Earlier this week, I attended the "closing retreat" for the 2010 Ministry Fellows. The 19 other people who had the same fellowship as I did came together at a conference center just south of Atlanta to share with each other what we did with our summers.
The projects were wonderfully diverse, addressing issues including modern-day slavery (sex trafficking), treatment of undocumented immigrants on the border in Arizona, acceptance of LBGTQ people in the Black Church, healing "moral injury" among returned combat veterans, farm-church relations in rural Vermont and New Hampshire, developing multi-cultural community in churches, the inclusion of Asian-American or Pacific Islanders among the clergy in different churches, and issues of God's presence during the "dark night of the soul" and healing of mental illness.
Eight of us traveled internationally, with visits to Spain, Hungary, Greece, Albania, Ukraine, Israel and Palestine, Nigeria, South Sudan, South Africa, and China. The fellow who traveled to South Sudan was there when South Sudan was declared an independent country this summer and got to witness "the birth of a nation." The projects that were not specifically issues-focused were mostly centered on addressing personal needs for healing, pilgrimage, prayer and renewal, providing a model for the importance of self-care in pastoral ministry.
Hearing my fellow Fellows' stories and their journeys was inspiring and gave me hope for the future of the church. But the best thing that came out of our conference, in my opinion, was that our group covenanted to continue meeting with each other in the future, maybe bi-annually, as a support system for one another as we go forward into church leadership.
In preparing for my presentation, I wrote the following reflection on the development of my project and the outcomes of it. I spoke on these themes and then shared the book of images and poetry I created with the group, and also posted an "exhibit" of some enlargements of my photographs on the wall in the conference room. I was surprised to find that many people asked if my book or the enlarged images would be available for purchase, so I am working on how to make that possible. I will post information about that on this blog when it is available.
Here's my "re-cap" of my Ministry Fellowship experience and what I presented to the group this week. Thanks to all of you who followed my journey this summer.
Ministry Fellowship Re-Cap
The issue I engaged with in this project had to do with participation in and with people of other religions in religious practice. It started with a story about an interfaith conference I attended where we all participated in worship services from different traditions. Rather than try to plan a generic, “interfaith” worship, they opted to offer many different worship services that were very specific – a Muslim Friday prayer service, a Jewish Sabbath service, Hindu meditation practice, and a Christian Eucharist, which was led by an Episcopal priest. I found that Eucharist very moving because all these people of different faiths were participating in the most sacred ritual of my tradition. I learned later that it is against the official rules of the Episcopal Church to offer communion to non-Christians, so what the priest did that day was in violation of her ordination vows. This all got me thinking about the value of boundaries between traditions as well as the ways in which we can experience God in and through religions and religious services other than our own.
My original idea for the project was to make an interfaith pilgrimage with my friend Valarie Kaur, who is a Sikh and who has been to churches with me and has received communion in the Episcopal Church. The idea was for us to visit each other’s holy lands – for me to go to India with her and for her to come to Israel with me. She was not able to travel with me, however, so I ultimately chose to make the pilgrimage alone, and to travel just to Israel instead of India – because I could not afford to travel to both places and from what I could gather, it would be safer and more manageable for me to travel alone in Israel than in India.
I still planned to make an “interfaith” pilgrimage by visiting sacred sites from different traditions – Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and Baha’i – and by meeting and talking with people involved in interfaith work in the Holy Land. The “dissemination piece” of the project was to chronicle my journey on my blog and to document the trip artistically through photography and to create an exhibit of my photos for display at my seminary and my home parish once I returned.
