Spiritual Care and Ethical Leadership for Our Times

Spiritual Care and Ethical Leadership for Our Times Interreligious and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Faith, Resilience, Culture, and Community in an Age of Uncertainty

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elcome to the Graduate Theological Union. We are delighted that you have chosen the GTU to be part of your learning journey.

As a leading innovator in the realm of higher education for religion, theology, and spirituality, the GTU provides extraordinary opportunities for emerging scholars such as yourself to engage with the world’s wisdom traditions and apply your learning to effect meaningful, positive change in the wider world. At the GTU, you can find a pathway to fulfilling your purpose, shaped by the ideas and issues that are most important to you.

We invite you to explore some of the ideas that drive our students, faculty, and alums in the pages of this anthology, which offers a series of interreligious and interdisciplinary reflections that began at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic for a project titled Spiritual Care and Ethical Leadership for Our Times: Faith, Resilience, and Community in an Age of Uncertainty.

This series is a testament to one of the GTU community’s greatest strengths—our shared vision for and dedication to working toward a brighter future that belongs to us all. The reflections that you will find in this volume offer a timely look into the work of our students, faculty, and alums, and the ways they have contributed to sowing the seeds of change for the good, even in these unprecedented times of widespread injustice, political strife, and heartbreaking violence.

INSIDE SPRING 2020 2 Faculty & Staff Reflections SUMMER 2020 Alum Reflections

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FALL 2020 24 Student Reflections FALL 2021 42 Faculty, Staff, & Alum Reflections

Within these pages, you will find voices exploring the meaning of spiritual care, ethics, and leadership from a broad array of perspectives and traditions. We hope these reflections from scholars, spiritual leaders, and cultural commentators will offer inspiration, encouragement, and insights to inspire you on your journey as a GTU student.

The intersectional crises that we have weathered since 2020, and well before, make it clear that the learning and research our students undertake is an urgent necessity, now more than ever. Let us meet our present moment together, drawing from the great reservoir of wisdom hailing from our world’s spiritual traditions, and applying these teachings to shape our work toward justice, compassion, and community.

The GTU is an unparalleled context in which scholarship, compassion, and a spirit of care will inspire and inform your purpose for creating real change in our world. We hope that you will accept our invitation to become a part of the GTU community and chart a bold course to fully realize your potential.

We look forward to welcoming your voice to the conversation.

Peace and blessings,

Uriah Kim President John Dillenberger Professor of Biblical Studies PhD, GTU ’04

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SPRING 2020: Faculty & Staff Reflections

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Uriah Kim | MARCH 23, 2020

Community and Connection: Calling on “Our Better Angels” through Crisis

“ It is in times like these that the remarkable resilience of the human spirit can be fully displayed.”

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hese are unprecedented times in our country and our world.

Here in California, for the first time in history, the governor has ordered a statewide shelter-in-place as an extreme, yet necessary measure to mitigate further transmission of the novel coronavirus. Forty million people have been called upon to voluntarily limit their personal freedoms in order to help preserve the lives and good health of friends, neighbors, and unknown strangers alike.

Across the nation, individuals and communities are seeking to do what we can to care for ourselves and one another, making decisions about which activities, businesses, and works are essential, and which can be suspended. At a time when community and connection seem more important than ever, we are nonetheless asked to maintain social distance. This is no less true at the GTU, where over the past few weeks, we have shifted all in-person courses to remote learning modalities, cancelled numerous public events, and put provisions in place for staff to work remotely. And yet, in these past weeks, there is a sense in which we remain remarkably intertwined: engaging with one another through Zoom, chat platforms, email, old fashioned

phone calls, and at a fundamental human level, in our shared experience of unfathomable circumstances.

Indeed, it’s natural to feel anxious and afraid in times of crisis like we are currently living through. If we are not mindful, we can easily let the “fight or flight” instinct take over, allowing awareness of our vulnerability to expose our ugliest tendencies.

Fear about the spread of the virus and anxieties about the availability of everything from test kits to toilet paper can cause us to turn on one another, blaming other people or nations, normalizing racism or xenophobia, and seeking our own welfare at the expense of the greater good.

But it’s also in times like these that the remarkable resilience of the human spirit can be fully displayed.

Amid this outbreak, we have extraordinary opportunities to care for one another, to advocate for the most vulnerable, and to live out the spirit of justice and compassion central to so many faith traditions—and at the heart of the mission of the GTU.

inspiration. In the Book of Numbers, we read of a moment when Moses’ sister Miriam has been struck with leprosy, necessitating her isolation outside of the Israelites’ camp for seven days (Numbers 12:15a). We are not told how she acquired the illness. But we know that her community refused to leave her behind, and the people did not continue their journey until Miriam was reintegrated to the community once more (12:15b). The story reminds us of the need for a community in crisis to come together in solidarity, to care for the afflicted, and to recognize that our futures are bound together.

From faculty, students, staff, and alumni, the GTU is a community of scholars and seekers committed to exploring the very nature of spirituality, drawing illumination from the remarkable reservoir of wisdom in our world’s religious traditions and bringing those insights into conversation with our modern moment.

And as this crisis has made clear, this work—now more than ever—is an urgent necessity. Among us are spiritual caregivers, pastors, religious scholars and educators, and community leaders who may be called upon to venture into unknown risk in order to offer compassion, connection, and care through moments of greatest need. As these events continue to unfold, may we all be led by “the better angels of our nature,” drawing inspiration from faith and scholarship to help our world as we navigate this crisis, and together shape the brighter future to which we are all bound.

Dr. Uriah Y. Kim is the President of the Graduate Theological Union.

As a biblical scholar, in good times and more challenging moments alike, I often turn to the Hebrew Scriptures for

 Read the reflection online at gtu.edu/scel/uriah-kim SPIRITUAL CARE AND ETHICAL LEADERSHIP FOR OUR TIMES | Spring 2020: Faculty & Staff Reflections | 3

Kamal Abu-Shamsieh | MARCH 27, 2020

Spiritual Care, Resilience, and Community

“ We can find strength

in remembering that we are connected and interdependent.”

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he coronavirus pandemic is the most difficult challenge we have faced in the 21st century. The unprecedented closure of educational institutions, businesses, borders, and houses of worship directly impacts our quality of life. The pandemic forces us to stay home, avoid hugging or shaking hands, and maintain a spatial distance.

The shutdown affects our souls and spirits. It’s common to feel anxious, stressed, confused, and bereaved. At a time like this, how is it even possible to care for our physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, occupational, environmental, and social wellbeing?

These days require resilience, the ability to sustain our purpose, and direction. Despite the need to maintain physical distance, we can find strength in remembering that we are connected and interdependent. We can offer one another words of hope, strengthen relationships, express our emotions, and empower ourselves by drawing on support resources. We can sustain our spiritual wellbeing by going out into nature or practicing art. We can meditate, pray, write letters, breathe, and laugh. We can read and contemplate holy writings that promote healing, hope, comfort, and safety. We can practice rituals, sing, and chant.

We can maintain silence and stillness.

We can check in on loved ones.

Here are some additional suggestions for sustaining our resilience: Develop a Positive Mindset: At times of crisis, I refer back to the foundation of my faith. The Qur’an assures me that whatever will happen is already decreed by God. This is a time to reaffirm trust in God and our belief in God’s goodness. At the same time, the coronavirus pandemic reminds us of our vulnerability. In order to maintain positive thoughts and patience when faced with loss of physical wellbeing and loss of life, we must keep hope alive by reflecting on what inspires us as we move through this difficulty.

Flexibility and Perseverance: Resilience is strengthened through perseverance at times of hardship.

Reflect on what your faith tradition teaches about ways to ease difficulty. When houses of worship are closed, the interruption of our usual practices can invite us to rethink the meaning of rituals, how we pray, or even what we ask in prayers, even as we adjust our lifestyles and worship practices to ensure the common good.

control the pandemic, we do have control over our responses. The Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) teaches that none will experience the depth of faith until they wish for others what they want for themselves. This is a time for building community, for caring for one another, and responding to the needs around us. Let us remember that even maintaining physical distance from one another, though it may feel isolating, is an effort to care for one another.

Seek Help and Mentorship: In chaplaincy circles, we believe every chaplain needs a chaplain. In these difficult days, seek out supportive mentors and wisdom in line with your system of belief and morality. This is a time to reach inward and outward, to check our own support systems, and to deploy resources to help others.

Spiritual resilience leads to satisfaction, nourishment, and fulfillment.

Building our spiritual health and strength can enable us to encounter difficulties more effectively. Even in these difficult times, remember that you are not alone! Smile. (Smiling is a form of charity in Islam.) Let us be joyful, and seek to lighten the pain of others, even as we pray that Divine healing will be upon us all and our world.

Dr. Kamal Abu-Shamsieh is Director of the Interreligious Chaplaincy Program at the GTU and Assistant Professor of Practical Theology.

Control and Community: This pandemic reminds us we are not in control. Coronavirus has disrupted our lives in ways we’ve never experienced before. Although we cannot

 View the accompanying video reflection at gtu.edu/scel/kamal-abu-shamsieh Graduate Theological Union | 4

Deena Aranoff | APRIL 3, 2020

Call the Passover a Delight

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he new moon of the Jewish month of Nissan has appeared. In most years this would usher in a frenzy of activity for Jewish households.

We would minimize our purchase of leavened goods (typically bread and cereal); the more organized among us would begin to shop for special Passover items such as hand-baked matzah or chocolate dipped desserts; we would issue or accept invitations to the Passover seder. Our hope would be that on the full moon of the month, we would find ourselves at tables filled with extended family and friends; we would repeat the stories of our ancestors, sing the songs of our families, and eat the recipes that have graced our tables for generations. We would taste bitter herbs, chant songs of gratitude, and settle into a familiar menu of savory dishes and desserts.

The new moon launches a phase of high-intensity preparation for this sacred moment. Passover turns household tasks into ceremonial ones; how we clean, how we shop, with whom we gather—all these elements acquire an acute ritual status. Passover is serious business. It is a time in which the house is turned inside out, upside down, shaken free of old forms, and a new collective is established.

Our current crisis poses a serious challenge to those who wish to step

into this enchanted sacred season.

The primal energies that are to be summoned toward the Passover holiday are the very same energies that are occupied in the face of COVID-19. The work to supply our homes with food, to organize and clean our homes, to tend to our social and family bonds—these activities are now impossibly weighed down by our efforts to secure our wellbeing in the face of COVID-19. In all other years, this sacred season is a welcome disruption to the unremarkable flow of our routine lives; this year we ask: How can we turn our lives upside down, when they are already upside down?

How can we embrace the strictures of this season when we lack our basic routines, which, as it turns out, function as a necessary backdrop to these ritual alterations? How can we create sacred time in an age of pandemic?

I believe we have two options before us. The first is to determine that there simply are no energies left for ceremony.

All our energies are accounted for in the effort to stay healthy in the face of the virus. The second option is perhaps more life-affirming. We might consider that there is a bit of energy available— like the fabled jar of oil that lit the temple for eight full days–energy that, if well-spent, may provide comfort and elevation in this time of uncertainty and fear. It is this second path that I would like to sketch out here.

How can we bring life to Passover during our current crisis? Perhaps the most expected way is to identify the convergences between the themes of Passover and the pandemic: Are we not experiencing a plague, deprivation, bitterness, and fear? Are we not gathering, huddled, as an angel of death passes through our dwellings? The fears that are stirred up by our crisis bear an uncanny resemblance to the themes of the exodus.

While these convergences are certainly worthy of consideration, I believe that if we linger too long on how the crisis mirrors the themes of the holiday, the results will be deflating and will further weaken our spirits. Do we really need to amplify the terror of this moment? Do we need to stimulate our awareness of our vulnerability, our urge for survival?

I want to propose another approach to this sacred season. I want to suggest that we enliven the elements of delight in the holiday. Some of us recall the great excitement we felt as young children, anticipating the magic of seder night. I propose that we step into that attitude. Let us enliven elements of the holiday that are a source of delight, and perhaps devote less mental energy to the strictures of the day.

What gives us joy about the holiday?

