Have you ever heard the expression, “You’re in my personal space?” As Americans, we love our space. During the frontier days, barb wire delineated my space from your space. Today, elongated “privacy” bush hedges and white picket fences take their place. We drive spacious SUV’s and have luxuriously wide hi-way lanes. We live in storied houses, and play in our own backyards.  This coveting of space can be detected in our physical interaction with other humans as well. Judith Orloff, MD., says that “most Americans need an arms-length [of personal space] around them,” and that an invasion of that personal space “causes our stress hormones to skyrocket and can affect our physical and mental health. Blood pressure, heart rate, and muscle tension are all affected.”

In my travels and subsequent period of expatriation in Latin America, I found that in order to truly experience the culture that was up until that time foreign, I would have to lower my arm’s length of personal space. I could not bring my hedges with me and I certainly could not drive a 7-passenger SUV. In my two years residing in Mexico City, I, like most of the 30 million residents, would pile into a metro station every morning and lose all concept of my socially constructed “personal space” all over again. This entailed a time of sustained vulnerability; a living as other and with other. I was a gringo en la casa (An American in the house). However, in Latin America, I was never reprimanded with “you’re in my personal space,” but rather as the saying goes, “Mi casa es su casa.” And soon I too became uncomfortable with wide open spaces, and like those in the communal culture about me, I longed for the closeness of my neighbor – I needed my neighbor.

I am currently in a Master’s of Divinity program at Andover Newton Theological School (ANTS), a now interdenominational Christian seminary (and soon to be an as-yet-undefined “Interfaith university”) in Newton, MA. ANTS shares a campus with Hebrew College (HC), which has a transdenominational Rabbinical school. Two months ago, at the start of the academic year and during the Jewish festival of Sukkot, my peers from ANTS and I were invited into the freshly erected Sukkah. After we were served delectable kosher food, we entered the festive song and joy of the Sukkah. It was packed full of people: Jews, Christians, Unitarian Universalists, agnostics, and I’m quite certain that others who self-identify with other traditions or philosophies were also there. Again, there were so many people – and so little space. I felt like I was back on the metro in el DF (Mexico City).  It was in this experience that I felt the similarities that an immersion-style interfaith experience has with an immersion-style cross-cultural experience. Once again, the hedges are to be left at the entrance of the Sukkah. Anything that impeded me from relating was to be left outside. Like Moses, taking off his sandals to commune with the Holy Other, we discarded parts of our constructed selves, in this case our “personal space,” to commune with others.

During the sacred time, I saw no flustered American with blood pressure rising, trying to demarcate his or her own personal space. Though I’m sure some thresholds were crossed, especially if being in such close proximity with the “religious other” was not normative for some, but it was in this action of tabernacling together, in the confines of being and relating in the presence of the other that our personal spaces, and I suspect in some instances, even our preconceptions of the other were to some extent deconstructed.

In my experience, it is in the art of relinquishing certainty and security, when one dares to be truly vulnerable, that one begins to more fully relate with others. I think this principle is no different in an interfaith exchange. Here on “the Hill” (our institutions share a campus on a hill just outside Boston, MA) we express this concept with the phrase, “sacred hospitality.” In participating in the Interfaith movement and in claiming a role in a common commitment for the bettering of the world, I have experienced “sacred hospitality” as a wonderful starting place; a practicing of being intimately present, radically serving/being served, and deeply listening to and mutually cherishing narratives. I believe this is essential for a genuine dialectic encounter. This is why joining State of Formation is important to me. I want to be a part of the bettering of the world; I want to be able to co-experience sacred texts; I want to co-participate in meaning-making dialogue; I want to co-construct communities; I want to be able to enter Sukkahs and I want to be able to say “mi casa es su casa también (My house is your house too),” because we indeed do need each other for the proliferation of Creation. I am far from advocating a universal syncretism of religions, but rather a conscious particularism; a maintaining of religious identities, coexisting in a pluralistic world.  How all this is playing out in my own experience as a Christian and how my own story affects this process will be the focus of future posts. Also I look forward to blogging about the happenings on the Hill here and in the Boston area.

“Truth is to be found in unhindered dialogue.” –Jürgen Moltmann

“Faith is not a question of the existence or non-existence of God. It is believing that love without reward is valuable.” — Emmanuel Levinas