I came across these words by Emmanuel Katongole and Chris Rice—from their 2008 book entitled Reconciling All Things—the day after Pope Francis raised the Christian practice of foot-washing to new heights. No doubt you’ve heard, or seen, the news. In an astonishing literal piece of leadership, with even more symbolic potency, Pope Francis took Holy Week to the streets: the Casal del Marmo detention center in Rome—where he washed the feet of twelve prisoners, including two women, including a Serbian Muslim woman.

Naturally the media buzz—religious and otherwise—has already faded into the next big thing. But I wanted to dwell on this big thing, a small thing really, because of how it might serve generally as a culture-making artifact, particularly in the arena of Christian-Muslim relations, with reference to the subject of power. God knows, and God help us all: In a current global context framed by urgencies, ignorance and fear between Christians and Muslims, we must audaciously create new artifacts in our textured, often tortured, relationship.

Make no mistake: what Pope Francis did on the Thursday within the first Holy Week of his promising papacy was an extraordinary act of power. Only, this power was unlike the dominant disposition attached to the kind of power we often see displayed so loudly and boldly in the world we’ve come to know. It was very much not according to politics as usual. In fact, this power ran severely counter the power desired and often expressed by the visible Church itself—Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant (including, with a notable mention: American Evangelicals). And it certainly cut against the grain of the power desired and often expressed by some Muslim-majority countries and their under-girding and motivating Islamic religious leadership.

I thought: Can you imagine, in a moment, a US president washing the feet of the president of the Islamic Republic of Iran? That would be a cold day in hell, right? For that matter, can you imagine the Grand Mufti of Egypt washing the feet of the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, whose name begins with Katharine? Not a chance in hell. Both imaginings are absolutely politically scandalous—to say nothing of the direct or associated religious implications.

In his 2010 book To Change the World James Davison Hunter has reminded us—from Christians to Muslims to the wildly popular “nones”—that for those with power, powerlessness is a fiction. Hunter makes the case that divestment of power, in this case, is not possible. On the other hand, re-appropriating power is. We reclaim God’s original mandate for humanity, Hunter says, when we “use power in the world in ways that reflect God’s intentions.”

In the Christian vision this is precisely why Pope Francis’ action was, in the end, so powerful: it was full of (brimming over with) rightly-intentioned and justly-expressed power. Power indeed had happened among the powerless—but in the name of genuine service to others, from love, and without distinction on any basis whatsoever. Put that image on your church or mosque bulletin board and encourage your community to live by it, even for a week.

During his homily to the prisoners at Casal del Marmo, the pope said that “among us the one who is highest up must be at the service of others.” This is, of course, a non-worldly tables-turning image cut from the same cloth as Jesus’ famous and shocking statement before Pilate: “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36). Jesus’ orientation toward the usual politics of power was defined by an otherworldly power: serving and loving the other, without any distinction on any basis whatsoever. It is supposed to be the definitive Christian way to live—and the model Christian way to lead in a tense, hostile and divisive world.

Significantly, Pope Francis’ hands-on act was equally as powerful because of how he re-appropriated his unique power in an unprecedented and unbecoming manner.

According to custom, popes do not wash the feet of non-Catholics or women. In one motion, then, the man who became the first pope from the Americas, or from the Jesuits, broke with custom regarding the foot-washing ritual—and during the most sacrosanct week in the Christian liturgical calendar. That one of the prisoners happened to be a Muslim woman can’t help but lead the symbolism into uncharted territory. Of Christian witness in our time and place, the renowned South African theologian David Bosch has said: “[Christians] should…with creative but responsible freedom, prolong the logic of the ministry of Jesus.”

Pope Francis’ logic of becoming the servant of everyone dignified this Muslim woman, a Serb. And by offering grace to her and blessing her through the act of foot-washing the pope was ministering to her multifaceted marginal identity—in the lengthy shadow, no less, of Christian-Muslim Balkan brokenness. Earlier in the day, the pope had preached to priests that they needed to get out, "to the outskirts." "It is not in soul-searching or constant introspection that we encounter the Lord,” the pope said. By receiving and encountering this Muslim woman, we can only interpret him to mean—by this logic—that he was receiving and encountering Jesus Christ.

So as essential as inter-religious dialogue and other such initiatives are for our historical moment, here the pope used his particular power to model the priority of actual relations over conversations or discussions. Not to mention: he highlighted deeds before words, in the Franciscan tradition. Here, too, there is a logic.

