If you Google “interfaith,” a number of results for the Boston area will appear. On the first page, you will likely find the websites of organizations that operate food banks, offer financial assistance to those facing economic emergencies, or work to address climate change. When I think back to when I first encountered interfaith work, these were the prime factors that led me to feel called to this work — I wanted to address social justice issues in a multi-faith context, seeking common ground while advocating for social change. I still find the work of seeking common ground important, especially given our political context, but through this type of interfaith engagement, I discovered there was another dimension to interfaith spaces. Interfaith spaces provide opportunities for transformative spiritual experiences—moments that allow us to discover (or rediscover) something about our own faith through the act of being in community with others.

Interfaith spaces provide an opportunity for personal spiritual growth and discovery through conversation, fellowship, telling the stories of our faith journeys, and listening to what others find most sacred. I’ve lost count of the number of times an experience in another faith’s worship space or a conversation with someone of a different religion than mine inspires me to dig a little deeper into my own faith. For example, over the summer, I accompanied two dozen high school-aged students to the Gurudwara Sikh Sangat in Everett, Massachusetts as a staff member of the Interfaith Youth Initiative. After the service was over, we were invited to join the community for a Langar meal. Our hosts explained the origins of Sikh Langar meals as a reaction to exclusion that early Sikhs faced on the basis of their caste and religion. To this day, they told us, anyone was welcome to participate in the Langar meal, regardless of class, caste, religion, ethnicity, or background. We were told that we were welcome anytime if we were ever hungry. I immediately felt a sense of jealousy, or what the Lutheran Bishop Krister Stendhahl calls “holy envy”—the feeling of wishing that what we admire in other faiths could be reflected in our own. I wished that the Christian faith could have something that powerful, that outward, and that open to stand in contrast to the ways Christianity has closed itself off to others based on race, gender identity, sexual orientation, theological position, ability, class, or any other number of factors.

This envy I felt toward the Sikh Langar meal encouraged me to consider how my own tradition approaches hospitality and justice. I spent time afterwards digging through Christianity’s embrace of exuberant love and radical hospitality, from Jesus’s mandates to love one’s neighbor, to the prophets of the Hebrew Bible, and to the history of Christian churches providing sanctuary to political prisoners and migrants. In this search, I did not find that the Sikh and Christian faiths were identical. They share different understandings of God and draw from different sacred sources, and their approaches to hospitality look much different. But the act of being invited into a Sikh space transformed how I view my faith, reminding me of what I prioritize and what I sometimes forget is right there in my own tradition. Interfaith experiences like this one inspire me to cultivate what I love about my faith and live it in a way that resembles what I admire in others.

A little over a month after this experience at the Sikh Sangat, the Boston Bridges Fellowship cohort met for the first time. While we may not visit each other’s places of worship, the conversations we have monthly allow us to enter into a space of experience and sharing through dialogue. During that meeting, we ended our gathering by sitting around a campfire discussing the role of fire in our faith traditions. The fire inspired each of us to tell a different story and to dig deep into our beliefs, rituals, and traditions and to consider what the flames may symbolize. Through simply listening to and learning from the other members of the cohort, a space for transformation was created. Hearing others discuss the spiritual significance of fire and the flame encouraged me to consider the role of fire in my own spiritual journey. Just as I thought about hospitality and justice after visiting the Sikh Sangat, I thought about how important lighting a candle has been for me in so many religious spaces I’ve worshipped in—how this act symbolizes an ongoing commitment with each other to be present, to listen, to worship together, and to seek God/the Divine in whatever way we are called to do. This same commitment is shared by the Fellows in the Boston Bridges cohort—to be present with each other, to listen, and to grow as leaders.

While these moments may be able to happen online in virtual communities or through solitary study of other religions, being physically present with each other and engaging in conversation or worship allows us to experience the most mundane—which are often the most sacred—elements of faith. We witness both the pain in someone’s eyes as they share their deepest struggles with their faith and feel the joy emanating from their body as they are offered a space where they can describe what they find most beautiful and inspiring in their tradition. To be present, to witness that which is most sacred for our peers, allows us to enter into a space of humility. We accept the fact that the ways we practice our religion may not always resemble the ways that another practices their faith. We reject trying to impose our own understandings of faith onto another religion, universalizing the world’s faiths as the same. Yet we see elements of a shared humanity in each other; we recognize common commitments of spirituality, justice, and hope; and we affirm a shared desire to live out our faith in ways that are most truthful to our deepest-held values. We can then leave these spaces reinvigorated and recommitted to our own faith and spiritual practices.

Photo by Kevin Erdvig on Unsplash