Let’s go to that. Go ahead—skip to dessert! Skip to hallel and sing those songs first. I am not suggesting that we loosen the restrictions (though there may be room for that). I am suggesting that we shift the mood of the holiday, that we give it a new character this year.

Passover typically brings with it a certain anxiety and puts a household under strain and depravation: no leavened goods, no crumbs upstairs; nothing routine and everything new. In this year when uncertainty and anxiety already surround us, my suggestion is that we change our relationship to the holiday, that we enliven the elements of delight, pleasure, song, and gratitude. This shift may allow each of us to take a long, deep breath and to find room to tell our stories.

Dr. Deena Aranoff is Director of the Richard S. Dinner Center for Jewish Studies, Senior Lecturer in Medieval Jewish Studies, and Core Doctoral Faculty at the GTU since 2006.

 View the accompanying video reflection at gtu.edu/scel/deena-aranoff SPIRITUAL CARE AND ETHICAL LEADERSHIP FOR OUR TIMES | Spring 2020: Faculty & Staff Reflections | 5

Kathryn Barush | APRIL 9, 2020

A Pilgrimage-in-Place

“ The ancient practice of tracing a labyrinth can help us find a moment of peace and solace in times of mourning, difficulty, and crisis.”

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abyrinths, whether made of stone, turf, or ink on paper, tend to be “thin places,” a concept originating through Celtic traditions. The phrase is used to describe sacred places where the time and distance between this world and the next seem to dissolve; spaces that invite encounter and connection. The ancient practice of tracing a labyrinth can help us find a moment of peace and solace in times of mourning, difficulty, and crisis.

The memories of the winding labyrinth paths I have negotiated in different places and at pivotal points in my life allow for reflections on past and future, as if an older version of myself has joined in communitas, crossing temporal boundaries through the augury of the ancient form. There were the miniature finger labyrinths with shallow paths carved into wood mounted on the wall at the progressive public high school I attended in Vermont, made by the students in a senior-year philosophy elective. (Where I first learned what a "paradigm shift" is!) There is the stone labyrinth in the little California beach town of town of Bolinas, where at high summer the hot sun cuts through the ocean wind (I have walked that one with three generations of women in my family). Then there is the time that I stood, feet planted slightly apart and hands clasped behind me, right in the very center of the Chartres

Cathedral pavement labyrinth while heavily pregnant with my daughter.

I was on the return journey from Santiago de Compostela as she somersaulted in utero on a journey of her own, leading me to contemplate the liminal stages and passages of life and their relationship to the mysterious medieval paths before me, in both the stones of the cathedral and then onward. My aching feet and body led my mind to reflect on whether these paths were interchangeable. Would they lead to the same revelations?

Some have posited that labyrinths originated as scaled-down pilgrimages for those unable to travel the long distance to a holy place. As we have faced the COVID-19 pandemic as a community, many have been called to practice self-isolation and “social distancing” to limit the spread of this virus. For those of us who are restless wanderers, travelers, and pilgrims, it has been a challenging adjustment. Even traveling to the little labyrinth in Bolinas, which has brought me so much joy, could put the community in peril as there is no way to maintain six feet of distance while passing others on the narrow path.

making or engaging with sacred art is a practice that crosses cultural and temporal boundaries. It is a form of prayer and contemplation in many cultures including Celtic Christianity, the Dharma religions, and earth-based spirituality. The interlaced knotwork of an illuminated manuscript like the books of Kells and Durrow, the sacred geometric matrices of a painted mandala, or the incised circles on ancient stones are an invitation to an outward journey of the eye that creates a channel to the innermost soul.

As we shelter-in-place, these old and winding pathways can be a holy place of solace, a pilgrimage on paper.

Labyrinths are distinct from mazes or traps. When walking or tracing a labyrinth, we follow a circuitous path to the center and back out again, often emerging a little wiser or at least a little less stressed. That center place (which one long-time California labyrinth maker, Thomas Nann, described to me as a centerpeace) invites a moment of rest. In a form of prayer said to have originated in the ancient Celtic corners of the world, the pilgrim calls out, “Circle me O God” and envisions a sanctuary space of love and protection. The inner circle of the labyrinth nested within the outward rings can be thought of as engendering this idea. Even as we shelter-in-place, these old and winding pathways can be a holy place of solace, a pilgrimage on paper.

Dr. Kathryn Barush is Thomas E. Bertelsen Jr. Associate Professor of Art History and Religion and GTU Core Doctoral Faculty.

One way to engage in “pilgrimage-inplace,” as my friend Annie O’Neil has called it, is by following a labyrinth with the eyes, the fingers, or even a paint brush. Pilgrimage through

 To view the accompanying video reflection, visit gtu.edu/scel/kathryn-barush Graduate Theological Union | 6

Rita Sherma and Devin Zuber | APRIL 17, 2020

A Meeting of the Waters

“ One thing the world’s

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ne common factor in our collective experience of the pandemic shut-down, shut-in, is a new sensitivity to time. On the one hand, we find our bodies slowed down, bound by the home with perhaps a new awareness of the diurnal rhythms of sun and weather. On the other, there is an accelerating sense of urgency and alarm at the planetary scale of the crisis, and the insufficiency of our dysfunctional politics to adequately redress it.

One thing the world’s different religious and wisdom traditions might have to offer at this critical juncture are spiritual resources—modes of thinking, embodied practices—for experiencing temporalities that lie outside the hot box of COVID-19 concern, and our debilitating sense of powerlessness.

Although the two of us come from very different cultural and religious backgrounds—Hindu, Swedenborgian, German-American and IndianAmerican—and yet in spite of our training in different disciplines— ecofeminist theology, literary theory—we have been collaborating at the GTU around our shared concern for the earth and for the planetary emergency that was already so acute prior to COVID-19. This current great disruption has pushed us, like many others, to return to our roots, and to reengage, reread the texts we love that have so formatively shaped

different religious and wisdom traditions might have to offer at this critical juncture are spiritual resources for experiencing temporalities that lie outside the hot box of COVID-19.”

us. Be they sacred texts or forms more secular, such words keep us company, providing some familiar stability in the present turbulence.

Both of us were impacted, early on, by reading the environmental classic Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854), written by the American Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau.

Shortly before Devin Zuber began his graduate work in literature, and ended up focusing on Thoreau and the Transcendentalists, he had traveled extensively throughout India, spending time on the banks of the Ganges (Ganga) River in Varanasi, and then going south to Auroville— the UNESCO-supported eco-village in Tamil Nadu constructed to actualize the philosophy of Sri Aurobindo, a visionary who—like Gandhi after him— had drunk deeply from Thoreau.

Rita Sherma, whose own grandfather had lived in Sri Aurobindo’s Ashram in Tamil Nadu, first encountered Thoreau in middle school in Canada. Rita quickly came to perceive how Aurobindo and Thoreau were mutually influenced by

the Upanishads, ancient texts whose revelations were situated, quite literally, in the generative power of forests.

In one of his books, The Life Divine, written in the traumatic aftermath of World War I and revised during the second World War, Sri Aurobindo had presciently warned: “At present [humanity] is undergoing an evolutionary crisis in which is concealed a choice of its destiny; for a stage has been reached in which the human mind has achieved in certain directions an enormous development while in others it stands arrested and bewildered and can no longer find its way.”

Nearly a century after Sri Aurobindo wrote these words, we find ourselves “arrested” in our collective development at a potentially transformative moment.

In Walden, Thoreau had undergone a form of self-imposed house-arrest and social distancing, choosing to live as self-sufficiently as he could in the little cabin that he had built for himself at Walden Pond. Walden is sometimes misread as an autobiography by a cranky, detached recluse; yet, it was during the Walden years that Thoreau worked the Underground Railroad helping runaway slaves, and went to jail for refusing to pay his taxes, not wanting to support American slavery and America’s imperial expansion into Mexico. “Under a government

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which imprisons any unjustly,” Thoreau wrote, in words that went on to influence Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “The only true place for a just man is also prison.”

Walden is an exuberant, joyful book, grounded in the wonder and ecstasy of observing the natural world, and witnessing the return of spring, the restorative deep-time of the planet we all call home. It is also profoundly transreligious: Thoreau had been responsible for the first translation and publication of Buddhist sutras in the United States (in 1843). Walden is filled with references to sacred texts from Islamic and Vedic traditions. Reading the Bhagavad-Gita, Thoreau felt, allowed him to imagine the American waters of his Walden Pond to momentarily become like the Ganges, that most holy river in India: “In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta,” he writes in Walden.

“Since whose composition years of the

“ Walden can help remind us that we are not alone,

and that, off the book, outside the page, the ecstatic, green presence of this spring continues to shimmer and beckon, reminding us of the larger timescales in which our bodies are (deliciously) entangled.”

gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial . . . the pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.”

Through interreligious imagination, Thoreau’s locale became interconnected to the global. In the ongoing solitude of our own stay-at-home quarantines, books like Walden can help remind us that we are not alone, and that off the book, outside the page, the ecstatic, green presence of this spring continues

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to shimmer and beckon, reminding us of the larger timescales in which our bodies are (deliciously) entangled.

Dr. Rita D. Sherma and Dr. Devin Zuber are co-chairs of the GTU’s Sustainability 360 Initiative. Dr. Sherma is the Director of the Center for Dharma Studies at the GTU; Dr. Zuber is Associate Professor of American Studies, Religion, and Literature at the Center for Swedenborgian Studies at the GTU.

Munir Jiwa | APRIL 24, 2020

Our Interconnectedness

“ COVID-19 has created new ways of collective

being; an altered sense of time, space, and place, and different rhythms of life that beat back and forth, fast and slow, with different intensities and emotions.”

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n this time of heightened uncertainty, our precariousness and fragility can find comfort and hope in our interconnectedness and interdependency.

As we begin the blessed month of Ramadan, it will be one like no other in our time. Muslims, like many in other religious traditions, are finding new ways of remaining together apart and online. The devastating spread of the deadly novel coronavirus, COVID-19, has created new ways of collective being; an altered sense of time, space, and place, and different rhythms of life that beat back and forth, fast and slow, with different intensities and emotions.

Amid the myriad of rules and regulations to which we continue to adapt, we share new vocabularies and new bodily, social, and spatial practices that are global, even as they are experienced in different ways locally. Our rituals of everyday life have changed. We shelter in place, stay at home, self-isolate, quarantine, and practice social and physical distancing, in hopes of saving lives and “flattening the curve.”

We realign and learn how to manage these new ways of being with ourselves, our families, our communities, our work, with other creatures, and with the environment, online and in the world.

We ask with more urgency and reflection about who matters, what matters, who is considered essential, and what is

considered essential. We are heartbroken to know so many who must be hospitalized and whose loved ones can’t visit them, or of the elderly, especially in care homes who might feel isolated, or those who cannot bury their loved ones who have died. We witness the heroes on the frontlines who risk their lives: from healthcare workers who attempt to save lives to countless others who make everyday life possible, who feed, house, and comfort others, who transport and deliver goods, and keep us safe.

As we navigate this pandemic, let us center our interconnectedness by finding ways to serve others and by attending to inequalities, local and global. As we continue to practice self-care, let us also remember and care for the most vulnerable among us with justice, patience, empathy, love, generosity, compassion, and kindness.

As many of the privileged experience vulnerabilities in new ways, they might express their fears of ill-health or mortality by referring to this pandemic as the great equalizer or leveler. But the poor and vulnerable— often people of color—remind us that though we are equal before God, we are not always treated so by each other. Refugees, immigrants, victims of ongoing wars and violence, the displaced, the orphans, the undocumented, the homeless, the unemployed,

the hungry, the abused—these people tell different stories often unheard. We have to contend with the urgency of our moment, the great loss of human life, pandemic politics and privilege, and various media and online platforms, with the enduring questions of rights, responsibilities, and justice.

“ As we continue to

practice self-care, let us also remember and care for the most vulnerable among us with justice, patience, empathy, love, generosity, compassion, and kindness.”

While COVID-19 has our rare global attention, it also reminds us that it cares little about who is inflicted and affected. Yet, we also have a rare global life-affirming moment to think more about our shared humanity, the environment that begs us to change

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our destructive ways, and to address and heal the inequalities, inequities, and injustices that stare us in the face.

