When I arrived at Brown for the 2018 fall semester, it had been eleven years since I had sat in a classroom. My reintroduction to a learning environment took place during orientation, when the roughly eighteen hundred members of the class of 2022 were divided into groups of twenty students and assigned to a specific faculty member to discuss the summer reading assignment. Randomly, I was assigned to the classroom of the Reverend Janet Cooper Nelson, the Chaplain of Brown University.

The topic of the summer reading—and therefore the topic of our discussion—was eviction and related issues of poverty in America. The Reverend led a captivating discussion; she connected inequality to moral responsibility and then seamlessly tied moral responsibility into her world of faith and organized religion. During the seminar, she asked each of us to commit to one goal: Do not leave Brown religiously illiterate.

Although I have been aware for years that I am religiously ignorant, it was not until the Reverend brought it up in class that I thought of my ignorance as a serious impediment to my desires to be a global leader for positive change. I immediately committed to the Reverend’s goal and soon found time to visit her in her office. Over the course of several extended conversations that week, we discussed my ignorance, my religious identity, my desire and need to educate myself, and the different paths that I might take to familiarize myself with a part of life that is central to so many and yet so foreign to me.

Less than a week later, I received an email from the Reverend asking me if I would like to represent Brown at the Boston Interfaith Leadership Initiative (BILI). I thought she must have made a mistake. She had definitely populated the TO line with the wrong address. She knew that I am not only religiously illiterate but that I also have almost no personal religious identity. How could I represent Brown at an interfaith gathering when I had no faith at all?

I politely replied that I was honored to be included but that she must be mistaken; I could represent neither faith nor Brown, for I was ignorant of both after less than a week on campus. She wrote back to say that she had invited me with full knowledge of my situation and that she believed that I would be a great participant in the initiative. In fact, she believed that it was important to have both agnostic and atheist representatives at any interfaith gathering because those groups represent a very large segment of the population.

With trepidation, I accepted the nomination.

The first BILI gathering seemed to confirm my fears. Each of the other students, all of whom are somewhere in the neighborhood of a decade younger than me, seemed to have a strong religious identity (even if that identity is as an atheist) and seemed vastly knowledgeable about their own religion as well as the religions of the other participants. However, with each passing meeting, my sense of belonging in the group has grown. This sense of fitting in has not come because of any revelation that I am more educated than I initially feared. (I am not.) Nor has it come from learning that my peers are less knowledgeable than they initially appeared. (They are extremely bright and religiously literate.) Rather, it has come from a growing understanding that, despite my illiteracy, I can be an asset to the group and can contribute positively to the goals that we all share.

As the Reverend predicted, participating in BILI has helped me begin to crack the seemingly impenetrable wall of ignorance that stands between me and religious understanding. I have a growing reading list of work that I now understand to be essential, including Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, Parker J. Palmer’s The Company of Strangers, and Howard Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited. I also am building a community of friends who are vastly more knowledgeable than myself and can offer me wonderful insights into their worlds.

Despite having learned that the most valuable resource at college is time and that every aspect of a college student’s life is worthy of a commitment many times the energy and attention that it is given, I have found BILI to be wonderfully rewarding and enlightening. I am so grateful to the Reverend for seeing potential where I had doubt and for giving me this opportunity. I also want to express my appreciation for our leaders Tom Reid, Phoebe Oler, and Rabbi Or Rose at Hebrew College for their patience and understanding of the chaotic and frustratingly segmented lives of the college students in our group, me chief among them. It has been an honor for me to be a part of this BILI cohort.

Image by IvanPais from Pixabay