“What is the purpose of interreligious dialogue?” asks Abraham Joshua Heschel:
It is neither to flatter nor to refute one another, but to help one another, to share insight and learning, to cooperate in academic ventures on the highest scholarly level and, what is even more important, to search in the wilderness for wellsprings of devotion, for treasures of stillness, for the power of love and care for man. What is urgently needed are ways of helping one another in the terrible predicament of here and now by the courage to believe that the word of the Lord endures forever as well as here and now; to cooperate in trying to bring about a resurrection of sensitivity, a revival of conscience; to keep alive the divine sparks in our souls; to nurture openness to the spirit of the Psalms, reverence for the words of the prophets, and faithfulness to the Living God.
If a loud restaurant overwhelms you, the sound of pots and pans crashing send you into a rage, or you find a roller coaster at breakneck speed to be oddly relaxing, then perhaps you recognize yourself on some spectrum or another. The sensory world is a weird mix of human bodies, each of us moving around in a singular flesh envelope. We traverse the rooms and streets we like and we hate, turning the little knobs of the world’s sensation by our choices of what to wear, how to walk, what to include and what to shut out. Augmented by headphones or a hat pulled low, decked in seamless socks or technical Lycra or fuzzy sheepskin, wrapped tightly or loosely, rocking or fidgeting or chewing our nails—each body makes a stream of conscious and unconscious choices, knitting together a habitable personal universe minute by minute by minute by minute. When I see Stephen mapping the world in lines, breaking its space to tame it, all I can think is how perceptively he’s externalized an invisible but fundamentally human need: to build bridges that temporarily edit the shapes, or sounds, or sights of the world. And I wonder: Who else is looking for lines, a little lost in space? Who else is seeking a way?