Interfaith Insight - 2021
Permanent link for "Affirming one's identity while learning from others" by Doug Kindschi on October 26, 2021
The challenge for America is to embrace an ethic that includes
“respect for different identities, relationships between diverse
communities, and a commitment to the common good.”
This is the theme of Eboo Patel’s 2018 book, Out of Many
Faiths: Religious Diversity and the American Promise. He is
clear that our effort is not the “melting pot” image, often used to
describe how we come together. That assumes we are somehow absorbed
into a common mix that obliterates our differences. He prefers the
image of a “potluck” where we bring our various dishes to share, and
where the variety enhances our experience with mutually different experiences.
An important part of this manner of coming together is sharing
our stories in ways that enable us to learn from each other as well as
learn with each other. Patel shares some of his personal experiences
as he learned to appreciate his own heritage while also learning from
others.
He tells of when he was in junior high and very self-conscious of
his minority status. When his grandmother from India attended one of
his junior high functions “at my largely white suburban school,
dressed in her Indian clothes and speaking with her Indian accent, I
quaked with embarrassment.”
One of his teachers, sensing his situation, told him that his
grandmother reminded her of her Italian grandmother. She continued,
“Outside of native peoples, we all come from somewhere, and we should
take pride in our heritage and customs of our family.” Patel recounts
how this made him feel more fully American.
He also recounts the story of how his father came from India to
America. Patel explains, “I am in this country because an institution
started by French priests in the Indiana countryside in the 1840s,
committed to the faith formation and economic uplift of poor
Midwestern Catholic boys, somehow saw fit to admit a wayward Ismaili
Muslim student from Bombay into its MBA program in the 1970s. That
man was my father.”
Patel continues to describe his father’s devotion to Notre Dame’s
Fighting Irish football team, leading to the occasion of what he
identifies as one of his earliest interfaith memories. Frequent trips
on Football Saturdays from Chicago to the campus always included a
stop at the Grotto, a shrine to the Virgin Mary. On one occasion,
Patel quizzed his father about why he as a Muslim would pray at a
shrine dedicated to a Christian figure. His father pointed to the
hundreds of candles and quoted from the Qur’an that God should be seen
as “Light upon Light.” He then said, “You have a choice whenever you
encounter something from another tradition, Eboo. You can look for
the difference, or you can find resonances. I advise you to find the resonances.”
Patel learned from his father that one’s identity can be
multiple, just as our nation can affirm multiple identities. His
father could affirm his Muslim and Indian identities while also
identifying with the Fighting Irish of the Catholic Notre Dame
University who had given him a place in his education.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks in his latest book, Morality: Restoring
the Common Good in Divided Times, also examines the important
concept of identity as well as its danger when it becomes toxic. He
says that identity is a part of our “primal, irrepressible need to
belong: to identify with something larger than Me.” It can be a
powerful motivator for the good, or be extremely dangerous when it
leads to war or when it dominates politics in ways that actually
threaten our democracy.
He outlines how nation, race, and class identities have
historically led to wars, prejudice, and racial purity concepts such
as that which led to the Holocaust. Led to the extreme, a society can
lose not only the ability to negotiate differences, but even a common
understanding of truth. It is in this way that Sacks worries about the
current individualism and toxic polarity that places Western democracy
at risk.
Is it possible that as we can, as Patel urged, learn more about,
and with, those of different faith traditions, that we too can “look
for the resonances?” Can we even find ways to communicate with those
whose positions and politics are not our own, as Sacks urges, to seek
ways that bring us to further understanding rather than promoting ways
to confront and divide? It may not be easy but our identities might
actually be enhanced and strengthened as we relate deeply to others
while working for the common good.