Chrys McVeigh, O.P. is an American and lives in Rome as the Assistant General for Apostolic Life for the Dominicans. He has been missioned in Pakistan for 40 years where he was engaged in Islamic Christian dialogue. A frequent contributor to conferences on contextualizing theology in Asia, he has written widely on the theological implications for dialogue and the identity of Christian minorities in Muslim countries.

Some years ago, a small international group of philosophers and theologians met in Aachen, at the Missiological Institute, to evaluate a survey on the teaching of philosophy and theology in the world. The replies to questionnaires over a three-year period indicated, among other things, a great deal of dissatisfaction over a lack of contextuality in the teaching. One inescapable conclusion was that it is not in universities, seminaries, or institutes that one looks for theology. Theology happens "outside the camp." Outside the camp is the very matrix of theology.

This is not really a new insight, nor should it be surprising. Mission begins with an experience of God, and theology is a reflection on that experience. Early in the Bible, it is written that "anyone who wished to consult the Lord would go to the meeting tent outside the camp" (Exod 33:7). Outside the camp is where we meet God: outside the institution, outside culturally conditioned perceptions and beliefs. Outside the camp, God speaks to us "face to face" (Exod 33:11). It is outside the camp where we meet a God who cannot be controlled. It is outside the camp where we meet the Other who is different—and discover who we are and where our home really is.

I am often asked to speak about dialogue in Pakistan, where I lived for almost 40 years before being uprooted and transplanted to Rome a year and a half ago. My debt to Pakistan is immense: everything I know, even who I am at this moment, I owe to the country that was home to me for well over half my life.

Pakistan, without any democratic tradition, has had a succession of martial law regimes, the harshest of which was the 11 year rule of General Zia-ul-Haq. His policy of Islamization (separate electorates for minorities, revision of the penal code and the laws of evidence, which reduced women and minorities to second-class citizens and everyone open to accusations of blasphemy) haunts the country still. Zia was a US/CIA surrogate during the Russian-Afghan war, whose main beneficiaries were Zia himself, the Taliban and extremist religious parties. Ever since his rule, violence has become part of daily life: Muhajir against Sindhi, Shia against Sunni, Sunni against each other, everyone against the heretical Ahmadiyya. This violence is buttressed by religious militants and in parts of the country, by the culture itself, which sanctions lawlessness: murderers of wives, sisters, or female relatives (for the sake of personal or family honor) are rarely prosecuted or brought to justice. And, since 9/11 and the presence of US military in Afghanistan, Christian churches and institutions have offered soft targets for terrorists.

Yet when things are bad, good things happen. It was during this last period of martial law that my priorities began to shift and I came to see Christians and the Christian community in the context of "living among Muslims." In the US I am often asked how many I have converted. To which, my standard reply is, "One: myself. And God is not finished with me yet." My understanding of dialogue and encounter has grown and I will try to describe something of that for you. And something about what I have learned.

It was during Zia’s period that dialogue really began on an organized level. What was remarkable, in at least two or three instances, was that dialogue was initiated not by Christians but by Muslims. It was as if Muslims needed Christians as a witness to pluriformity and to the possibility of an Islam other than the one offered by the monochromatic vision of Zia-ul-Haq. Growing contact, over a 20-year period, with Muslims, especially with journalists, lawyers, human rights activists—many of them women—developed into esteem and friendship. These meetings helped me realize the truth of Georges Bernanos’ familiar quote: "God does not seem to call the same people to hear his word and to keep it." That humbling experience was the beginning of a new understanding of dialogue not as something we do but as a way of living.

"By dialogue," as Pope John Paul II said on February 5, 1986, "we let God be present in our midst, for as we open ourselves to one another, we open ourselves to God." And that can prove to be a grand adventure.

