My Brief, Reverberatory Encounters with Islam in Divinity School
As an ex-Christian and someone slightly allergic to religion, I didn't expect to feel so much and so deeply
Readers, it has been a whole month since I graduated with my MDiv. Which means I’ve done a lot of:
… unprompted crying
… cleaning my closet
… organizing my backpack collection
… reading books on death, Zionism, interfaith chaplaincy, Chinese vegetarianism
… staring out the window at the tall trees
… biking around Cambridge pathways
… playing Khruangbin, Charli XCX, and Adrienne Lenker albums on repeat
… and pestering my cat Lavender Boba.
I haven’t felt like writing a single line about the last three years… until today.
I’m overflowing with unfinished thoughts, vibrations and feelings about the power of ritual, my relationship to religion(s), my commitment to God/god/Goddess/Spirit, how to crystallize my inexplicable inner transformation in divinity school to help stop the wounding of the world. And I’m OK with this, I am sitting with this muddle and being with it. I don’t feel like I’m at a point where I can pump out finished material to the tune of, “I know what going on and how to orient you” or “Do these things and you’ll feel a little bit more hopeful.”
I do feel like I took that approach to my activisty writing, circa 2017-2020, in an effort to fit in with the kinds of writing that were oft quoted or going viral. And it got me lots of views! After this latest round of education, especially undergoing 8 months of Clinical Pastoral Education, where I was sitting with precious dying human beings gazing with them into the fathomless maw of what lies beyond this short little life, I know I don’t have any of the answers. I can no longer pretend to be polished and wise. At the same time, I can’t pretend that in being the recipient of this advanced education, I don’t have anything of use to offer my communities.
My writing and my idea of what constitutes (to me) as ‘good writing’ has thusly evolved. What I value more now is communication that is honest, raw, unconcerned with being impressive (academically speaking), that feels true. My writing has to create more space. My writing has to be a balm. My writing to has to reduce alienation.
The question I want to answer in the following essay is, “How have I been changed by non-Christian religious encounters?”
The way I aim to do this is by sharing a few screenshots of my text thread with my good friend and Greenhouse co-founder, Auds. She is also a fellow Harvard Divinity School MDiv 2024 and our esteemed commencement speaker (you must read 'We Are Walking a Sacred, Anointed Path'). Texting her run-on sentences in moments of confusion, stress and revelation (and her also to me) has been ones of my greatest outlets. Thank you, Auds <3
If you know me at all, you’ll know I grew up in an evangelical-ish Chinese Christian church and household in Texas, with my dad going to seminary becoming a pastor when I was in my teens. I had virtually zero learning or encounter with other faith traditions and picked up the vibe that I was to be skeptical and suspicious about them (even though I had not ever properly learned what they were about). No Jesus, no consideration! After leaving Christianity, I took many, many years away from all religious people, when possible.
During my first two years at HDS (Harvard Divinity School), I didn’t prioritize taking classes on particular religions, and focused more on spiritual care, the arts, preaching, and history. Honestly religious devotion didn’t really interest me, that’s what the students organizations were for. However, in my last semester at HDS, I took a class called Spiritual Care from a Muslim Perspective from Dr. Yunus Kumek. I was in a year-long field education placement at Tufts Chaplaincy, and I also began to work more closely supporting the Muslim chaplain and attending on-campus MSA (Muslim Student Association) events.
While I learned a great deal about the foundations of Islam by reading the Qur'an and hearing from Muslim health professionals each week, my most profound experiences were in participating. I was invited to partake in fasting and iftar (fast-breaking dinner) for Ramadan, attending Friday Jum'ah prayers, and doing dhikr or chanting/meditation to remember Allah. Instead of trying to be a detached observer or scholar of Islam, I found myself drawn in as an invited guest and engaging on all levels: mind, heart, body, spirit.
Last spring, I attended my first Jum'ah prayer, a community prayer for Muslims each Friday. I removed my shoes, walked into the Tufts University Interfaith Center, and wasn’t sure where to sit: the first row of prayer rugs were for the men, and the second row of prayer rugs were for the women. Najiba, the Muslim chaplain, saw me freeze and kindly ushered me to sit in a chair in the back of the room with her. I hadn’t learned how to perform salah, or Muslim prayer that involves a series of body movements while facing Mecca, so I silently watched.
It was an unfamiliar setup, and I couldn’t understand the Arabic recitations, and listened with great interest to the khutbah (a sermon based on the Qur’an and Sunnah sacred texts). What felt immediately familiar was the physical separateness from regular life, that I had entered a sacred portal, and a collective experience of remembrance of truth and goodness. My insider-outsider positionality gave me multiple angles of perspective. It also scraped the wound inside of me that was longing for spiritual community with a robust set of tools and stories. I felt a layer of release.
During Ramadan, the holy month of fasting, for one day, I abstained from solid food (my reasonable compromise as a non-Muslim), from sunrise to sunset. I felt a newfound sense of solidarity with the Muslims in my HDS class and at Tufts. I knew not to offer my students snacks, as I was refraining from them too. The ache of hunger in my belly was uncomfortable, and instead of trying to solve it, I used it to assess my relationship to God/Allah, finding that I do indeed long to be in right alignment with Them!
That day, for me, while I was still running around to class and meetings and on my phone a lot, felt spiritual in a way that none of my other blend of days have. I’m used to meditating five minutes at the start of each day, seeing that as a spiritual infusion to get me through the “secular” day, and not returning to a spiritual matters until after the busyness of the day has subsided. To infuse every moment of the day with a remembrance of Allah was something else completely. I felt another layer of release.