As the month of Ramadan begins, so many of us have had to reconcile and accept that we will not be able to physically attend the mosque this Ramadan standing shoulder to shoulder in prayer, or break our fasts together, a time when many make extra efforts of coming to the mosque to experience the love and beauty of this sacred time in community. We continue to keep in our hearts those who cannot practice their faith freely due to Islamophobia, religious intimidation, and persecution. But there is also so much hope

in knowing that we are united in our efforts of fulfilling our religious obligations with a renewed sense of commitment, continuity, and purpose.

Ramadan, the 9th month of the Islamic lunar calendar, is the month in which the Qur’an was revealed to our beloved Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), a month of fasting from dawn to sunset each day, of intensive prayers, of reading the Qur’an, and of striving to be in a constant state of God-consciousness, a month of mercy, forgiveness, and emancipation. It is the month in which we reflect and struggle to center ourselves, offer our gratitude, to practice charity and be especially mindful of

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and connected to those in need.

May we flatten the curve of inequality, inequity and injustice, and may we shelter in God as we shelter in place.

Prayers for good health, unity, peace, and safety, and may the blessings of this generous month be shared with all.

Ameen. Ramadan Mubarak and Salaam.

Verily with every hardship comes ease Verily with every hardship comes ease (Qur’an 94: 5-6) Dr. Munir Jiwa is Founding Director of the Center for Islamic Studies at the GTU.

Braden Molhoek | APRIL 28, 2020

The Conflict and Ethics of We’re in this Together

“ Trying to reflect on

ethical concerns raised

by COVID-19 feels like trying to untie the Gordian knot.”

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rying to reflect on ethical concerns raised by COVID-19 feels like trying to untie the Gordian knot. There are profound connections between a variety of aspects that relate to the ongoing situation, from the mental and emotional impact of sheltering in place, to the disproportionate exposure of certain populations to COVID-19, to the economic impact that workers and businesses face, to the heartbreaking and inspiring stories from the front-line workers; not to mention the questions of how do we emerge from this and what are the long lasting repercussions?

In order to make any headway, I am reminded of the work done by Sir William David Ross, a Scottish philosopher more readily known as W.D. Ross. Ross believed there were multiple goods to seek or multiple principles to follow and that inevitably these would come into conflict with one other.

These duties, then, should be understood as prima facie obligations, even though he did not particularly care for that term. In other words, you should fulfill your obligations unless it conflicts with an equal or greater obligation. When such a case occurs, that does not mean that the overridden obligation can be discarded completely.

Instead, Ross also spoke of moral traces, or ways of making amends for the obligation you’ve failed to fulfill.

When I discuss this concept in class, I often present a hypothetical situation where I have agreed to help a friend move apartments over the weekend, but a family member suddenly becomes ill. I have two conflicting duties: one to uphold the promise I made to my friend, and the other a familial obligation to visit or assist the person in need. In their book Principles of Biomedical Ethics, Beauchamp and Childress identify criteria that can be used to weigh and balance obligations. Like Ross, they emphasize that the infringement of the obligation must be as minimal as possible. So if it turns out that my family member is healthy enough to return home on Saturday afternoon, I cannot use that situation to avoid helping my friend move on Sunday and do as I please. They also state that better reasons must be given for the overriding obligation. This is where the classroom example is far easier than most real life situations. If I am the only family member capable of helping my ill relative, for example, there is an obligation to family that could supersede the obligation to a friend as realistically, any able-bodied person can help my friend move, it does not necessarily have to be me. Another

criteria Beauchamp and Childress use is that all alternatives must be exhausted. Again, the classroom example has an easier solution: I can call a mutual friend and ask them to help our friend move in my place. Even if this does not become possible, I can still make amends via moral traces by hiring movers to assist my friend.

The complexities of life caused by our response to COVID-19 do not allow for such simple adjudication. What I hope to have done is to show how concerns and obligations need to be balanced, and that even if certain obligations are overridden for more compelling reasons moral traces are still relevant. So when we speak of extending shelter in place, we also need to be aware of the impact that has on people, be it emotional, economic, or physical, and seek to mitigate those effects as we strive to flatten the curve to protect the most vulnerable among us and ensure that our medical professionals and resources are not overwhelmed. These are difficult discussions and decisions to have and to make, but I would rather work through these problems than be faced with more difficult ones. If ICUs are out of beds and there is a shortage of ventilators, what do we do? In that situation we are making decisions that directly lead to some people receiving treatment and others being denied. It is in everyone’s best interest to find alternatives that avoid such terrible decisions, to remember that we are all in this together, and to treat one another well.

Dr. Braden Molhoek is incoming Director of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences (CTNS) and a Lecturer in Science, Technology, and Ethics at the GTU.

 View the accompanying video reflection at gtu.edu/scel/braden-molhoek SPIRITUAL CARE AND ETHICAL LEADERSHIP FOR OUR TIMES | Spring 2020: Faculty & Staff Reflections | 11

Elizabeth S. Peña | MAY 5, 2020

Troubled Times: Turning to the Arts

“ Art enables us

to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.”

—Thomas Merton

F

or months now, the grim daily news about COVID-19 has given us reason to feel destabilized and discouraged. Where can we seek equilibrium, considering that a simple grocery store visit is now cause for anxiety? How can we alleviate our loneliness when sheltering-in-place, distant from friends and family?

Across the globe, many have turned to the arts for comfort, understanding, and hope.

Art can comfort us.

Experiencing art—looking at an artwork, listening to music, reading a poem—allows us to temporarily escape into another world, and to become enveloped in beauty.

Surrendering to this beauty gives our wounded psyches a much-needed break from our communal anxiety.

Art can help us understand and express our own emotions.

In the absence of our usual schedules and rituals, many of us feel unmoored as we struggle to understand our new reality. Making art reminds us of our own agency when we feel powerless.

Art can give us hope.

The arts transcend boundaries of language, nationality, and religion, helping us to see beyond ourselves and to connect with others. Singing

together (though 6 ft apart) confirms our sense of community. The arts can remind us of the good and beauty of which humankind is capable.

The exhibition currently installed in the Doug Adams Gallery, AFTER/LIFE, features work by artists affected by an earlier pandemic—HIV/AIDS. Since the arrival of COVID-19, the exhibition has taken on new weight and updated resonance, despite the fact that we last welcomed visitors to the Gallery on Friday, March 13. (Visit gtu.edu/ scel/elizabeth-pena to view a video that allows a look behind the locked doors, with guest curator Alla Efimova providing insights into the exhibition.)

Both artists featured in AFTER/ LIFE —Ed Aulerich-Sugai and Mark Mitchell—were affected by HIV/AIDS during the early years of the virus, when it went unacknowledged by the U.S. government. The disease was not well understood, and no good treatments existed. Those who suffered from HIV/AIDS were stigmatized, since so many belonged to a group then de-valued in American society, gay men.

All these things, unfortunately, resonate to a certain extent to what we are enduring as COVID-19 continues to ravage the world and our country.

The U.S. government response has been negligent, the virus is not well

understood, and no vaccine yet exists, and, shockingly and sadly, some view sufferers’ lives as less worthy, as a sacrifice necessary to revive the economy. Because of our own, newly acquired personal experiences, the work in AFTER/LIFE resonates even more deeply than before.

AFTER/LIFE presents Ed AulerichSugai’s Figures series, the last body of work he made before his death. In some of these paintings, with figures with cast down faces, he is remembering friends who died during the AIDS crisis. In other paintings, showing ascending bodies, he was willing himself into a healthy body through the act of painting. We can join the artist in mourning those who died, and in expressing hope and recovery for others.

The exhibition also includes Mark Mitchell’s Burial series, in which Mitchell created multi-garment death ensembles for friends. These friends are still living—in sewing these outfits, he honors their lives. We have displayed these works floating from the ceiling, showcasing their ethereal quality. It makes us think of the passage from life to death, of the importance of recognizing, thanking, and honoring our friends and family while we are together on earth.

While the artwork in AFTER/LIFE concerns themes relating to death, the pale colors and graceful shapes are uplifting and life affirming. Take a moment and soak it in—or, read a book, listen to music, or watch a dance performance—and gather solace and strength for the future.

Dr. Elizabeth S. Peña is the Director of the Center for the Arts & Religion at the GTU.

 View the accompanying video reflection at gtu.edu/scel/elizabeth-pena Graduate Theological Union | 12

Ed Aulerich-Sugai, Figures, Repose: Study #6, 1991, Oil on canvas , Courtesy Ed Aulerich-Sugai Collection and Archive.

Mark Mitchell, Burial Ensembles, 2013, textiles, courtesy of the artist. Paintings by Ed Aulerich-Sugai.

SPIRITUAL CARE AND ETHICAL LEADERSHIP FOR OUR TIMES | Faculty & Staff Reflections | 13

Wendy Arce | MAY 15, 2020

Persevera y Vencerás: An Abuelita’s Words Revisited during a Global Pandemic

“ Persevera y vencerás.

Persevere, and you will overcome.”

A

s the Associate Dean of Students at the Graduate Theological Union, the second week of May is a busy time in my office. The office of student services works as a team to organize and execute the events that honor the hard work and dedication of our graduates on the second Thursday of May. It is particularly special because this team has accompanied our graduates through the highs and lows of the program, so the ceremony becomes one last gift to celebrate the people we have worked so closely with throughout their time at the GTU. But this year, everything is different.

For the first time, the GTU will be celebrating our graduates online so as to not put our graduates, their families and friends, or our community at risk with an in-person commencement. It is with such a heavy heart that I present these reflections today, online, from the safety and isolation of home.

Four years ago this week, I gave the remarks at my own commencement, and I shared the words of wisdom from my abuelita—my grandmother: “Persevera y vencerás.” Persevere, and you will overcome. Back then, these words were a beacon of hope through what felt like endless years in the doctoral program.

Today they serve as a reminder that perseverance is the key, especially during the crisis we currently face.

I am not sure my grandmother ever imagined that her grandchildren would live at a time when these words were so apt. Abuelita teaches us from her wisdom that troubling times pass—the tough part is to not lose hope and faith that one’s persistence and perseverance will see us through. My grandmother persevered through very uncertain times, but in all of those years, she built a strong foundation that holds my extended family together to this day— despite the fact that we live all over the United States, Costa Rica, Panama, the UK, and Italy. Persevera y vencerás.

But when we are in the thick of it, it is very easy to lose this big-picture perspective. I cannot imagine persevering in the face of your child’s hunger, in face the unemployment, in the face of an empty bank account, or in the face of an eviction notice.

This feels insurmountable, and yet, giving into despair is so dangerous.

Perseverance is a survival strategy.

We could easily enter a downward spiral and lose all hope, but this is a time when hope and faith, coupled with

wisdom, critical thinking, and creating different forms of community can help us make safe and informed decisions while not feeling alone and scared, to stay home if we’re lucky enough to be able to do so, safely, to protect ourselves if we must go out to work or find new places to live. As our shelter-in-place orders have grown from three weeks to seven and seven weeks to eleven, here in the state of California, we must find ways to persevere, to be persistent in desperate and seemingly hopeless times, to create space for what we are feeling but find ways to press on and give ourselves and others our very best.

There will be a new normal, and yes, the world will look different when we emerge. We do not know what it will look like. But what we do know is that the world is in need of the theological, ethical, and spiritual leadership seeped in the wisdom traditions and academic training represented at the GTU. Our graduates and our current students have always answered the call of a world in need of their leadership, but now more than ever, our world counts on the leaders that emerge from the GTU to think critically, deeply, and holistically of the changes our world faces. Our graduates and current students must think creatively about how to answer that call, how to persevere, how to inspire others to persevere and how to accompany the most vulnerable until we all overcome this current crisis.

Just the other day, I was on a Zoom call with one of our 2020 graduates, Dr. Cecilia Titizano, and our mutual friends. Among the circle we have myself; Dr. Titizano, who teaches and is building a network of indigenous women and Latinas; Mario GonzálezBrito, an organizer with the Alameda and Santa Clara County Employment

 View the accompanying video reflection at gtu.edu/scel/wendy-arce Graduate Theological Union | 14

Management Associations; Guillermo Durgin, who organizes with the California Teachers Association; and Paulina González-Brito, executive director of the California Reinvestment Coalition. It is a pretty impressive group of people, and we have wonderful conversations!

