“I give only what I carry in my purse”

By Eboo Patel - Washington Post/Newsweek "On Faith" blog - Washington D.C., U.S.A.

Saturday, April 7, 2007

My friend Aquil, a black Muslim who grew up on the south side of Chicago, spent his summer days as a counselor at a Jewish summer camp in Hyde Park and his summer nights as a standout player on a baseball team with mostly black Christians.

In between innings, they argued about Jesus. Aquil's Christian friends chided him for not believing in the resurrection and Jesus's divinity.

Aquil insisted that Jesus was one of God’s chosen messengers, but human like the rest of us.
In a beautiful piece that he wrote several years later, Aquil reflected, “I wish I knew then how to communicate to them the point that God's words and Jesus's example are immortal, and these are the ideas that Muslims don't question."

I believe there is a deep spirituality in the physical being of Jesus. Muslims with Sufi inclinations have made pilgrimages to the mausoleums of saints and Prophets for centuries, and Jesus is both.

But more than his bones, it is Jesus’s message and example which move me.

One of my favorite lines on Jesus is by the great theologian Howard Thurman:
“I love Jesus for the shaft of light that he throws across the pathway of those who seek to answer the question, ‘What shall I do with my life?’”

And one of my favorite stories about Jesus is told by Sufi Muslims:

When Jesus was in the marketplace in Jerusalem, a crowd gathered and started to insult him.
In return, Jesus blessed them.
“How can you bless people who insult you?” the disciples asked Jesus.
“I give only what I carry in my purse.”

May we all fill our purses with mercy.

“On Faith” panelist Eboo Patel is founder and executive director of the Interfaith Youth Core, a Chicago-based international nonprofit working to make the forces of interfaith cooperation stronger than the forces of religious extremism

[picture: Eboo Patel, photo by Nubar Alexanian]