Acts of Faith

by Eboo Patel

  “I love this,” Linda said during one meeting. “We each bring something important and unique to this discussion. Mark and Allie have the experience of living in co-ops in Madison. Eboo and Jeff know about the Catholic Worker movement. It reminds me of my favorite childhood story, about a guy who comes into a starving village with a large pot and a big stone and tells the villagers that he is going to cook them stone soup. He puts water and the stone in a pot, and when it starts boiling, he tastes it and says, ‘It’s almost ready, but it needs some carrots.’ One of the villagers says that he has some carrots, and he runs and gets those. The guy cuts them up, puts them in the pot, and then tastes it again and says, ‘Almost ready. It just needs some celery.’ Somebody else says they’ve got celery and runs and gets it, and the guy cuts it up and puts it in the pot. And on and on with potatoes and turnips and garlic. And then presto—stone soup.”

  People were quiet for a moment. The story had struck a profound chord. “I think that’s exactly what we’re about,” Jeff said. “Creating a space that brings out the various talents of a diverse community, and then collecting those talents so that they form something even better that can feed all of us.”

  “I think we just got our name—Stone Soup,” John said.

  A small group of us went to meet with Father Lambert from Our Lady of Lourdes Parish. We described the mission of Stone Soup and told him that each of us was actively helping others through our professional work. What we were about resonated with him, but he preferred to rent his convent to a religious group. “Are any of you Catholic?” he asked.

  Nobody raised a hand.

  “Anybody Christian?”

  A couple of people said they had been raised Christian.

  “Anybody religious?”

  Nobody.

  He paused for a long time. “Well, your mission certainly has a spiritual core. I am going to get scrutinized for this move by the archdiocese, but I think I’m willing to give it a try.”

  Seven of us moved into the Stone Soup Cooperative on Ashland in the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago in September 1997. Our membership grew to fifteen that first year. Our Tuesday night potlucks regularly drew fifty-plus people, including some of the most cutting-edge young activists and artists in the city. We were covered by the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Public Radio, and the Chicago Reader (the city’s alternative weekly, which referred to Stone Soup as a community “that smelled strongly of lentils”). Stone Soup started playing a role in neighborhood affairs, especially in doing our best to keep Uptown economically and ethnically diverse. A small group of forward-thinking people started pooling their money, and when, unexpectedly, a large house down the street went on the market, they had several thousand dollars toward a down payment on a site that would become Stone Soup II, the Leland House.

  Somebody once asked me for a metaphor to describe Stone Soup, and I said it was the love child of Walt Whitman and Ani DiFranco. It was the most creative group of people I have ever been around, the most fun I have ever had. But there was a part of me that it did not fill. At Stone Soup, we rejoiced in creating ourselves anew every day. The lightness of that was not so much unbearable as unsatisfying. Occasionally, I would think about Sarah in Israel, and I wondered what it might be like to feel the weight of history. I loved my work as a teacher, and I loved the people I was living with, but however I combined community, justice, and creativity, it did not add up to identity.

  And that was one of the key reasons I was attracted to Brother Wayne. He might have had his head in the clouds, but he had a very clear sense of his role in the cosmos.

  My friend Kevin and I started tagging along with Brother Wayne to various interfaith events. Everywhere he went, Brother Wayne was adored, treated like a holy man rock star. After finishing his talk, Brother Wayne would invite Kevin and me to the stage. “These are the leaders of the next generation, a Muslim and a Jew who are building the interfaith youth movement,” he would say. Then he would move away from the microphone and whisper to us, “Tell them about the interfaith youth movement.”

  There were three problems with the position Brother Wayne put us in. First, Kevin and I were uncomfortable with being called a Muslim and a Jew. Actually, we were both trying to be Buddhists. One of the reasons we were drawn to Brother Wayne was his intimate knowledge of Eastern traditions. He was very close friends with the Dalai Lama’s brother and had recently entered into a dialogue with His Holiness himself. Kevin and I wanted him to teach us meditation, chanting, secrets, anything that seemed mysterious. The last thing we wanted was to be boxed into the traditions of our birth. We still harbored an adolescent discrimination against the familiar.

  But Brother Wayne didn’t see boxes or borders. He happily taught us meditation techniques and introduced us to Hindu and Buddhist writers. He had spent years studying both traditions, and the encounter with them had served to strengthen his Catholic faith and help him rethink it along the way. He was, after all, a monk who taught at a Catholic seminary, took his vows very seriously, and had received a special honor from Chicago’s archbishop, Francis Cardinal George. The tradition you were born into was your home, Brother Wayne told me, but as Gandhi once wrote, it should be a home with the windows open so that the winds of other traditions can blow through and bring their unique oxygen. “It’s good to have wings,” he would say, “but you have to have roots, too.”

  The second problem with the position Brother Wayne put Kevin and me in was that there was no interfaith youth movement, at least none that Kevin and I knew about. We were two twentysomethings in Chicago exploring spirituality, diversity, community, and social justice. That hardly constituted a movement. Still, when Brother Wayne invited us to speak, we would look at each other and shrug and move to the mike. What else could we do but talk? “It’s like free-styling,” Kevin would say later, using a hip-hop term for making the story up as you go along, as long as it contains the truth.