Not to be outdone by the unprecedented, Pope Francis also did the remarkably unbecoming thing. I say “unbecoming” mostly related to our own human, cultural and religious expectations surrounding power and its actions. No matter how much we sincerely appreciate and even advocate a humble and self-giving spirit within our leaders, more often than not we would still prefer our leaders to stand up tall and wave from a distance, not to kneel down and serve from up-close.

Before the election of Pope Benedict’s successor, David Gushee, professor and director of the Center for Theology and Public Life at Mercer University, passionately urged: “The new pope needs to offer a renewal of evangelical-gospel Christianity.” I dare say: there it is—with a deep and wide flourish. In this small leadership act we received a glimpse into the good news of Jesus Christ, of what he brings to earth from on high, of what he offers to us from himself freely, of how he asks us to belong and to participate in the mission of God for the sake of (for the blessing of) the nations.

What would it honestly and authentically look like for Christian communities to kneel down before their Muslim neighbors, and vice versa? What does it mean to serve each other from up-close—in Indonesia, Nigeria or Great Britain? For both Muslims and Christians, depending on the context, what is the analogous thing to cleaning each other’s feet, tenderly wiping them, kissing them, and then whispering words of peace to the other? My guess is, in Pakistan as in America it would be rather unbecoming.

Then again, we desperately need unprecedented, unbecoming artifacts in leadership along this fractured, ancient landscape.

Which brings me, ironically, to a question that often disturbs American sensibilities: What do we make of the way some Muslim women cover themselves?

Undoubtedly, since Eden, the boiling question of how women’s clothing communicates what it communicates, and in what context, is one overflowing with moral, religious and political nuance. Take two recent high-profile examples.

In May, on a “CBS This Morning” appearance, Ann Romney’s choice of blouse became an occasion for wide-ranging analysis: High marks for authentic individuality? Low marks for economic insensitivity? Why is she contrasting her husband’s more staid personality? Meanwhile, during a concert in June in Istanbul, Madonna’s “Material Girl” was on full display—albeit with less material. The deliberate exposure of her breast during the song “Human Nature” could be seen, I suppose, as equal parts theological and artistic provocation.

But try as they might, neither Mrs. Romney nor Madonna herself can relieve the social pressure emanating from the ever-vexed wardrobe of the Muslim woman. No one stands at the intersection of covering or uncovering—what it may or may not mean—quite like her. See, for instance, the ABC News experiment designed to gauge responses to a Muslim woman who was being denied service at a bakery because of her head scarf.

Of course, in parsing a Muslim woman’s closet, the hijab is forever Exhibit A. Often Western onlookers immediately and passionately see it as a symbol par excellence of inequality or oppression. Quite the contrary argues Ayesha Nusrat, an Indian Muslim activist for women's rights who poignantly reflected on the benefits of the hijab in The New York Times. And in the wake of FIFA’s historic decision this month to lift the head scarf ban for international soccer, it’s interesting to note that both the original critics of not allowing female players to wear the head scarf and now critics of allowing the head scarf—unsurprisingly, the French Football Federation among them—argue on the basis of inequality.

Given the differing religious interpretations as to its obligation—and the interplay of custom or tradition—the hijab is simply an enormously conflicted article of clothing. At Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), where I direct an interfaith initiative, a professor from North Africa who does not wear the hijab once told me she felt betrayed when a close colleague at another university began wearing it. An American-born student of South Asian immigrants confided with me that this piece of cloth, which she chose not to drape over her head in middle school and high school in northern Virginia, still triggers tensions between her and her dad.

In Oman, a Muslim-majority country where I spent two weeks in January, the ascendancy of the abaya has made the little black dress of a Muslim woman a matter of intensifying Western curiosity. Loose, flowing and robe-like, the abaya, usually but not exclusively black, is worn as an over-garment by many Omani women. It is surely the anti-bikini in more ways than one, typically covering the whole body except the face, feet and hands.

Although the abaya’s origins are somewhat vague, its prominence in Oman—not unlike other Arab countries in the Gulf—is a relatively new sensation. The little black dress was literally everywhere: in the market, at the mall, in the mosques, behind the wheel of very expensive cars, in restaurants, along the promenade. Exhibit B.

Exactly right about now our varied assumptions, which are sometimes built on real concerns, kick-in passionately. In this case, they inform our leading questions about the meaning and messaging of the abaya.

