"You can't argue with me about my love" : Peace between Muslim Americans and Christian Americans

Last night at Wake-Up Wednesday we were joined by Jenn Ulschak who gave us a perspective on Muslims few of us have ever had the chance to see.

With all of the unrest in America related to Islamic terrorism, it’s difficult for the public to see past the fear and hatred of radical Islam to the peaceful religion that the majority of Muslims follow. Jenn, as an ASL interpreter for the convention held for the Islamic Society of North America, was able to give us a personal account of her relationship with Muslims. Even more than her interpreting work, Jenn has been able to connect to the Muslim community through her best friend since she was a freshman in college, who is Muslim. She spoke about how during that time she loved spending time at her friend’s house because she and her family were so loving, kind, and accepting of her.

What may be surprising to most Americans is the similarities between Islam and Christianity. Muslims believe in all of the same prophets Christians do plus one more--Muhammad. Of course one of the main differences lies in how the different groups view Jesus. Christians believe Jesus to be the Messiah, the Savior. Muslims believe that Jesus was a great prophet and revere him greatly. In fact, in the Islamic tradition, every time the name of a prophet is said--including Jesus, Moses, and Muhammad--it is followed with the phrase “Peace be upon him”. This is done as a sign of respect for the prophets.

With the fear of Islamic terrorism and ignorance, comes hate crimes against Muslim Americans particularly Muslim women because they are so easily recognizable with their hijabs. Jenn urged us to remember that when Americans commit hate crimes against Muslims, it only gives terrorist groups more fuel. She said, “Every time I put on a hijab I am afraid.” She told us how much she admires Muslim women who wear hijabs in public every day.

Despite this fear and real danger, Jenn says she wears a hijab at times as an act of embodied solidarity. This concept of embodied solidarity comes from Dr. Larycia Hawkins. Dr. Hawkins was a professor at the Christian institution Wheaton College when in an act of embodied solidarity she wore a hijab to work. She was suspended from her job and although Wheaton College’s official statement says they did not fire Dr. Hawkins, she was ultimately let go. So what is embodied solidarity? Jenn told us that embodied solidarity is using your body, putting your body at risk, to be in solidarity with others. According to Jenn, by wearing a hijab she is becoming an accomplice rather than an ally. She argues that embodied solidarity requires you to risk and therefore strengthens you solidarity.

At the end of the night, Jenn was asked if she feels called to lead her Muslim friends to Christ. She said no. She told us that she and her Muslim friends do not try to convert each other; they simply exist in peace, love, and harmony. Personally, I was pleased to hear Jenn speak so fondly of her Muslim friends and the sisterhood she feels a part of when she is with other Muslim women. I think this is a message of peace that all Americans need to hear right now.

Wake-Up Wednesday will take a break this week. On October 5, Wake-Up Wednesday will join Cardboard City.

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A Rabbi, Reverend, Mullah, & Monk are My Traveling Companions

Last week at Wake-Up Wednesday, Reverend Mark Pafford of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Cookeville joined us for the second time. Rev. Pafford brought us a talk about the many different religions he carries around with him as teachers.

He grew up in the United Methodist tradition and was a Methodist minister for some time.  Following his time as a minister, Rev. Pafford became a chaplain for the Veterans Association where he worked specifically with those dealing with addiction.  Right after high school, he joined the army and went to South Korea where he was introduced to Zen Buddhism.  This was the first step towards his interfaith journey.

Rev. Pafford described his interfaith lifestyle as looking through many different lenses.  He said that some days he may pick up the lenses from his Christian heritage while other days he may pick up the lenses of his Islamic faith and still other days he may pick up the lenses for the Buddhism he discovered at a young age.

Today, he serves as pastor to the Unitarian Universalist church in Cookeville.  The Unitarian Universalist church is a safe haven for those of many different religions, sexual orientations, and other backgrounds. Rev. Pafford is also expecting to graduate with a Master’s degree in counseling this December.

