Devotional: Interfaith Dialogue

Dear God of surprising encounters,

The writer of Hebrews whispered a secret that still unsettles us: "Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some have entertained angels without knowing it." Angels — not in the faces we expected, not in the voices that sound like our own, but in the stranger whose prayers rise in unfamiliar cadences toward the same sky.

I think of Thomas Merton standing in the streets of Louisville, Kentucky, on a March afternoon in 1958, when he looked at the ordinary crowds on the corner of Fourth and Walnut and was overwhelmed by the realization that he loved all these people — that they belonged to him and he to them. He had spent years behind monastery walls, and God broke through not in silence but in the beautiful chaos of human difference.

Father, forgive us when we mistake our own comfort for faithfulness. Forgive us when we build walls where You have set doors. The Anglican tradition teaches us that all truth is God's truth — that Your Spirit has not left Yourself without witness anywhere on this earth. Give us the holy curiosity of the Magi, those foreign stargazers who recognized Your light before Your own people did.