3/19/2017
The Islamic Society cooked the breakfast yesterday at the Community Breakfast (now in its 4th or 5th year) and served the guests side by side with the rest of us regular volunteers. The organizers of breakfast have generally given the privilege of offering a prayer of thanks for the food to the group responsible for providing it. Imam Dabour gave that honor to a gentleman who appeared to be associated with the Avicenna Clinic for uninsured indigent people in our community. He offered what I and others received as a gracious and inter-culturally respectful prayer. I as a Christian can hear another person’s prayer, even if our theology doesn’t mesh and I can pray in my own heart according to my personal belief and know that the Holy Spirit within me filters it according to what is acceptable to God. If we, as diverse people are showing respect and gratitude to the Divine, I think being able to hear one another’s prayers without judgment is a good starting point for finding common ground….even if our personal views of the Divine are different.
After the breakfast, one person, wearing a clergy collar, came to me (because we have known one another for a number of years) and said that the group this clergy person brought would not be back as we had allowed a non-Christian to pray. The point of the breakfast is to extend God’s hospitality and love to all who come, not to evangelize or proselytize or apply some standard of theological or social acceptability. We wear our Christian smiles, some wear their Christian crosses, and we sing our Christian songs. But obviously we do it in a way that does not make non-Christians uncomfortable as attested to by the fact that Imam Dabour said his group would be willing to come again. In doing so, we might even find the common humanity and shared values that can help us work together even in times of community stress and division.
The invitation to “come” is extended to everyone….homeless, mentally ill, socially marginalized, financially well-heeled or indigent, believer or non-believer in Jesus, those with faith in the Divine or those with faith only in their own understanding and desire, How sad that some insist on only associating with their own and demand that their faith and dogma trump that of others to whom we are to witness by our love.