During one of our sessions, Mario González-Brito talked about how he is bringing the notion of social solidarity to his web-based organizing.

In response, Dr. Titizano said, “Yes! We do not need social distancing.

Instead we should shift the conversation to physical distancing with social solidarity. We must still be in solidarity with each other despite physical distancing.”

This was such a poignant moment for me because in our fear and need to protect our health and safety, we distance ourselves from others physically, but that distance threatens the humanity of everyone around us. The less we interact with each other, the more we forget the humanity of those who are different from us, and in the world of COVID-19, those who are different can even be those who are not in our immediate homes. Social solidarity brings more into the picture.

It gives us the opportunity to think not only about how this crisis affects me, but also how it affects those around me.

“ We do not know what [the world] will look like.

But what we do know is that the world is in need of the theological, ethical and spiritual leadership seeped in the wisdom traditions and academic training represented at the GTU.”

How does this crisis affect the rich and the poor differently? How do we make sure to protect those who are most vulnerable—those who have health issues, or who are unable to work from home, or who have been unemployed or furloughed due to budget cuts? And how can we create community, offer support, and provide wisdom to societies that are afraid, at risk, in mourning, and isolated?

Our graduates and our current students are engaged in this incredibly important work, supporting their communities, families, and colleagues while finding ways to create social solidarity despite physical distancing.

It is with great pride and joy that I announce the GTU Commencement website (2020commencement.gtu. edu) celebrating the accomplishments of the Class of 2020, graduates of the Master of Arts and Doctoral of Philosophy degrees! On this site, you will find several components that mirror our in-person ceremony. Dr.

Susan Aguilar (PhD graduate) has shared some reflections to start. After that, you will find remarks from our Interim President and Dean Dr. Uriah Kim. You will also hear from Michael Dodds, one of our faculty members, and Dr. Yohana Junker, graduate of the PhD program. You will also find a dedicated page for each graduate that showcases their work accompanied by a short video or text tribute from their faculty advisors. At the bottom, MA graduate Albert Honegan closes our time together with texts from Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, spoken in many languages. This sends our graduates to go forth into the world.

I hope you take a moment to look at the wonderful accomplishments of our graduates—leaders for a world in crisis.

Stay healthy and be well.

Dr. Wendy Arce is Associate Dean of Students at the GTU.

SPIRITUAL CARE AND ETHICAL LEADERSHIP FOR OUR TIMES | Spring 2020: Faculty & Staff Reflections | 15

Uriah Kim | MAY 22, 2020

Spiritual Reintegration in the Wake of COVID-19

“ I am certain that our

I

f the past two months have shown us anything about this unprecedented crisis that we are living through, it’s that we do not know what the future will hold. We are still uncertain of the full extent of what COVID-19’s impact will be on the world, our lives, or our school. I am optimistic about the future, especially with regard to the potential role that the GTU and its community can play in finding a way forward through these new challenging opportunities.

As the nation contemplates next steps in the reopening of businesses and institutions, our focus is rightly on logistical and operational matters. Will counties allow retailers to provide curbside pick-up? What EDD (Employment Development Department) program benefits are available to workers whose earnings are impacted? And, yes, at the GTU we are also working on the logistics of reopening our campus and offering courses in the fall semester while managing social distancing.

While questions like these are exceptionally important, if we have hope of ever truly reconstituting a healthy society, we also need to consider how we reintegrate on a communal, social, and spiritual level.

With more than 2 billion people (nearly one third of the human population) living under “stay at

work at the GTU is essential for answering this question and for finding ways to reimagine and recreate a more generous and equitable community.”

home” orders at some point over the past two months, few of the institutions and social customs we typically rely upon to help us forge and maintain community are likely to be at our disposal. The net outcome is that we have adapted to a lifestyle of relative isolation. We have been “trained” to stigmatize one another, necessarily, for our own well-being. Fear about the spread of the virus is already causing some to shun one another, or worse, capitulate to sentiments of racism, xenophobia, scapegoating, and in-fighting at the highest levels of government, further undermining our already frayed social fabric.

How can we combat this tendency and reconstitute our sense of community beyond the fear that coronavirus has generated?

I am certain that our work at the GTU is essential for answering this question and for finding ways to reimagine and recreate a more generous and equitable community.

common good in this region, the nation, and beyond. The work done daily at the GTU provides a template for those who could help their respective communities rise above the din of our current crises.

On any given day, you’ll hear students and teachers sharing ideas to come together, to understand one another’s points of view. You’ll find students and teachers congregating to worship in the manner they see fit, meditating on the better part of life, and contemplating how they can move forward and improve the world around them.

At the GTU, we find solutions for the soul. We collaborate and cooperate. We stand together, work together, and learn together, so we can thrive together.

In short, the GTU is a community of teachers, researchers, learners, and doers that encourages and sustains a healthy and caring society—one that engages across differences.

As this crisis has made clear, this work— now more than ever—is an urgent necessity. If community is created in moments of sharing, it will be up to us to continue to find ways to do so in a spirit of generosity, calling on “the better angels of our nature,” if we hope to allow for this moment to offer us a brighter future to which we are all bound. I am confident we can rise to the challenge and be all the better for it.

Dr. Uriah Y. Kim is the President of the Graduate Theological Union.

The GTU’s doctoral and MA programs have shaped, inspired, and empowered theological thinkers and doers who have made transformative impacts on countless communities and individuals and made positive differences for the

 View accompanying video reflection at gtu.edu/scel/uriah-kim-2 Graduate Theological Union | 16

SUMMER 2020: Alum Reflections

SPIRITUAL CARE AND ETHICAL LEADERSHIP FOR OUR TIMES | Summer 2020: Alumni Reflections | 17

Michael Sepidoza Campos | JULY 10, 2020

Transgressive Conversations

“ At the Graduate

Theological Union, I learned to entwine body, identity, and place with the rigors of theological work.”

A

s a teacher, there are moments that compel one to transgress the stability of theory in order to respond to the immediacy of lived reality.

Three months ago, the global community hunkered down before an emerging pandemic. Ethical nuance was reduced to simple precepts: Wash our hands. Stay home. Keep distance. Breathe.

But just as we began to awaken from seclusion, the world imploded as citizens took to the streets to protest the death of George Floyd, yet another Black man whose suffocation exposed the scourge of whiteness that long strangled our democracy.

Two moments— One that threatened the integrity of bodies; Another that pierced through the ideology of our body politic.

In between, I looked on in disbelief, drowning in questions, a growing distrust of the systems that secured my body, identity, and sense of place.

For the first time in a long while, I, the teacher, could neither speak nor breathe. Theory could not endure before the transgressions of real life.

As a young teacher, I remember being

taken by Benedict of Nursia’s ancient counsel: “Listen with the ear of your heart.”

To listen was to encounter, enfleshed in the practice of conversatio morum—convers(at)ions that left one open to the Other’s allure.

Benedict might well have been speaking to teachers. After all, learning is, at heart, conversational. In the encounter of student, teacher, and text, there prevails a constant interrogation of ideas, knowledge, and comprehension— exposing one to the arbitrariness of body, identity, and sense of place.

To the extent that learning nudges one to cross into the unknown, it cannot but transgress.

At the Graduate Theological Union, I learned to entwine body, identity, and place with the rigors of theological work. Conversations shaped ideas and expositions, texts and corporealities. And so, with Naomi Seidman, I intuited layers of history embedded in words; with Mayra Rivera, I gleaned the other-ness of texts and potency of imagination; with Boyung Lee, I elevated context on equal footing with theory; and with Michael James, I resurrected the primal impulse of

a story—my own—to break through colonial discourse.

These teachers enfleshed scholarly conversations in a manner that allowed transgressions between theory and lived reality, refusing to privilege one at the cost of diminishing the other.

At a time when a single breath can affirm bodily integrity while eroding our national ideology, how might we teach? How might we endure the suffocation of familiar tropes and cross over—indeed, transgress—into the possible? How might we heal?

When scholars, ministers, theologians, and teachers are compelled to speak, might we, instead, converse? In choosing to listen, might we submit “to what is ‘intractable’ . . . [to encounters] where the political weapons of consciousness [become] available in a constant tumult of possibility.”[1] Perhaps in beholding the Other beyond ourselves, we might simply love; moved to an enduring conversion.

[1] Sandoval, Chela. Methodology of the Oppressed. Theory Out of Bounds, V. 18, p. 142. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.

Dr. Michael Sepidoza Campos is an Associate Professor in the Theology and Religious Education Department of De La Salle University, Manila. He also teaches religion at Convent & Stuart Hall, Schools of the Sacred Heart, San Francisco. Campos obtained his PhD from the GTU in 2011.

 View the accompanying video reflection at gtu.edu/scel/michael-campos Graduate Theological Union | 18

Harry Singleton | JULY 16, 2020

Why Black Lives Matter

“ The veracity of the position lies in the contention that God created all human beings, including Black human beings, in freedom.”

B

lack lives really do matter. While they have never publicly mattered to this country, they have always mattered to Black people. Recent protests in the aftermath of the public execution of George Floyd have brought both positive and negative results. On the one hand, Floyd’s legal lynching has elicited a Macedonian call answered by outraged Blacks and sympathetic whites to end racial profiling and police brutality now! But on the other hand, the racial mood of the country still lends the impression that this was an isolated incident and that systemic racism does not extend to other major facets of national life. This thinking, however, does more to assuage white guilt than free Black people.

The Black community understands that these recent protests are but the latest round of a history of prophetic responses to white hegemony — the latest outcry of justified rage from the trenches of Black oppression. For in that physical and psychical trauma has been borne by the Black liberation tradition most notably recognized in Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Ida B. Wells Barnett, W. E. B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Fannie Lou Hamer — a tradition that has incessantly made the public statement, Black lives matter!

They matter as an infusion of hope to a Black community that needs a sense

of somebody-ness, and they matter as a formidable challenge to a white community that has long rendered Black humanity an aberration.

The veracity of the position lies in the contention that God created all human beings, including Black human beings, in freedom. Thus, to deprive a group of human beings’ freedom in any way is antithetical to divine will and has no place in a responsible Christian theology. That to theologically sanction the desecration of Black humanity while confessing love for the God of Jesus Christ is the pinnacle of sin. In such a milieu, God is an idol, not a liberator!

“ Black lives matter

religious meaning itself. This means a new focus, not on ecclesiastical dogma, but on repairing the tattered and torn Imago Dei in people of color in a world continually committed to their debasement. Only through an abandonment of the seminal value of racism will the church and all other religious institutions be a part of a liberation reformation. Only in the prophetic transformation of human value will Black lives matter in a way that reflects the true nature of divine will.

Dr. Harry Singleton III is a professor at Benedict College and the University of South Carolina. He graduated with his PhD from the GTU in 1998.

also to God.”

This is why for all religious institutions the salvation of the world lies in their response to the challenge put forth by a liberating hermeneutic regarding true reformation: seeing God in people of color! If America’s gruesome racial history has not done anything else it has taught us that true reformation has less to do with altering a particular doctrine or liturgy, not in the true apostolic authority (Catholic) or in the elimination of indulgences (Protestant), but more to do with the radical altering of

 View the accompanying video reflection at gtu.edu/scel/harry-singleton SPIRITUAL CARE AND ETHICAL LEADERSHIP FOR OUR TIMES | Summer 2020: Alum Reflections | 19

Mahjabeen Dhala | JULY 24, 2020

A Pilgrim’s Perspective on a Spiritual Reboot

“ In bravely seeking hope and innovative strategies

to navigate through the despair and distrust, most of us have resorted to our religious traditions and spiritual practices.”

S

ince the beginning of this year, the failure of systems that were meant to protect and preserve has exposed the fragility of international relationships, precarity of physical health, vulnerability of mental wellbeing, and malignant flaring of deep rooted discrimination based on race and immigration status.

In the wake of such global anxiety, communities have united to curate reparative modalities for reform and renewal, often finding inspiration in each other’s rituals and spiritual practices. For Muslims, the Hajj pilgrimage is an archetypical exercise in reflection on the human condition and working toward a spiritual reboot.

