If you read my last post about Christian reticence in the workplace, you should know that not only have I had to wince a bit in hindsight at its full-frontal approach—despite my best efforts to pre-empt this in the writing itself—but even better, I was “outed” by my co-workers in the very midst of finishing the piece. As there wasn’t enough space or time to tell the story there, I’ll do so briefly here as a platform to the related aim of this piece.

During an afternoon lull in the writers room, with the lot of us tired from breaking stories for the first season of Kings, someone said, “What’s the name of everyone’s production company? Let’s play that game.”

Let’s not, I thought, my heart skipping a beat or two as I promptly got up and left for the bathroom. You might be inclined to suddenly have to tell a group of screenwriters—and then inevitably explain the biblical reference—that the name of your company is Upper Room Productions. But I wasn’t.

Until I got to the bathroom with nothing to pass but time. Because as disinclined as I was to tell a group I had only known for two weeks that my company is named after the place where the apostles gathered in the wake of the Crucifixion, the greater sense of shame that hit me in the bathroom for such spiritual cowardice was far worse. Sheep we may be, as the metaphor goes, but God help those who succumb to this kind of sheepishness.

So I headed back to the room where they had finished the game and resumed the conversation as if I’d never left, in order to get someone to ask me the name of my company. I said it, I explained it, and made a vow that I would never pull that same (insert pun here) again.

Sometimes the Lord moves in mysterious ways. And other times His ways are as obvious as a YIELD sign.

But what was I afraid of to begin with, sitting across the table from Kamren Pasha, a bunker-busting Muslim who disarms your reticence with his forthcoming ways at the same time he destroys the slightest hint of a stereotype you might have about his kind?

From day one “The Pasha” (a high school nickname he has proudly revived at work twenty years later) has been open about his faith, from his religious upbringing in Pakistan to his bout with fundamentalism while a student at Dartmouth (who can blame him?), to his more recent mentorship with a Sufi mystic in Senegal. And for all his deep knowledge of his own faith tradition—before the job on “Kings,” he completed a 900-page novel in seven months about the birth of Islam as seen through the eyes of Mohammed’s wife—he seems every bit as knowledgeable about the Judeo-Christian tradition that he embraces in truly Abrahamic fashion.

I, for my part, have a hard enough time embracing anyone who can write a 900-page novel in seven months.

Yet with his fearless self-disclosure, his ecumenical heart, and the laughter of a giant to compensate for what he lacks in height, it doesn’t take long to be won over by “The Pasha”—or, as I sometimes refer to him, “The Dalai Pasha,” as the Buddhist tradition surely completes the picture of someone who is nothing short of a walking Zen koan.

Because for all his openness in matters of religion and faith, he’s every bit as open about other things which, in accord with a koan, elude the rational mind. For here is a former Islamic fundamentalist and perhaps future Sufi mystic who often regales us at lunch with Hollywood gossip from his online subscription to the tabloids; who applied for a slot on Survivor and recently took up Krav Maga, the Israeli martial art; and who isn’t afraid not only to introduce himself to a famous actress at a West Hollywood café, but read her a poem he wrote for her only moments beforehand. Then again, maybe he was used to engaging celebrities, given his former life as a reporter in which he interviewed the likes of Shimon Peres, Benzair Bhutto, and Alberto Fujimori. (See his Wikipedia entry.)

And just when you think the well of contradictions has surely gone dry, on the same day that you learn he’s an actual descendant of Mohammed you hear he took a porn star out to lunch to discuss a script he wants to write in the vein of Boogie Nights.

I’m not sure he’s in the right business, given how desperately this country needs a certain “pop ambassador” of his stripe. But I was glad to have him there at the table when upon returning from the bathroom in my belated attempt to admit the name of my production company, he flashed a smile and said, as if there were no one else in the room, “Oh great! So we have that bond of faith.”

Yes, we do.