[easter] and the path to islam

Catholicism meets Islam

Today is western Easter and the majority will either enjoy the long weekend or will be into the bunnies and eggs.

The key to Easter is not so much Good Friday, as any scholar knows and every child used to know three decades ago but Easter Sunday. That it was Sunday at all is a moot point and to me - an irrelevant one.

Just as the old arguments of consubstantiation v transubstantiation should never ever a be a basis for schism, just as the Great Schism was nothing but a power play of patriarchs, so divisions within Christendom are stupid - especially as we can't definitively know the finer details.

We know the main idea is that there is One G-d and go from there.

My bona fides. I was christened and baptised as a child into the Church of England. I am a WASP and one of the most pernicious kind - I was public school educated. So it's pretty clear where I'm coming from.

My father stood on the banks of the Jordan once with the Armed Forces and in later years told me that on one side was desert, with a few encampments of Arabs and on the other - fertile irrigated land. That had a profound effect on him and my views on Jews were not negative, although the Hassidic took some getting used to. I have seen fanaticism in both our camps.

Just like everyone else, my views on Muslims were of the 911 variety until I began to do some research and started putting aside the more vehement of my "colleagues" and trying to see it from the other side.

In the past few weeks I've been able to see another side and much of what the west alleges - I know, at least in a non-Sharia state, to be just not so. I live in a Muslim republic, speak with them every day, work for them and this last contact has been a real eye-opener.

We were discussing the ills of the world and found we agreed on virtually everything and both of us were arguing for a return to some sort of code you come back to by yourself which orders these things. I'll tell you now I'm in the process of learning all this and the reason for much of the daily ritual and so on.

When I said we have to do something to reverse this moral degradation we see around us, she answered, "That's called jihad, James."

Of course I countered that I don't see 911 jihad as such a good thing and she showed what it could also mean, shorn of its hypersensitivity. And also of course, I was dealing here with an educated speaker of English who was able to put what it was like at grass roots level.

The key problem, even if we're at one on the social issues, loosely described as "faith, hope and charity", is the question of the redemptive power of the resurrection from the dead.

If you are to say it is not possible to be resurrected, then you are denying an aspect of G-d's power. I mean, is he omnipotent or not? If he is - then such a thing is always going to be possible. With Him, if you are a believer, all things must be possible.

So why the problem of the Nazarene Carpenter's Son? Why couldn't He have been resurrected?

You can have multi-faith conferences, rapprochement, peace and mutual understanding till the cows come home but this assertion of the resurrection is always going to be the stumbling block.

It's dashed inconvenient and it doesn't go away.