for continuing, serious, thoughtful civil dialogue among devout persons who seriously believe that there is one God, who is the creator of every member of our one human worldwide family, every single member of which is loved by God with an unqualified and benevolent love. Students and teachers active in the fields of ecumenism or interfaith dialogue have known for a long time that both of these challenging arts are much more difficult to practice among high-ranking denominational leaders than among rank and file church- goers. To illustrate this opinion I would like to examine with you three separate Minnesota programs in interfaith dialogue at the local grass-roots level, which have enjoyed extraordinary acceptance and success. The first of these occurred in the notoriously difficult field of religion and politics. In 1968 three Minnesotans who were charged by their respective religious denominations to monitor legislative activities in Minnesota discovered that 80 percent of their separate agenda items related to the same issues. These persons were Father Edward Flahavan, Executive Director of the Urban Affairs Commission of the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis, the Reverend Willis Merriman, Director of Social Relations for the Minnesota Council of Churches, and Sam Shiner, executive Director of the Minnesota Rabbinic Association. Acting on the premise that three voices (Jewish, Protestant, and Catholic) speaking in unison to the legislature would be stronger than three separate voices, Shiner, Merriman, and Flahavan persuaded their respective sponsors to create a new cooperative venture, called the Joint Religious Legislative Council. The "JRLC," as it is now known, has become a national model for Jews and Christians (and, prospectively, Muslims) who are committed to finding wider common ground on which to base their joint recommendations for good public policy. From the beginning the sponsors of this interfaith venture, while always looking for wider grounds of agreement among its three partners, agreed that any issues on which any one of these three parties could not find common ground with the other two parties would not be suitable issues for the coalition to address. With this antecedent agreement to disagree in place, the JRLC has had an admirably successful record of fostering sound new legislation at the level of state government in Minnesota. This smooth and harmonious operation has, for more that 30 years, fostered a healthy and productive climate of opinion among Minnesota lawmakers on issues related, directly or indirectly, to social justice or the practice of religion. One reason, I submit, for such progress by the JRLC is its reliance on common sense, sound evidence, and collegial decision-making based on broadly shared cultural and religious values. The second successful interfaith venture in Minnesota that I would like to cite is an ambitious religious educational program begun six years ago and still guided by Rabbi Joseph Edelheit, senior rabbi of Temple Israel and Father Michael O'Connell, rector of The Basilica of Saint Mary. In 1994 these two friends began exploring new ways in which the members of their congregations could come to know each other better and to understand more fully their respective religious traditions. One form that this dialogue took was their decision to schedule a one-day trip to and from Washington, D. C. for a group of Minnesota rabbis and priests to visit the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum together and then to help each other comprehend more fully the awful significance of this traumatic chapter in our 20th century human history. Persons making this first trip were a chartered planeload of 160 clergy. The trip was repeated the next year for members of the two sponsoring congregations, and one year later for a delegation of 160 high school teachers.
Dr. Shannon, left, signing books at temple Israel following the program		A second phase of this educational process occurred in 1996 when Rabbi Edelheit and Father O'Connell led a tour of 83 persons, Jews and Catholics, to Israel for two weeks of study, worship, and travel to the sacred religious sites of Israel. More recently the two sponsoring congregations have organized an ongoing interfaith study group for the members of seven local temples and churches who meet periodically to learn more about their respective religious traditions and to deepen their bonds of personal friendship. My third and final illustration of a successful interfaith program is the history of the Jay Phillips Chair in Jewish Studies, established at Saint John's University in 1969 and the Center for Jewish-Christian Learning, established at the University of St. Thomas in 1985. Started separately, these two academic programs were consolidated into a joint program in 1996 under the direction of Rabbi Barry Cytron.