Rev. Pafford filled us in about the “Standing on the Side of Love” movement that is going on in the Unitarian Universalist and LGBT communities right now. The movement was mobilized after the shooting in a Knoxville church where LGBT believers were welcome.  They are working to continue to fight for the rights of the people of the LGBT community.

Join us next week with guest Jenn Ulschak with a talk titled “A Christian Woman Wears a Hijab”.

Fear Through the Years: The 2016 Election in Historical Context

Last week at Wake-Up Wednesday Dr. Troy Smith of the history department at TTU joined us to speak about the upcoming election in a historical context.

           

It seems like all the media can talk about is Hillary vs Trump. We wanted to know how this campaign compares to those in the past. The first election that seems to come to mind is 1884 for the sole reason that no one liked either candidate then either. It makes me wonder why this is the first issue that comes to mind. Perhaps it speaks to what Americans (or at least those who are unversed in politics and only watch the evening news for the latest football scores) value most in their leaders: appearances.

Dr. Smith, however, argues that there are other elections that provide us with a better comparison. The two elections that compare the best to the 2016 election are 1856 and 1920. The first comparison is immigration.  Today’s candidates are constantly arguing about immigration policies.  But even more than policies, the issue of hatred and fear towards immigration is huge in this election.  This was also the case in the 1856 election when the issue wasn’t Latino immigrants but Irish and German Catholic immigrants. In 1920, it was Jewish immigrants. Today, we aren’t as bothered by European immigrants (Trump’s wife is a European immigrant), but Latino immigrants strike a chord in many Americans; our candidates have caught on.

In the 1920 election, people feared immigrants because of their ideas revolving around socialism and anarchy among other things. Today, people fear immigrants, especially Middle Eastern immigrants, because of the terrorism we’ve faced in the last 15 years from a small radical faction of Islam.  Regardless of what people are fearing it is certainly a throwback.

There are some unique qualities about the 2016 election, though. One of the main unique factors is the Democratic candidate herself. Despite her gender (she is the first female candidate to win the nomination of a major party), Hillary Clinton is the first candidate who is a former First Lady, a former Senator, and the Secretary of State. While the Republican candidate seems to be lacking any political experience, he has certainly gained the backing of many Americans. 2016 will certainly be a historical race that could go either way. Remember to stay tuned into the election and VOTE. Here is a link to the Putnam County Election Commission: http://www.putnamcountytn.gov/?p=departments&s=electioncomm

Join us tomorrow night with Rev. Mark Pafford from the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Cookeville for a talk titled “A Rabbi, Reverend, Mullah, & Monk are My Traveling Companions”.    

Purple Goes Green

We opened Wake-Up Wednesday for the semester with a visit from DeLayne Miller, Carolyn Huppman, and Allie Ricketts from Tech’s new Office of Sustainability created in January of 2016.

In 2005, Tech began its sustainability efforts with the “Green Fee” which is an $8 fee that students pay every semester. These funds go to projects such as our Bike Share program, the hydration stations that enable students to use reusable bottles, the green fitness room in the Fit that harnesses human energy to help power the building, the recycling program, solar charging tables, and much more.

Additionally, with the creation of the “Green Fee,” came the creation of the Sustainable Campus Committee which is in charge of deciding how the money will be spent. The committee consists of eight students and ten faculty or staff. The Sustainable Campus Committee is the only organization on campus where the students control where their fee money goes. For this reason, only six of the faculty members on the committee are voting members.

The Office of Sustainability is currently working on plans for Earth Week and Sustainability month.  Miller told us that they are also in the process of attaining a LEED Certification for the new science building which will be the first building on campus to have this sustainable certification.

One of the main goals of the Office of Sustainability is student outreach.  To achieve this goal, they are holding “Think Tanks” and maintaining a presence on social media. They are constantly looking for innovative ideas from students and the community. If you have any ideas or questions you can contact DeLayne Miller at dlmiller@tntech.edu or visit the Office of Sustainability on campus.

Join us tonight at Wake-Up Wednesday with Dr. Troy Smith from the History Department to find out what you need to know about the historical context for the upcoming presidential election.   

