In this globalized society, the question is not whether we can be faithful to our Abrahamic traditions if we borrow practices from other religions, but whether our neighbors can provide means to the kind of relationship with God that Abraham had. Religions do not exist to define different kingdoms but to enrich each other.
In the West, we have experienced a sea change of consciousness. We have lost the sense of the sacred and have amputated our spiritual lives. For that reason, practices that can reconnect us to our own core and to the heart of the universe are appealing because they can act as the instrumentalities of a basic faith commitment.
However, this does not mean that we can act without accountability to the traditions from whence we come nor the traditions from which we learn new means of interaction with the sacred. We must separate buying prayer beads from a relational understanding of Buddhism. We must seek for clarity about the core of our faith with the same passion that drives our search for connection to the pulse of the universe.
For example, a Christian can use a Marxist critique to understand the alienation of labor. But I can hear that and use that new understanding in a very Christian context, as our Latin American Catholic brothers and sisters began to do in the 1970’s.
We must recognize ourselves as a technological and consumer society in need of representatives of cultures that centralize their focus on spiritual life. If they are so generous, our neighbors can help us return to the Abrahamic roots of our own spirituality.
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