I’m not a very religious person. Other than going to weddings and funerals and occasionally visiting a cathedral as a tourist, I don’t think I’ve been in a church for religious purposes for 30 years.
When I was a kid, however, I went to my share of Sunday school classes, and so I’ve picked up at least a passing knowledge of the main Bible stories. One of my favorites was always the story of Abraham, and how he almost sacrificed his own son to God.
Abraham’s faith in God was legendary. No one believed in or trusted and loved God as much as Abraham did.
He had two sons, Ishmael and Isaac. Ishmael, for various reasons, had been banished from the household, and so Isaac was the only son living under the roof.
One day God decided to test Abraham’s faith. God sent a series of dreams to Abraham, and in those dreams, He told Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac.
We all know that a parent’s instinct to protect his child is easily one of the strongest instincts a human has. So for God to order Abraham to kill his own son was pretty severe. And what’s even more severe, what’s over the top fanatical, is that Abraham said yes.
So Abraham took his son Isaac up to the top of a nearby mountain and laid out his son for the sacrifice. Moments before Abraham did the dirty deed, moments before he plunged a knife into his son’s body, God sent an angel and the angel said to Abraham, “Stop, stop, God is just testing you, you don’t actually have to kill your son. Let your son go. Here’s a ram, kill this ram instead.”
Growing up as a kid, reading this story in the Bible and learning about it in Sunday school, I figured the story of Abraham was a Christian story. Of course, later, I learned how to put two and two together, and I realized that this story, one of the first stories in the first book of the Old Testament, was a Jewish story long before Christianity even existed.
But still, for me, this story has always remained a Christian story.
Fast forward 20 years or so, and I found myself in Turkey. In my first few months in Turkey, I got to observe the Kurban Bayram (“Feast of the Sacrifice”) holiday. This is one of the holiest holidays on the Muslim calendar. When you turn on the TV and see millions of Muslim pilgrims descending on Mecca wearing white caps and white robes and sandals and converging on a stone square to throw pebbles at a pillar, that’s Kurban Bayram.
The first time I encountered this holiday face to face, I learned something else about it — they slaughter sheep. Not in a polite, sanitized, shrink-wrapped sort of way. In a bloody, violent, gruesome sort of way.
An entire family will walk down to the market together, buy a live lamb, and take it back to their home. Right there, in front of their own house, they’ll grab the lamb by the nose, tilt its head back to expose the neck, and slit its throat right there in the courtyard.
I saw this going on and I thought, “Oh my god, what kind of country have I just moved to? What kind of people do something like this and call it holy?” They’re killing an innocent lamb with their bare hands, and calling it a celebration. Who are these people?
Well, I found out they don’t call it the “Feast of the Sacrifice” because they are killing a lamb and eating it. They call it the “Feast of the Sacrifice” because they are celebrating that Abraham’s devotion to God was so strong he would sacrifice his own son.
They are celebrating the exact same story I grew up with as a kid. For their holiest of holidays, they have chosen to celebrate a story I grew up with and thought Christianity owned.
When I learned that, it set the tone for my 6 years in Turkey. This is the tone it set:
If you imagine the entire human experience as a pie chart, the things that make us different are a tiny piece of that pie. Maybe 5% at most. On the other hand, the things we have in common, the things that make us the same, make up the other 95% of the pie.
And yet we humans focus on, obsess over, that 5%. We allow that 5% to be what drives our actions in the world. We allow it to be what determines how we treat each other.
What we really should be doing is allowing the 95% to determine how we act in this world. Live the 95%.