The Transition

After nine weeks in Chautauqua (CHQ), I came home for two weeks to spend time with my family and do some school shopping. I'm in a completely different world, but that's a good thing because the magic of CHQ is wasted if I don't carry my transformation with me after I leave the grounds. Here's a short attempt at capturing my experience at Chautauqua in 300 words for an article. The link is at the end. Check it out to read the reflections of the rest of my team!

Being at Chautauqua has been intellectually and spiritually empowering. Because there is so much going on, each moment is precious. It is incredible to take in the ballet, pick the brains of distinguished speakers, stroll along lush grass, experience a breathtaking sunset reflected on the lake, and hear the stories of open-minded people I once thought of as strangers. The weeks spent here gave me a chance to take this community for granted and then to realize its majesty all over again.

As a Muslim coordinator for APYA, I had an easier time navigating Chautauqua than most folks. The Interfaith Lectures, social hours, various dinners and religious services changed my perception of individuals, groups and the insider-outsider mentality enhanced my understanding of God — and added dimensions to my spirituality.

One of my most powerful experiences took place at Hurlbut Church. I learned to knit there. I participated in multiple Jewish services for the first time. I co-led a discussion about women and Islam with my fellow Muslim APYA coordinator, which was a powerful, humbling experience. And from time to time, I sat in an empty pew and poured my heart out to God. Hurlbut Church, to me, signifies the exceptional spirit of an interfaith community founded on mutual respect, creativity and generosity that seeks the sacred in the profane.

This summer has been the most instructional, invigorating and uplifting time of my life. Giving something to the warm community at Chautauqua meant that I got a lot more back, from the support and strength I found in my dear APYA coordinators and phenomenal program director Maureen Rovegno to a better understanding of the kind of person I want to be.

I’m not sure what the future holds, but as I’m indebted to Chautauqua, I’ll be looking for ways to spark in others the fire that Chautauqua has ignited in me.

http://chqdaily.com/2012/08/18/the-apya-coordinators-in-their-own-words/

I didn't know if I would revert back to the old me when I came into contact with people I knew pre-CHQ. Yesterday, I had an argument with a friend. I usually walk away from arguments with this friend feeling distraught, but this argument was different. In my mind I heard Eboo Patel telling me that it's a waste of energy to argue with someone who isn't willing to listen. (He might not use those exact words.) So I ended the conversation, and life was good.

CHQ has also changed my interaction with people at grocery stores. When I was little, I hated all kinds of shopping, including grocery shopping. I was just so bored following my mom around for three hours. It turns out I don't mind it much when I'm not following anyone. I also like to find a flavor of yogurt I've never tried. The ones I pick are never as good as Key Lime Pie or Choco Mousse, which is unfortunate. One thing that I've noticed at grocery stores especially is my new perception of people. The mom with her son checking out backpacks, the young couple considering different brands of orange juice, the man hovering around pinto beans. Each person with her cart has the capacity to love, to fear, and to hope. Each person is part of Creation. Each person is a manifestation of God. And it's a little crippling to suddenly sense the Divine in the form of a man shopping for pinto beans. 

From experience I know that with time, I will not be able to retain the awe of feeling sacredness in everyday life. Its meaning and beauty won't waver, but I'll become desensitized to it. And I have no idea what to do about that. I ask others about their faith because their understanding of their beliefs might be commonplace to them, but to me, they could create waves of awe and bring about new ways to see the world. So I ask. The human experience is rich with stories that create awe and bring us closer to each other, closer to the Divine.

Why Is Interfaith Dialogue So Important?

Religions teach the value of human life, and they provide meaning for it. Religious people are an interesting bunch. Some of them like the Red Sox. Some have a Rochester accent. Some are avid gardeners. Some come from secular households. Some are Republicans. Some are Lord of the Rings fans. Some are left-handed. Some have never questioned their sexual orientation. Some are war veterans. Some are divorced. I think you get the idea. There is more to religious people than their beliefs, and when you call upon a religious person, you’re getting all of that person, from her allergies to the allegories she uses to understand the world around her. Because each person understands her world uniquely based on her teachings emphasized by her experiences, there tend to be disagreements.

Disagreements are a little like plastic bags. If we’re acting like infants, we can suffocate in our disagreements when we insist that there is room for just one right view and we all fight over it. If instead we utilize our disagreements to carry forth multiple perspectives, we find that our differences are a source of strength.