We're All Artists (featuring Troy Bronsink)

On September 30, we had the privilege of hosting singer-songwriter and creative design leader Troy Bronsink. Troy travelled to Tech from Cincinnati where he lives with his wife and two children to teach us how to live our lives as art.

Bronsink introduced us to tools to enhance the creative design process. This process is circular in nature and contains six components. It can be used for everything from writing a short story to designing a cell phone to planning an event to living your life.

The starting point of the design process is dreaming. We have to open our minds to what is possible. This may seem like a simple step, but we all have roadblocks to our dreams. We may not realize that we stand in our own way. Not knowing our own roadblocks can become our biggest roadblock of all. In order to learn and let go of our roadblocks, Troy led us through a meditation process. Once we are able to fully open our minds to all possibilities, we can truly dream. Without a dream, the entire process is impossible.

Following the discovery of a dream, we must enter the next step of hovering. Here, we focus on a particular aspect of the dream. As this may be difficult for some of us, particularly those of us who often get caught up in the dreaming phase, Troy led us through a meditative focusing exercise. He instructed us to focus a warm energy flowing from the top of our heads to our ankles. This taught us to focus our creative energies. It can be difficult to let go of a part of our dreams as they often become a part of who we are; however, it is necessary to let go of certain aspects of our dreams in order to make the entire dream come true.

Once we are able to focus our dream, we need to risk it. We have to put our baby out into the world and sit back, waiting for success or failure. We have to test how our creation will function in the world. Risk isn’t something we only do with a project. We risk things in our lives every time we make a major decision. Troy encouraged us to ask ourselves what the “no” or “yes” is in our lives that we are postponing. What is the crossroads in our lives? The reason we often stand at a crossroads and postpone saying no or yes lies in our fear of risk. It is, however, a critical part of the design process that is our lives.

           

The results of our risk will come whether we like it or not. In order to gain insight from our risk, we must listen, truly listen, to our audience, or in the events of our life design, to ourselves. We must listen to understand what our user’s experience is. Feedback is crucial to the creative design process. As a writer, I go through a feedback process every time one of my pieces is read and workshopped by my peers. It’s a tough process, but without it, I’ll never grow as a writer. As a leader, I go through a feedback process every time an event or idea I worked hard on plays out.

Sometimes my risk resulted in success and sometimes it didn’t. Either way, I always learn something through truly listening to feedback. This is the only way I grow as a leader. One of the exercises Troy led us through for the listening process was meditating over our day. We began from the morning and worked our way through the day reflecting on what our body was telling us at each part of our day. Listening to our bodies daily allows us to discover the question that lingers inside of us all day every day.

           

So what do we do with our feedback? The next step of the design process is to reintegrate our feedback into our design. We make changes and improvements to our design based on our listening. This may involve going back to any one of the previous stages of the process. We may have to scrap everything and begin dreaming again.

           

Following whatever reintegrating means for our particular creative endeavor, we must rest. We must, as artists, take a step away from our creation giving it and ourselves room to breathe and rest. Many of us forget or refuse to take this step. Many of us, myself included, feel guilty for taking this step always feeling like we could do more. However, rest is key to a successful creative design. It may be a cliché, but if you love something, you must let it go. The same thing goes for your creation.

           

While a useful tool to shaping our projects and lives, the creative design process can only go so far. We must be mindful of our use of it particularly in the listening stage. We must go through the day stopping to integrate our meditative processes into our everyday lives. As citizens of a sleepless nation, we often get swept up in the business of the day and miss out on the opportunities to listen that happen all around us. Troy suggests carrying a token of some sort—something small such as a stone or prayer beads—around with you to remind you to meditate throughout the day. Or for the more techy people, put a reminder on your phone.