Is it, at the end of the long, hot day, a religious development? Does it signal a tilt toward more conservative, potentially extremist, interpretations of Islam? In Oman, is it symbolic of another Arab country walking down the path to Saudi Arabia? Isn’t it a step backwards for democratic reforms and women’s rights in the Muslim world—not to mention Oman’s own positive sensibilities toward religious pluralism?

In a vibrant personal encounter with a middle-aged Omani woman named Hannat, I began to learn that until the 1990s the abaya was mostly worn—occasionally—by older women. In fact, if you visit Bait Al Zubair Museum in old Muscat, you’ll see a stunning assortment of colorful, patterned tribal dresses representative of different periods of Omani history.

A mother and a geophysicist, Hannat was giving a lecture at Al Amana Centre on women and Islam in the Omani context. She recalled that sometime in the mid-1990s younger women increasingly began favoring the abaya. Today, she said, the little black dress often gets accessorized by the most fashionable handbags and heels, which, admittedly, seems somewhat incongruent with the traditional austerity of Omanis. But along the landscape of, say, VCU, where handbags and heels also rule the day, the more likely accompaniment is an extreme miniskirt or a pair of Daisy Dukes.

Hannat went on to say, gently but emphatically, that the religion most influencing the growing abaya style in Oman was not Islam. Nor was any sinister expression of Islam guiding the plot. Rather, it was—drumroll, please—in a landslide victory: fashion. That’s right—a mundane, authoritative god if there ever was one.

To be sure, Hannat was a model of intellectual honesty: she did not play the naïve partisan; she did not argue that Islamic identity was a complete non-factor. However, perhaps much to the surprise of those of us who—whether innocently or insidiously—stop at mere assumptions, “Islam” was not the silver-bullet cause behind the cultural effect. Fittingly this conversation was a blinding reminder that there is usually more than meets the casual eye.

As it turns out, in Oman at least, the almighty and pervasive dictates of fashion have given rise to a distinctive Arabian march of the little black dresses. Which only serves to remind this father: my daughter’s summer bikini—notwithstanding its cool American style—has me a bit conflicted.

This photo was taken by Loquax (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

In the modern and still modernizing Sultanate of Oman, the al-Salimi name is a venerable religious brand. Nur al-Din al-Salimi (d. 1914) was a distinguished Muslim scholar in the Ibadi tradition, the prevailing expression of Islam in Oman. The current Minister of Awqaf and Religious Affairs is His Excellency Sheikh Abdullah al-Salimi. And the minister’s nephew, AbdulRahman, a tall man with warm eyes whom I met in Muscat in January, serves as editor of the influential Al Tafahom (“Understanding”).

In his office at the Ministry, AbdulRahman explained that the journal’s former name, Al Tasamoh (“Tolerance”), did not take inter-religious dialogue or interfaith education far enough. Or close enough, from his perspective. With tolerance, he said, “There is still a distance.” With understanding—here he leaned in to pour me yet another cup of Omani coffee—we come closer.

Only two days earlier, on my journey from Frankfurt to Muscat, I had landed in Riyadh on December 31^st. As the plane touched down, I remember absorbing a serene dusk from the partial vision of the plane’s windows. It was—indeed—the last evening of the year, according to the Western calendar, and the last evening this American evangelical could say: I have not come close enough to the Arab Muslim world.

This Arabian moment marked a first trip for me to the Peninsula—into the cradle of Islam, which, it is recounted, the Kings of Oman accepted peacefully in 629. With the blessing of Virginia Baptists, whose executive director is also serving a term as president of the Baptist World Alliance, I was embarking on a two-week graduate-level travel seminar through Hartford Seminary’s partnership with Al Amana Centre, a Christian ecumenical center in Muscat fostering "understanding, acceptance, trust and peace between Christian and Muslim communities in Oman, the Persian Gulf and the world."

Tolerance is, of course, an ideological flashpoint for some evangelical Christians along the cultural landscape where I work—Virginia Commonwealth University. A stunningly diverse university, with over 32,000 students representing over 100 nationalities, it is mostly true: it can be deemed an unforgivable sin to sound, or to smell, even the slightest bit intolerant. It is also true that many Baptists or evangelical variations eschew the term “tolerance” as deriving from, at best, an imposed liberalism surfacing as political correctness, or, at worst, an outright devilish scheme automatically opposing Jesus Christ himself.

