One Family Under God

Sounds so red, white, and blue, doesn’t it! But will you be my friend if I think differently from you? Will you be my friend if I believe a woman has the right to choose whatever’s given her? Will you be my friend if I believe gay people have just as much right to love as heterosexuals? Will you be my friend if I believe those without a home are given us to befriend? Finally, will you be my friend if I believe that a Jew, and a Muslim, are just as “saved” as any Christian brother or sister?
"Do not do unto others what you would not have done unto you." Noted religious writer Karen Armstrong, a favorite hero of mine who has authored over twenty books on religion and who like me spent formative years as a nun, identifies this golden rule as the bedrock directive of all the world’s faiths. I watched her the other night on PBS Bill Moyers’ Journal. Her words rang with a welcome rock-solid basis for universal inclusion.
Religion isn't about believing things. It's more like ethical alchemy, about behaving in a way that changes you, that gives you intimations of holiness and sacredness.
Yes, behaving! Even as I walk downtown, past Sanford’s famed church-on-every-block of every denomination, I’m reminded to behave in a way that reflects the goodness of each of those expressions of good faith, to love them for their traditions, even for what I may take to be their shortcomings.  
In our post-9/11 era Karen Armstrong has become a powerful voice for ecumenical understanding, for the virtue of compassion that links us, makes us connected beings. She presents her current project, a worldwide Charter of Compassion, in a video that can be found on Google.
Compassion is not pity, but the ability to walk in another’s shoes. 
I’m reminded of my favorite New Testament scripture: Matthew 25:  I was hungry and you gave me to eat, thirsty and you gave me to drink, in prison and you came to visit me. I was naked and you clothed me . . . 
It seems I’ve always been chasing religion’s Good News. Baptized into the Greek Orthodox church, I attended a Baptist Sunday school and then a Catholic grade school. Following college as young Sister Mary Adele I enrolled in Barry University’s Religious Studies graduate program. There, in lively classroom discussions that exploded any easy theological complacency, I heard the definitive voices of Teilhard de Chardin, Thomas Merton, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Karen Armstrong’s current voice fits into that probing theological chorus. 
A visiting professor ended my Miami classroom experience to say: “You all possess some part of religious truth, but each of your truths is simply part of an entirely bigger sphere of God’s truth.”
It has taken time, but slowly I am coming around to accept the ground of that reality, that any downplaying of another’s belief is venturing far from the mandate to walk in his or her shoes.  
Here’s how another prominent thinker sees our Heinz-57 clan. Albert Einstein, who upended the way we think of our physical world, was often asked, “What religion are you?”  His most famous retort: “I’m a mosaic!” Which is to say, “Yes! I am all of them.”
  In my weekly life for the last three years, I attend an energizing group who have become more family for me than many I can remember. Our Toastmasters Club in Altamonte Springs, begins with a traditional Pledge of Allegiance to the flag. Then I listen to heartfelt talks by dark-skinned Americans, by Asians, Jews, Buddhists, Christians, and who-knows-what shade inbetween, altogether a tasty soup of ethnic, cultural, and religious diversity. Sometimes I’m stretched by the differences. More often Jim and I come home richly nourished: how we see ourselves in each of these brothers and sisters! God’s family lived up-close.