The JRLC interfaith program operates in the fields of politics and religion; the Temple Israel and Basilica of St. Mary interfaith programs operate at the level of local religious congregations; and the internationally known Jay Phillips Center offers lectures and symposia, graduate and undergraduate level academic programs. Over the years these centers have brought to Minnesota, as lecturers, some of the most distinguished scholars of Jewish and Christian learning in the world. Graduates of Saint John's and St. Thomas who have studied in these programs have been blessed by the opportunity to read widely and in depth the rich religious traditions of the Torah, Rabbinic Hebrew literature, the New Testament and the writings of Christian theologians. Granted, this academic program is not unique. In our day many colleges, universities and seminaries offer courses in Jewish/Christian studies on both the graduate and undergraduate levels. This program has, however, by the depth and the quality of its curriculum, its public lecture series, its publications, and the quality of its academic sponsorship, over a span of 30 years, earned it a premier position among its peers in academia. We can say, with confidence, that the existence of all three of these interfaith ventures, their quality, their success, and the number of their graduates clearly give Minnesota a leadership position among comparable programs anywhere. It is also heartening to think that the spirit of interfaith amity and cooperation that generated each of these programs continues to thrive and to augur well for the likely proliferation of more such ventures in the new millenium. To appreciate the perennial importance of these interfaith programs, consider for a moment the current plight of the hundreds of thousands of people who have been driven from their homes in Kosovo by the "ethnic cleansing" drive of Slobodan Milovasic. Have not most of us assumed that the diabolical horrors of Hitler's ethnic cleansing campaign in Germany six decades ago should and could never happen again? Granted the number of ethnic Albanians now in exile do not approach the number of Jews imprisoned and massacred in Nazi Germany. Nonetheless, the same vicious cancers of ethnic hatred and religious persecution are still alive in our society and still busily at work pushing their diabolical designs. The healing message of "love thy neighbor" has always been a necessary standard in civilized human society. The several healing interfaith programs we have considered here tonight address that abiding human need for knowing, loving and helping our neighbors. Spiritual writers, in both the rabbinic and the Christian traditions have, over the centuries, widened and deepened our understanding of these sacred terms: love of God and love of neighbor. Thomas Aquinas, in his treatises on the moral virtues, cautions us not to assume that we do, in truth, love God and our neighbor just because we are able to verbalize these twin duties of our faith. Aquinas advises us to examine our individual daily habits of prayer, actions and words to discover whether our love of God and of neighbor is an actual or merely a verbal commitment. In his view there are several lesser virtues that we should practice which are discernible signs of the quality of our daily bond with God and with our human associates. One of these qualities is benevolence, the habit of regularly thinking well of other people. This trait means that we habitually give other persons the benefit of the doubt in our dealing with them. This lofty ideal flies in the face of many of our acquired cultural practices. Some of you here tonight are able to remember the famous line of vaudevillian W. C. Fields in his counsel to young people: "My little chickadee, let me give you a little bit of fatherly advice: never give a sucker an even break, and never wisen up a chump." W. C. Fields speaks to us as a savvy, street-smart, worldly-wise survivor in a highly competitive society. The words Leviticus, Deuteronomy, and Jesus are precisely the opposite. They say, turn the other cheek, go the extra mile, and when asked by a poor man who is cold to give him our shirt, we are to give him our shirt and our sweater or our coat as well. A few years before her death Mother Teresa was interviewed in Calcutta by a reporter from London. In a question faintly tinged with hubris, the reporter asked her how her ministry to the dead and the dying in Calcutta could possibly make even a small difference in the huge numbers of homeless persons dying each day on the streets of Calcutta. Her simple reply was, "One person at a time." No single person is obligated to solve, or even address, all the social and economic crises of our world; but each of us who professes to love God and our neighbor is responsible every day for the way we treat God and the way we treat all other persons. This means that our daily conduct should demonstrate the ordinary virtues such as courtesy, civility, kindness, patience, generosity, and attention to the voice of God which comes to us through the obvious needs, sufferings or weaknesses of other human beings who somehow come into our lives. Another lesson we could learn from the life and ministry of Mother Teresa concerns our daily life of prayer. When she was asked by another writer about the details of her daily prayer life, she said that she regarded her daily ministry of washing the bodies and binding up the wounds of her needy clientele as a continuing prayer. When pressed for more details on her specific formulas of prayer, she said that she really did not have any such formulas. But she did say that each day she did set aside quiet times to try to be more aware of the presence of God in the world, in human society, and in her. The writer pressed for more details and asked, "What do you do in these quiet times?" She replied, "I just listen to God". Then the writer asked, "What does God do in these quiet times?" She answered, "God just listens."