           

It was a great pleasure to meet and get to know Troy Bronsink. I’m very grateful for the things he was able to teach us during his time in the Tree House. He helped us create a peaceful open energy the entire night through music and meditation. As my friend and colleague Brett Meeks said, “These meditations created amazing unity and energy in the room.” The unity and atmosphere Troy was able to help us create was a true gift that we will be able to use for the rest of our lives. I’ll leave you with this thought that Troy borrowed from Frederick Buechner and that really spoke to me: your calling is where your deepest passion meets the world’s deepest need. - Chelsea Mathes 

Wake-Up Wednesday has been hiatus due to midterms but resumes this Wednesday, October 21, with Rev. Mark Pafford on “What is Unitarian Universalism?”

                

Rabbi Rami Shapiro: An Interfaith Conversation

Rabbi Rami Shapiro and Andrew Smith

Rabbi Rami Shapiro joined us for Wake-Up Wednesday this week for the first leg of our interfaith journey.  Shapiro is a prolific author and practical mystic who lives in Murfreesboro. We expected an in depth discussion about Judaism and how it fits into the interfaith web.  What we got was much better. 

Rabbi Rami presented us with a smorgasbord of faith traditions and opened up the conversation to little known pieces of Hebrew translation that make all the difference.  For another curve ball, he even expressed this idea that Judaism, his chosen path, is only one path to a universal truth and ultimate reality, or God, depending on your individual path.

One of the points Rabbi Rami talked about was this idea of drawing teachings from many different faiths.  Yes, all religions are mutually exclusive as religious doctrine.  If you ask a Christian how to get to heaven, she will tell you to accept Jesus Christ into your heart.  No other answer will fulfill her faith requirements.  The same goes for any other religion and whatever their answer may be.  But are there not things we can learn from other faiths that may even enhance our own spiritual journey? 

You may believe that the only way to heaven is to accept Jesus Christ as your savior, but does that prevent you from learning a thing or two about life from other faith traditions?  We don’t think it should.  We all have something to learn, even if it is just respect, from other faith traditions. 

As Rabbi Rami said, “I was only interested in what worked.”  His statement says it all.  If what works for an individual on his or her path to this universal truth we all so desperately seek happens to be a collection of teachings and beliefs from a multitude of faiths, who are we to say that person is wrong?

As a translator, Rabbi Rami was able to give us some insights into the original Hebrew text of the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament.  Certain words or phrases can often get lost in translation causing us to lose the original meaning of the text.  One such instance occurs when Abraham is called in Genesis 12 to “Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you” (Genesis 12:1 ESV).  Another translation of the Hebrew could be “go inside yourself” instead of “go from”.  This interpretation changes everything.  It makes Abraham’s journey and our own journey not one of physical travel but one of pscyhospiritual exploration.  It calls us to free ourselves from ourselves rather than the external world so that God can do His work.  The translation means everything. 

Another translation issue Rabbi Rami spoke about comes in the opening lines of Ecclesiastes. The English translation says “’Meaningless! Meaningless!’ says the Teacher. ‘Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.’” (Ecclesiastes 1:2 NIV).  The Hebrew word that was translated into “meaningless” is hevel, which can also mean “impermanent.” This completely changes how we read this entire book.  Rabbi Rami put his understanding of the text like this, “Life is no more permanent than the morning dew.”  Nothing in life can be meaningless.  Even a single drop of morning dew is meaningful.  It is God—or a piece of God.  It becomes words to a poet and perfection to a painter.  We simply cannot reconcile ourselves to a life where anything is meaningless.  It hurts more the more meaning you have, but imagine carving your heart out of your chest every day, rather than sit with absolutely nothing where everything should be.  A simple translation difference can change a life perspective. 

One of the most powerful pieces of our talk with Rabbi Rami came when he talked about this idea that God cannot be named but only experienced.  A brilliant illustration of this came when he explained about contemplatives (people who spend their lives praying and meditating) of different religions coming together to meditate in their own way and having a discussion about their experiences.  Rabbi Rami said that no matter what faith each person came from, he or she had the same experience as everyone in the group.  Each person experienced this oneness with God. 

Alternatively, he or she experienced God even though each person would have a different name for what they were experiencing.  No matter your faith, God can be anywhere.  We may not be able to put a name to what we’re experiencing, though we’ve been using the term “God” throughout this blog simply from habit or lack of a better term at the present time or because of the comfort that familiarity brings.

