Let’s Get Off Our Cell Phones and Hear a Sikh Maxim from Pope Francis

Abstract

Our obsession to connect virtually with millions has left us terribly impoverished at the personal level. We need to put our cell phones away and engage directly with one another across religions and cultures. With this in mind, Singh proposes an interfaith exercise: bring the first Sikh guru (Nanak 1469–1539) and Pope Francis in conversation with each other. Indeed, the two figures are centuries apart; they come from two totally different parts of the world and belong to two different religious and cultural traditions. And yet, each illuminates the other. Interestingly, Guru Nanak’s poetic verses I grew up on acquire enormous immediacy, meaning, and relevancy through the voice of Pope Francis’s addresses to audiences across the globe. Together, the Sikh guru and the Catholic pontiff open up for us significant new ways of recognizing the past and of being in the present; in the scholarly parlance of comparative religionists, they provide us a rich “reciprocal illumination.”