Does that sound hokey to you? I admit I had a difficult time fully believing “diversity is strength.” I wanted to believe it, but if you’re a teacher and you catch the end of a fist fight between two of your students, and you get a diversity of viewpoints about what happened, how does that put you in a position of strength if each story contradicts the others?

It took me a long time to understand that I’m engrained or socialized to search for one truth, and by default, anything that contradicts that truth is false. But reality is not that simple. There isn’t an all-encompassing right and wrong, true and false, good and bad. In the case of the fist fight, what if none of the accounts is accurate? Your diverse stories each have some truth in them. Your strength comes from sifting the stories and weighing out a possible reality.

Extrapolating from this example, I find it easier to believe that this country has a lot of potential because it is the home of individuals with extremely diverse experiences and backgrounds. We face so much social inequality, and our values and socio-economic landscape won’t stop shifting! Instead of assuming there’s one right or best way to attack a problem, if we recognize that different methods work better in different regions, we’ll need the diversity of experiences our people have cultivated.

I recently started to understand another reason to appreciate differences and disagreements. Two nights ago, I was delighted to talk with a Chautauquan who explained to me that real interfaith dialogue (where we don’t just agree on everything) helps us to solidify our positions on our beliefs. People who believe the same things as us don’t need to ask us to explain our beliefs, and it’s really when we articulate what we believe and our reasoning or understanding for it that we learn more about ourselves. So we need people with different beliefs who respectfully challenge, listen, and share experiences with us.

The beauty of interfaith dialogue starts when we make a commitment to respect our dialogue partner and listen with an open mind when we would rather ‘gift’ our partner with our own experiences. The importance of interfaith dialogue stems from our rapidly changing world. I have access to a small slice of the reality of the world. By engaging in respectful, open dialogue, my understanding of reality is both solidified and questioned. If I keep in mind that reality is more complex than I can understand, then I can accept apparent contradictions that may one day seem straightforward. That’s useful if I’m interested in understanding the world as it is, possibly so I can engage with it in a smarter way. I try to keep in mind that I’ll always have biases, only a few of which I may be aware.

My new mantra is that if I disagree with you, I’ll try to remember that we both may be wrong and right. If I treat you with dignity, I’d like to think I’m not too wrong. Note to self: make mantra catchier. 

Restlessness

A significant facet of my identity is my faith. It fuels my actions, colors my character, and empowers me to seek the best in humankind. As a Muslim Coordinator at Chautauqua, my religious identity is often at the forefront. Muslims are so diverse in our beliefs and practices, and we have so much to learn from each other. What troubles me is when we try to define what it means to be a Muslim. I self-identify as one, but if I don't fit your definition, that's awkward. I personally like to avoid awkwardness, sometimes to a fault. For that reason, I don't like to include religious actions in my definition. It's a little problematic because beliefs should be followed by action, but I'll leave it to the believer to give good-intentioned significance to one set of actions over another when it comes to our religious practices. I strongly believe that Muslims are called to perform compassionate actions to our fellow human beings and to all of God's creation, and compassion is one of the cornerstones of the month of Ramadan. 

Ramadan has me restless. At the onset of the month, I told myself that I would watch my words and work at being more truthful with people. Most of the time, I’m brutally honest with myself but rarely share my innermost secrets with others. This leads to people thinking well of me when I’m not sure I deserve it. Compliments are great when they’re genuine and address an insecurity of mine, but they often undermine my regimen of humility. I wish I were better at being humble so that no praise or insult could affect my sense of self. I would prefer that sense of self be in a state of constant flux agitated by my understanding of God in an effort to be more human, but I digress.

I’m restless because of my failure to be truthful, to perform good actions with equally good intentions. I’ve also been untruthful because I’ve said on multiple occasions in the last several weeks that I love my tradition because of the sense of community I find in it. I said this because other Muslims voiced this experience, and I wanted to identify with it. I work to bring the Muslim community on my campus together, and I derive great pleasure from the happiness my work brings to others. However, of all the things I’m most grateful for, it’s not the sense of community I feel when I’m participating in ritual. Sometimes, like on Laylat-ul-Qadr, or the Night of Power on which the Prophet Muhammad first received revelation from God (which I hope to be observing at sunset later today), that sense of community motivates and pushes me to a higher spiritual plane. Most of the time, however, performing ritual in community is personally debilitating. It’s like finding $20 on the road and noticing that someone else saw you find the money, and when you turn it into the authorities, you don’t know how much that onlooker influenced your action. You hope you’d have turned the money in regardless, but you’ll never know. The good deed feels tainted. I wish I didn’t question the influence of my religious peers on my religious practice. God willing, I will one day trust that I act truthfully. In the meantime, I pray for strength and compassion.