While I don’t entirely share my clansmen’s trumped-up edginess about the word or ideology, I do share AbdulRahman’s emboldened pragmatism, a much-observed Ibadi characteristic. I agree with him: as it is presented and often prescribed in the multicultural milieu, tolerance lacks a real potency or sustained capacity to relieve some of the greatest human distances. For all its academic bluster and university buzz, it cannot necessarily get us on the inside—where understanding tends to arrive alongside knowledge that is most crucially coming via proximity.

On one highly memorable day in Oman, proximity begged for my attention in the most unique way. In the morning it came in the form of a guided tour of Sur Al-Lawatia, the historic walled Shia quarter in Mutrah near old Muscat; in the evening it showed itself happily at a village wedding near Samail.

In Mutrah we walked leisurely through the Shia community tucked behind Al-Rasul Al-Aadam Mosque. The somberness was striking: Shias were marking the liturgical days of mourning for Husayn’s martyrdom in 680. A large, black drape was hung over the backside of the mosque, symbolizing the cascading spiritual mood. Small sections of cloth representing individual prayers for healing were tied to a pole, which asserted itself at one intersection of the maze-like neighborhood. And the shoes of elderly women rested in the walkway outside a husayniyah, a small room unable to contain the chanted laments.

Near Samail, in contrast, the joy was irrepressible. As guests of a friend of the groom, we had been invited into someone else’s grand celebration—which turned out to be an outdoor multi-family wedding in which several different grooms were engaging the traditional religious and cultural rites. Standing in a typical village in the interior of Oman, the sunset came and went as we waited in a receiving line with approximately 200 Arab men. We shook hands with the grooms and offered our blessings in broken Arabic. We observed the proper protocol where each groom receives a set of terms from his bride (mediated by officiates). We ate with our right hands as we sat in small groups on the covered ground, encircling a platter of beef and rice. Later, we accepted the intimate hospitality of an exuberant father: fruits, halwa and coffee, out on his terrace and under the moon.

Eboo Patel, who directs the Interfaith Youth Core, persistently envisions a world where interfaith cooperation is the normative value. He calls the leadership of faith communities to move us beyond the fear, the ignorance and a plethora of other barriers. In Acts of Faith he passionately champions “a deep religious pluralism”—“neither mere coexistence nor forced consensus”—that embraces differences even as people of strong faith attempt to achieve a common life.

In Oman, it was exactly these close-up experiences-in-difference, in Mutrah and Samail, which for this particular American evangelical contributed much in the way of envisioning and achieving a common life for Muslims and Christians. Not to mention the flourishing of that common life. In A Common Word: Muslims and Christians on Loving God and Neighbor, Miroslav Volf urges us: "When Christians and Muslims commit themselves to practicing the dual command of love, they are not satisfying some private religious fancy. They are making possible the constructive collaboration of people of different faiths in the common public space and for the common good."

Ultimately, as Al Amana Centre's director Doug Leonard says, “Experiential and relational interfaith education is what it will take to transform people’s understanding of the other.”

In the assertive imagination of AbdulRahman: with understanding, we come closer. Anything less, well, we might as well call it tolerance from a distance.

Photo: A walkway within the Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque in Muscat, Oman

(Nathan Elmore)

Zarmeena, one of the poets who presented at the 2011 MSA Coffeehouse at Virginia Commonwealth University

(Photo: Nathan Elmore)

On the last night of Osama bin Laden’s earthly sojourn, unbeknownst to him, in the Student Commons at Virginia Commonwealth University, the Muslim Student Association at VCU presented its annual performance-art showcase called Coffeehouse. As it turns out, the two dissimilar occurrences are quite connected to Islam’s modern messaging.

First, it must be said: as a Wahhabi under the Salafi influence, bin Laden would not be caught dead at a Muslim art event whose ad promoted the golden era of the Turkish coffeehouse. Quicker than you can say "deviation" or "innovation" he would certainly shake the hand of a Shia before turning up to hear the student group BPROC (Best Pakistani Rappers on Campus) drop it like it’s hot. He might even tolerate saying prayers in an evangelical mega-church that "worships three gods" before listening to a female Muslim poet read her original verse while not wearing a headscarf.

Bin Laden died after spending years in hiding, which is fitting given the circumstances. In contrast, art usually evidences a strong tendency to reveal. His death, then, when juxtaposed against young creative Muslims at VCU, gives rise to that famous quotation attributed to Hippocrates: "Art is long; life is short."

