I recently had the wonderful occasion to attend the Fall Gathering of the Interfaith Round Table of Washtenaw County (IRT), which included speeches, music, rituals, and interfaith prayers. Christine Modey is the Chair of the Board of Directors for IRT, and I loved what she shared to open the experience and frame the time together. I asked her if I could share her remarks here, and gratefully, she sent them along.
Welcome, and thank you all for being here. Thanks, especially, to Theresa and the Unitarian Universalist Congregation for hosting us in your beautiful space again this year.
Thanks to the board and program committee of the Interfaith Round Table, and to everyone who is offering their gifts to this fall gathering, including our guest speaker Bob Brutell from the InterFaith Leadership Council of Metropolitan Detroit. We are so glad you’re here.
My name is Christine Modey, and I’m currently serving as the chair of the Interfaith Round Table of Washtenaw County.
One of the things I’ve been thinking about since starting interfaith work and joining the Interfaith Round Table is the question of what interfaith needs to do and be at this moment, in our place.
I don’t know the answer to this question.
I do know that the world has changed, since our founding in 1994. Since 9/11. Since 2016. Since Nov. 5.
The only thing certain is change. And so it’s right to keep asking ourselves what our community needs, what word we need to speak to each other, what next elegant step only we can take together?
An image that returns to my mind, again and again, is a bowl, maybe a basket.
Interfaith dialogue and interfaith relationship is a container for difference, not the eraser of difference. It refuses to reduce the irreducible. It doesn’t coerce artificial agreement. It doesn’t configure interfaith encounter into lowest common denominator spirituality.
Interfaith is spiky. Challenging. Demanding.
In a polarized world that asks us to declare our loyalties and shut “the Other” out, interfaith invites us into the same container, with those with whom we disagree, with those whose Truth is not our truth. Interfaith exists in the tension between competing truths.
Contained by our shared commitment to listen and understand our neighbors, interfaith demands mutual respect, trust, vulnerability, intellectual humility, and love. It demands recognition of the dignity and freedom of each person.
Interfaith invites us to hear one another’s songs, to lift up one another’s prayers, and–knowing the deepest longings of one another’s hearts–to act.
— Christine Modey
Christine Modey directs the Michigan Community Scholars Program at the University of Michigan. From 2015 to 2020, she also directed the Peer Writing Consultant Program at the Sweetland Center for Writing at the University of Michigan and taught courses in the theory and practice of peer writing tutoring, new media writing for nonprofit organizations, and first year composition. She has published articles about university-secondary school writing center partnerships, data visualization and corpus analysis of writing center session notes, and nineteenth-century literature, and has an abiding interest in networks, collaboration, and community building. She is the co-editor with David Schoem and Edward St. John of Teaching the Whole Student: Engaged Learning with Heart, Mind, and Spirit. She holds degrees in chemistry and English from Hope College (B.A.) and in English and American Literature from the University of Delaware (M.A., Ph.D.).
Smuggling Grace 