Restlessness isn’t inherently a bad state to be in. I’m thankful for the weaknesses in myself that I’ve come to better understand, for I gain the ability to make progress. I’m thankful for the network of friends I can reach out to when I cripple myself with judgment, for in making myself vulnerable, others can heal wounds I’ve treated unfairly.  And I’m ever-so-thankful to acknowledge that I’m having a bad day, for the sun will rise on a new day within an hour, and I can better appreciate a good morning after having a not-so-good night. 

The Not-So-Melting Pot

A little over a week ago, a woman came up to me after Jum’a (the Friday congregational prayer), so very touched to be welcomed and included in the service. She spent most of her life in countries where Islam was pervasive, to the extent that the adhan, the call to prayer, was a source of comfort to her. However, she relegated to the role of an outsider. She encountered a Muslim identity that drew strength from community but refused to let her participate because of her skin color.

This is a very real and complex issue. Identities are often defined in opposition to other identities. I thought we were all at fault and that each identity had something to be proud of, and that was about as far as I needed to think about the problem. I didn’t understand the suffering we cause. I didn’t understand that a human being’s fundamental need to belong could be left sorely wanting because she needed to belong to a people who didn’t need her.

Born in India and raised in the Bible Belt of the United States, I have a hard time thinking of recent immigrants as Americans, regardless of their citizenship. I truly feel that Americans, as individuals, are receptive to cultures they are unfamiliar with, but for some reason, I don’t get the feeling that American culture is a blending of multiple cultures. The cultures didn’t melt in the pot; they congealed separately, and they’re all there, stacked on top of and around one another, mixing at the fringes but each culture holds on to its identity. I wonder if the reason is because the melting pot never got hot enough. The fire under the pot was a tolerant one, short of the heat of an all-encompassing embrace.

I can’t blame one culture for not embracing another as a sister embraces her brother. Those bonds take time and trust, and they’re reciprocal. An embrace that is not reciprocated is an awkward encounter that I wouldn't wish to repeat. So rather than finger pointing, what shall we do? We’ve got to reheat and stir vigorously, without stop. It will take a lot of understanding, compassion, determination, and respect to fuel the fire. Respect for each individual culture that may not be compatible with its neighbor but may find something admirable in its neighbor’s neighbor. Ultimately, we won’t turn into a brown sludge, but the compassionate fire underneath us will serve as a reminder to respect that which we don’t agree with and embrace its right to live alongside us.

I’ll try to fuel that fire, but I must admit that I’ve only got a little fuel. I cling to my Indian identity (even though I don’t feel Indian when I’m in India) because from time to time, I am scorned in America, and I may not have the strength to declare my Americanness in the face of those who seem more American than I, so I may need to retreat to my Indianness to satisfy my need to belong to some community.

I’ve simplified this to two national identities, but there are many more that come in play for Americans, including religious identities, sexual orientation, and political affiliations. If we would really listen to the stories of those we fear or distrust, we would find a whole host of ideals and events to share our joys and sorrows over, we would become human first and labeled as X second, and we would find ways to disagree without compromising our values. 

Lessons

My position this summer is as one of the four coordinators for the Abrahamic Program for Young Adults (APYA) at the Chautauqua Institution (CHQ), and I have to say that I love my team. They’re supportive, funny, inspirational, and real.

