By This They Will Know You Are My Disciples

Some six months ago I launched a Friday night coffee house called The Spirit Café. Our tag line is “where all paths come together,” and my desire was to attract people who are spiritually thirsty, whether or not they have a practice of faith. We all know people who claim to be “spiritual but not religious,” and it was my plan to give them a place to feel spiritual without hitting them between the eyes with whatever it was that drove them away from organized religion, usually sometime in their youth.

I had—and still have—a vision of bringing together people who know there is something beyond us, what many faiths call God and theologian Marcus Borg calls the dimension of “More.” Every practice of religion or spirituality, east or west, recognizes this dimension beyond our mortal limits. That common thread is what separates faith from simple philosophy.

It’s my experience that most people who claim an affinity with Taoism or Buddhism—the two most popular among the eastern faiths admired by westerners—don’t actually practice their faith in an active way. Of course, that’s also true of many Christians. But being the social creatures we humans are, I counted on an innate desire to validate “truth” by sharing it with others. And so I opened the doors of the Spirit Café to any and all who wanted a place to express their sense of spirituality, to say, “Yes, I feel the force of goodness that flows through the universe and it’s flowing in me.” I knew that bringing together individuals in whom a spiritual force was present would increases the flow for all, and each would benefit from the strength of the other.

Not surprisingly, most of the people who come to the Spirit Café are Christians, but they are Christians who feel comfortable sitting next to someone who honors Jesus as a great prophet but sees the Buddha the same way. As I said, the Spirit Café is a place where all paths come together.

I have a purpose in telling this tale beyond describing the Spirit Café experience. When I first launched the Café I sponsored a thorough publicity campaign that included visits to many local churches and news releases to local media outlets. Among those were Christian radio stations. A day before the Café was to open I received a call from a pastor who hosts an interview show on our most conservative Christian radio station. Along with our “all paths” tag line the press release had included words like “inclusive” that tipped him off I was dealing from the same Christian deck he usually played with. He called, purportedly to determine if I might make a good guest for his show, but I think he already had his answer on that. What he wanted was a debate. “Do you mind if we talk awhile?” he asked, “I get lots of opportunities to talk with people who agree with me but not many to talk with someone who doesn’t.”

And so we talked for maybe two hours. He pressed me the whole time with his literalist understanding of scripture and I responded with my comprehensive context approach. “What do you do with this scripture,” he would ask, quoting some stalwart text in his literalist lexicon, and I would respond by trying to help him understand it in the context of Jesus’ mission to open doors to the kingdom and not to close them—especially for those most in need of God’s love.

Finally I began to tire of it all and said, “Pastor Mel, if you decide to have me on your show I promise I won’t come on and deliberately say anything to make your listeners uncomfortable. On the other hand, if you feel I’m not the right messenger for your show, I won’t judge you, I won’t feel you have the love of Jesus in your heart any less than me.” For the first time in two hours I had caught him off guard. That wasn’t my intention, but I could tell he didn’t know how to respond. Finally he said, “Well, that’s big of you.” “Not really,” I replied. “That’s just me doing what Christ calls me to do: opening my arms in love to my brothers and sisters. God bless you pastor,” I concluded. He was quiet for a moment and then replied, “God bless you.” We said goodbye and the conversation ended.

I tell this story because there’s so much pain in the world and so much hunger for spiritual healing. Some, in their honest desire to get it right, will follow paths that by their very exclusiveness run outside of God’s intentions. We should smile on them and assume their good will. My own pastor recently wrote in her column for our local newspaper that God casts the net of love wide enough to take in all of creation, wide enough to take in all people regardless of any of the particulars by which we humans in our limited understanding might define them, such as sexual orientation.

Many churches, denominations and individual Christians in their blindness to God’s true nature still struggle with this issue. Another pastor, at a more conservative church, wrote the newspaper asserting that God’s net had some limitations and one of those is homosexuals. How do we respond? By condemning the condemner? No, God’s net reaches every corner of creation. We respond by opening our arms in love to all our brothers and sisters. “By this,” Jesus said, “they will know you are my disciples.”