I’ve been trying to write this article for a week. I thought it would be as simple as “Hello, you might have met me before, this is what I’m doing” kind of quick post. What I am doing: over the next couple of weeks I am going to be posting a series of interviews with religious leaders and congregants of different religions from the metro Detroit area.

Why? Well, that’s a complicated answer.

I’ve been trying to pin down when I first became interested in interfaith relations. I can look back to a couple of years ago picking up a book of poetry by the Sufi poet Rumi. The way he spoke of God was so beautiful and different from what I had heard before.
<blockquote>This lion of God
watches over me,
I sing as he roars.</blockquote>
(From “I’ve Got You Now” from <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Hush-Dont-Say-Anything-God/dp/0875730841/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1332704201&amp;sr=8-1"><em>Hush, Don’t Say Anything to God: Passionate Poems by Rumi</em></a>.)

I can think back to the World Religion class that I took a few semesters back that I inhaled. I think back to when I flew from Miami to Detroit and asked lots of questions to a Baha’i gentleman I was sitting next to. I have been in multiple workshops about comparative religion. And this is only the short list; world religion has captured my interest for a long time.

As I have written about before, the environment I grew up in was very isolated from and very ignorant to other religions. At the end of high school I had my own journey with disillusionment/migration from one church to another and I started to see how hurtful my previous views of other religions had been.

I know how important, devastating, crucial, life-changing and transformational religion had been in my life, and people of other faiths feel that way about theirs, why would I brush them off?

When I was younger I was always told to go to a Christian university because if I went to any kind of secular university I would surely be barraged with professors who would try to dissuade me from my faith, and therefore weren’t supposed to give more than a passing glance at learning about other religions because they would dissuade me too.

“If that were true, that means that your faith was not very strong to begin with,” Bob Cornwall, pastor of Central Woodward Christian Church who leads an interfaith group, said to me when I asked him “How do you deal with people who think that you are losing your faith by participating in interfaith activities?” (You’ll get to hear more from Bob soon.)

The things that I have learned about other religions do not weaken my faith but they <em>enhance it</em>.

When I learned about the ninety-nine names that Muslims have for God, they made me think of my God. Would I have thought to refer to my creator as "The Repeatedly Forgiving" or "The Irresistible, The Compeller" or "The All-Embracing"? No, but by getting outside of the traditional nomenclature that my religious background thrusts upon me, I was able to find new descriptions and a new way of seeing my own God. My God is the one who is the repeatedly forgiving, who is all-embracing according to John 3:16, and is irresistible and compels me to follow him.

I have a deep personal belief that all people want the same basic things. They want to be: heard, seen, understood, loved, represented (fought for/have an ally) and accepted. Inside each person, all of humanity, each religion is a way of finding those things and giving those things to others.

If you haven’t watched the TV series LOST, there's a point where after enough division, the main character, Jack, gives this beautiful speech and says "We either live together, or die alone." It's not a perfect analogy, but if we start are able to start seeing each other as people seeking love as a humans first, there is a lot more we have in common. We’ll have a lot more to appreciate, a lot more to learn, and a lot more to express and explore with each other.

If we can learn about each other and hear each other’s stories we won’t have to be afraid anymore. We’ll be able to see each other as neighbors, as doctors, as teachers, as friends, as real estate agents, and not as terrorists, liars, or aliens. We’ll be able to see each other as God sees us: his beautiful creation.

The point of this series is to call out what is good in each of these faith perspectives because at the core of all of them is love. I want to find the expressions of their journeys that bring meaning to my journey and to your journey.

This allows us to give more grace, redemption and honor to each other as humans without having to agree on logistics or trying to get everyone to believe in one faith.

After all, everyone is created and born long before they have a religious affiliation. If we start to view each other as humans <em>first</em>, it takes the teeth of these heated, damaging religious conversations and redeems us all.

<em>First up we will hear from Carl, the Baha'i gentleman from Detroit, Michigan.</em>

<em>Photo credit: Flickr / <a href="Why It All Matters" target="_blank">macisaguy</a></em>