The New York City artist Makoto Fujimura says, "An artist’s task is to see through the eye into the invisible." Creative expression begins in the artist’s eye, which then opens up or enlarges a world for our eyes to see. Meanwhile, bin Laden’s world – despite his global ambitions and forceful pursuits – was actually closing or shrinking even as the Arab Spring, in many cases, had decided to move on without him.

Interestingly, as the capstone to "Islam Awareness Week" at VCU, the 2011 MSA Coffeehouse didn’t beg the typical question we hear repeated in the news cycle: "Which Islam are they talking about?" Instead it offered us the more nuanced: "What type of Islamic awareness is this?"

For instance, due to Egypt’s political revolution, we are more than a little aware of the Muslim Brotherhood. But did you know there are Muslim musicians who rather enjoy covering songs by Linkin Park? Earlier this year, much appropriate hubbub was made concerning the clandestine surveillance of Muslims, including Muslim students, in New York City and across the Northeast by the New York Police Department. But did you know that Muslim students are making sensitive short films addressing nagging American social issues like entrenched urban homelessness?

It seems that often our Islamic awareness is as complicated as the old and new relationship itself between Islam and art.

On the one hand, listen to the recitations of the Qur’an, whose verses, some say, are musically better than pre-Islamic Arabian poetry, itself a much fabled thing. Or take a breather from the horrible daily scenes in Syria to look at the Great Mosque of Damascus. Completed in 715, it is regarded as an Islamic architectural template. Or consider Islam’s Persian confluence – the elevated form of painting known as miniature, and, of course, those world-renowned carpets.

On the other hand, the contemporary situation is fraught with challenge. At the 2007 gathering of the Islamic Society of North America, several punk bands channeling a self-described "taqwacore" sensibility were kicked off the stage. Subsequent debate centered on whether it was the musical genre or the appearance of female performers (or some combination of both) which prompted the censors. Last year, a Tunisian filmmaker was attacked in the head with a sharp object. Linking the incident to Salafi ideology – bin Laden’s former muse – the filmmaker sized it up as symbolic of a growing battle in Tunisia over uninhibited artistic expression.

But at the MSA Coffeehouse at VCU, in addition to the rappers, poets and filmmakers, the art simply kept happening. Two young Muslim men – putting the P in Punjabi while in polo shirts and jeans – introduced the crowd to the qawwali, a 700-year-old form of Sufi devotional music. The lead student organizer for the event, a woman whose family hails from the Swat Valley in Pakistan, joined an Afghan-born woman in acting out a dramatic scene from the play In Darfur. An Indian medical student played a charming piano piece in an Italian style. And a non-Muslim singer-guitarist, a female in uncovered arms, passionately covered a Jason Mraz song.

The late Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz, who experienced a strict Islamic upbringing, said in an interview in 2002: "You would never have thought that an artist would emerge from [my] family." No stranger to an Islamic fundamentalist death-list, Mahfouz would have been right at home in the middle of what emerged at the MSA Coffeehouse at VCU. Bin Laden, well, I imagine all the explosive art-making must have surely killed him sometime during that last night before the day he was actually killed.

In a 2001 photo of bin Laden published in the May 16, 2011, edition of The New Yorker, we see the terrorist’s gun resting against a tall shelf of books. These books would at least include copies of the Qur’an and the sayings of Muhammad. It’s an unsettling image – and for many reasons. However, in the aftermath of one Muslim student group's creative explorations at the intersection of faith and art, another image continues to materialize and confront our Islamic awareness: resting beside the Muslim’s books are his musical instruments, her film cameras and, of course, the poet’s pen.

"They can scare us, and they can comfort us." {Jonathan Safran Foer, on words}

In September 2007 our Honda Odyssey idled in the gravel parking lot of a mosque in Clemson, South Carolina. As it turned out, the unadorned aluminum structure sat ironically and lonely on Old Stone Church Road in the Deep South. Suddenly my then two-year-old daughter voiced the words that apparently reverberate in America from time to time: “Mosque…scary.”

A man named Abdul had invited our family to join the Muslim community in the Clemson area for a veritable potluck dinner. Southern fried hospitality meets hijabs, thawbs and take-your-shoes-off. Only God knew what the scene would actually be like.

