COFFEE WITH RAMI SHAPIRO

By RAY WADDLE

Earth is becoming a spiritually hyphenated place, says Rabbi Rami Shapiro of Murfreesboro.

I know what he means. Lately I’ve run into Unitarian-pagans, Episcopalian-skeptics, Christian-Sufis, Presbyterian-ecologists, Baptist-Democrats. At the blink of an e-mail, boundaries are blurring. Ideas are leaping over firewalls of religious routine.

Hyphenation is Shapiro’s way of talking about the future well-being of a pluralistic planet. Simply put, only empathy and hospitality across religions can keep us from destroying each other.

“The more religions I know, the more vocabulary I have for dealing with the human condition,” Shapiro says.

“In the future, I think we’ll root our spirituality in our humanity, not our ethnicity. People will say, ‘I’m Jewish AND I find the teachings of Jesus compelling, or ‘I’m Christian AND I find (Muslim mystic) Rumi’s poetry amazing.’ ”

Entrepreneurial Shapiro is busy with his own hyphenated identity as author-poet-professor-blogger-explorer-of-world-religions, with Judaism as his base camp. Add this to the list: he walks six miles a morning as a form of meditative prayer.

Since moving to Murfreesboro from Miami four years ago, the rabbi has shared his unusual interfaith enthusiasms with Middle Tennessee. Last year he hatched an award-winning “Common Grounds” series of discussions at the Murfreesboro public library, leading adults and teens in sacred stories of Buddhism, Christianity, Taoism, Judaism, Islam and Hinduism. Recently he became the first rabbi on staff at Nashville’s Scarritt-Bennett Center, a United Methodist-affiliated conference center with an ecumenical spirit.

“It is not enough to be versed in only one religion,” Shapiro, 55, declares in his new book, The Sacred Art of Lovingkindness. “You are heir to the entire spectrum of human spirituality. ... No one religion has a monopoly on lovingkindness, and each has something to offer those who have made the choice for heaven.”

Shapiro’s journey started as an Orthodox Jew raised in Massachusetts. He became enamored of Zen Buddhism and, during a “meditation breakthrough” at 16, experienced a life-changing connection with the universe.

“I felt love for and from everything. I realized God is the only reality.”

He practiced Buddhism for 10 years, but Judaism’s undertow never let go. He did rabbinical study at Hebrew Union College and, for two decades, led a small Reconstructionist Jewish temple in Miami. Then he moved on again.

“If you understand that God is bigger than your story, you have to broaden your story,” he says.

The world trembles now between two competing dreams -- tribal fundamentalism and global hospitality to the stranger. In still-Protestant Midstate, an optimistic rabbi evangelizes for a future of hyphenated generosity.

“We went from human sacrifice to animal sacrifice to ethics: people can change,” he says. “The world’s too small to get away with carving it up. We either live or die together.”