As a New Yorker who took up calligraphy in the wake of 9/11, a thought occurred to me one day. What if—in the spirit of “Show, don’t tell”—one found a more refreshing way to establish common ground among Abraham’s oft-estranged offspring of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam? What if one were to mount an exhibit in New York that honors not only the shared reverence of these traditions for Scripture, but also their historical expression of that reverence with calligraphy, the art of “beautiful writing”?

My own interest in the craft had been seeded in childhood by my mother’s irregular practice of it, then watered in early adulthood by a growing delight in ancient sacred manuscripts along with a broader fascination with the history of writing in its many cultural manifestations.

Take me to the Metropolitan Museum, and I was more likely to seek out the cuneiform tablets of Mesopotamia or silk scrolls of China than Picasso or Degas. When my wife gave me Sister Wendy Beckett’s Meditations on Peace, it was a leaf from the Qur’an—the one manuscript in a book of paintings, yet a painting in its own right—that I returned to again and again for the peace to be found in its visually splendid inscriptions.

And when I finally made good on the desire to practice the craft rather than just admire it, I did so under the guidance of Christopher Calderhead, whose Illuminating the Word: The Making of the Saint John’s Bible told the story of how the first illuminated, hand-lettered Bible in over 500 years since the invention of moveable type came to be commissioned in modern times by the Benedictine monks of St. John’s Abbey in Minnesota.

(My essay, “Eat this Scroll,” about my seminal encounter with The Saint John’s Bible, appeared in Image #53.)

Though it struck me as a good idea, my hoped-for exhibit seemed to be an unlikely one. Then, in 2007, while visiting the British Library in London, I saw in its gift shop the catalogue for Sacred: Discover What We Share. It was a daydream come true, though one I woke to find already closed. At the time I thought I would simply have to settle for the catalogue, which was no small boon given the breadth and beauty of its compilation.

What I didn’t know then was that the New York Public Library had plans of its own for a joint exhibition between the two institutions in the same vein of Sacred. Ultimately, the British Library backed out due to concern for mistreatment of precious manuscripts by customs officials in New York. The NYPL, however, thankfully forged ahead, pulling 200 items from its permanent collection of sacred texts to open Three Faiths: Judaism, Christianity, Islam this past October.

Let me say first of all that the exhibit closes on February 27th, so if you live in the greater New York area, then run! You may not share my passion for things paleographical, but in today’s increasingly digitized society where handwritten letters and the like are all but artifacts of the near past (see Dyana Herron’s excellent “The Lost Art of Letter Writing”), the sight of ancient manuscripts can be as much a balm for the senses as for the spirit.

Centered on four main commonalities of the three religions—Monotheism, Abraham, Revelation, and Scripture—the exhibition provides a kind of “sacred salad bar” with samples of calligraphic devotion by each religion in the four thematic quadrants.

Of course there’s no way for “sacred salad bar” not to sound a bit laughable, but with an eye toward Scripture the metaphor is just as apt: in the third chapter of Ezekiel the prophet is commanded to eat the scroll handed down to him from on high. I had long relished the thought of Ezekiel literally consuming the scroll—more for nourishment than mere knowledge—a prophetic act itself in advance of the Word made flesh.

And having stood before the same command inscribed in The Saint John’s Bible when the Museum of Biblical Art in New York hosted an exhibit of the Prophets volume, a hunger more literal than figurative opened its mouth at my core.

Hence the feast to be had in these remaining days of Three Faiths, as one walks among the prayer books, lectionaries, Torah scrolls, ketubahs, Haggadahs, and Qur’an leaves—a feast redolent with Hebrew, Greek, Arabic, Coptic, Slavonic, Armenian, and more.

Stand before a Torah scroll from the Ottoman Empire opened to the “Song at the Sea” in Exodus, and even momentarily it’s easy to believe, as the Jewish mystics did, that the Torah was given by God to Moses in the form of black fire superimposed on white fire.

Gaze at a leaf of the Qur’an whose roundels dot the page like golden snowflakes in a dark field of Arabic, and one sees why the Qur’an claims that “the first thing God created was the pen.” Call the claim heretical on Judeo-Christian grounds, but on the grounds of this exhibit it sounds achingly true.

The spirit of common ground in the exhibit notwithstanding, the New York Times cultural critic Edward Rothstein rightly points out in his review of it:

“In fact, because Christianity developed out of Judaism, and Islam grew out of both, similarities and allusions are also the markers of great differences. Each religion aggressively reinterpreted its predecessors, accepting its sacred texts but radically altering their implications and meanings. And each predecessor religion, in turn, opposed attempts to treat it as a prelude to something greater. These are not subtle disputes, and the consequences were far from ecumenical, particularly when successor religions sought to spread their beliefs through conquest and conversion.”

That said, a visit to the interactive Scriptorium adjacent to the exhibit, with its immersive introduction to the material side of the matter, i.e. quills, inks, vellum, etc., further helps connect sensually what will, and in some ways must, live on divided theologically.