Perhaps the most fascinating piece of our evening was Rabbi Rami’s discussion on goddesses and femininity in the Bible and religion in general. In the original Hebrew text, the Holy Spirit is feminine.  Just another thing we lost in translation. 

Mary could be said to be a type of goddess particularly in the Catholic tradition.  Protestants tend to shy away from the existence of goddesses or femininity in religion at all, even though Lady Wisdom appears in Proverbs 8: “Does not wisdom call out?/ Does not understanding raise her voice?/At the highest point along the way,/where the paths meet, she takes her stand” (Proverbs 8:1-2 NIV).  The masculine cannot exist without the feminine.  The creative energies of both the masculine and feminine are needed to maintain balance.  More importantly, when the presence of the feminine is acknowledged it must not be with the attributes of soft, delicate, and nurturing only.  In fact, even in Proverbs the feminine is strong calling her people to understand their own failings. 

Students crave meaningful interfaith conversations that are honest. Surely not everyone shares Rabbi Rami’s interreligious approach, but we all wanted to learn from him, as this was our best attended Wednesday night discussion to date.

Join us next week for a discussion of Islam with Dr. Wali Kharif. 

What is White Privilege?

This week at Wake-Up Wednesday, we welcomed Dr. Troy Smith of the history department here at TTU. He joined us to discuss the topic of white privilege, and what follows are some of our insights from the evening's discussion. 

So what is white privilege?  Many people associate white privilege with prejudice, but it’s not exactly the same thing.  While prejudice can be handed down as a learned behavior from family members, it is ultimately a choice one makes to be prejudiced towards a certain group of people based on their race.  White privilege refers to the cultural privileges white people are born into in this society and have no choice in.  Some aren’t even aware that it’s something they have.

To better explain white privilege, Dr. Smith spoke about the concept of whiteness.  White people did not always identify themselves as white.  In fact, the concept of whiteness only came along when white people began interacting with other races who happened to have darker skin colors. Shortly after this interaction began, a social hierarchy developed placing white Anglo-Saxons at the top and other races at the bottom.  This hierarchy and concept of whiteness became the backbone of the slave industry.  White people had to believe that black people were inferior to them in order to justify slavery.

Slavery left the hierarchy permanently ingrained in everyone.  W.E.B DuBois said that black Americans had a double consciousness meaning that they not only had to see themselves as how they truly were but also had to be aware of how they appear to white people.  White people do not have to have this awareness.  White people in the United States seem to possess an ingrained fear of black men.  This fear traces back to our ancestors who feared slave rebellions of black men during the antebellum period.  It doesn’t mean that these people are racist though they may be; it only means that the race hierarchy put in place by our ancestors still plays an important role in today’s society.

In 1954 when Brown v. Board was brought to the Supreme Court, psychologist Kenneth Clark and his wife Mamie Clark designed an experiment to show the psychological effect of segregation on school children.  Black and white children were given dolls that ranged in skin tone from white to black.  They were then asked questions like which doll would be the good doll and which one would be the bad one.  Both black and white children responded that the white doll would be the good doll and the black one would be the bad one.  This study was replicated ten years ago with similar results.  This is just another example of how white privilege and social hierarchy have leaked down into the generations.

So now that we’re aware of white privilege, what can we do about it?  Can we do anything about it?  How do we use it to everyone’s advantage?  As white allies, we can change the system from the inside.  As unfortunate as it is, one white person is generally more likely to listen to another white person especially on race issues.  This is a prime example of white privilege.  If we use that privilege by speaking to people about the issues of groups other than our own and becoming a support group within activist groups, we can change the white privilege system from the inside out.  We must, however, remember to come with a sense of humility as we offer our support.  - Chelsea Mathes and Andrew Smith of the Tree House, commenting on our conversation with Troy Smith 

Join us next week as we begin an interfaith journey with Rabbi Rami with a talk titled “Heart of Judaism”.  http://www.rabbirami.com/