The Extravagance of God

Jeannette Cooperman interviews Prof. Lamin Sanneh, author of Summoned From the Margin about his conversion from Muslim to Catholicism.

A little boy grows up Muslim, falls in love with Catholicism, and winds up one of the world’s foremost scholars on both traditions.

Lamin Sanneh grew up in Gambia, where years were measured by the number of rains you’d seen. He carried the blood of the nyanchos, an ancient African royal line. His grandfather was an Islamic scholar. His father had many wives. Lonely, thoughtful, restless in a way he didn’t understand, Sanneh discovered Christianity and asked to convert, to his family’s chagrin, when he was a teenager. The Methodists stalled; the Catholics were initially reluctant. Finally, just before he left Africa to study in the U.S., he persuaded a minister to baptize him. Years later, he was accepted into the Catholic Church.

Today, Sanneh is the D. Willis James Professor of Missions and World Christianity and professor of history at Yale Divinity School. Pope John Paul II appointed him to the Pontifical Commission of the Historical Sciences; Pope Benedict XVI asked him to serve on the Pontifical Commission on Religious Relations with Muslims. He’s written a long list of acclaimed books and articles about Islam and Christianity.

Sanneh writes easily, his prose mixing formal elegance with a dry sense of humor. But only recently, at the urging of his children, did he write a more personal book, a memoir titled Summoned From the Margin. It’s the story of his conversion.—Jeannette Cooperman

 

Would you rather have been a cradle Catholic?

I have no way to know! As I wrote in the book, I basically stumbled into my own life, with very little planning or foreknowledge of what to do. As all my childhood was about doing what there was to do, we were never encouraged to dream about anything.

Do you see your journey as hard-won, as predestined and inevitable, or as random?

Oh, I don’t see it as random. I see it as embracing the fullness of life with all the challenges that go with it. This is what I’ve learned: There is nothing you get in life as a blessing that is not also a mixed blessing. We are never absolved from a feeling of responsibility for our life.

What were your earliest childhood lessons—and were there any you decided to unlearn?

My father was pretty iconoclastic, very cut and dried; he saw no use indulging in mystery. We never grew up with images in our home. My mother was more traditional; she would consult diviners. She also had a tremendous sense of society—that people belong together. I remember as boys, my friends and I teased a man who’d had a mental breakdown and begun to behave in eccentric ways—my mother was very upset with me. Something I felt didn’t help me was thinking of non-Muslims as half human beings. On that scale, Christians came out the worst!

And yet you persisted.

I grew up thinking of God as a stern God of justice. When I learned about Christianity, I became aware for the first time that God is a God of love. I felt drawn by that power.

How did your conversion change you?

I was pretty shy and timid socially, but when I had that experience that day, I suddenly felt unburdened I felt that I was not alone in this world, and my thoughts were not just private thoughts locked up in my head. There was a reason I was having those thoughts and feelings, and that reason is right here and now, and I must yield to it. My friends said I became friendly in a very extroverted way. I really felt almost born again. I felt I was given a new sense of life.

“Born again” has become a cliché, but what did those words mean to you?

When I came to America, my evangelical friends started quizzing me: had I found the Lord? Was I born again? I was literally puzzled. The overconfidence with which my evangelical friends expressed themselves was so alien to how I read the apostles. These apostles were coming from a Jewish background. Reverence for the name of God was inscribed into their very being. My evangelical friends just threw around this language like sound bites. I thought, “I think they are using language as a tool to achieve a certain end.” You don’t “birth” yourself. Somebody else does it for you. God is the one giving us second birth.

For me, conversion didn’t come with the idea that I had the answer to life’s questions and others didn’t. No, no, no. I just felt humbled by the experience, and now I could understand when people were kind to me and did me favors. I knew what to do with that. People were not just there to fulfill my needs. They were put there by God to teach me something. Since that day, in every situation I’ve been in, every country I’ve lived in, I’ve always asked myself, “Now what is it that God wants to teach you here?”

What’s been the hardest lesson so far?

I was in college in Virginia in the ’60s, at the height of the civil rights movement, and I used to walk to Jamestown every Saturday and sit there and think of the first colony in Virginia and think, “God, why did you send me here? This is bewildering and frustrating and sometimes scary.” I absolutely was convinced that God wanted to teach me but America was not the place God wanted to do it! And I remember at the end of the year deciding to return to Africa and go to Europe for college—but it didn’t happen. I got a call to transfer to Union College in the north. So God foiled my plan.

Religion is not license to preach, to be complacent, and to be smug and self-satisfied. Religion is a way to be vulnerable and open, even when it’s not convenient.

How did you teach yourself about your new faith?