I was already downloading the church fellowship halls of my evangelical youth: utilitarian fold-out tables; rickety metal chairs; desperate parents imploring their children to eat something nutritious before inhaling the sugar, running around mad and spinning into orbit within sacred space like some Pentecostal. Abdul did say there would be Algerians, Egyptians, Palestinians, Lebanese, Turks, Pakistanis and Indians. So the casserole selections were certain to be noticeably, if not deliciously, different from those famed potlucks I treasured.

Earlier that year, in March, after a bit of righteous persistence, I initiated an informal Christian-Muslim dialogue at the same mosque with five Muslim men. In no particular order: the middle-aged Algerian chemical engineer with the vintage Osama-like beard; the Ghanaian Ph.D. student with the warm, infectious smile; two young graduate students, one Turkish, one Moroccan, the Moroccan wearing a black jacket a la Grease; and an African-American from North Carolina, a Baptist who converted to Islam in the Bronx in his late teens. My first table experience with Muslims, I will not too soon forget how veggie pizzas from Domino’s efficiently calmed this Christian minister’s shaky nerves.

Wanting in some way to share these new friendships with my family and hoping to model, albeit feebly, how to begin to move beyond – or through – barriers, I was now blessed by the seeds of a possible mutiny right there in the mosque parking lot. Naturally, I should’ve known better; two-year-olds are intuitively skilled in the fine arts of how to throw a passionate but sustained rebellion. Take note, Arab Spring, wherever you are.

Intense, and with a burgeoning dramatic sensibility, my daughter vocalized the words again for all the minivan to hear – this time, drawing out the mosque scaaarrry for full theatrical affect and then smiling almost perversely. Honestly, what the hell was going on?

In a parental flash-forward I saw our girl wandering around in the mosque, eyes wide and lips pursed, uttering those two words to any Muslim man or woman in unfortunate earshot. I pictured the mosque leadership scurrying about in an absolute quandary. Like those Israeli guards upon seeing a red balloon, with Yasser Arafat’s face on it, flying past a West Bank checkpoint in Elia Suleiman’s outstanding film Divine Intervention.

Seemingly coming from out of nowhere and packaged together so succinctly, her words had arrived – and three years before the Park 51 hubbub near Ground Zero in New York City and the arson attack at an Islamic center in Tennessee. Like a preternatural journalist, our cute little thing was on the scene, reporting live from the American religious front, mouthing prescient syllables ahead of her time. In fact, her proclamation foreshadowed Rep. Peter King’s congressional hearings on Islamic radicalization in American mosques by approximately four years. We had a prophetess among us.

Meanwhile, my wife and I simply looked at each other, aghast. Is this really happening? We had taken special religious and cultural care to brief our children on this new experience, and this is the thanks we get? I remember feeling caught in the vortex of a genuinely surreal moment, overwhelmed by a thick and uniquely American irony – democratic ideals and religious pluralism, mocking us. And in a foreign-made minivan, for God’s sake.

“Kate, sweetheart, no, no, no, it’s not scary. Why are you saying that?”

“Mask. Scaaarrry…”

You have got to be kidding me. Wow. Whew. What an unknowingly clever two-year-old, a real unsuspecting jokester.

For my wife and me, one word had sent relief washing over us. “Dear,” we said, “it’s a mosque, not a mask.”

We were certainly lost in transliteration and left to wonder why language always plays the cruelest games.

But, of all seasons, leave it to the Halloween season – in the hands of an innocent child – to bring us some much needed light. There was our sweet daughter, giggling, babbling in our faces, showing us the darker things that haunt those of us who are the less innocent children. No matter our adult view of the world, no matter our robust accumulation of knowledge, no matter our unparalleled access to this knowledge, no matter our supposed spiritual development - willful prejudice, suspicious ignorance and irrational fear often have a knack for keeping us exactly where we are: sitting in the parking lot, going on and on like a two-year-old.

In Christian-Muslim relations it goes without saying: not all mosque doors, or church doors, are created equal. We should continue to be, if anything, realists about the real barriers. Still, notwithstanding the predictable ones, it is the unforeseen ones – internal and far more frightening – that can make getting through each other’s doors a small act with a high degree of difficulty.

This story is, of course, only the beginning of what our family learned on a very eventful Saturday night that did not include a college football game in dear old Clemson. Stepping inside that mosque and moving beyond the masks and the words we’ve misunderstood had a remarkable effect: it started authentically pushing away a lot of the so-called scariness.

Photo Source: Robert Couse-Baker (Attribution via Flickr Commons)