The Kaaba is a sacred historical symbol revered by Muslims as the House of God and the direction (qibla) towards which they orient themselves to perform their daily ritual prayers (salat). Although the Qur’an deems it an obligation on all humanity (Q3:97), Muslims observe the annual Hajj as a key tenet of faith and practice.

Enshrined within the Kaaba are the narratives of male prophets as well as the grave of a woman named Hajar whose actions are embodied within Hajj rituals. As the Hajj season begins, though a physical pilgrimage might not be possible this year, reflecting on its spiritual aspects will help ease the anxiety, grief, and insecurity caused

by the precariousness of our time.

While COVID-19 has altered our sense of normalcy, the reemergence of the pandemic of discrimination has questioned our communal ethics.

Racial and ethnic minorities in the West and religious minorities in the East are being blamed for the spread of the coronavirus, Black lives continue to be blatantly disregarded, and international students brace themselves for the nervewracking wave of stipulations by ICE. This has been a shocking reminder that the killer virus of prejudice has been stealthily lurking under the pretentious garb of democracy and human rights.

In bravely seeking hope and innovative strategies to navigate through the despair and distrust, most of us have resorted to our religious traditions and spiritual practices. Hajj rituals offer an opportunity for critical introspection of individual and collective human conduct. Pilgrims reflect on the true meaning of home and security as they leave behind the comforts of their physical homes to seek the spiritual homecoming at the House of God. Donning their pilgrimage robes, they mindfully strip off all assumed, construed, and imagined identities to embrace their core human identity.

Circumambulating in an anti-clockwise movement, they consciously undo the grip of delusional supremacies around

color, gender, and class. Standing at the station of Abraham as a multicultural, multiethnic, and multinational group they seek the human in themselves and the other. Embodying Hajar’s sprint between the hills of Safa and Marwa, they are reminded that inaction in the face of injustice is not an option.

Hajj rituals are a way of detecting and removing malwares in the human system and the Eid of Hajj symbolizes an intentional resolution to sustain spiritual and social wellbeing.

While our resilience, interdependence, interconnectedness, and our faith in God during these anxious times of killer viruses and systems failures has undoubtedly provided us with comfort and hope, it is important to ensure that these measures are not reduced to mere crisis management, but rather translate into a sophisticated and strategic rebooting of the human system. Let us awaken the pilgrim in us and embark on a journey inward and toward the substance of being human.

Dr. Mahjabeen Dhala is Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies and Director of the Madrasa-Midrasha Program at the GTU. She graduated from the GTU with her PhD in 2021 and her MA in 2017.

 View the accompanying video reflection at gtu.edu/scel/mahjabeen-dhala Graduate Theological Union | 20

Debra J. Mumford | JULY 31, 2020

Practicing What We Preach

“ We must also do

our own internal work to understand, critique, confront, and dismantle white racism within our own institutions.”

A

s a homiletician and lifelong churchgoer, I have often heard people use the phrase “practice what you preach.” When people use this phrase, they are reminding others to actually personify or live out what they are advising others to do.

This exercise should not be confined to individuals, but should be expanded to include all communities and institutions, including seminaries and divinity schools. We equip people of many different faith traditions to do work they feel God is calling them to do in the world. We teach them to critically interpret and critique sacred texts and the world in which they live to discern their divine callings.

We must practice what we preach.

Over the course of the past few months, the painful and ubiquitous racially motivated injustices perpetuated in our culture have been thrust into the spotlight. Racism is one of the original and perpetually pervasive sins of the United States of America. As the result of the historical currents of white supremacy and white racism continue to permeate the cultural waters in which we all swim, we are conditioned to adopt these racist norms and values in order to survive and/or thrive in this cultural context. Understanding this, practicing what we preach mandates that we not only teach our students to understand,

critique, confront, and, dismantle the many structures that uphold white supremacy, but that we must also do our own internal work to understand, critique, confront, and dismantle white racism within our own institutions.

Louisville Seminary has begun to practice what we preach. Yet, we still have a long way to go. For almost twenty years, we have worked to teach our students about racism. We have educated our faculty and students about the culture of racism. We have examined our curriculum and decentered white male scholarship within various theological disciplines. We have restructured our faculty work into frameworks that decenter the Enlightenment notions that scientific ideas, Eurocentric worldviews, and ways of being are the models upon which theological education should be based. We have committed to ensuring that our faculty is continually representative of the larger society (eight out of seventeen full-time faculty members are people of color). We have committed to ensuring that our senior leadership is representative of larger society (four out of six members of the senior leadership team are people of color). We have begun to regularly recruit students at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, faith traditions, and associations. We continue to work to ensure that our Board of

Trustees is representative of our wider society. All of this work is admirable.

However, in all of our doing, we have never taken a deep dive into our own institutional culture to intentionally and systematically dismantle the systems and structures that continue to perpetuate white supremacy.

Now is the time to do this very difficult work. Beginning this fall, we as a faith community will examine policies, practices, traditions, and commitments (financial and otherwise) within every sector of our community for ways we all continue to uphold white, racist culture. This will be difficult and painful work. No one individual, department, or discipline within our community will be able to escape responsibility and culpability because we have all been socialized within this destructive, deceptive, and damning culture. Undergirding this praxis is the belief that our students will learn more from what we do than what we say.

How long this part of the journey will take, we do not know. What we will discover about ourselves, we are presently unsure. What we do know is that we need your prayers. Pray for us that we may adhere to the advice the Apostle Paul gave to the church at Galatia (Galatians 6) to not grow weary in our welldoing before we reap the harvest God has in store for us.

Dr. Debra J. Mumford is Dean of the Louisville Presbyterian Seminary.

She graduated with her PhD from the GTU in 2007 and was named the 2019 GTU Alum of the Year.

 View the accompanying video reflection at gtu.edu/scel/debra-mumford SPIRITUAL CARE AND ETHICAL LEADERSHIP FOR OUR TIMES | Summer 2020: Alum Reflections | 21

Cecilia González-Andrieu | AUGUST 07, 2020

The 6 Things Vulnerable Immigrants Need You to Hear

“ In these last three years, these conversations

about the wounds that vulnerable immigrants and their children carry have become more painfully urgent.”

I

t’s an afternoon last week and we’re talking through video cameras; or it’s an afternoon the semester before and a student is sitting in my office, tearfully releasing years of pent-up emotion; or it’s an afternoon in the last decade and we’re walking together, trying to fit this conversation between classes. Each of these experiences is a privileged moment that happens only as we build trust. In each instance I can truthfully say “I remember … I know …

I felt.” These are important words of companionship and purposeful vulnerability, and they make evident how vital it is for students of color to know faculty who not only look like them, but more significantly have encountered the world in a way that shares and values their own experiences.

In these last three years, these conversations about the wounds that vulnerable immigrants and their children carry have become more painfully urgent. I have been called to heartbreaking prayer groups with custodians, to many hours spent making sense of bureaucratic messes, to the homes of the sick, to tearful funerals, to raising money for the furloughed and unemployed, to reading legal briefs, to countless demonstrations, and to simply embracing a fellow human trying to

survive. Trumpism has been particularly hard on immigrant families and people of color, and its rise requires us to begin peeling back some of the taboo subjects we didn’t acknowledge or discuss even among ourselves.

As a public theologian-teacher-activist, I want to give you a glimpse into these conversations because they reveal some of the burdens we need everyone’s help to carry.

1. We are defined by others.

own perceived unworthiness. We even classify ourselves by levels of whiteness, knowing that those of us who can pass as white will have a much easier time than those of us who can’t. Some of us align ourselves with the powerful, hoping for acceptance. We live between the exhaustion of marginality or the self-hatred of complicity, and we often see no way out.

3. We feel like impostors.

As a child, I remember the taunts. I was an “alien,” an outsider. I was named by others, not for the dynamic and fragile self I was growing into but through hurtful labels that made it easy for me to be dismissed. Today, some of my students are called “illegals,” elders recall being called “spics” and “beaners,” and Latinx people, lumped together under loathsome xenophobic labels, have been made into the fuel for Trumpism’s fire: not fellow humans, not neighbors, not made in the image of God.

When we are accepted into a university, a graduate program, or a coveted job, we often feel that, “it’s just too good to be true.” My students, whose parents are farm or factory workers, tell me about the phone call from our university announcing their awarding of the coveted Social Justice Scholarship. The memories are of tears and then cautious stoic disbelief— always afraid someone has made a mistake. Sometimes it takes these young people years to believe that we belong to each other and that their flourishing is truly our most central concern.

2. We carry internalized racism.

4. We battle survivor syndrome.

Without sympathetic mirrors in which to see ourselves, we believe these denigrating labels and sink into our

As the first in my family to go to college, I cried my first few nights in my new university dorm room, asking myself,

 View the accompanying video reflection at gtu.edu/scel/cecilia-gonzalez-andrieu Graduate Theological Union | 22

“Why am I here?” I had shared a room with my Abuela my whole life. I was accustomed to trying to figure out how to pay rent, or talk to the landlord about our substandard living conditions. Now here I was in a beautiful room, outside my window were fragrant trees and an ocean breeze. My heart ached and I reproached myself for this privilege, knowing that outside my Abuela’s window was a car body shop full of noise and toxicity. How could I spend my time with books and college life, while my family was home struggling to survive? So many of my students live in this constant paradox and it becomes paralyzing, keeping us from joy and from claiming our rightful place.

5. We face a relentless but also revelatory “cotidiano.”

The vulnerable cannot choose their daily experiences: lo cotidiano. Situations come at us and must be faced. I listen to my friend who works at a food packing plant and spends a month gravely ill with coronavirus. He is now waiting for a clean bill of health to return to that same plant so he can feed his family. He has no other choice and his voice reveals a wounded grace. He cries as he talks about his faith and reaching out for God’s embrace. His suffering, echoing the wisdom of many religious traditions, continually reveals to him his need of God. His religious beliefs mature, not built on abstract propositions but on the real, abiding presence of God in the midst of every day.

6. We need to take care of ourselves before we can take care of others.

Those conversations in my office, in the quad or on a call, almost invariably end here: “How are you taking care of yourself?” I ask. Everything about the life of my “undocu” student or my friend on the custodial staff has always centered on taking care of others. For them, our Ignatian motto of, “being women and men for others,” forms the core of their identity, not as a nice slogan but as an exhausting reality. Part of my work is to help us see that we carry this sense of duty deep within us as a script, which tells us we have no worth, but that perhaps by helping others we can at least be useful, útiles.

We talk about small children, the elderly, and the sick, and ask, “aren’t they God’s beloved?”

A light appears in their eyes and they say, “yes, they are!” I press on, “are they being useful to anyone?” The light burns brighter, “no.” We talk, about how each person that calls us to a deeper love brings us to a truer sense of ourselves.

How my Abuela, even when she was elderly and blind, filled my life with joy.

I so loved who she was, and this sense of her inherent worth made my heart grow! “But she needed me to care of myself,” I tell my students, “so I could finish school, so I could do what she worked for and dreamed for me.”

recalling airplane safety videos, “so we can then help others.” We look into each other’s eyes. “Yes, we need our oxygen.” Someone has understood our weariness and honored it.

Communities of color need those who would be our allies to know how these often-unnamed realities weigh on us. We need accompaniment, space, and encouragement. We need to be made present, to be seen, and to be heard. And if we look tired, it’s because we are. We need a breather, the fresh oxygen of accompaniment, and then to have a mirror held up to us that says, “you are unconditionally loved.” That’s the God I believe in, the One who is madly in love with us, not in spite of, but because of our beautiful fragility.

Special thanks to my graduate students Manuel Valencia, Hilda Tapia, and Leonardo Mendoza, who shared their experiences with me and read a first draft of this essay. We do this work together, en conjunto.

Dr. Cecilia González-Andrieu is a professor at Loyola Marymount University. She graduated with her PhD 2007 and was named the 2020 GTU Alum of the Year.

