In the summer of 2017 I traveled to Indonesia to participate in a two-week immersive program through CEDAR (Communities Engaging with Difference and Religion). The aim of the summer school is to bring together local and international fellows for holistic learning related to the history of colonialism and religious diversity. This is the second in a series of reflections based on my experiences abroad and the deeply felt theory that is emerging as I unpack from my trip. Find my first reflection here.

When I think about interfaith work, I am constantly drawn toward thinking about how people with irreconcilable differences can work together and share space. By irreconcilable differences, I am not only referring to distinctions between religions but also to differences in politics, practices, and values. My trip to Indonesia was focused on learning how to live with this kind of difference and the discomfort that it often produces. In this post, I want to highlight the importance of a shared history in interfaith work and how what counts as common does not have to be based on values and beliefs. Rather, a shared history contributes to a collective memory that generates belonging.

I entered the CEDAR conference in Indonesia with very little connectivity to our group of thirty fellows and organizers. I had taken a class with the Boston University professor and organizer who had invited me, but we were not particularly close. I quickly felt the loneliness of my situation. I was in a foreign country, did not speak the language, and had little in common with any of the other participants and organizers; I started with almost nothing shared. Additionally, CEDAR conferences involve an exhaustive daily schedule. We started early and ended late at night, with each day including multiple lectures, site visits, and immersive cultural experiences. As the program progressed, we were increasingly able to point backwards to moments and experiences that were collective and becoming part of our shared memory.

We each remembered our sanitation struggles in Kauniki, the roller coaster of a bus ride that took us there, and other funny and distinct moments in small groups and in passing. Someone who I went through a lot with during my trip was my roommate, Fanny. Fanny and I are wildly different. He constantly bragged about eating every kind of pork snack in Indonesia, while I am vegan. He is an amalgam of multiple religious and ethnic identities, while I am a humanist and a white guy. We also have a host of different opinions on gender and race. However, Fanny and I shared a room every night for two weeks. In learning how to live together and share space, our shared history became something that bonded us. What often mattered most between us was not our commonalities as persons but simply the experiences we had both been through. We stayed in the same room in the remote village of Kauniki, where we slept on dusty blankets, used the restroom in a muddy outhouse, and fended off frogs while doing our business. We were both there when, on one of the last nights, we slept on some spaced out two-by-fours in what had to be the room where our host family kept their gasoline supply.

There were times where Fanny and I shared little else than this history that built over two weeks. All the same, it was through these commonalities that we could better engage our differences and place them in some sort of context. The shared symbols of our experience enabled us to engage on other levels and to build trust. This relationship was a microcosm of what was happening on a larger scale with our group. We were each unique in our identities yet all in the same space for the same school for two weeks. The shared history that we developed bonded me even to those whom I had interacted with very little. We had each seen the beauty of Mount Kelimutu after sleeping for only a few hours the previous night. We all remembered dancing with the local Regent (governor) and his family to American karaoke tracks.These moments generated the belonging necessary to work together.

This sense of belonging was put to the test multiple times during the conference. One time in particular, we were to meet at a mosque for a conversation with the imam and some of the community leaders. When we arrived, they told us that they wanted to meet inside the mosque but that women who were menstruating would not be allowed in and would have to wait outside. Our group quickly decided that, in a sense, we would all be menstruating, and we all decided to only go as far as the women in our group were allowed to go. This was on just day three of our conference, so I can think of no other bonding force we had other than the shared, albeit short, history of our group and the belonging that it generated.

I learned that a shared history is much more powerful and cohesive an element than I had previously thought. I came to appreciate this only through feeling its effects over the course of the school. I needed this sense of belonging that came through a shared history. A shared history provides a set of shared symbolic experiences, which give people who are different something to point to together. These are not an abstract ideals but rather concrete experiences. It is one thing to know something, but a wholly other thing to feel it. A shared history is experientially based. Thus, it seems to operate on a different plane than common values and beliefs, while being, possibly, just as cohesive.

Following my experience in Indonesia, I am left with a question: is a shared history a more useful way of approaching difference than a values-driven approach? It seems, to me, that a shared history creates a container for difference that hinges on something outside of values and beliefs, without rendering them absent. Does a sense of belonging created in this way generate more possibilities and broader imaginations than an approach more focused on a common ground of values? I am not sure what the answer is, but I know that our shared history was an essential bonding element for me that fostered trust and belonging in a group with whom I had very little in common in belief or value.