The two books I read immediately were the Acts of the Apostles and St. John’s gospel—and then the epistle of Paul to the Romans. The idea of a God of love was so revolutionary for me that at first, it upset me. I read avidly, as much as I could. I read commentaries on Scripture that I could find in the supermarket. There was no library that carried Christian books, but the local supermarket was run by the British.  And when I read about a God of love, I felt I should go back to my family, not to preach, but to put my body where my mouth was. My father was stunned. He’d never said to me, as his son, that he loved me. This idea of love was so alien to my Muslim upbringing. But once I embraced it, everything made perfect sense. God’s love is what enables us to accept our humanity with all its inadequacies and not be cynical or despairing, because God is not niggardly or miserly. I did not have to commit huge acts of faithfulness for God to approve of me. Every little thing counted.

Converts are famously rigid, far more zealous than those born into a faith—but it doesn’t sound like you were.

For me, conversion was almost a two-way process. I embraced Christianity, but I also felt compelled to go back to my father and my relatives and say to them, “I love you in a way I never really could have as a Muslim.” That’s really the logic of the gospel. I couldn’t embrace it honestly and with any credibility if I fell short on that front. I don’t know if that’s typical—it was a pretty lonely experience for me becoming a Christian. But my idea of God growing up was a stern God of justice. The idea of God as a God of love would have been almost offensive to the Muslims I knew. It’s too subjective.

As a young man, you saw Christians drunk and wondered, “If religion does not avert wild behavior, can it save?” What’s your answer now?

What I understand now is that when religion becomes a function of one’s psychology, a form of self-motivation, there comes a point when one becomes tired of being motivated all the time, and when that moment comes, the flip side of that is to become somewhat bored, and then you hang on to other things to try and fill the vacant spaces in your life, and it can become quite desperate. If one doesn’t deal with the question of the ultimate purpose of life, then the ad hoc arrangements we put in place to deal with daily living will sap our energy. As I know very well from doing my prayers in boarding school. I started to think, “Maybe there is a way to cheat, to cut corners, to jump the queue.” One year I thought, “Oh, I’m tired of this fasting.” I drank a glass of water and I felt so horrible, because the choice became “Go on drinking water and abandon this fast or stop drinking and fast,” and since I wasn’t sure what God was thinking, it was a pretty uncomfortable position to be in.

Religion isn’t about indulging us. It’s about finding our fulfillment, certainly, but the way to find our fulfillment is to do the work of God. And God gives us back ourselves in a way we never knew ourselves before. For me, that’s the secret of life. Why should I get up every day? Because there is a reason for which I was made, and the more I take on the challenges of the day, the more that reality hits home. Religion has to save and challenge us at the same time, or else we are left to our own devices, and that’s a hit-or-miss situation.

You had to fight hard to get baptized. I think I might have given up.

At the time, a friend said, “It just shows your faith is genuine, and all of these things you are suffering will be rewarded. I remember resisting that idea. There is nothing you can do to earn the forgiveness of God. Everything you need to do to earn that, God has already done for you. There is no price you can pay for your faith that is greater than the price God paid on the cross, and therefore you should count yourself privileged because God has accepted you. Just that fact, I remember that hitting me very hard. So when I looked at how reluctant they were to accept me, I can honestly say that it did not affect me in the least, except that I wanted the church to know how much it meant to me to discover that there is a God of love. All I wanted was to be instructed in the faith. If the church won’t do it, I thought, God will find a way.

You did finally manage to get baptized, and years later, you became Catholic. Why bother with that additional step?

There was nothing in life I wanted more. It’s like the roots of your primal consciousness. It really brought back for me the Easter when I converted to Christianity. As if God were saying to me, “Now you are home.” All this wandering, all these years… So many times I would meet someone, and they would say—and I have no idea why—“You should go to the Catholic church.” All that came tumbling back.

The old catechism defined Catholicism as the one true faith, but most contemporary theologians refuse to privilege Catholicism as superior to other faiths. You didn’t rest until you became Catholic, though. Did you see Catholicism as closer to the truth in some way?

Well, Catholicism is about truth in this way: that ultimately only truth is worthy of itself. Catholicism brings that home to us on the basis of reason. I would argue that other religions have this same moral spark, spread out amidst them, that kindles the quest for moral truth. Catholicism thematicizes that, brings it to the surface. But it’s there—hidden, tacit, unspoken, and latent—in all religions, because of the way God made us. So I don’t see Catholicism to be in conflict with other religions. I am aware of pre-Vatican II, tridentate Catholic attitudes, but they all spoke about this truth, this light of reason that illuminates the human heart and our moral quest for meaning and relationship. One of the great encyclicals of Pope John Paul II is Fides et Ratio, Faith and Reason. This is what I was feeling for as a Muslim. I didn’t want a religion narrowly defined that was exclusive. I wanted this vision of a universal humanity that is grounded in faith and reason. And Catholicism offers us that possibility.