Almost 60 years ago, before being killed by the Nazis, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote about

I can think of many people who have inspired me by their willingness to go beyond their own inherited faith, in "prayer and action," in order to discover God’s purposes, which are never "inherited," but must be "born anew" in each generation. That means, in the words of one of the great Indian ecumenical pioneers, M. M. Thomas, "risking Christ for Christ’s sake." Just such an ideal is proposed by John S. Dunne, who believes

A few years ago, I happened to be in Lahore, where over 100 Sikhs, Hindus, Muslims, and Christians gathered to celebrate the birthday of Guru Nanak, the 16^th century pacifist founder of the Sikh religion. Among the Muslims present, there were both Shia and Sunni imam, and among the Sunni, representatives of the major schools of thought. By their appearance—tall Astrakhan caps, long grey beards, shawls and canes—I did not expect much. Then, one imam after another began to praise the message of peace and tolerance of Guru Nanak as needed in Pakistan at that moment. One, the venerable imam of the Badshahi Mosque in Lahore, believed that "although there is but One God, there are many ways to God." Another likened the presence of so many different believers in one room to a "beautiful bouquet," of different colored flowers to present to God. These were extraordinary statements for Muslim religious leaders to make in a public forum at that time.

It is these kinds of surprises (and there are many others, like the time during a conference when I was seated next to a Muslim woman, who began a discussion with me comparing St. Augustine to Meister Eckhart!)—it was God-willed yet serendipitous meetings like this one that forced me to confront my own prejudices and helped me see things differently. Pakistan changed the way I see God, Jesus, Church, and Mission. "When Christianity meets the Other," as Gavin D’Costa writes, "all sorts of interesting and unpredictable things happen, in which patterns might be discerned; but only after, rather than before an engagement with these complex particulars" (Hawley 1998:94).

I suspect that just such an ability to engage with complex particulars is essential for the acknowledgement and acceptance of difference. Fear of complexity leads to something akin to the Taliban reaction when true believers barricade themselves against any other truth breaking in from the complex particulars of the world outside.

It is from living in a different culture—although my age too has a lot to do with it—that I find myself a little better equipped now at dealing with inconsistencies and am more content living within the mystery of incompleteness. For me, the great moment came many years ago with the sudden realization that God is not who he used to be! Such a moment is captured beautifully by the poet, Denise Levertov:

How confidently the desires

of God are spoken of!

Perhaps God wants

something quite different.

Or nothing, nothing at all (1997:25).

I remember too what now seems a rather bizarre moment during the 1995 general chapter of the Dominicans (when I was moderating!), where there was heated debate on whether or not we can really know the God about whom we preach. Most threatened by the possibility that we might not know were a young Spanish missionary in Taiwan and an old Hungarian who had spent years in slave labor under the Communists.

Muslims and Christians might get along better if each remembered the God neither one knows. While God is concerned about humankind, knows people intimately, and can act in history, God is and remains, for Muslims, transcendent: "No vision can grasp him, but his grasp is over all vision. He is above comprehension, yet is acquainted with all things" (Qur’an 6:103). The Qur’an does not reveal God but makes known God’s will or law for all creation. This is similar to Aquinas’ teaching that God is incomprehensible to us precisely because he is creator of all that is and outside the order of all beings. We can know something about God from his effects, but all that we can safely affirm is what God is not. "We are joined to him as to the unknown."¹ As Justin Martyr put it: "No one can give a name to God who is too great for words, if anyone dares to say that it is possible to do so, he must be suffering from an incurable madness." Both Christian and Muslim confess their inability to know God, yet both, very often, profess to know exactly what God wants. Remembering the mystery is a good corrective to bad behavior—as one very wise Muslim scholar reminded TV listeners shortly after 9/11: "If you limit God, you create God."

Living among Muslims, the Jesus in whom I believe is someone whose uniqueness lies in his unqualified acceptance of others in their differences. One of my brothers reminded me of John’s complaint to Jesus, "We saw someone who is not one of us driving out devils in your name, and because he was not one of us, we tried to stop him." And Jesus rebuked John, "You must not stop him; no one who works a miracle in my name could soon afterward speak evil of me. Anyone who is not against us is for us" (Mk 9:38-40).² This is a shocking inclusiveness—enough, I would imagine, for George Bush to label it "un-Christian"! More than this, Jesus presents all these others who are "not one of us" as models for belief and action: the Syro-Phoenician woman, the Samaritan, lepers, women, publicans, and prostitutes. The Jesus of faith is a surprising and beckoning God, whose Gospel is not behind us but in front of us. He who is Lord of history reveals himself, little by little, in the present—and especially when Christians and Others meet. He is the Word incarnate, the Word spoken, but he is also the Word being spoken now in all the "complex particulars" of our world. Incarnate and being incarnated.

