“When we approach the [person] of another faith than our own it will be in a spirit of expectancy to find how God has been speaking to [them] and what new understandings of the grace and love of God we may ourselves discover in this encounter. Our first task in approaching another people, another culture, another religion, is to take off our shoes, for the place we are approaching is holy. Else we may find ourselves treading on [people’s] dreams. More serious still, we may forget that God was here before our arrival.”
-- Max Warren (1904-1977)
General Secretary of the Church Missionary Society
This semester alone, I have taught Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Confucianism, Taoism, and various forms of Buddhism. I am doing this in two separate, simultaneous classes, one dedicated to the Abrahamic Religions and one to Eastern Religions. I don’t teach any of these religions at arm’s length, as if religions were curious phenomena to be observed under a microscope; rather, I teach them from the inside out, asking my students to imagine what it is like to be a person who chooses to practice each religion. How does the world look when one is looking out through that person’s lenses?
It is a lot to ask, particularly from students who overwhelmingly identify as non-religious! A student asked me last week, “How can they expect one person to do this?” I guess the “They” in this circumstance would be me, as I am the person who thought this would be a good way to teach Religion at an Episcopal School.
But as you can see from the above statement, which is not in any way recent, Episcopalians have always seen God at work in wide-ranging and even unexpected places. Internally, the Episcopal (Anglican) church is highly diverse, which means that accepting other forms of diversity, even those outside Christianity, requires only a simple extension. Personally, I have no difficulty finding the “holy” in every religion I teach, which makes slipping behind others’ lenses an easy thing. And knowing that God has been at work everywhere, long before I came to the party with my own glasses on, keeps me humble. I hope it will do the same for them.
--The Rev. Barbara Talcott
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