Long-time friends, Rabbi Max A.Shapiro, Dr. James P. Shannon and Msgr. James A. Habiger		Granted Mother Teresa is an extraordinary example of a believing and committed religious person. She was, in fact, more than that. She was an activist mystic whose daily prayers were her simple manual ministrations of soap and warm water, a wash cloth, towels, bandages, kind words, affection, and in the end, gently closing the eyelids of an elderly child of God who had just been called out this world. Be it noted as well, in our discussion tonight of admirable interfaith activities, that the thousands of patients nursed by her over a lifetime were seldom Christians. That was not her concern. They were all children of a loving, benevolent, and merciful God, and she saw herself as a partner with God in trying to make their final moments on this earth an appropriate experience for human beings created in the image of a loving God.
A person does not have to be a mystic or a great scholar of Hebrew or Christian Scriptures to know the basic elements of what God considers a good human person or a life well lived. Early on God made a covenant with Abraham. Later God called Moses to lead his people from slavery to freedom, and, in the process, to help them learn the vital difference between slavery and freedom. En route to Canaan the weary travelers received and accepted their great gift, the Ten Commandments, at Sinai. In each of these cosmic transactions God was performing on his contract with Abraham and was giving to his chosen people the guidelines they would need, first, to actualize their individual human potential for growth and, secondly, to implement God's grand design for the descendants of Abraham in time to come. In a very real sense the Judeo-Christian religious tradition makes each one of us who claims to follow it a co-creator with God in shaping a civilized human society that is always being perfected, if not rebuilt. In our day one of the most perceptive writers on the elements of building a civilization worthy of the name is John W. Gardner. Now in his second or third "retirement," but still writing and speaking eloquently, Gardner has said that all of his early books on human, social and political development have been, essentially, the building blocks for his current interest in the art of building cohesive, long term, human communities, starting with family. In one sense Gardner's work on the art of community building describes a process that is the reverse of what Slobodan Milosevic is doing in the Balkans. In Gardner's perceptive words: "[One of] the first acts of totalitarian dictators...is to undermine the private associative links of the citizens, so [that] there is nothing left but the State and a mass of separate- individuals [who are] easily dominated." In Gardner's catalog of the elements which define a civilized human community he lists "A reasonable basis of shared values," and says, "of all the ingredients of community this is possibly the most important." I ask you to reflect for a moment on how this most basic element of community underlies the success of the several recent interfaith programs of Temple Israel and the Basilica of Saint Mary to create new study-groups of Jews and Christians whose express purpose is to find and celebrate the common grounds of their religious faith. Ironically, in our history, religious wars have been our most prolonged, unproductive, and inconclusive conflicts. The record is clear, our fighting over religion and our fostering religious prejudices or bearing ancient religious grudges have been among our most expensive and mindless endeavors for centuries. Consider the cancer of religious bigotry in our day between Protestants and Catholics in Northren Ireland, between Christians and Muslims in the Balkans, and among Jews, Christians and Muslims in the Middle East. One reason that it is hard to end these ancient enmities is that each side is convinced that God is their ally and that any overture for compromise is an affront to an all-knowing God. In contrast, experience shows that once we sense the psychic satisfaction that comes from building or re-building cohesive human communities, we are inclined to search for new opportunities to do more such building. Who knows what new schemes are being hatched, even as we speak, in the fertile imaginations of Rabbi Joseph Edelheit and Father Michael O'Connell? In all sincerity, it is my very deep personal belief that in our troubled global village today our hope for peace and justice in the future lies in our ability to duplicate many more interfaith programs such as those that have been generated on the local level by Temple Israel and the Basilica of Saint Mary. In closing I would like to focus briefly on the fact that our faith in God is a gift from God. It is not something we have earned. It is not something we have discovered by study or research. It is not something we have merited. It is a gift freely given by a generous and loving Creator. And it brings with it a serious correlative responsibility to use it respectfully, with appreciation and gratitude, and in a productive manner. Several times in these remarks I have cited Mother Teresa of Calcutta as a person of our era whose life reflects what it means to love God with all our heart and to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. When she was asked by the patronizing reporter from London a question something like this: How can you say that your life's work of ministering to the poor of Calcutta has been successful," her reply was disarmingly simple: "God does not expect us always to be successful. All God asks is that we be faithful." I can think of no more fitting mantra for each of us. All God asks of you and me is that we be faithful! Thank you for the privilege of being with you this evening and for your kind attention to these remarks.

This page was revised on 10/18/00
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