You were surprised by all the biblical proof-texts used by Christians.

Yeah, sometimes I think my Christian friends are more Muslim than the Muslims. This reliance on Scripture, on quoting verses—that’s what Muslims do very well! When the pilgrims arrived in 1621, not one of them came with a copy of the King James Bible. It was not until 1630 that the King James Bible made its way to America. I don’t want to give this argument to Muslims, but Muslims say there is a little bit of Islam in every one of us. We want texts that are fixed, immutable, that offer us assurance and a guarantee of what is true. For me, that is not what I understand Christianity to be. The New Testament is a witness to the Christ event. For many modern Christians, the Bible is at the center of their faith. This displacement of Jesus with the Bible may also be a reflection of the Enlightenment. In the early 19^th century, when you asked people what religion was, they would say, “Religion is what people do.” After the middle of the 19^th century, with the discovery of manuscripts and new texts and scriptures, religion became a text, a book. It was no longer a lived experience. And Christianity became very text-bound. If we are a religion of the incarnation, we should become more community-minded, more involved with others.

What spiritual practice is hardest for you?

Daily devotion, which I used to do as a Muslim several times a day. As a Catholic, you become a little lazy. I say, “Oh, the lectionary’s too heavy, I can’t carry it around.” I found a shorter version, so I bought that, and had no excuse. But we are all so busy.

What aspect of devotion do you find most delightful?

The fellowship of being with other Catholics—in the sacrament of Eucharist, that’s the most meaningful way, that’s the apex. But the sacrament empowers you; it doesn’t leave you disengaged. You have to renew your commitment. You must give. Americans are so good at this idea of giving. I maintain that as a religious practice: I try to divide my giving between Catholic and secular causes. That’s something I learned very early in my Christian life: We belong together. That secular world too, God has made, even if it does not acknowledge Him.

Having endured famine, what’s your feeling about fasting as a spiritual practice?

So much of this is a function of our minds. It’s what you expect to happen that most grabs your attention when it doesn’t. Fasting that’s self-discipline and self-denial is different from famine, because fasting is something you do to yourself, and famine is something that is done for you. And because you have no control or power over it, it exposes your helplessness and that is a frightening position to be in. I didn’t say in the book, but I remember as a boy, age 8 or 9, going to the funerals of friends who died from the famine. I grew up when I wasn’t screened from the realities and the ruthlessness of life. you don’t try to put an ornament around life and disguise it with a façade. You are in immediate contact with all of life. The religious nature of fasting made it very different, because even if you die from kidney failure—and that happened, during Ramadan—people always say, “You become a martyr to God. God will reward you.” Life and death had a religious understanding built into them. Famine doesn’t. Famine is castigation.

You write that the Catholic church is free of historical baggage in Africa and other areas of vibrant growth—what do you mean?

It’s free of the Christendom complex, the complex of the Crusades. This new Catholicism is not about defining enemies and heretics, building walls and boundaries, excluding and intimidating. This new Catholicism is about being hospitable, welcoming, encouraging. I say to my American friends that Catholic bishops in Africa and Asia are not convening synods to attack enemies, yet they are lumbered with the guilt complex of a time when the Catholic church was embroiled in that kind of business. That’s why I think we need a new kind of leadership. The role of the laity in the expansion of the Catholic Church in Africa is unprecedented. In 1960 there were 23 million Catholics in Africa. Today there are more than 100 million. There are more Catholics today in the world who are post-Vatican II Catholics than pre-Vatican II Catholics. It’s a different reality. We don’t have the complex of Europe about its heritage. It is—not just optimism—Christian hope is the building block in the new church.

So many intellectuals mock religious faith—does that bother you?

I had an English friend who was very anti-Christian. He said he was a devout Englishman and a religious skeptic. I said, “Yeah, culture begins to fill the space that religion normally fills, and gives us confidence in ourselves. The problem with that is, it’s the way you grow nationalism, and you become chauvinistic.” You can’t glorify your culture without trampling on the culture of others. I think my secular friends—and I have many here at Yale who still like my company!—that’s the challenge they face. I still feel there is a moral vacuum that has to be filled. If you don’t fill it with religion, you have to look for substitutes—but that’s a very dangerous way to do religion.

How does reverence play out differently in Islam and Christianity?

Reverence in Islam—the Qur’an uses many words to describe piety or fear. Fear probably comes closest to defining reverence. It is best expressed by Al-Ghazali, who describes the quest of the religious life as a quest to avert the anger and the punishment of God. He wrote a little poem called “Blemishes of the Soul” in which he carries on a dialogue with himself about obedience and disobedience, truth and folly, safety and danger. At the end of the poem he raises his hands up to God and says whether we make it is a matter of luck. Wow. And that is the closest we come in Islam to say an Augustinian kind of personal inquiry into faith.

