Do you remember the first time you saw fireworks-maybe it was even some Fourth of July long ago? If you want, close your eyes for a moment, or gaze down at your hands, so you can create a little island of privacy in the midst of this community. Picture the scene. How old were you-do you remember, can you guess? Were you excited, or scared, or sleepy? Were there lots of people around you-friends, family, neighbors-or folks you'd never seen before? What kind of a night was it-sultry and still, windy and cool? How did the air feel on your skin? And can you remember the smells? Can you smell the grass, or the still-hot cement, the blankets you were sitting on (or the plastic lawn chairs), did you catch a whiff of the smoke drifting over after the explosions? What did you hear, and what did you see? Can you still picture those first surprising stars, bursting out of nowhere, multicolored sprinkles raining down from high, high overhead ...?
Rejoin me now (if you're still awake) and let's try to conjure some communal fireworks. Surprise is what strikes me most about them; I've never grown jaded about fireworks, have you.9 each time is as though it's the first: the distant "poom" of the launch, then the high "pop" and the startling spray of color, blooming against the dark. Often when fireworks explode, I feel a matching mini-explosion in my chest, a burst of joy and wonder that makes me coo "Oooooh" with the rest of the crowd and that sometimes makes me laugh, Just as a child laughs, from sheer pleasure. Fireworks can blast right through that cynical armor we adults so often wear, and suddenly we're united: we're united with our children, and with other people's children, squealing and bouncing with delight in the park around us; we're united with part~es on ne~ghboring rooftops and all across the city-and we become, while the show lasts, one community, focused together on the same thing, on each sparkling moment that helps to create the whole event.
Martin Buber, in I and Thou, says that true community comes into being when people "stand in a living, reciprocal relationship to a single living center," and they "stand in a living, reciprocal relationship" to each other. So in community, he's saying, each of us radiates out from a common center like spokes on a wheel, and all of"us spokes" are connected to each other-and then all of this is continually in motion-because of course that is what it means to be living.
Well, then I thought, this image of community-which is really an image of religion, too-is like fireworks! Each firework bursts from a mysterious, invisible center, just as a religion or a philosophy of life takes its source and meaning from its center. And a whole bunch of fireworks going off at once are like all the world's religions-all the world's communities-bursting forth, each with its own sense of what stands at the center.... (Of course, Buddhists would say that nothing is at the center, but if that's so, then those explosions of color are even more miraculous, if you ask me....) But the point is, we have to have all those "differently centered" explosions if we want to have the whole glorious experience. I mean, we don't go to see one "firework"; we go to see fireworks.
So then if we stretch this metaphor just a little bit further, couldn't we say that each of us is like a single one of those squiggly, bejeweled strands, each of us following our own unique path, but always forming part of the larger pattern? I wonder what would happen if we really began to see each other in this way, if we really stopped to take each person in as the individual sparkler that he or she is. What would happen with your friends and family, say, if you stopped to give each other a big "Pakistani handshake" embrace and all each time you got together? What if we walked down the street seeing even strangers as these unique, invaluable, sparkling additions to this community of New York City; what if we took the time to ask, "What is this 'living center' we all share?" and to notice how we do all stand in "living, reciprocal relationship with each other"?
Yeah, right .
Well, c'mon, when's the last time you really noticed the sparkle in even your most intimate friend? And for that matter, how much time do we spend appreciating and nurturing the sparkle in ourselves? Let alone all those "others," the strangers, the "differently centered"-or the just plain different. We seem awfully short on the kind of time, and attention, and patience we would need to create this kind of community.
And here's another barrier: In my own memory of the first time I saw fireworks, I am sitting on a stranger's lawn with my folks and a whole bunch of other unknown families-I guess in the late l950s you could sit on a stranger's lawn without the lawn's owner either coming at you with a shotgun, or charging you five bucks to park your blanket there-anyway, across the street from where we were sitting was this high wall. On the other side of the wall was the biggest and supposedly "best" of San Antonio's country clubs even my white middle-class family couldn't get in to this country club, and certainly the only people of color allowed inside the gates were those who held the lowest-paying, most "invisible" jobs. I'm sure that when the fireworks were set off from the middle of the golf course that evening, they filled me with all that wonder and delight I described before but what I remember now is the wall. "The fields undivided, ... the walls built low," Rilke's poem goes. Ours is not a world where the walls are built low. Ours is a world where if you are black and I am white, female, male, gay, straight, Muslim, Christian, or Jew, it often does "matter"-dividing communities disastrously, and sparking discrimination, hatred, murder, war ...
