Christian Ministry in the Midst of Religious Diversity (http://experts.patheos.com/expert/roberthunt/2011/05/02/christian-ministry-in-the-midst-of-religious-diversity/)
2 May 2011
by Dr. Robert Hunt
To begin our exploration we need to note that in all the world’s religions illness is understood strictly in relationship to being healthy, and thus in relationship to what it means to be fully human and fully alive. And health in turn is understood by all the world’s religions as being able to fully and vigorously live out one’s human purpose. Of course the religions differ considerably about just what that life purpose is, and who or what gives human life purpose. They agree, however, that human life as lived in each moment is directed toward achieving some end, and thus that illness is something that, at least as it is immediately experienced, hinders one from reaching that end.
In this respect illness is different from a physical disability, which may prove a hindrance from undertaking some human activities, but doesn’t keep humans from achieving their human purpose.
A well-known example of illness as a hindrance in Christianity comes from the gospels. In the time of Jesus people with certain skin diseases were considered ritually unclean. This prevented them from both fulfilling their proper role within a family and society, and from offering praise and worship to God in the community. These two things, righteousness and praise, were central to the purpose of human life. Thus those with such skin diseases were prevented from fully living out their human vocation. When Jesus healed these people he restored them not only to physical health, but also to fulfilling their human purpose. And this was true regardless of the actual cause of their illness – about which Jesus had little to say.
We should note that Christians understand that the healing offered by Jesus was also a sign of God’s Reign being present, because a characteristic of God’s Reign is that people are free to live our their human vocation of justice and praise. And indeed most religions see healing as a sign of something more than mere medical effectiveness. Healing is a sign that whoever or whatever controls the destiny of humankind is at work for good.
Also relevant is the Christian idea that sin, a broken relationship with one’s fellow humans and God, is the ultimate disease. This concept has influenced all other Christian understandings of illness. In Christianity all cures of physical illness are partial, albeit critically important, until this ultimate disease is addressed.
Turning to Buddhism, we find that physical illness is understood in terms of the human vocation of seeking the Truth, enlightenment, or if you wish, dharma. In this respect illness can play a positive role; for it reminds a person that life is transient and uncertain except with regard to its end in decrepitude and death. Indeed the Buddha’s quest for enlightenment began when he saw illness, decrepitude and death and sought a way to overcome the suffering they cause. What he discovered was that these three things were part of , and indeed contributed to, the delusion that keeps the human person from seeing the truth. To overcome them one must seek the truth, dharma, by reaching toward enlightenment. At a deep level, then, ignorance is the ultimate illness in Buddhism, and delusion is its most obvious symptom.
Yet as in Christianity, there are also proximate causes of illness, and illness has immediate deleterious effects. A person who is ill will have trouble concentrating the mind toward enlightenment, and may not be able to fulfill the social obligations required by the law of karma. Thus Buddhists, particularly Mahayana Buddhists, have undertaken to be healers both in a time of pre-modern methods and more recently with modern understandings of disease. This is particularly true of Pure Land Buddhism, which teaches that practices undertaken in a lifetime may lead to rebirth in a “pure land” where only the truth is taught and disease, decrepitude, and death are ended. Human life is the realm in which one seeks enlightenment, and is thus precious. Extending and enriching it is a great mercy.
Islam, a religion born in the Semitic cultural traditions that include Judaism and Christianity, understands that the purpose of human life is to live according to God’s divine law, and thus to be worthy of restoration to the Paradise from which the first humans were banished. In relation to this purpose for life illness poses a problem because it prevents humans from undertaking the obligations of divine law to their families and God. Illness is not fatal in this regard, because God is also merciful and knows human weakness and limits. Yet it remains a challenge, something for humans to overcome so that they may more fully live out the divine will. It is a struggle, a jihad to use that misunderstood term, in which humans should be fully engaged. Like Buddhists and Christians, Muslims thus seek to cure illness whenever possible and restore humans to their ability to submit to God’s will fully and wholeheartedly.
Similar observations could be made with regard to Taoism, Confucianism, and Hinduism. Illness in each case is a hindrance to humans seeking to live out their human vocation. And thus all these religions seek some remedy, some cure to physical illness that will bring their followers back to health.
And yet all religions recognize that ultimately all such remedies will fail. No religion teaches that humans can be or even should be immortal in what Woody Allen called “the classical meaning of the word: living forever.” Or to bring our artistic allusions home, Guy Clark wrote, and Jerry Jeff Walker recorded those great last lines:
“The day ‘fore he died I went to see him, I was grown and he was almost gone, So we just closed our eyes and dreamed us up a kitchen, And sang one more verse to that old song: (Come on, Jack, that son-of-a-bitch is comin’,) We’re desperadoes waitin’ for a train, like desperadoes waitin’ for a train.”
Here I believe that the world’s religions agree. Death, the son-of-a-bitch, is coming for us all and we’re all waiting for that train. Our ability to cure disease, to heal human illnesses, should never delude us into believing that we’ll live forever. The religions teach us to realize that in living out our human vocation we must ultimately live with illness and death, and find some way to let them serve our life purpose.
