On evangelicals and interfaith cooperation: an interview with Tony Campolo by Shane Claiborne

Cross Currents, Spring, 2005 by Shane Claiborne

SC: Community seems to form most naturally during times of struggle. Most of the times I have felt deeply connected to people of other faiths were during times where our survival required interdependence. I remember when our peace team was leaving Iraq, in the middle of the bombing. The car I was in had a bad accident, all of us were injured, planes were still flying over. And the first car of Iraqi civilians stopped. Waving a white sheet at the planes overhead, risking their lives, they drove us into the nearest town called Rutba. The doctors and townspeople gathered. One of the doctors was pleading, "Why, why, why is your country doing this?" He said that they could not take us into the hospital, because three days before the bombs hit their hospital, the children's ward. In the same breath he said, "But we will take care of you. Because here, in Rutba, it does not matter if you are American or Iraqi, Christian or Muslim. We take care of you as our friends." And they did, they set up a little shanty clinic outside the bombed out hospital, and they literally saved my friend's life. These are the times when I think cooperation and community are inevitable.

TC: Peter Arnett used to be with CNN. I know him and I met him in an airport in Chicago, and I said, "Peter so glad to see you, I'm running out of stories. Tell me a story." He said, "I've got one ... I'm in the West bank, a bomb goes off and bodies are blown through the air. The Israeli troops seal off the whole area. A man comes running up to me with a bloody little girl in his arms, and says, 'You are press, you can get us out of here. If I don't get her into a hospital then immediately she's going to die. You can get us out of here. You are press'. Peter said, "I put them in the back seat and threw a blanket over them."

And I did get through the lines. As I rushed towards Tel Aviv in the car, I could hear him in the back seat, as he rocked this little girl in his arms whispering, "Go faster, oh God help him to go faster. God help him to go faster. Then he starts moaning, I'm losing her! I'm losing her! Oh God I'm losing her, I'm losing her!" Peter said by the time I got to the hospital I was emotionally drained. They took the little girl into the operating room, and the two of us sat down on a bench in the waiting room, exhausted. We must have sat there a half hour, silent, exhausted from the emotion. The doctor came out and said, "I'm sorry. She's dead." This man dissolved in tears. I put my arm around him and said, I'm not married. I don't have any children. I don't know what it's like to lose a daughter. The man snapped his head back and said, "My daughter? That little girl is not my child. I'm an Israeli settler, she's a Muslim girl. But maybe the time has come for us to recognize every child as our child."

What can we learn about that kind of spirituality that can help us find common ground? No theological statements were made, no compromising beliefs, no attempts to come to a common denominator. And yet, a kind of spiritual oneness.