IF WE SEEK more than spiritual security—if we long for more than bobble-headed affirmation of our preconceived beliefs—we must step out of our cloistered faith and engage the strangers all around us. This is the message at the center of spiritual memoirist and best-selling author Barbara Brown Taylor’s Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others.
After leaving behind her clerical collar and post as an Episcopal priest, Taylor took up the call to teach. For nearly 20 years, she taught introductory classes on world religion at a small college in northern Georgia. Early on, her aims were relatively meager. To introduce her students to a few of the world’s great religions, acquaint them with the diversity of faiths that exist not just across the globe but right across the street—this seemed enough. And so she outlined Buddhism’s eightfold path. She explicated the doctrinal differences between Sunni and Shia Islam and taught her students what exactly made a kosher meal kosher.
It didn’t take Taylor long to realize that though literature and secondhand knowledge can teach much, it is through direct interaction with people of other faiths that we learn the most about their faiths and our own. When Taylor stepped out from behind the lectern and took her students on field trips to masjids (mosques) and temples, she learned that her view of God and faith was partial. On these trips, she often found her faith tested and was, on more than one occasion, totally smitten.
Taylor calls the feelings of awe, inspiration, and longing that overtook her when she witnessed the best of another’s faith “holy envy.” For instance, when an imam bid her class farewell, not with a call to conversion or a reminder of the many stereotypes the West harbors against Islam, but by expressing his desire that her students become the very best people that they could be, be they Christian or Jew, Buddhist or Hindu.
For those Christians who fear that engaging with other religious traditions may lead them astray, Taylor pulls no punches. She acknowledges that standing humbly before the mystery of God and faith in all its variegated forms may disillusion you. In fact, she goes a step further and says that such disillusionment is to be expected. But she also insists that approaching other faiths in a spirit of genuine humility need not drive us to abandon our faith altogether. Taylor argues persuasively that engaging with others and their faiths may, in fact, bring us to a faith more mature and secure in the fathomless mysteries of life and God. She suggests it may also bring us to a faith less focused on exclusionary beliefs and creeds than on what she calls “the monumental spiritual challenge” of loving God through the people before us—no matter how unlike us they may appear.
If Taylor is correct and we heed her call to expand our circle of neighborly concern to those of other religious traditions, we might find ourselves on that long and winding road toward a faith finally worth envying. And if we find ourselves on that road, we should not be surprised when we come across fellow travelers that aren’t Christian. The road may be narrow, but it’s wide enough for travelers of many faiths.
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