Last week, while I was at a book store, I picked up Paulo Coelho’s Like the Flowing River and randomly turned to a page. The page I found myself reading was entitled “The Catholic and The Muslim”. It was a short anecdote which touched me with its last two statements. And, I quote, “It’s a shame that people see only the differences that separate them. If you were to look with more love, you would mainly see what we have in common, then half the world’s problems would be solved.”
This week, I encountered 2 Yahoo! news clips involving Catholics and Muslims with both earning the ire of netizens. The first news clip was about a picture of a girl posing in front a cross “parodying” Jesus’ death. The second news clip was about an imam that said the phrase “sumabog na kung sasabog” in an airplane after a passenger denies their request of taking another seat because in their religion, a female is not permitted to sit beside a man unless they are married. Reading the comments after the news clip and summing it up, this is what I got: in the first news clip, the netizens slammed the girl because they feel they were violated by the mere fact that the girl violated the cross, a sacred symbol to their religion while in the second news clip, netizens slammed the imam for not adjusting to society’s rules (seating plan in an airplane) because of their religion’s rules and calls for muslims to adjust their beliefs. What I got disappointed me.
The sad truth is we all have this tendency. That is, to command respect to things that we consider sacred or important but to disregard that which we do not understand. I can understand why people called for respect to the girl when they saw the cross being violated but what I can’t understand is why they cannot give the same respect to the imam who holds his belief sacred and even resorted to calling the imam (and other muslims) degrading names (not that what the imam blurted out after his denied request is justifiable).
Here’s the thing, the religion that we all feel “fighting” for teaches us to practice love and it is Jesus who best said how. Mark 12:30-31 states “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength. The second is this, You shall love your neighbor as yourself”. While our religion provides us a set of rules and symbols to be able to express our love for God better, a faith that is alive is supposed to not stop there. It also calls us to love our neighbors (with the same love that God loved us) even if it means accepting things we do not understand.
The quote from Coelho’s message is an application of Jesus’ commandment. It’s not a new revelation. It does, however, put it in a different light.
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