The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews invites us to "keep [our] eyes fixed on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith" (12:1-2). This pioneer is way out ahead of us, elusive, never-caught-up-with, yet leaves trail-markings for us to follow and perfects our faith to the extent we keep our eyes fixed on him and follow. Highly revered in the Sufi tradition of Islam, Jesus is often called "the traveler," or "the one on the road." This Jesus-coming-to-be, this journeying Jesus, beckons us to take the road, not toward certainty, but toward mystery and into deeper faith. It is risky, but profitable, according to some contemporary writers, to rethink the role of Jesus, to "put Jesus in his proper place." We might, for example, try to reverse the order in which we commonly think of the Son and the Spirit in the world. "God first sent the Spirit, and then the Son, in the context of the Spirit’s mission, to bring it to completion." And "since the Spirit is the way that God is present to humankind from the beginning of its emergence, then we Christians are already in relation to women and men of other religious ways."³ It is the Spirit who makes relationship possible and necessary. Cyril of Alexandria, in his commentary on John’s Gospel (Bk II, II), writes about "our unity in the Spirit… we have all received one and the same Spirit, the Holy Spirit, and so, in a certain sense, are mingled with one another and with God."

Some years ago, the French Dominican, Claude Geffré, suggested that the originality of Christianity lay in "the unforeseeable power of the Gospel," and not in its being a "religion." He asked whether it were "possible to be both Buddhist and a Christian or both a Muslim and a Christian" (Geffré 1987:159-180). Given the early coexistence of the Jewish religion and Christian practice, he believed this was not at all an absurd question. I was quite taken with the notion at the time and mentioned these ideas favorably in a letter to the great Islamic scholar and Egyptian Dominican, Pere Anawati. I received an immediate and blistering reply, urging me not to repeat "such nonsense" because some of my assertions looked "really absurd," and he pleaded with me not to add more confusion to what is sufficiently confused in "modern" theology!

It is still, however, quite tantalizing to play with and it opens up many possibilities. If, for example, Christianity is not a religion like other religions, then there is the possibility of its becoming truly incarnate, at-home anywhere, in any culture, with any religion, and never in competition. In this, St. Paul challenges us as much as he did the Corinthians: "Do you really think that you are the source of the Word of God? Or that you are the only people to whom it has come?" (1 Cor 14:36)

Two years ago, in a talk in Rome for Dominican women and men working in Muslim countries, Geffré addressed "the challenge of religious pluralism that invites us to return to the heart of the Christian paradox as the religion of the Incarnation and the religion of the kenosis of God" (2002:15-6). Because of this, Geffré defines Christianity as "a religion of otherness." This is a definition inviting us to return to ourselves, to our true identity, as people for others.

It is an invitation that is provocative and stimulating. Most significant is how this emphasis on the "otherness" of Christianity, even before affecting our theology and how we think about mission, can—and indeed must—affect the way we relate to others. In the present climate this is surely the most important issue.

I have been fascinated in recent years by the thinking of the Jewish philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas, who turned philosophy upside down in his insistence that it is ethics, not metaphysics, that is the first philosophy, so that "being in relationship" is much more basic than simply "being." Levinas is fond of quoting Aloysha Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov: "We are all responsible for everyone else—but I am more responsible than all the others" (Levinas 1996). This is a thought that can "make us tremble," for we are then endlessly obligated to the Other, endlessly responsible for the Other, and the good (in the form of fraternity and discourse) takes precedence over what is. To be oneself is to be for others.

If the essence of the Church is in extending the Incarnation and in being at-home with other religions and cultures, then it can be argued that the Church needs these other religions and cultures for her self-understanding. Perhaps the major task of the Church today is to create what Levinas called "a culture of otherness," a culture of relatedness. (This surely is a good description of the kingdom that Jesus preached.) Levinas describes this culture of otherness as "one in which each constituent, acknowledging its finitude, seeks to recognize and respect as equals those others whose very different narratives and perceptions affect and change our own" (Levinas 1996). Others who believe and act differently are vital for our understanding of what the Church is. I have often wondered: if it is true that Islam, the fastest growing religion, will be the largest in the 21st century, then perhaps the way minority churches live and act in Muslim countries may serve as a model for the world Church on how to live as minority in this new century. Minority is thus not only a witness to the powerless Jesus; it is also a service to the Church coming to be.