So. What to do?
Let me tell you a story about an experience I had this spring, about the forming of a community where I least expected it. I signed up for an introductory class on Islam; "Islam in Local Cultures," it was called, and that was its focus: the amazing variety and pluralism of Islam in all its incarnations around the world. Now, I enrolled in this class with a great deal of "righteousness," believing (as I still do) that understanding Islam is particularly crucial now. Indeed, our professor, Ali Asani, opened the class by summarizing the stereotypes applied to Muslims by the media, and by politicians ("Communism, Nazism, and Islam are the great dangers of our time"-Dan Quayle). As Professor Asani pointed out, we are only able to maintain an image of the "other," of an "enemy," if we stereotype a person or a group, because that's how we dehumanize them.
Well, I was in total agreement! But ... it was a huge class, and required an enormous amount of work, and some of this material seemed so opaque-the dates, the names, the complicated history, the Arabic words, the sheer unfamiliarity and difference of it all-plus, I was in my own private huff because I'd been "stuck" in a discussion section with a bunch of youngsters, undergraduates, instead of with my divinity school comrades. What was I going to get out of that? I had a bad attitude I had a lot of walls up....
I can't name the day it started to change, but slowly people's stories began to break through my armor. Some of these stories were the garden-variety stuff of life: like the day I noticed that two of the twenty-year-olds in my section were falling in love, or the day my Div School friend Al-Husein and I had a long talk about dating-dating people of different ages, people of different faiths. And some of these stories were more exotic: like that of Enna Kaminitzwa, an undergraduate who immigrated from Bosnia; brought up under the Communist regime where religion had no place in public spaces, he only "discovered" his Muslim identity when he was shot at and imprisoned. Then there were Texas stories that surprised and touched me: like that of Arik Nathoo, born in Houston to parents from Bombay; he described their being the only nonwhite family in the neighborhood: "And people were, like, 'Wow, that's cool,' and they'd bring us baked goods," he said.... He praised the strong sense of community that was part of his Southern culture: "We'd go to barbecues on the weekends," he told us, "and, well, I don't eat pork, but people were, like, 'Hey, no problem, we'll throw a few more cow ribs on the grill for you!"' Or there was Anitra Muhammad, the Baptist from Dallas who converted to the Nation of Islam in her teens; she was in their office when the Oklahoma City bombings occurred and the phone calls came in, assuming that her group had been involved-"I don't hate anyone as a group," she said, and there was a plea in her voice, for herself and for her daughter's future, that we set aside the stereotypes. All of them, individual sparklers, following their own bright paths across the night sky. Precious Rasheeda Muhammad is another-"a quiet storm," she calls herself, and asks Allah to "let me be patient, let me be kind, to make me tinselfish in my jihad of Islamic self-education and the education of others, without being blind."
"Jihad"-it doesn't mean violence, or terrorism, or war; it means "to strive, to struggle." As I began to notice the sparkle in the individual lives around me, I also came to recognize the "living center" that had drawn us all together. We were, all of us-freshmen, juniors, seniors in the college, Muslim, Jewish, and Unitarian graduate students-striving to understand: ourselves, each other, our world. This was the center from which our community bloomed. As the daunting final exam drew near, we studied together, calling each other "fellow jihadsters," but also "my brothers and sisters in islam"-for islam-with-a-little-i means obedience to God, which I will translate further: we were all seeking the truth.
But you don't have to go to grad school to have this kind of experience! We have the opportunity to create true community every day, if we'll just listen for the stories, just look for the sparkle in the people around us. Try it, today, at coffee hour-no one has to know! In that island of privacy inside your head, you can just take a moment to see what a sparkling individual you are talking to. Or better yet, go ahead and go for the "main course," the "steak" embrace each other, take each other in "with affection overbrimming"-and notice the fireworks we create! Maybe, maybe it's just that simple: just noticing, just asking, as we move through this week, What is the center we all share? And what is my relationship to these brothers and sisters, these fellow jihadsters? Try it, for just one week. I bet you'll see some fireworks, and I guarantee that you will feel a matching explosion, an expansion, in your heart. And then try it for another week. And another. And gradually we will find ways to form new and more loving and inclusive communities, and with that united strength we will move together toward a world where our doors welcome all who knock and there is a "sense of boundless offering in all relations-and in you and me." Amen. Happy Fourth of July! Let's sing! Copyrighr AllSouls 1999.