“We need to make sure we have our oxygen mask on,” I tell them,

SPIRITUAL CARE AND ETHICAL LEADERSHIP FOR OUR TIMES | Summer 2020: Alum Reflections | 23

FALL 2020: Student Reflections

Graduate Theological Union | 24

By Sheryl Johnson | OCTOBER 23, 2020

Where Deep Joys Meets Deep Need

“ I love the idea of a vocation

being where your deep joy meets the world’s deep needs.”

I

have always been passionate about the intersection of faith and social justice. Within my social justice work, I’ve seen how economic inequality connects so many different issues. It intersects with race, gender, sexual orientation, and ability; all of these have ethical, economic components to them. Focusing on economic justice is a way to show how all of these different concerns intersect. It allows us to look at how transformation, a focus on solutions, and economic justice can help to mitigate some of those other forms of inequality as well.

Currently, I work halftime at the Congregational Church of San Mateo, CA, which is a wonderful community.

We have both an English service on Sunday mornings as well as a Spanish service on Wednesdays. Ours is a community that tries to look at its neighborhood and the changing demographics to a find a way to bring together different populations who might not otherwise interact. The church has tried to find ways to build community, to engage in social justice and solidarity, and to work together on issues of mutual concern such as immigration justice and economic justice. We look to see how we can support and learn from each other.

COVID-19 has encouraged us as a church to get people to share their

needs, which can be challenging, especially for people who are not used to asking for help or would rather not ask for help. We all have different types of needs, and for us as a church, it is important to think about the ways in which we can meet those needs and find the ways in which people who have extra resources can contribute and be matched with people who really could use that help right now.

It has been a great opportunity for the congregation to think about how we can have economic solidarity as one community, and how we reach out to the wider community as well.

It has been great to be rooted in a congregation that is already trying to do so many of the things that I think the church needs to be trying to do more broadly. That has been a hopeful experience in my day-to-day work by seeing how some of these things that I believe and write about as possible are actually possible, and are already happening in some communities.

need to be changed and have needed to be changed for some time. This is a very important moment that we need to think about critically and make sure that when we are getting ready for what comes next that we do so informed by what we have learned during this time.

It is great to know where you are situated. I love the idea of a vocation or call being where your deep joy meets the world’s deep needs. So I think that being the change is about knowing what you are equipped to do, what you are well situated to do, and then seeing how that could intersect to meet a need that the world has. Maybe the world as a whole is overwhelming, but it could be a particular community where you find that match between what is going to give you life and bring you joy, and also what is going to help and serve others and serve the world.

Sheryl Johnson is a PhD Student at the Graduate Theological Union.

A lot of us are not in our usual patterns, which can allow us the opportunity to reflect. Why have we been doing things as we have been doing them? Do we want to go back to the way that everything was? Many of us have reflections in our personal lives and collectively, as well as in terms of our society and what this is exposing about the things that

 View Sheryl’s video reflection at gtu.edu/scel/sheryl-johnson SPIRITUAL CARE AND ETHICAL LEADERSHIP FOR OUR TIMES | Fall 2020: Student Reflections | 25

By Leonard McMahon | OCTOBER 30, 2020

In Search of Common Ground

“ If we do not first work through a contemplative

process to deal with the tension within ourselves, our efforts to work across the table are going to be penultimate and possibly fruitless.”

R

eligion often has a bad name in the public square right now because it is seen as a divisive factor in our politics, and there is a good reason for that. However, it is also good to remember that, throughout American history, religion has often been the source of healing and repair within our democracy. The civil rights movement is a classic example, of course, but you can go back to find encouraging examples at the turns of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Knowing this is what prompted me to ask, what is it about religion that prompts such amazing social change?

How do we do religion in a way that allows it to be a positive resource for democracy as opposed to a negative one?

One of the things about religion that is important but that people forget— that American Protestants especially forget—is that traditions are never settled issues. There is no such thing as the Christian faith, for instance.

Christian theology and Christian living are ongoing conversations about fundamentally unanswerable and perennial questions, which scholars organize into systematic theology. Questions such as: What is God? Who is Jesus Christ? What is Creation? What is evil?

What are human beings? All these are fundamental, systematic theological questions. And in fact, keeping the conversations going is the point of

the Christian theological tradition.

But there is a paradox at the heart of religion that makes it risky for democracy. Indeed, critics can reliably cite how religion has been detrimental for our society, where it has been dogmatic and oppressive and reactionary precisely because of this paradox. And the paradox is that while religion can be endlessly studied, making it work requires an emotional commitment to some set of answers to perennial questions. We must decide what answers we find compelling enough to risk our lives. Put another way, we must choose a faith out of the many possible faiths there are in the world. All the wonderful scholarship at the GTU tracks how these choices have been made over time and around the world, but the point is that being religious requires a narrowing of vision, a choice among choices, a selection of this over that, and every religious person does this, consciously or unconsciously.

The problems come when we forget, as we often do when living out our faith, that what we have committed to was, in fact, one choice in an ongoing conversation with many options, and this is difficult because what we do religiously does not, in the reverential moment, feel like a choice. It feels like something outside and beyond us, compelling and irresistible; in truth, it is unnerving to

think we could have done otherwise. But alas, it is a choice, and it may be one we made consciously and urgently or it may be one that was made for us by family, community, or culture. But whatever the reason, we bear the responsibility for it. And if we do not take responsibility for our religious life at some point, we run a serious moral risk of hurting others. I think we recognize, across the board, that an adult who cannot or does not assume self-responsibility is missing something vital, and the same is true with the religious life.

Crucially, taking responsibility for our choices means acknowledging the choices we could have made but did not. Indeed, other people have chosen those answers we found unsatisfactory, and sometimes the answers we outright rejected. The hitch is that in a pluralistic democracy we are in conversation with these people, and not only the ones with whom we agree theologically. The fact of the matter is that, in a democracy, we are connected to people we will never meet and to people we would never want to meet, yet if the phrase, “the common good,” is to have any meaning at all, it must demand we think constructively about these folks as we go about our lives.

So, we are inextricably bound up, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., suggests, and in conversation with strangers, some

 View Leonard’s video reflection at gtu.edu/scel/leonard-mcmahon Graduate Theological Union | 26

of with whom we will fundamentally, vigorously, and righteously disagree.

These are people who have made other religious choices, and how we get along with them depends on how we frame our religious faith. If we hold our faith as absolutely right, exclusive, and immutable, then the conflict and tension that naturally come from difference explode into rage and revenge, and this is what we see in our politics today. But if we hold our faith with a sense of contingency, then this allows religion to work productively within us, helping us discover something beyond irritation and uneasiness.

By the way, some of the worst advice we could follow would be to “resolve” conflict and tension. Tension and conflict are natural to human life, and signs that we are ironically but powerfully connected to those people with whom we vigorously disagree. The key is to make this connection work for everybody. I think people who want to resolve a conflict in fact want to resolve a crisis, an acute moment of discomfort that threatens disconnection, and this is quite laudable. But once the crisis has passed, tension and conflict should return and be managed by all concerned.

In the work I do with my diversity consultancy firm, Common Ground Dialogue (cgdialogue.org), I have developed a method for bringing people to a place of contingency, using my training in Christian and classical spirituality, theology, and political theory.

I, and my colleagues and staff, help people understand that what they hold so dear is, at its root, not rational or obvious or inevitable, but something contingent and therefore precious. We help people feel how fragile and precious their own worldview is, and thus appreciate how others must feel when what they hold dear is faced with difference.

And there are many good people out there—civic groups, persuasive pundits, public intellectuals, and dedicated scholars—doing amazing work in trying to improve civility and civic engagement. There are good people talking across political difference, and

there is wonderful work being done to, “repair the breach” and, “restore the streets,” as it says in Isaiah.

However, what I have been able to bring through my work and my study here at the GTU is a theological rigor, robustness, and depth to precisely how and why a better body politic is possible. The work currently being done in anti-racism, for example, is rooted in psychology, sociology, and cultural theory, but I argue that only theology, that original science, reaches the heart of the problem and therefore offers the most promising solutions.

The upshot of my work is simple: If we do not first work through a contemplative process to deal with the tension within ourselves, our efforts to work across the table are going to be penultimate and possibly fruitless. They are going to be limited because they will be sourced in attempts to find common ground through education and empathy, or in other words, to seek some ground that we all have in common. Efforts to convince us that we all share the same ground, while principled, are misguided. It is not that we share the same ground, and that if only we could recognize this the world would be a better place. It is, rather, the fact that we each have a ground, but do not know it, that binds us in common.

Noble as efforts at education and empathy might be, eventually they will peter out in the heat of the moment, in the exigency of the discourse, and over the long haul of life. The pain of the tension will become too great.

We will hit a wall at some point, and the connection will fracture, possibly forever. But when we practice a contemplative method, we will find that we sit atop an inexhaustible source of love, compassion, and respect for ourselves, qualities we can then share with other people, especially those with whom we vigorously disagree. The tension in each of us keeps us from appreciating our potential, but at Common Ground Dialogue, we work to deepen awareness of this tension and make it an avenue, not a roadblock, to civility, discourse, and engagement.

Folks will go to the polls soon, and I urge them to vote and be part of the process because I think voting is not just a matter of accounting for the majority.

I think it is a matter of social consolidation. Even when people feel their vote does not count, the voting process itself shapes a certain kind of democratic person. It is important because it helps us to think in terms of conversation across difference, and the conversation is the most important thing.

It is not about winning this election or the next one. It is about creating a community of strangers that allows people to feel connected—even when they lose and even when they win.

This is what a democracy is, and it means, again, holding tension and being willing to live with conflict. An obsession with winning, even when we know we are morally right, is about doing away with conflict; and consequently, when we win, things still do not feel quite right. There is no peace outside because there is no peace inside.

Democracy is easier when we win, but it also requires we live with loss. Even when we think the consequences are absolutely dire, we must be able to access the moral and spiritual resources necessary to stay connected, and the only way to do that is with some kind of moral, emotional, spiritual, and ultimately contemplative work.

There is a kind of vulnerability, contingency, and connection we can call the common ground. There is a place we can all touch together, but it is first and foremost inside of each one of us. True community, the kind we all dream about, comes only from within.

Leonard McMahon is pursuing his PhD in political theology at the Graduate Theological Union. He is the founder/CEO of Common Ground Dialogue, a diversity consulting firm that specializes in making political, racial, and cultural difference work for groups and organizations, and may be reached at cgdialogue.org and lmcmahon@ses.gtu.edu.

SPIRITUAL CARE AND ETHICAL LEADERSHIP FOR OUR TIMES | Fall 2020: Student Reflections | 27

By Vanessa Fox | NOVEMBER 6, 2020

Building Bridges of Love get passed down through the DNA, as pointed out by Resmaa Menakem in his phenomenal book My Grandmother’s Hands. Since the beginning of human history, people have been subjugated and victimized by one another. Being able to heal these traumas and stop the cycle of violence is essential work.

I

was raised in a Reform Jewish household where my parents encouraged me to do mitzvahs—good deeds—for people, and to have a lifelong goal of doing tikkun olam, or repairing the world, in this world that is so heartbroken. Motivated by wonderful moral values, I committed to spending my time outside of school visiting nursing homes, giving resources to the needy, and helping out wherever it was needed. When I became a student at Arizona State University, I continued my community involvement by volunteering in every project. I have been a social justice activist ever since.

My family’s past motivated my activism as well. My maternal cousins were imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps and endured so much suffering because of their heritage. Many of my family members died there. I make it my responsibility to tell new generations about the Holocaust, so that it will never be forgotten or happen again and to remember all of those who died. It has been over 70 years since the Holocaust happened, and we are beginning to see the signs of renewed violence on the horizon. It is essential that we talk about the events that led up to the Holocaust, and stop the genocides that are now occurring around the world.

Racism and anti-Semitism can find their some of their origins in the intergenerational and historical traumas that

Another reason exists for this violence as well. People are yearning for their psycho-spiritual needs to be met in a world that tells them that they are not enough, that there is a scarcity of resources that they must fight for, and that others are to blame for what they lack.

People need to know that they count, are worthy of love, and are valuable for who they are and not just for what they do.

