Smuggling Grace

Inch Wide, Mile Deep

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.).

I saw this quote from Shannon Craigo-Snell, and it may be helpful to take in:

“One of the tenets of resisting injustice is ‘do not acquiesce in advance.’ I am telling myself that a corollary is ‘do not despair in advance.’ Prepare, yes. Protect, yes. Grieve, yes. But not despair.”

There’s some definite wisdom there.

Last night, I was in a room where it happens. I won’t say the room where it happens, because I believe there are many such rooms. But the Interfaith Council for Peace and Justice (ICPJ) held its annual Harvest Dinner with a couple hundred people, and it was truly a room like that. With a great deal of connection and cross-pollination, relationships were forged and deepened. Multiple times, people said, “Look around this room,” inviting us to take in the scene. It was filled with community members who are change agents, activists, creatives, and people who love deeply. We had music and speeches that drew us together. We shared opportunities to applaud honorees who were presented with awards for their vision and work in our county.

Desirae Simmons, one of ICPJ’s Co-Directors, began her address by saying, “Gathering together is a radical act.” I appreciated that statement, and it felt undeniably true.

I also heard some additional quotes that will stay with me:

Shihab Jackson, recipient of the Anti-Racist Advocate Award, shared that our county includes 12% Black residents, but 40% of the county’s population experiencing homelessness are Black. Jackson then said, “Every trauma inflicted on our community deserves an equal and opposite level of joy.” We were invited into advocacy and joy together.

A Brighter Way is an organization that uplifts the experiences and leadership of people who have been formerly incarcerated. Through mentoring, they help each other to “find a brighter way and thrive.” Adam Grant, the Executive Director, said, “I believe justice is giving people what they need to be whole, not giving them what they ‘deserve’ because they haven’t been so.” He also added, “I don’t care what you’ve done; I care what you want to do. We’re not inviting people into avoidance. We’re inviting them into aspiration.” And then: “So many people have prayed for us. But don’t only do that in privacy, on the inside. Don’t only pray in the bedrooms. Pray for us in the boardrooms. That’s how we build change.” In great love for one another, the team of leaders at A Brighter Way lifted each other up with gratitude and with tears. Many of us in the room had those tears too.

Gathering together is truly a radical act. These gatherings create rooms where it happens.

— Renee Roederer

There is a phenomenon that sometimes occurs in care work, and it is a beautiful thing to witness. When we create a space where people feel truly safe and seen, they begin to share what is most important to them, the essence of who they are called to be, and the purposes that bring meaning to their lives.

It feels sacred to serve as a mirror in these moments. People start to voice their own affirmations, naming who they are, what they need, and what they are capable of doing. What is remarkable is that you do not need to tell them; you simply make room, and they find the words themselves. Basically, talking to you, they give themselves a pep talk. You get to bear witness, wholeheartedly agreeing as they lead the way.

And it is so special because as they speak these words, something shifts. The energy of those words moves through their bodies, aligning them with the very things they are naming. It is an experience of deep truth-telling, and it is powerful to be present for it.

I always feel immense gratitude when I witness one of these personal litanies of meaning. Moments like these remind me of the transformative power of being known, and the way our own words can help us see ourselves more fully.

— Renee Roederer

— Photos by Renee Roederer

During these turbulent times we must remind ourselves repeatedly that life goes on.
This we are apt to forget.
The wisdom of life transcends our wisdoms;
the purpose of life outlasts our purposes;
the process of life cushions our processes.
The mass attack of disillusion and despair,
distilled out of the collapse of hope,
has so invaded our thoughts that what we know to be true and valid seems unreal and ephemeral.
There seems to be little energy left for aught but futility.
This is the great deception.
By it whole peoples have gone down to oblivion 
without the will to affirm the great and permanent strength of the clean and the commonplace.
Let us not be deceived.
It is just as important as ever to attend to the little graces
by which the dignity of our lives is maintained and sustained.
Birds still sing;
the stars continue to cast their gentle gleam over the desolation of the battlefields,
and the heart is still inspired by the kind word and the gracious deed.
There is no need to fear evil.
There is every need to understand what it does,
how it operates in the world,
what it draws upon to sustain itself.
We must not shrink from the knowledge of the evilness of evil.
Over and over we must know that the real target of evil is not destruction of the body,
the reduction to rubble of cities;
the real target of evil is to corrupt the spirit of man 
and to give his soul the contagion of inner disintegration.
When this happens,
there is nothing left,
the very citadel of man is captured and laid waste.
Therefore the evil in the world around us must not be allowed to move from without to within.
This would be to be overcome by evil.
To drink in the beauty that is within reach,
to clothe one’s life with simple deeds of kindness,
to keep alive a sensitiveness to the movement of the spirit of God
in the quietness of the human heart and in the workings of the human mind—
this is as always the ultimate answer to the great deception.

Excerpted from Meditations of the Heart by Howard Thurman

Before going to bed tonight, what if you remember and tell yourself a story of resilience — your own or one in your community? What would it be?

Also, I’d be willing to hear yours.

— Renee Roederer

This day is the one day that is before us — just this one.

If you can make it count by making it feel like it has some normalcy, or some joy, or especially some care, that is enough, and it is good.

But if that feels like rolling a boulder up a mountain right now, just take care of you as best you can. It is enough.

And as always, you are enough.

— Renee Roederer