For the Buddhist, illness need not merely be a hindrance. It is also a reminder that life is transient, and that one’s time should be invested in seeking enlightenment. While one is young and able one should train body and mind to overcome pain and distraction, so that when the pain and worry of illness come, as they inevitably will, one can stay focused on seeking the truth, the dharma. And when illness comes prematurely, or unexpectedly, the Buddhist teachers advise that one “lean into it” as one would any transient experience that needs to be investigated until its illusory nature is revealed. Illness can become the means through which illusion is parsed from reality, and the mind cleared of delusion. It may become a means by which we become more compassionate to others who are ill, since we share their experience. And that compassionate knowing is itself a way of grasping the truth about our own humanity and reality as a whole.
For Muslims illness will be an opportunity to conform themselves further with God’s will. For one who has struggled to be obedient through life, it is the opportunity to accept one’s destiny, grateful for both what has been given and the paradise one hopes to gain. For Muslims healing is to be sought when it is possible, for God is the giver of life. Yet God also puts limits on human life, and those who submit to God’s will accept those limits.
In the Christian tradition there are some who, like Muslims, regard illnesses as the opportunity to submit to God’s will. For others such illnesses provide an opportunity to turn one’s attention from purely physical concerns to those that are more spiritual. As one becomes incapable of caring for others, or even one’s self, there is the opportunity to remember that ultimately God is the source and end of human life. Helpless against the ravages of disease, the Christian remembers that he or she has always lived in a vast network of care and support. And being thrown back on that network for even the smallest forms of help is a chance to be grateful for something otherwise hidden in times of health and self-sufficiency. Like the Buddhist, the Christian knows that the discipline of seeking Reality when one is young and strong makes it easier when illness makes the body a distraction to the mind. And for those less disciplined illness may be, in the end, the opportunity to turn at last toward Reality in itself, toward God, given that one’s own self is rapidly deteriorating. Nor is suffering entirely unwelcome, since it too is a participation in the suffering of Christ on the Cross, and thus a reminder of the promise of his resurrection into the life of God.
And finally, it seems to me that all the world’s religions understand that when illness finally ends in death one must trust one’s life to whatever Reality is greater than any human conception of the universe, and to which alone life can be entrusted for eternity.
All understand the poet’s call to “rage against the dying of the light,” for life is precious to all. And yet more often than not they council dignity in the face of death, and indeed hope their followers will go gently into the good night it offers.
All religions remind their followers that while humans will remember only for a season those whom they have loved that passed away. Songs and stories and monuments endure for a time, but even humanity as a whole will face its final illness and pass into time or eternity. The great wheel of the Samsara world will turn again and even the six realms of gods and demigods, humans and animals, demons and the damned will dissolve into some new form that knows nothing of us and ours.
For Buddhists this timeless reality beyond the world is simply the Truth, a truth of which one becomes eternally a part by living within its precepts. Regardless of whether the body or indeed the soul endures, karma carries all that is good in each person forward into changeless eternity. For Hindus there is Brahman, timeless undifferentiated Being out of which all beings come and to which all inevitably return, losing themselves into its ocean like salt tossed into the sea. Such is the hope also of the Sufi mystic seeking fana or extinction in wadat al wudud, the unity of Being. For Christians and Muslims this Reality is a God who holds in the Divine Life the lives of all those creatures that have ever lived, and who has created an eternal home for them where illness is no more, and life goes only on to life.
All look forward in hope, for all hold that the future is in better hands than those of their followers.
In the classic work, “Letters from an Indian Judge to an English Gentlewoman,” Arvind Nehra – a Hindu writes:
“Of all your English hymns I have listened to, one only has aroused some answering cord in the heart of me, who am a black man. I do not know who wrote it, but I heard it first in a small country church to which I had walked over pleasant fields at evening. It begins with the words ”O Love, that will not let me go”, but the verse that remains most constant in my mind is this one:
‘O joy, that seekest me through pain, I cannot close my heart to thee! I trace the rainbow through the rain, And feel the promise is not vain, That morn shall tearless be.’
Vaguely (he writes) and in some way I cannot tell you, I also feel the promise is not in vain, although the Faith in which I was brought up gives us small guidance on that matter.”
And if a Hindu could appreciate these Christian verses, surely a Buddhist would agree in part with the sentiments of Catherine von Schlegal, although their Lord might be the Amitab Buddha rather than the Christ.
Be still, my soul; the hour is hastening on
When we shall be forever with the Lord,
When disappointment, grief and fear are gone,
Sorrow forgot, love’s purest joys restored.
Be still, my soul; when change and tears are past,
All safe and blessed, we shall meet at last.
But then Christians should appreciate the words of Ibn al-Arabi, who reminds us that death is the gateway to a Reality deeper than humans can comprehend in their religions.
“When the Divine Being is epiphanized to the believer in the form of his faith, this faith is true. He professes this faith in this world. But when the veil is lifted in the other world, the knot (‘aqd), that is to say, the dogma (‘aqida) which binds him to his particular faith, is untied; dogma gives way to knowledge by direct vision (mushahada). For the person of authentic faith, capable of spiritual vision, this is the beginning of an ascending movement after death toward God.”
But then of course John, in his great Revelation, reminds us also that:
I did not see a temple in that city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple. The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp. The nations will be walking by its light, and the kings of the earth will be bringing their splendor into it. On no day will its gates ever be shut, for there will be no night there. The glory and honor of the nations will be brought into it.
As we minister to our neighbors of different religions I think for Christians at least these verses should be foremost in our minds. Healing when it is possible comes first. Compassion when healing seems impossible is likewise a mercy they will understand. And always hope unconstrained by needless urgency. For on no day, now or to come, will the gates of the New Jerusalem be closed.
(End)