  We ended up articulating a zigzag of hopes. Shouldn’t we look at poetry and scripture from different religions and try to find the common pulse of love that ran through them? Shouldn’t we bring young people from radically different backgrounds—rich and poor, Easterner and Westerner, Arab and American—together to build community in diversity? Shouldn’t we follow the lead of Martin Luther King Jr. and Abraham Joshua Heschel, a Christian and a Jew, who had marched together in Selma, Alabama, for freedom, Heschel even saying, “I felt like my legs were praying”?

  People loved our free-styling. We regularly got standing ovations. Teachers would ask us to speak to their classes. Religious leaders wanted us to visit their congregations.

  We started to feel a little uncomfortable with the attention. At one point, I made a confession to Brother Wayne: “There really isn’t an interfaith youth movement. Kevin and I are just dreaming out loud.”

  He was unperturbed. “Even articulating the hope is helping to make it a reality. Keep praying for it and meeting people who feel like you do, and it will begin to take shape.”

  The third problem with going to these events was that they were excruciatingly boring. They were always dinners or conferences with a lot of old people doing a lot of talking. The big goal seemed to be drafting documents declaring that religious people should be dialoguing with each other and then planning the next conference for the document to be reviewed. It was always the same people saying the same things, and still the events went way too long. I remember one especially torturous interfaith dinner in Chicago. By the time the ninth speaker of the evening took the podium, the audience was long past being discreet about looking at their watches and had begun to shift noisily in their seats. The evening had proceeded like most interfaith activities: a couple of hundred people ranging from middle-aged to senior citizen picking at plates of dry hotel food and listening to a long list of speakers repeat the same reasons interfaith activities are important. This speaker, a senior American religious leader, appeared to notice the restlessness and tried to bring new energy to the cro
wd. In a kind of singsongy shout, he declared, “This is so important what we are doing here. It is interfaith we are doing.” He paused while a look of delight crossed his face. “Yes, interfaith is a doing. It is a verb. Repeat after me,” he said gleefully. “We are interfaithing.”

  “Interfaithing,” mumbled about half the audience. The rest stared longingly at the door. Pretending not to notice the halfhearted response, the speaker plowed ahead through the reasons we must continue having annual interfaith banquets. “See you next year,” he said with a satisfied air.

  Not only was I bored at these events, but I was also deflated. I wanted so badly to be part of a movement that brought spirituality, diversity, and social action together in a very concrete way. At the heart of every social movement I studied—the civil rights movement, the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, the movement to free India—had been a group of religiously diverse people putting their skins on the line for social justice. Every leader I admired was deeply rooted in a different faith. I could not understand why the people at the interfaith events I attended seemed so thrilled that Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, Christians, and Muslims had all gathered at one conference. My high school lunch table had had at least as much diversity. It baffled me that so much energy was spent on writing documents and creating interfaith ceremonies and positioning people onstage ever so carefully so that the photographs could come out looking like a Benetton ad. Where was the concrete commitment to social action, the stuff that our faith heroes had been about? And where were the young people?

  Kevin and I were about fed up with interfaith events when we got a phone call from Charles Gibbs, the executive director of the United Religions Initiative (URI), an international interfaith organization based in San Francisco. Brother Wayne had told Charles that the interfaith movement had to involve more young people and that Kevin and I were building an interfaith youth movement in Chicago. Charles was calling to invite us to the URI’s Global Summit. He gave us full scholarships to the conference and told us that there were going to be young people there from around the world who were interested in being part of the interfaith youth movement.

  The URI had been formed in the mid-1990s by William Swing, then the Episcopal bishop of the diocese of California. The big idea was that interfaith work needed to include not just high-level religious leaders but also people at the grass roots, and that there had to be concrete, ongoing interfaith activities and not just international conferences. The job of a global organization would be to network various local interfaith groups and coordinate their activities.

  The URI Global Summit was held at Stanford and was attended by people from several dozen countries around the world. The under-thirties skipped a lot of the conference sessions to spend time together. We had come from Malaysia, Ghana, Brazil, Argentina, and the United States. We were Hindus, Jews, Christians, Muslims, Baha—is, Buddhists, and practitioners of indigenous religions. In the discussions of our faith lives, two themes stood out: our faith formation had occurred in the midst of religious diversity, and serving others was a core part of how we lived our religions. A young Hindu woman called herself a “karma yogi,” someone who seeks God through the path of actively serving others. Kevin talked about the connection between the Hindu call to service and the Jewish command of tikkun olam, repairing the world. A Malaysian Christian quoted from Matthew 25 and said that this is exactly what Jesus was about. I couldn’t help but think of the conversation I had had with my parents about volunteering and their insistence that I serve because it was part of Islam.