Now, at the other end of the spectrum is the great poet Rumi, and for Rumi, the fear is replaced by love of God, but if you notice, in Rumi, love is a human attribute, so Rumi explains it in terms of physical pleasure. Which is exactly the problem Al-Ghazali tried to solve: How do we get away from ourselves unless God can help us? Is there another reality even more real, who is God, who is grace? Al-Ghazali didn’t know, but he and Rumi were interested in a kind of ethical system: how do we live as human beings?

Reverence in Islam really plays with the fact that God is hidden and unseen but ever-present in terms of taking account of what you are doing or not doing. It’s like Franz Kafka’s inquisitor. You don’t know the crime for which you are being pursued.

For me, reverence in Christianity is grounded in the fundamental fact that the human being is created in the image and resemblance of God, and therefore our reverence for God is not reverence for something alien to which we are as human beings. Philosophers mock the idea that the divine would ever condescend to come to our level, with the inadequacies of time, which brings corruption, and space, which brings contamination. But when St. Francis talks about the poor in Catholic thinking, there is almost this reverence for the poor, and for the sick and the lame—this kind of reverence which is really of a piece with the dignity of the human being. So reverence is not alien, it’s not aloof, it’s not remote, it’s not something unknown to our nature.

I notice you are very careful with your theological language…

This is something I learned very early on—and Islam taught me this, and for this I am very, very grateful. There are two ways we can use language. One is to frame it in such a way that we think we capture who God is. We are very good at this way of crafting language, thanks to the Enlightenment, and for those of us who are professional academics, that’s how we earn our living. But there is another way in which language functions: language as a frame so that God can capture us. So that we become aware of our proximity to God, so that the presence of God becomes the reality in which we see ourselves. When I became a Christian and I went to church and I read in the liturgy about confessing, “Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief”—when I saw that in the context of the liturgy, said at the altar where Christ gave Himself for us, I thought, “This is the only place where those things are not contradictions. I believe, but boy, oh boy, there is so much unbelief in me that only God can help me.” That is why worship becomes the place where we entrust ourselves to God.

What’s your favorite overlap between Islam and Christianity?

Muslims declare in prayer, “God than whom there is nothing greater.” When I hear them say that in Arabic, I think, “That is so true, if you only knew that.” You get radicals who say they are going to kill to honor this God.

At one point you considered focusing on jihad studies. You’d be on all the news networks every day if you had!

Yeah, I know. There are certain things you can do. I’ve just finished a historical manuscript called Beyond Jihad: Looking at the Pacifist Impulse in Islam and making the argument that you cannot love or worship God if you are afraid or are compelled against your will. I’ve looked at examples of Muslim communities that rejected jihad because they felt it was not compatible with their faith. One of the surprising things about Islam in the modern age is you have a theocratic system of government in a place like Iran. That is completely unprecedented in the history of Islam. Why was that possible in our time? I wondered whether the nation-state, which has not worked very well in many parts of the world—whether the failure of the nation-state has provoked a kind of extreme reaction to replace the nation-state with an ideology, in order to try to save the nation-state.

The Catholic moral project is so important. In the 21^st century things could get even worse than they did in the 20^th century, and I’m not sure that we should pay that price anymore. Pius XII gave his first encyclical on this problem. He foresaw a time when Europe without God was going to imperil the rest of the world. I cannot talk like this with my Catholic friends, because they say, “Oh, you want to bring back theocracy.” And I say, “That does not keep me awake at night. That is never going to happen!”

What about your values, character, world view, is African? What is Muslim? What is Catholic?

From the African side, it is the sense of kinship, of belonging, of being part of the human family. That’s very, very strong in me. When I was growing up, my mother and my grandmother taught me that every stranger I met could be an angel in disguise. So I was not afraid of strangers. Kindness to strangers is one way God measures our faithfulness. That’s very African. It’s very alien to me, thinking of religion as dividing people.

The Muslim side of me is this sense of the utter transcendence of God. I find it difficult to engage in the sort of theology called contextualization, where religion is reduced to cultural forms only. Al-Ghazali put it very well. He said that you cannot prove God who is greater by an analogy that is lesser. He said for philosophy it’s important to make God accountable to reason, but for theology, for a person of faith, it’s important to make reason accountable to God. You don’t throw out either, you just change the relationship.

And my Catholicism? It is—how shall I put it? Karl Rahner talks about the extravagance of the grace of God. For me it comes out in the epistles of Paul to the Romans: He talks about God’s generosity. Those phrases completely upset my world—the idea of this extravagance, this overgenerous God.