In Pakistan, almost every farmer will speak of "my wife, my land, my children, my cow"—and "my enemy"—to describe who he is. The one who is different, and dangerous, is part of his identity. There is a profound truth in this: the Other does enter into our self-definition and determines how we act. This Other comes to us in different guises: as guest, friend, stranger, sometimes enemy. Each meeting is important because each carries the ethical challenge to embrace responsibility—and by being for others, to become oneself. This is, of course, risky. Ancient Persian wisdom advises: Do not welcome elephant trainers into your tent unless you are prepared to entertain elephants.

The biblical criterion for good action is always dependent on how the orphan, the widow and the stranger are treated. Thus, in Deuteronomy:

Leviticus is even more specific:

The biblical appeal is to a shared human experience as providing common ground. St. Paul envisions strangers becoming community because of the experience of what God did in Jesus: "In Christ God was making friends with the world… and entrusted to us the task of making friends" (2 Cor 5:19). This is why he entreats the Romans to "practice hospitality" (12:13). But to be hospitable, to welcome them as guests, strangers have to be looked at as "like us" in needs, experiences, and expectations. "It was not sufficient," writes Christine D. Pohl, "that strangers be vulnerable; hosts had to identify with their experiences of vulnerability and suffering before they welcomed them" (Pohl 1999:97). Perhaps linked to this obligation of hospitality is the awareness of our own culpability as part of a social system which produces strangers, displaced and vulnerable.

The Greek word used in the New Testament for hospitality or welcome (proslambanomai: compound of lambano, "take, receive, possess") is not about taking aside those whose conduct is not in harmony with ours. The verb indicates that we must also "take [them] with us" and "introduce [them] warmly into our fellowship" (Cf. Spicq 1996:195-200). This "taking to oneself" and what it involves is seen in another word Paul uses in Romans (12:13), where "hospitality" is philoxenia. Not just welcoming but "loving the stranger." This is, in fact, the original name of Rublev’s famous icon of the three angels (which we know as the Trinity). The angels are seated around a table with an empty place in the foreground set for the guest/stranger. It is good to link the two names, "love of the stranger" and "the Trinity," because it is in the Trinity that we find the model and motive for "loving the stranger."

"Christianity," as Gregory of Nyssa says, "is the imitation of God’s nature." This finds an echo in Aquinas, who teaches that "we are made, not in the image of the Son, as many think, but in the image of the Trinity." The Trinity is in our very genes. And the Trinity is a mystery of relationship. We are made not for isolation but for interdependence and relatedness and the summit of this relationship is when we reach out to touch each other in mutual healing. Compassion is feeling for the other, reaching out, stretching, touching, and healing. These seem to be necessary components of the Gospel paradigm: "Jesus felt compassion for him, stretched out his hand, touched him and said… Be clean" (Mk 1:41). In the Gospel Jesus is always reaching out to those on the fringes, to the pagan, and ritually unclean, touching them and becoming himself unclean. But this is Jesus’ country. He himself comes from outside the camp, ministers to those outside the camp, and tells his disciples it is there they will find him.

Jesus begins his mission in Galilee of the Nations, Galilee of the foreigners, half-Gentile in population, half-pagan in cult, a land populated by people considered suspect by the institution in Jerusalem: "Can anything good come from Nazareth?" (Jn 1:46) Yet after the Resurrection, Jesus tells his disciples, "I will go ahead of you to Galilee" (Mt 26:32). Even more intriguing is Jesus’ command to the women: "Go and tell my brothers to set out for Galilee, there they will see me" (Mt 28:10). There—not in Jerusalem, not in Rome. There, outside the camp.

It is outside the camp, in all the Galilees that surround us, where we discover what Mission is: to be in mission is to live outside the camp. And to discover with others what God is really about. But this knowledge comes at a price. The image of going outside the camp in order to meet God is found again at the end of the Bible, in the Letter to the Hebrews: "Jesus suffered outside the gate to sanctify the people with his blood. Let us go to him, then, outside the camp and bear the abuse he suffered" (13:12-13).

I was once asked by a visitor from a Dutch agency how long I planned on remaining in Pakistan. Without thinking, I said, "Until I get tired of dying." My answer surprised even me but I realized the truth of it as soon as the words left my lips. Journeying with Jesus outside the camp is dangerous. We go outside the camp to die.

"It might be possible," writes my patron, St. John Chrysostom, "for a person to love without risking danger—but that is not the case with us."

That is not the case with any of us—outside the camp.