Last night we had our first meeting in 2018 of the Bergen County Women’s Interfaith Initiative at my house. We are a group of Jewish, Christian and Muslim women who have been meeting monthly at different homes for many years. Our group is an off-shoot of a nationally organized Muslim/Jewish study group that was studying each other’s texts and that used to be co-ed. After 2 years of meeting, the group splintered apart when political issues entered the dialogue – surprise, surprise! And so two of the women formed our women only group with the commitment to keep the dialogue going, and see if women can go deeper in the dialogue without breaking the precious bonds built up over time. So far our deep friendships and relationships have allowed us to navigate even the most difficult conversations.
Our purpose is to build interfaith understanding amongst ourselves and our larger communities. We use dialogue as a tool to hold “civil conversations”(remember those?), and have rules which we have codified into a Dialogue Handbook. We learn more each other as people, how we practice our faiths, and delight in so much that is common across all faiths and commanded by the One, Our Creator. We talk about what it means to be an American- recent or older- in our multicultural society. And occasionally we hold public events to spread knowledge and wage peace. Faith is just one of many divides plaguing not just our society, but the whole world and of course that is not new. Some of our members actually call themselves humanists, and I appreciate that term as it unites us towards a higher universal aspiration transcending yet including our different faith traditions.
We first shared our reflections on the past year, and how the bizarre got normalized, first shocking us, angering us and now numbing us. Many of us feel so depressed and hopeless, and have stopped watching public media altogether, to protect whatever little peace we have in our micro-worlds. For me, I practice this diligently, and stay away from media obsessions about celebrities, about the clowns ruling our planet and putting on a show to distract us from what is real. And yet that is also a problem, as we all create our own “alternative universes” as President Obama said recently on David Letterman’s new program “My Next Guest” on Netflix. While we seem to revere Obama, and ignore Trump, the reality is actually just as ugly, only the pretty veneer has been lifted and we see the raw ugliness whether it is race relations or our wars. There are plenty of bigger divides tearing us apart, all of which are interconnected and always emanate from material, economic and political greed, and always fomented and manufactured to benefit a few at the expense of the many. I like to say that “follow the hate trail” and you will find the beneficiary and the culprit very easily.
In fact, one of the topics we discussed last night is how much unity is part of our faith’s message and prescription for peace. If we see what we have in common, if we know the other, if we can feel what they feel, we would not harbor the depths of hate that is being manufactured and stoked daily. And it is that “if” which we agreed is our calling, our goal and directs our actions. We will turn that “if” into a call to action. All we can do is practice learning about each other, appreciating each other and sharing what we have learned more widely. We shared our goals for 2018, which were how to cope with this scary era and continue to build and spread hope. “The Universe rewards Action” as someone said, and so we will continue to work on a few projects that will allow our tiny group to spread our collective knowledge more widely, such as an educational event themed “Welcoming the Stranger”. We hope to feature what our faiths say about Welcoming the Stranger, and also deepen our understanding of the current refugee/immigration/emigration crises. We have to learn to live in a more interdependent and complex world. We agreed that we can never go back to the simple life of the 1950’s, and that delusion needs to be exposed.
We have to always hold out hope in our fellow human beings – many of whom are organizing and doing good; our faiths command us towards patience and steadfastness, and remind us that after dark periods there is ease. We have to move away from oversimplification, generalizations, stereotyping, blaming, fantasizing about the past, fear of scarcity to a different way of being- a way of being that embraces change and uncertainty, that propels learning and change, that believes in abundance and that shapes a human society, where no one or no group is dehumanized.
Mino Farooq Akhtar January 26, 2018
Well written . Mino you are a true activist .
Keep doing the good work .