interfaith dialogue, spain

the fiery breath of autumn is chilling over the land.  tytti is spinning along the cold roads on her motorbike while i sit behind her, dressed up in all my clothes.  i even have tied my shorts and an old shirt round my ankles, to stop the cold wind from riding up my trousers.  i have engrained in me the image of spain as a land of perpetual sun and heat, but a times i surprise myself, seeing that it is also possible for the opposite to be true.  es que ya estamos en la época de lluvias, say the spaniards.  here is the cold and the rain and the chilly breath of autumn, turning the quivering poplars into yellow shooting flames along the valley bottoms.  tytti points upwards to draw my attention to the beauty of the ochre-orange rocks rising at the roadside.  she loves a lot to be in the mountains because in her native finland there are none.  i love a lot to be in the forest because the forest is magical.

the rain that evening makes us take refuge in an abandoned little stone hut.  we have bought wine and olives and cheese from the nearby village store, just before it closed, and prepare a pot of pasta over a fire in the corner.  the smoke rises up and disappears through a hole in the roof.  closeby is the railway that runs between madrid and cuenca.  the whistling sound of the approaching highspeed trains becomes audible through the whistle of the wind in the poplars, then it roars past ferociously and always makes us look at each other with surprised eyes.  tytti becomes determined to record the sound on her phone, but she never gets to the button in time.  it must be recorded right at the start of the far-off whistle.  it will be very good as part of a theatre production, tytti is sure. the next morning we find a fig tree outside the hut bearing many delicious soft sweet fruits, as well as an almond tree, laden with nuts, which we crack open slowly with stones, admiring the intricate structure of the shells, and how the precious nut always fits snugly inside.  it takes us more than two days to get from madrid to the rainbow gathering, on account of all the time spent sheltering from the wind and the rain, which would not make for a pleasant motorcycle journey. 

tytti should be attending her classes at la escuela de teatro in madrid, but when i tell her that i will travel to the rainbow gathering, in the mountains 300k kilometres to the east of madrid, she spontaneously decides that she will come too.  she is very interested in all the things i have told her about the rainbow, and wants to see it for herself.  we arrive just in time for the food circle.  stefano the liverpudlian suddenly comes bounding along behind us and him and i give yelps of delight, bounding along together and rolling about on the ground and exchanging a lot of excited energy.  around fifty people are already holding hands in a circle, singing songs of love and unity, when someone breaks off and makes the circle snake around the meadow, laughing and dancing until the circle coils around itself and everyone ends up in one big ball, and then the umming begins.  the umming the omming, the united vibration of everyone's outbreath rising all around us as each individual's voice harmonises with the whole.  afterwards everyone sits in a big circle again and the food is served. 

after the food circle a talking circle is organised, whose purpose is for the ones who had been to the rainbow before to describe to the ones who haven´t been before what the rainbow is all about.  when the talking stick comes to tytti, she says that it is her first time and that although she loves the displays of love and unity, she is a little unsure about some things because of her christian faith.  later, when it is jay's turn to talk - a spanish sexagenarian with long blonde hair and shining blue eyes - he looks at tytti and says he is sure that jesus would have been in the rainbow family if there had been one in his time.

tytti's strong christian faith is a topic which surfaces from time to time between us.  tytti is direct and sincere in everything she says, and this invites me to be the same.

"i have to confess that i don't like it," tytti says, "when i see these hindu symbols, and i don't want to to bow down and worship the earth or sing praises to any God other than the One Creator, whose son Jesus . . . "

 - yes, there is only One God -  i say - and i believe that He is present everywhere.  the God that animates the christian world view is the same Life Principal that pulsates throughout the Universe.  it is the non-sectarian Divine Mystery, spoken of by all religions and seekers of truth. 

when i was a child i had the same conviction as you do, handed down to me by my parents - that christianity held the only true answers to life, but my questioning mind has gradually led me to abandon that conviction.  now i have the impression that i have opened the window of a restricted room and am now outside where my vision of reality has been considerably extended.

"i have the same feeling!" laughs tytti "except that for me being a christian is like being outside, whereas any other belief is like having a restricted vision of truth"

- hmmmmm  - i say - but the muslims have the same conviction that their religious tradition is the sole truth.  i think it is more useful, especially in today's globalised society, to look for the things that unite people rather than divide them, the obvious things that no-one disputes.  why expect that everyone give the same importance to jesus as the christian tradition when they are capable of leading deep and meanginful lives without reference to him?  how can you be so sure that the christian worldview is the one that should belong to everyone?

"for me," says tytti, eyes beaming with the sincerity of conveying her deep inner truth, "I can say that in Jesus I have so much more than in all else I've met in this life so far. His absolute, complete, sublime love is not the same as a system of energy or beautiful spirituality. He is MORE.  And what value has societal usefullness of unity of beliefs, next to absolute truth, an almighty God?  I vote for love, respect and understanding among us all, absolutely, but existence and nature of God is not something one can reason by measuring it's usefullness."

- me talking about things being useful or not comes from my feeling that we are the creators of our experience, the creators of life.  life really would not be (for us) if we did not create it into existence with our perceptions and imaginations.  "i want life to be such and such a way" says the perceiver, and life is that way.  the christian says: "i want to invent a God, the Creator and Sustainer of Everything, who loves me and loves me and i will pray to Him" and it is so.  such a God exists for such a christian.  the misanthrope (to give an example of somebody i met recently) says: "pues, i live in a world full of bad people, liars and people who will trick me" and it is so.  the misanthrope lives in such a world.    given how free we are as human beings, it is time we asked ourselves:  okay, so we can create any world for ourselves, but which would be really useful?  i mean which would cause us to flourish, would cause all of us to flourish in unison.  would create harmony and peace and resonate most profoundly with what we love in our hearts. 

- looking at you now - i tell tytti - i can see that the reality of your relationship with Jesus fills you with conviction and constitutes your truth for you, and i totally respect that, but i think that you should also recognise that other people do not have the same personal experience of Jesus as you do.

tytti recognises this.  tytti professes that jesus is the undisputable centre of her meaningful life, and i recognise that this is true for her and that truth is a wonderful and all-encompassing thing.  

it all makes me think that words are poor purveyors of inner truth and the best thing is to feel inwardly, and the connections thereby produced will flow and know no bounds.  amen