Each day is a challenge. Some days I get to sleep with a smile on my face, content with the way I held myself, while on other days I welcome unconsciousness and ask for mercy, patience and strength to start anew. The days go by quickly, but each one is marked by growth. I’ve learned so many lessons in my four weeks here. I feel like I’m taking a hands-on course in interpersonal relations, and things I try to keep in mind and incorporate into my daily life include

• Each person I meet is carrying his or her own burden. I challenge myself to be sensitive and compassionate. 
• People will disappoint. It’s what we do. I challenge myself to refrain from getting frustrated, and I free myself from perfect behavior. From time to time, I will disappoint those I care about most, so I watch my intentions carefully. 
• Truth has multiple dimensions, and my eyes alone cannot chart all of it. In many cases, the victim of injustice or intolerance is also a victimizer. To work toward a common good, we must be able to acknowledge the injustice done to those who do injustice to us. While my eyes alone may not be able to understand, I can rely on the stories of others and my intellect to uncover what my ego may wish to hide. 
• There's a murky difference between respecting each individual's right to hold a viewpoint and respecting the individual's actual viewpoint. The former is necessary for civil dialogue, while asking everyone to respect all views seems to lead to conversations that don't go very far. I'm working on refining which views I respect. 
• While we are the owners of many identities, when one of them is under attack, we seem to experience a fight-or-flight response, where we see the attack on the identity as an attack on our character or distance ourselves from this identity and any implications on our character. This seems dangerous to me, and it makes the question of how I see myself more timely. How can I prioritize my identities when they're fluid? 
• According to Father Greg Boyle, "Service is the hallway to the ballroom of kinship and mutuality." That is, through service, we build valuable relationships that reinvigorate us when we share our stories. While we have a strong desire to do good and be helpful, we often find ourselves in a paradigm where those who give service are elevated in status to those who are the recipients of service. This turned me off from serving even though the ideal of serving is a strong pillar of my definition of a Muslim. I hope to re-engage in service by better understanding the delight I receive from serving.  
• I am who I am because you are who you are. After settling in at CHQ, I realized I behave very differently depending on the group of friends I'm with. With some, I'm much more calm and pensive, and with others, I'm spewing ridiculous things and straining to catch my breath from laughing. Different people bring out and help develop different sides of me. I'm afraid I don't know what being myself means when it's so tied to others being themselves. 
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That's a lot to keep in mind, and it's much harder to do justice to the lessons than pay lip-service to them, but I'm trying.

What are your thoughts? Do you think I oversimplified? Are your identities in a power struggle? 

Where Is the Love?

In August of 2010, I had a short but formative conversation with a woman I met on a layover from Alabama to Massachusetts. I was excited and nervous to start my freshman year of college. I grew up in the Deep South, where Southern hospitality was served with big smiles and open doors. I wanted to know how I should mentally prepare myself for the cold North. The woman I was talking to scoffed. Would I stop holding doors open because I've crossed a state border? People are people, and these stereotypes are too small-minded, she persuaded me.  


The take-away message for me was a warning. I was ready to judge a whole group of people so diverse in thought because the people I grew up with defined themselves in relation to the "Other." What's good, ol' Southern hospitality if you can find this hospitality anywhere? But if we distance the positive attributes of our community from the negative characteristics of another (the North in this case), then we can celebrate our heritage (at the price of degrading our neighbor's). By no means am I saying that the South is filled with people who have deep-seated prejudices about the North. This is simply one of the many cases where a community prides itself in opposition to another. 


I've come to operate on the belief that what unifies us will always be stronger than what divides us. Our political beliefs, for example, might be fundamentally different, but at the end of the day, we want the best for our family, and we want to be happy. Happiness defies physics. There's no law of conservation of happiness: if I share my happiness with another, I can still be just as happy. So it confuses me when people try to obtain happiness at the expense of others. Why can't we strive for mutual happiness? 


On some level we've forgotten who we are. We've forgotten what lies underneath the accents and mannerisms is a humanity dying to share its story in an effort to ease its pain and swell with joy. Our forgetfulness manifests itself in intolerance toward people of different religious beliefs. We are fragmented and unwilling to listen to the story of another fragment as if it were our story. 


In the words of the Black Eyed Peas in their song "Where Is The Love?"


     "But if you only have love for your own race 
     Then you only leave space to discriminate
     And to discriminate only generates hate."


We get so caught up in our narrowly defined communities that we forget we belong to a larger community. We forget how to relate when we forget to listen without the judgment reserved for those unlike us. 


This summer, I have the opportunity to share my interpretation of Islam with others as they share their faith with me. It's a chance to learn about people through the lens of their beliefs. Some things we'll agree on and others we won't. Entering with respect and a sincere desire to listen without expectations or judgments, I look forward to gaining an understanding of myself and those I wish to serve. I'll update this blog with my thoughts and the revelations my experiences allow me and look forward to reading your thoughts or comments.