As part of our Spiritual Care from a Muslim Perspective class requirements, we had to go to an iftar dinner at a community member’s house in the Cambridge area. I got a phone number and a first name from Prof. Kumek and texted them to get their address and share some of my dietary restrictions. Later that same day I had fasted, as I was biking through Central Square to get there, I thought about how it was such an odd “leap of faith” (so to speak) for me to go to a stranger’s house and break bread with them, and also for them to open the door to a complete stranger.
I am compelled to write about this because it was easily the moment where I found the most spiritual alignment with other people coupled with the biggest discomfort of my non-binary gender I had felt during my time on the East Coast. That’s why I had to immediately text Auds about it later that evening. Even months later, it is still difficult for me to parse the internal and external dynamics.
The moment I knocked on their door, two women opened it with a smile, saw me, and their faces twisted into a sort of shock. Fuck– why did I cut my hair short the day before? They didn’t invite me in, so I stood there, stuttering, confirming my identity, asking if everything’s OK, before they half-nodded and eventually allowed me in. I got the vibe that Muslim women shouldn’t alone be in the company of single “men,” they should be with their husbands, and I felt in my gut it was a terrible start to our encounter. The kids were bouncing off the walls and wanted to show me their toys, and I made every effort to show that I’m a safe, good person, and not a creep.
Eventually, the woman’s husband came home for the iftar meal and that seemed to settle the awkwardness. We broke the fast with dried dates, the home-cooked food was amazing, the conversation flowed freely. I was witness to the love and devotion this family and their friends had to Allah and for their faith. When it was time for maghrib, the evening prayer, the father was so kind as to ask if I would like to join them. He handed me a beautifully woven prayer rug, invited me to the front of the living room, where we faced a full view of the shimmering Quinobequin (Charles River) and the full moon against the dark sky. He recited the verses slowly, offers salah slowly, as I watched him and repeated his postures in full. I felt yet another layer a release.
It felt good to involve my body in an act of worship. It felt good to prostrate myself before the Giver of Life, as I am just a tiny speck in the universe. It felt good to break from casual conversation for sacred speech. It felt good to be religious with others.
There is a belief in Islam that everyone is born Muslim, and that it is everyone’s duty to find their way to the religion. Thus, having Muslim parents is the best outcome for a child. When I first heard this come out the mouth of my professor, I was taken aback. In this day and age, it’s not cool to be making exclusivist claims about religion, especially at a multireligious divinity school. But after my few, but deep encounters with Muslims and in Muslim practice, I am coming away holding a truth of Islam.
I don’t know if it is the only truth, and I haven’t explored Islam extensively, but its prayers and fasting feel true in my body and spirit. To discuss in another post, Judaism and its rituals have felt more true to me than the loosey-goosey expressions of Protestant Christianity; Buddhism and its teachings of non-attachment feel more true to me than any religion when I am contemplating my own death. I remain open to unfolding understanding and integration.
I am reminded of the wisdom of this quote by Judith Berling, a professor at the Graduate Theological Union, upon her witness of a Taiwanese Daoist fire-walking ritual:
“The unexpected impact of the vibrant experience was itself the teacher, and I had to process it on my own, over time, keeping my mind and imagination open to the insights that would come, not prematurely closing off the challenge of difference with a Western interpretation explaining away the discomfiting aspects of the experience.”
From My Neighbor's Faith: Stories of Interreligious Encounter, Growth, and Transformation, edited by Jennifer Howe Peace, Or N. Rose, Gregory Mobley, 2012
Am I a Muslim? Maybe. Maybe not. The question doesn’t cause me consternation. At this age and stage in life, I don’t find myself living in the strict binary of religious conversion. It broke my heart to bump up against the gender binary and patriarchy embedded in lived Islam. Am I surprised? No. I’ve been through it and back with Christianity to understand that no human institution can prevent me from love and relationship with God.
I decided a long time ago that while I respect Christianity and those who chose to follow and be leaders in all of its many culturally-shaped versions, I know in my heart that is 100% not my responsibility or calling to resuscitate dominant western Christianity. So I don’t think I have what it takes to fight these internal community battles again in another religious and cultural context.
Something I thought about a lot was the cultural component to Islam, and how being around majority Arab, South and Southeast Asian people automatically felt better to me in a white-dominated New England context. I have also seen and heard so much about the impacts of Islamophobia on my Muslim students, especially this past year, which has been and continues to be utterly upsetting. I am also trying to reign in my built-in preference for cultures of the oppressed, knowing that power dynamics shift in the timeline of the world, and to be clear-eyed about the beauty, ugliness and possibility of every tradition.
One of the many gifts that Islam has given me is a relatively uncomplicated way to worship God and ask for Their help (for Muslims, making dua). I did not expect this going in and I am so grateful for this medicine. Because of how and where I grew up, I have no personal baggage when it comes to Allah. In critical ways, devotion to Allah has allowed me to reimagine the punishing Christian God as a divine entity beyond religious boundaries, one Who is completely worthy of my faithfulness. At the end of the day, I remain open to being fundamentally rearranged by religious encounter, whether that is through continued access to my religion of origin–Christianity, or others, such as Islam, Judaism and Buddhism (and others).
Now that I no longer have accessible educational and professional connections to Muslim community in the Boston area, I will look for more opportunities to engage. At the very least, in order to build competence around Islam life for the benefit of my future Muslim patients and students when I am an interfaith chaplain. May I be the most loving, accepting and religious professional that I can be, whatever field or community I am placed in, Inshallah! (God willing!)