At my Unity Church, as soon as COVID-19 came to our attention, we had to close our doors. We, as a congregation, found ourselves feeling lonely and needing something to make up for the socialization that we lacked. We needed a deeper meaning and purpose for our lives, a way to remember that we mattered.

The COVID -19 quarantine showed us how badly our Unity values were really needed in the world beyond our doors. We witnessed horrible injustices like routine police brutalities against Black and brown people, especially involving the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many others. Reverend Sheryl Padgett knew that I was attending the Starr King School for the Ministry to become a professional activist, and said, “hey, Vanessa, we want to do something about this. ” She asked me to lead anti-racism trainings for the congregation. I welcomed that opportunity with open arms. I feel that it is our responsibility as human beings to recognize systemic and institutionalized racism, call it what it is, and help dismantle it. Recognizing these injustices is the very first step to stopping them and to changing the policies that allow them.

We all yearn for love, belonging, and connection with each other, and we need to develop a culture that engenders this.

We live in a capitalist economy where competition for power and money are placed above all else. People are valued only by the amount and the efficiency at which they produce, not for their precious uniqueness. Money and power will never meet the deepest needs that we all have—empathy, compassion, understanding, inclusivity, peace, connection, and, most of all, love.

The borders and boundaries that we have erected to make ourselves feel better than others are artificial. We need to take these defenses down and let each other in so that we can all heal. This requires having hard conversations and talking about the elephant in the room. By engaging in peaceful cross-cultural and inter-religious dialogue, we can begin to envision the just and peaceful world we seek. It is a dream that can become and is becoming reality.

We all need to realize how interconnected we are. It is common for people to believe that humans are separate from each other and from Nature.

Humans are in fact a part of Nature.

Everything we do, say, and believe has an effect on everyone and every form of life around us. There are such wonderfully rich cultures and worlds that we are missing out on because we have shut each other out with our artificial walls.

Being able to listen to your heart and to others is the first step to becoming the change you wish to see in the world.

The only value you need to be a leader is LOVE. As long as you can listen and love with your whole heart, you can lead and you can repair the world.

Vanessa Fox is pursuing a Master of Arts in Social Change at Starr King School for the Ministry.

 View Vanessa’s video reflection at gtu.edu/scel/vanessa-fox Graduate Theological Union | 28

By Gideon M. M’Mwonyo Mbûûi | NOVEMBER 13, 2020

Knitting Back our Community

“ I’m doing what I can with what I’ve got.”

I

am a student at the GTU pursuing my PhD in theology and ethics. I arrived here in Castro Valley back in May just before the George Floyd protests.

I had just lost my uncle and came here through a friend of mine, who was so gracious because she just felt that I needed a change of environment to help with the grieving process. It’s an enormous blessing to have a place to relax and just read and to be safe and far away from the hassles of city life.

In all honesty, there’s no way to quantify the impact that the protests have had on me because it’s just so multifaceted, from every aspect, from every direction you look at it. Especially as an immigrant, as an international student, and as an alien—that’s how we are officially referred to, and that’s how it feels, the alien-ness. Because during the conversations around Black Lives Matter and all the protests, sometimes you feel like your voice is gagged. You can’t say anything because the expectation is that you have nothing much useful to add to the conversation. Yet you do. You have something to say, actually. So you’ve got to sit with with the possibilities of depression, sadness, deep sadness, and frustration, and you try to just try to stay sane in the process amid the pain.

The story that really frames my approach to my ministry and project right now is this story about a hummingbird that I heard during a class at the GTU in the Spring semester, a Human Rights and Personhood class.

Our professor invited us to listen to a speech that was given by the late Kenyan Professor Wangari Maathai, who was an environmental activist and social justice crusader. She told this story during her acceptance speech when she won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 for environmental conservation efforts.

The story goes like this: There was this big, huge fire in the forest and all the animals congregated out of panic, and they were like, “We are just done.” Just like here in California when there are all of these warnings and you’ve got to move out and evacuate. The elephants were ready for the next phase, whatever that might be. But the hummingbird decided to do something. They kept going back and forth, making endless trips to the river, and with their little beak they would ferry drops of water to try to put out the fire. The animals were like, “Are you crazy? Just relax and wait and see what happens.” But Wangari Maathai says the hummingbird just kept saying, “No, I’m doing what I can with what I’ve got.”

That idea speaks to our situation —as a call for each of us to do what we can with what we’ve got.

The thing that I’ve got, that I feel that I can share, is my artwork. When I create art, I see it as having a threepronged effect: inward, outward, and upward. The inward is in the practice's ability to still me and calm me so that I have a sense of sanity.

One thing that I share with others is my knitting. As I knit, I envision a situation where relationships—broken relationships—are knit back together. Knitting back together our communities, our nations, and the global village. Knitting calms me down and is a subversive exercise, because where I come from men should not be knitting. So, by knitting I am reclaiming my agency.

Another art I practice is my music.

When I’m stressed or something’s happening, I might just decide to listen to my music on YouTube and sing or compose spontaneously; or I might even share that music with someone; or I might just sing out loud, especially during birthday celebrations. For example, when I get an update on Facebook that it’s a friend’s birthday, I often contact them to sing “Happy Birthday” to them. And the many people that have said that my singing or my song made their day or made them rejoice or filled them with joy—across the globe, in Kenya, Canada, California, wherever—it is such a blessing.

The other thing that I love to share with others is my hospitality and my cooking. Just yesterday I shared a wonderful meal with guests of Kenyan ugali or Kenyan tea. Offering hospitality is our way of saying I can do something. I might be limited, but I can be a host with whatever I’ve got, with my Kenyan hospitality. By feeding

 View Gideon’s video reflection at gtu.edu/scel/gideon-mbuui SPIRITUAL CARE AND ETHICAL LEADERSHIP FOR OUR TIMES | Fall 2020: Student Reflections | 29

our friends, we make a change, and we impact other people’s lives. We fill their bellies and make their faces smile.

All of these small actions help to remind me that when you feel that you’ve come to an end, it will actually be the start of a fresh season. It has happened to me in the past, and it will happen again in the future. There’s a song that says, “Hold on just a little longer and it will be alright.”

Now, I know that, but at the time it’s happening—during the depression and the loneliness and being in that helpless

and paralyzed state—you feel like all hope is gone and even such songs don’t make sense. Well, from my experience, I can say that it shall be alright. But it takes work. You might have to reach out to others, call someone, chat with them, just be there. Reach out and be open to receiving love also.

As we wait for the maneuverings of Washington, D.C., we may not be there to say anything, our voice may be little.

We might not make big changes, but we can do something in the process.

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We can take small actions to keep and maintain our sanity as we await that big day of salvation and deliverance.

Gideon M. M’Mwonyo Mbûûi is a doctoral student in the department of Theology and Ethics at the GTU, working on Constructive African Theology and Liberative Ethics.

By Teresa Charlton | NOVEMBER 20, 2020

The Steadfastness of God

“ In a world filled

B

orn and raised in the Presbyterian Church in Canada, I grew up in a small rural town on the eastern side of the country in Ontario, where the old style of church had long since ended. I had absolutely no intentions of being a minister. I was a church organist. When my music skills got to a point where I was proficient enough, I soon found myself being called upon in that capacity. I always assumed that would be my only capacity, and yet the good Lord had other plans.

In our small church where I grew up, a lot of what goes on in the church runs on the underground: in the gossip line, in the families, in the communities and those relationships in small towns.

However, a lot of our churches here in Canada have pushed those relationship principles aside and said we are past that stage. Well, unfortunately, we are.

I think COVID-19 has really just torn the Band-Aid off the fact that we have a serious problem with maintaining and building trustful relationships between preacher and congregation and between pew sitter and pew sitter.

When COVID-19 hit, it hit us right between the knees. We went from having a congregation of over a hundred people on a Sunday morning, ranging in ages from fifty-five to ninety-five or older, to having no one for six months because we were in lockdown due to

with cynicism and hypocrisy, the time has come for the Church to once again take its place as a voice of reason and of justice, but also as an example of respectful and mature leadership.”

the parameters in British Columbia.

We have since opened up, but there is just a huge fear. You have a fear of what we’ve been through, a fear of stepping out, of inadvertently making ourselves ill, and now a greater fear, as in British Columbia, we are now moving into dangerous levels of round two.

In all of this, there is the sense of being lost. Some of my coursework over the summer was looking at Old Testament metaphors and layering them over top of COVID-19, things like wilderness experiences, Exodus, being an exile, and a promised land.

There it is, now it’s not. So, there is just all of this uncertainty and all that solid ground that we feel we have lost.

The Moses story was in the lectionary this summer in the Old Testament. So, I simply threw all the New Testament stuff out and we just did this long quiet journey with Moses every week, one step at a time. It felt like we were journeying together not only biblically, but also in our own time, being able to layer the COVID-19 metaphor on top of that and finding that at the end of the journey, God was as steadfast and faithful with Moses, despite all

the ups and downs, as he had been back at the burning bush at the very beginning. That, I felt, kept that quiet sense of hope very much alive without having to speak too heavily about it.

My congregation is filled with people who, for the most part, have been faithful churchgoers their entire life.

They may not have been spiritually deep in those years, but one of the things that COVID-19 has done is forced all of us— but particularly the seniors—to look at their spiritual life and re-examine it. On a milder level, it is a continuation of what I was starting to see happen with the congregation before COVID-19. People were coming in desiring something new or something different, not just from their church, but from their God, from their faith, and from their spirituality.

And fortunately, with technology, we can continue to be there every Sunday. If we cannot be there in person, we can be there online. It is not the same, and we acknowledge that this is not quite what you are used to, but it is something and it is steady. For someone who is used to coming to church every Sunday and going to say their prayers, that’s important—the trustfulness, the calmness, and a re-examination of the steadfastness of God. I’m a real advocate that we don’t need nice people in the pulpit anymore. Isn’t that an awful thing to say? We need passionate people. Today’s leaders in in the pulpit are called to be more than just acceptable. They are challenged to be exceptional. In a world filled with cynicism and hypocrisy, the time has come for the Church to once again take its place as a voice of reason and justice, but also act as an example of respectful and mature leadership.

Teresa Charlton is a Doctor of Divinity student at San Francisco Theological Seminary.

 View Teresa’s video reflection at gtu.edu/scel/teresa-charlton SPIRITUAL CARE AND ETHICAL LEADERSHIP FOR OUR TIMES | Fall 2020: Student Reflections | 31

By Leora Cockrell | NOVEMBER 27, 2020

Beloved Community in Land and Spirit

“ What would happen if we all got together

to totally shift reality in ways that are generative and good for this earth and each other?”

I

f you had told me just a few years ago that I would be studying at a theological seminary, I don’t think I would have believed you. The path that led me to study the intersections of ecology, Judaism, and Indigenous solidarity has been a winding one.

In May of 2021, I will be graduating from Starr King School for the Ministry from the Masters in Social Change program. Upon reflection, I see my path’s origins in my childhood as well as the new bends that have been carved by the COVID-19 crisis.

I grew up two hours east of the Bay Area in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains. My parents built our house on 12 acres in a meadow surrounded by oaks and pine trees. It was an idyllic and beautiful childhood. At that time, I did not know that the people indigenous to that place are the WopumnesNisenan-MeWuk tribe, nor did I know the violent history of genocide.

As a child, I felt connected to the land and developed a curiosity for sustainable food production, which I would later follow in my undergraduate studies. While my rural upbringing fostered my spiritual connection to the land, it disconnected me from my Jewish heritage. Because I was one of a few Jewish people in my town, I felt resistance and resentment toward my Jewish identity. After my bat

mitzvah, I felt that I was done with God, with religion, and with my Jewish heritage. It was too painful to feel like I didn’t belong in my hometown.

In my undergraduate education, I followed my connection to land care and studied Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems. I also found a home in Queer Studies classes and minored in Gender & Sexualities. These two areas complemented each other because holistic land care requires understanding power structures and reimagining relationships. After I graduated, I wasn’t sure how to follow my passions. Eventually, I read Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent. While reading the reimagined story of Dinah and her four mothers, I realized I could claim a Jewish heritage that honored the feminine and find communities where it was safe and honoring to be Jewish.

I returned to the Jewish summer camp of my childhood where I lived and worked as the gardener for six months of the year for two seasons.