  The discussions went long into the night, and by the time I got back to my room, I was exhausted. But I couldn’t sleep. It was a rare space that we had created at that conference: an open conversation about faith, diversity, and service. In other spaces, I had experienced pieces of these conversations, but never all the parts together. In college, I had been part of a lot of service learning efforts that brought people from diverse backgrounds together to build houses or tutor children, but we had never talked about faith. At Catholic Worker houses, there was much discussion of faith and service, but little talk of religious diversity. Thus far, my experience in the interfaith movement had included plenty of faith and diversity, but little attention to concrete service.

  I was afraid that space would evaporate with the goodbye hugs at the end of the conference. How to continue it? I racked my brain late at night thinking about that. And suddenly, an idea hit me: what if we created a project where religiously diverse young people came together for one year in a residential community where they would live together and take part in community service projects? There were a number of faith-based efforts along these lines—Jesuit Volunteer Corps, Lutheran Volunteer Corps, and a parallel Jewish volunteer program called Avodah. They connected faith and service but had no religious diversity. Moreover, there were programs like City Year, Teach for America, and Public Allies that deliberately brought people from different races, classes, genders, and geographic backgrounds together to engage in community development efforts (although they were generally not residential programs), but faith was largely ignored. And then there was the interfaith movement, where people from different religious backgrounds came together, but they seemed intent on focusing on organizing conferences, curating ceremonies, and drafting documents. An Interfaith Youth Corps would learn from all of these efforts while creating something genuinely new.

  It was about three in the morning. Four more hours, and I would be able to tell other people about this.

  Ideas become reality when the right people commit to them. There are two categories of the “right people”—mentors and peers. Mentors are people with resources, networks, and wisdom. They guide you, encourage you, and connect you. In One Day, All Children …, Wendy Kopp describes the various mentors who helped launch Teach for America. The chair of Princeton’s sociology department, Marvin Bressler, immediately saw the potential of the idea. He set up a meeting with Princeton’s director of development so that Wendy could learn about fundraising. The director of development agreed to have Princeton act as Teach for America’s fiscal agent. Richard Fisher, a fellow Princeton alum and the CEO of Morgan Stanley, gave Wendy a sympathetic ear and free office space. The founders of City Year, Michael Brown and Alan Khazei, provided ongoing strategic advice, including the all-important counsel “Just say no” when other people ask you to change your mission even a tiny bit. The little things made a big difference. Wendy writes about a corporate executive who called her and said, “Wendy, I just read your proposal. It’s stunning.” That phone call energized her for a week.

  Thankfully, the URI Global Summit was a world of friendly mentors. Charles Gibbs had watched the young people sneak out of conference sessions with a twinkle in his eye. When I cornered him at breakfast with the idea of the Interfaith Youth Corps, he said, “I was wondering what you all were cooking up.” Jim Kenney, a longtime supporter of youth participation in interfaith work, listened intently to the idea and suggested a practical next step: that different interfaith organizations contribute money to a youth conference where the details could be further discussed. Joe Hall, a conference participant who came from a community development and arts background, spent an entire afternoon with me discussing how to make this idea happen. He gave me exactly what I needed at the time: his belief that the Interfaith Youth Corps idea was both powerful and possible, and his counsel that anger-based activism goes only a fraction of the distance that compassion-based approaches do.

  Even more important than the support of mentors, I needed the companionship of my peers. I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t crazy when I said that young people desired a space to connect faith, diversity, and service and that my initial sketch for an Interfaith Youth Corps met that need. Wendy Kopp writes that throughout all the early trials of creating Teach for America, her most important connection was to her peers who were committed to educational equality in America. I felt the same love from my peers at the Global Summit. “Th
at’s exactly what our generation needs to be about,” said my friend Parthi, a Malaysian Christian. “Yeah, man, make that thing happen,” said Socrates, an African Traditionalist from Ghana. Our conference discussions began focusing on the shape of this project. As the end of the conference loomed, a big question hung in the air: who would do what when we all scattered back home? I repeated the offer made by Jim Kenney and Charles Gibbs to help fund an interfaith youth conference and committed to take the lead on it. Other people stated what they could do. I left the conference with an idea, a burning passion, and a group of mentors and peers ready to making it a reality.

  Kevin and I went to see Brother Wayne about the Interfaith Youth Corps as soon as we got back to Chicago. He could barely contain himself as we described it. When he finally calmed down, he started plotting strategy. “Well, after the corps frees Tibet, it can start working on the environment. Those are the two biggest crises of our time, and their causes are spiritual. The solutions have to be spiritual, too.”

  He was quiet for a moment. “You know who will want to hear about this?” he suddenly said. “His Holiness.” He stood up abruptly, pointed his finger in the air, and proclaimed, “You have to go to Dharamsala and tell His Holiness about the Interfaith Youth Corps. You have to get his blessing before you do anything else.”

  5

  An American in India

  What is my inheritance? To what am I an heir? To all that humanity has achieved during tens of thousands of years, to all that it has thought and felt and suffered and taken pleasure in, to its cries of triumph and its bitter agony of defeat, to that astonishing adventure of man which began so long ago and yet continues and beckons us. To all this and more in common with all men. But there is a special heritage for those of us of India, one more especially applicable.