Although I did visit sites from different religious traditions, there were often restrictions against non-Muslims or non-Jews or non-Baha’is visiting except during certain hours or under certain circumstances, and I found that I spent most of my time visiting and meditating on Christian sites. I found myself more shy or hesitant about just walking in to a mosque or a synagogue (the ones that WERE more open and less restricted). I did visit the White Mosque in Nazareth, which was open to the public, but no one was there except one man praying in the corner and I felt very out of place and feared it would be obvious I wasn’t a Muslim and people someone would wonder why I was there if they came in and saw me. I walked through the Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem but did not enter any of the historic synagogues I came across, even though they were likely open. I simply did not feel comfortable just walking in to a religious place of another tradition like I did walking into any of the churches I visited. On a visceral level, I felt that I did not belong there, that it wasn’t my holy place.
This was strange for someone who usually feels very comfortable visiting places of worship of many different traditions and has spent a good bit of my adult life working in interfaith work. I realized, however, that I had not often visited other religions’ places of worship entirely on my own. I was either going to do research and had an appointment to speak with someone, or I went with friends who were followers of that faith, to accompany them to a service or event. I had visited mosques and synagogues in Turkey and Greece and Italy on my foreign study trip in college, but I was with a large class and a guide every time I entered the places. Although I know some people draw from many different traditions in their own personal spirituality, for me as someone deeply grounded in one particular faith, I came to the somewhat obvious but still very insightful observation that I can’t be “interfaith” by myself – that a crucial element of “interfaith” is actually engaging with a PERSON of a different faith and encountering that faith through that other human – and that without that personal engagement, my encounter with sites from different religious was less meaningful and even intimidating.
This pilgrimage raised awareness for me about the importance of developing interfaith friendships and relationships, and how that really has to come through person-to-person engagement, not just through learning about other religions in a book or visiting other places of worship. While I think it’s great that some churches participate in interfaith “tours” of their cities or towns, where a group from the church will visit the local synagogue or mosque, I think these trips are largely in vain if they are not also accompanied by very real opportunities for the people from those two congregations to develop relationships with each other – which doesn’t happen naturally when they’re both serving in an “ambassador” or “host” role for their house of worship and their tradition. Programming social and outreach events with other religious communities where Christians can interact in more “normal” settings with Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, Baha’is, and others is crucial for the future of interfaith leadership in the church, in my opinion.
My encounter with Palestinians in the West Bank through a one-day trip I took to Bethlehem also opened my eyes to the very real dangers of “exceptionalist” theology that asserts that we are God’s chosen and either implicitly or explicitly justifies degradation and violence toward other groups. I wrestle with how to preach certain passages from the Old Testament about Israel as God’s chosen people and God giving the land to the Jews in light of the ways that theology has caused the suffering and subjugation of the Palestinian people.
My encounter with the injustice in the West Bank made me question the significance of my original plan to produce an exhibit of photos as the "outcome" of this trip. Who cares about my "pretty pictures" when there are people suffering in the world? I wondered. I felt like my presentation and the outcome of my trip should be entirely about Palestinian advocacy -- to focus solely on an artistic response seemed not important and serious enough.
A poetry reading in Sewanee this summer after I returned helped to change that response. Nick Flynn's integration of his experiences traveling to Turkey to meet with Iraqi people who had been imprisoned at Abu Ghraib into his poetry made me realize that art can be used for advocacy, and the two need not be mutually exclusive. (I know I had known this before, but that poetry reading was a helpful reminder and example of the ways in which advocacy can be done through art.) This helped me to move forward with my plans to create an exhibit and I even decided, at the suggestion of my husband, to try my hand at some poetry myself to accompany the images.
Re-engaging with my creative side through this project also reminded me of the importance of nurturing the creative arts among the clergy. Seminaries are very good about teaching students book knowledge and even hands-on knowledge of ministry experience, but overall are not so good about teaching the creative arts, at least not from what I’ve seen. Since the Bible itself is largely poetry and literature, and many essential religious truths cannot be expressed in rational prose but are communicated best through art, I think clergy have an obligation to nurture their own creative sides and think about how to use art to preach the Gospel. My exhibit of photographs and my book of images and poetry that came out of this project is one small step towards doing that in my own ministry.
