How many literary characters can you name who embrace three religions? 

In Life of Pi, directed by Ang Lee and based on the winning novel by Yann Martel, we meet Pi, a Hindu-Christian-Muslim. Since most religions build their ideologies around stories, this film prods us to consider the ways in which faith, story, and life converge both on and off the screen.

As an unconventional religion school teacher who values exposing her students to other religions, I found myself identifying with Pi, the story’s protagonist. In his wish to love God, Pi finds meaning in more than one tradition. We learn later how his multi-religious practice helps him survive, along with life lessons from his zookeeper father, when lost at sea with a Bengal tiger. If the story seemed empty, as one critic claimed, it is because it demands that we, the viewers, fill in the blank. Namely, given the same outcomes, we are asked to decide which of two stories we prefer. And this requires some thinking and feeling on our part.

We are not asked to decide which story is True or False, Right or Wrong, but better. Which do we prefer? Several assumptions underly this simple question and bring into focus what I claim is the need for more interfaith education.

1. The first assumption in asking which story we prefer is that both stories are stories.  Whether created for entertainment, meaning-making, or mind-control, each is a story.  Recognizing this function, keeps extremism at bay and allows for the distance needed to look at one’s own or another’s worldview.

2. A second underlying assumption is that each one of us gets to choose the story we prefer. No longer must we accept that someone else, a parent, pope, or president, chooses the story (or in Pi’s case, collected stories) for us. Not only do we get to state the story we prefer to guide us in life, but, like Pi, we can combine different stories to make our own. That is, we can practice more than one religion even on the same day or integrate them in unique ways to create a preferable, perhaps grander, more spectacular story.

3. There is an assumption that one must choose. Walking away without picking a story is not an option. This point is driven home at the end of the movie. It reminded me of another story I once read about a Holocaust survivor. A man asked, “After the horrible things you’ve been through, how can you believe in God?” to which the survivor replied, “How can I not.” Stories help.

4. There is one more point worth making lest we lose atheists and agnostics from seeing their part in interfaith education. While Pi’s progressive father prefers his son to be secular and not flirt with three religions, let alone one, he asks only that his son use reason when choosing a path. And Pi does. His choice to practice three faiths (to which he adds Jewish mysticism as an adult) while respectfully recognizing the role of doubt is ultimately based on aesthetic judgement. Thus he trumps blind faith, making his decision to be multi-religious seem that much more rational. That we learn a little about Hinduism and its multiple Gods, Christianity and its sacrificial Son, and Islam and its submission to Allah along the way is all to our benefit. Such education provides us with more color, more perspective, and more opportunities for enriching our own stories, whichever ones we choose or create, for better or for worse, to guide us in our personal journeys along the ocean of life.

May we be as aware of the stories we tell ourselves – and our students – as Pi was of his.

Visit my Resources page for Move Guides, Holiday and Social Justice programs, Lessons and Inspirational materials for teachers and parents.