Seeking More Than a Conversation

~ by Justin S. Kim, an attorney who lives and works in Washington, D.C.

When I first read about the Faith House, I was impressed.  It is an ambitious plan supported by a strong list of endorsements. I loved the idea—but it was an idea for New York City.  I live near Washington, D.C.  And I’m not a minister or professor of religion, but an attorney who spends much of the day in front of a computer.  What does an interfaith community in another city have to do with me?

Religion has been described as a faux pas of polite conversation.  Scratch the surface of a person’s religion and faith, and squirming and shifting begins.  We have all seen religion and faith lead to difference and division.  Perhaps this is why we don’t think of the workplace as a safe place for serious conversations about religion.

Yet despite all this, every day, people engage in casual conversations about faith and religion–in schools and offices, over meals and coffee, and between persons of different faiths and nonfaith.  But after promising beginnings, these conversations often end prematurely.  They last over a lunch but then are put on hold when everyone returns to work.

My first conversation about religion at work was also the first sustained encounter with a person who did not share a Christian background.  A colleague and I shared an office for a year.  He was a secular Jew who spent much of his life in Brooklyn; I was born, raised, and schooled in a cocoon of suburban Adventism.  Occasionally, our mutual curiosity led to conversations about faith and religion.  As a secular Jew, he found Adventism to be an amusing puzzle–a Christian denomination with some decidedly Jewish traditions.  (As we would leave work on Friday afternoons, he would wish me “Shabbat shalom” with a big grin.  We laughed at the irony of the Christian who kept the Sabbath and the Jew who did not.)  My political leanings also confounded his idea of evangelical Christianity, which seemed largely derived from reading the New York Times.  Similarly, he was a paradox to me–a secular, agnostic Jew who nevertheless attended temple on holy days.

Over that year, we had engaging discussions about religious doctrine and practice, the nature of God as revealed in the story of Abraham’s sacrifice, and the role of religion in public life and global affairs.  But that was it–a series of interesting conversations.  At the end of that year, we both moved on to different jobs in different cities.

When you read this, I hope you feel a twinge of loss–maybe a familiar loss that you too have felt.  I wonder how many conversations share the same fate and whether with each repetition, if another opportunity for sharing, understanding, and healing is lost.  Many of us no longer live in a place where entire countries, cities, and neighborhoods share one faith.  Sadly, the diversity of faith and nonfaith in our communities often leads to division and misunderstanding.  A byproduct of this dysfunction is the loneliness and isolation that we feel, even in the dense crowds of city life.

The Faith House is not primarily a place for interfaith dialogue amongst the clergy.  It’s for all of us who long for our faith to be more intertwined with our daily lives–at work, at home, in our neighborhoods and communities.  When we can’t experience matters of faith and religion with those who regularly come into our lives, it limits our faith.  That is why I am heartened by the Faith House and the idea of a place devoted to supporting and encouraging shared experiences across faiths and religions.  It gives me hope for the conversations yet to come.