The camp is located on 160 acres of MeWuk land. I loved the combination of living with the beautiful land and Jewish community. It felt like a homecoming of two identities that weren’t able to coexist in my childhood.

I also began to notice that, as the gardener, I was bringing a lot of

techniques for growing food that didn’t really make sense in that ecosystem. I became curious about how Indigenous people tended that land. This curiosity led me to graduate school, where I ask a complex and painful question: What does it mean to be a Jewish person of European descent living in California, in lands that I love, that have been stolen from Indigenous people?

For me, that question can’t be “moved with” without spirituality, without the container of something greater than me. One of the ways I “move with” that question is through my work as an organizer with Jews on Ohlone Land (JOOL, https://www.jewsonohloneland.org/). JOOL has been my home base and my beloved community asking these questions, returning resources to Indigenous people, and engaging in collective Jewish healing. JOOL has allowed me to not only figure out as an individual how to be in right relationships with Indigenous people, but also as a member of a community of Jewish people who are working on this generations-long process.

Jews on Ohlone Land was founded

by Rabbi Dev and Ariel Luckey who have long-term relationships with the founders of Sogorea Te’, a women-led indigenous land trust here in the East Bay (sogoreate-landtrust.org/). Jews on Ohlone Land works to activate the

 View Leora’s video reflection at gtu.edu/scel/leora-cockrell Graduate Theological Union | 32

East Bay Jewish community to support Indigenous solidarity, primarily through individual and organizational contributions to Shuumi—a land tax for non-Indigenous people.

Sogorea Te’s vision is to return land to Indigenous stewardship in this land called Huichin. Because Ohlone Indigenous people are not federally recognized, they do not (yet) have the sovereign recognition that would allow them to govern their own ancestral homeland. Instead, they are working with a land trust model to take land off the speculative market and return it to Indigenous women-led communities, which is called “rematriation.”

One of Sogorea Te’s projects is called Himmetka—the “Chochenyo word for ‘in one place, together’”—which are resiliency hubs, with “ceremonial space, food and medicine gardens, water catchment, filtration, and storage, first-aid supplies, tools, and a seed saving library.” Himmetka hubs “provide essential, culturally relevant, resilience and survival support in some of the most marginalized parts

of our city.” What speaks to me particularly about the project of Himmetka is the acknowledgment that when we go through times of chaos and catastrophe, our nervous systems will experience trauma and we will need rituals to work through that trauma.

It has been an important learning for me to think about how preparing for disasters can and should include preparing ritual and ceremonial spaces.

Along with the disaster of COVID-19 and the underlying systemic injustices and neglect that have been highlighted (i.e. vaccine access, child care access, ability to work from home, and so much more), I also see something like a silver lining. COVID-19 has been a significant shift in reality, or at least our relationship with reality. Whenever there are significant shifts, there are also huge openings for new ways of looking at reality and new ways of connecting to ourselves and each other.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, I’ve had more time to reflect on questions: who am I, what am I responsible for, what have I inherited, and what do I

want to pass on to the future generations? I’ve also had many sparkles of imaginings of what the world could be. If we were able, in the course of a weekend, to completely change our lives when shelter-in-place happened in the Bay Area, what would happen if we all got together to totally shift reality, in ways that are generative and good for this earth and each other?

If you asked me today how I feel being a student at a theological seminary, I’d say it feels quite perfect. Where else could I ask interreligious and interdisciplinary questions that will likely take generations to answer in the context of a beloved community?

To learn more and give to Shuumi, please visit the Sogorea Te’ website at www.sogoreate-landtrust.org/.

Leora Cockrell is a Master of Social Change (MASC) student at Starr King School for Ministry.

SPIRITUAL CARE AND ETHICAL LEADERSHIP FOR OUR TIMES | Fall 2020: Student Reflections | 33

By Pamela Stevens | DECEMBER 4, 2020

Bridging Identities en Conjunto

“ Si se puede, en conjunto.

Yes we can, together.”

L

atinx people in California occupy multiple spaces, they carry multiple identities, and find unity through shared experience. That is what I study in my academic work, and now I’m able to live it personally as a ministerial vocation by serving as a bridge and companion to fellow Spanish-speaking people who want to have a voice in a church that is primarily white and Anglophone.

I’m a native speaker of English and Spanish. I identify as bicultural and bilingual. I heard from my church, which is the Episcopal Church in the Bay Area, or the Episcopal Diocese of California, about a group of communities in transition. They had lost their vicar of twenty-five years. They had a history of being dislocated from one borrowed space in a parish to another, and recently one of the communities had once again lost its worship space. That community had been renting space in a Lutheran church, which decided to remodel during the pandemic. I was invited by the diocese to work as a consultant to help bridge communication and accompany the communities through change.

It’s been an amazing experience to listen in both English and Spanish and to bridge the Diocese with a community that is resilient in spite of its challenges.

I’m inspired by the opportunity to be part of a journey of self-empowerment in which the people meet to discern next steps, which involves identifying a new worship location and building a new relationship with a new host parish. It has involved working together to organize lay-led services in an online format that worked among people with limited access to the devices and internet bandwidth required for livestream online worship.

The people in this community made live streaming through social media work. They tailored their worship to the media and as a result they widened their reach to include family members in other countries.

I’ve had the honor of participating in a process of finding unity across a variety of racial, cultural, social, and citizenship status differences, along a spectrum of religious pieties. By finding unity in a shared language and in the experiences of asylumseeking and living in the borderlands of multiculturality, we have practiced resilience en conjunto, together.

Our annual celebration of el Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead, is one example of how we find unity. We combine the Christian observance of All Souls Day with a traditional ritual of community across the divide

of death. Our community made an ofrenda, an altar of varying levels, and people brought photographs of their beloved difuntos, their departed family members. Members adorned the levels of the altar with favorite foods and drinks, paper flowers, and decorations. We brought in strings of cut paper decorations called papel picado, paper flowers, and cempasuchil, marigolds, which in indigenous religious tradition in Mexico evoke the sun. On the Day of the Dead we are all together again.

There is reunion. We see fiesta as a way of bringing about unity even in times of challenge, change, and separation.

In this marrying of traditions indigenous to our local context here in California, a community with roots across Latin America and Spain found unity in a popular religious tradition. Amid a context of transition and pain, we accompany each other through transitions, just as we pray that the souls of our departed would both be with us and be accompanied on their eternal journey, and that our community remains unified.

Within our community, I often hear people repeat the phrase, si se puede, en conjunto. Yes we can, together. We can do it together; we are not alone.

We face the pandemic the same way we have faced other adversity: together. For us, la comunidad, the community, has value. It provides a sense of belonging even across differences. La comunidad is critical to our survival and our resilience.

I was asked by a white colleague, well, what’s the activism focus for the Latinx people in these communities? What’s important to them? I think the answer is survival. Survival is its own form of activism, of resistance toward justice and community. We are a people of exile.

We are asylum-seekers as Christians

 View Pamela’s video reflection at gtu.edu/scel/pamela-stevens Graduate Theological Union | 34

and as Latinx people. We seek belonging together and provide it mutually.

One of the challenges we face is that while our members are adept social networkers, they find online meetings challenging. Our members struggle with online meetings due to a lack of dependable access to the internet, little experience with technology, and the lack of devices like computers and tablets. We were successful once in organizing a community meeting. It took us about two hours, but we finally got most of the community on Zoom in September. Our members hadn’t seen each other’s faces since March. People were smiling from ear to ear at the chance to spend time together. It was just really beautiful to connect people

who had been separated for months from the in-person connections that are so important in Latinx culture.

I would say to anybody facing this time of change to trust that they’re not alone and to trust that they have community. Latinx people do not have the privilege of social distance at home in multi-generational households. We may not have the privileges of working from home, meeting on Zoom, or traveling in private vehicles.

Nevertheless, in our Latinx community, we have practiced resilience by building community and by enduring together.

physical damage due to limited access to personal protective equipment.

Another person works three part-time jobs without benefits and was out for more than a month with the COVID-19 virus. Others continue to use public transportation to public spaces where they can get access to free wifi. What keeps us going and what helps us is our ability to reach out to each other and to find ways to connect to each other creatively, however we are able so that we can continue en conjunto.

Pamela Stevens is a PhD candidate at the GTU.

One person in our community lost his job at a hotel and got a job picking grapes in the smoke and suffered

SPIRITUAL CARE AND ETHICAL LEADERSHIP FOR OUR TIMES | Fall 2020: Student Reflections | 35

By Victoria Price | DECEMBER 18, 2020

Love Thy Neighbor

“ For people who have limitations and cannot

physically be there, how do you open up your theology to include them?”

M

y research at the GTU has been largely based on historical analysis and ethnography, but with the emergence of COVID-19, my focus has shifted to include more of the practical aspects of Hindu studies.

The research that I have done in the last nine months or so­—and that I plan to continue throughout my PhD and beyond—will assess disability and inclusion in digital religious spaces, specifically focusing on how Hindus in America and around the world have reacted to these kinds of issues.

I have always been aware of the needs of the disabled community because of my dad, who has been a coach for the Special Olympics for many years. He has always made it known to me how important the issues of the disabled community are, and I am overjoyed that I now have the chance to include disability studies in my own work.

Over the last year, COVID-19 has shined a spotlight on how useful digital communication technologies can be for including disabled individuals into spaces that they might not have access to offline. The pandemic has made room for these technologies to be improved and to be more accessible for disabled individuals who need specific accommodations to participate in online services.

But it’s important to emphasize that while technology can be inclusive, it

can also be limiting, and it’s important that we pay attention to who is getting included and who is being excluded, even when we implement new technologies.

Religious institutions in general take stances on a lot of important issues like homelessness, food scarcity, and wealth inequality, but one of the places that a lot of religious institutions are lacking clear platforms is on the issue of disability and inclusion.

In fact, when the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was passed in 1990, a lot of religious organizations actually went to the courts to argue that they did not need to comply with ADA requirements either for their buildings or their practices. And they won. So even though there is a belief across religions that we should help other members of society who are in need, there seems to be a disconnect between that belief and what is actually being practiced.

This is why I am so passionate about advocating for this. Something that I want to argue for is liberation theology across traditions, but liberation theology that specifically addresses issues of disability.

An issue that has come up during COVID-19, especially in Christian churches is the need to sanctify the host during Eucharist. How do church leaders expand their theology to be able

to include people who cannot physically be in the building? There are so many different theological boundaries in place. In some traditions, they cannot sanctify the host over a screen.

In other traditions, the host, once it’s sanctified cannot leave the building. In some traditions, there is a little more latitude; they can sanctify the host in the building and bring it outside the building to those who cannot be present.

This is the case in the Catholic Church that I grew up in, where one can sanctify the host in the church, place it in a specific capsule, and bring it to someone in a nursing home or the hospital.

For people who have limitations and cannot physically be there, how do you open up your theology to include them?

If you cannot sanctify the host over a screen, or have people be physically present, then it creates an exclusionary space for people who do not have the ability to be physically present or have access to technology. I am specifically thinking about people with age-related disabilities, people with Alzheimer’s and dementia, or people who are in nursing homes who do not have regular access to religious services. In many cases, having an online service is not the best option for them, because they don’t feel like the service is happening in their home or in their physical space, whereas younger people who have disabilities, if they’ve grown up with

 View Victoria’s video reflection at gtu.edu/scel/victoria-price Graduate Theological Union | 36

technology, generally feel like it is a more immersive experience for them.

I was fortunate to do a three-part podcast series earlier in the semester for Our Savior’s Lutheran Church in Lafayette where I talked about the history of online religion. I looked at things like radio and televangelism and then brought it back around to what different communities have specifically done during COVID-19. In the final episode of that series I talked about issues of disability and inclusivity and how disabled people are impacted by the uptick in the use of digital communication technologies. I think just having that conversation and having those kinds of things out in the open is a good way to just get the ball rolling.

When we finished the podcast, the pastor of Our Savior’s Lutheran Church, who is leading that program, specifically told me at the end of our recording that he realized after listening to my episode just how important disability ministry and providing inclusive opportunities are. I hope that small things like that, talking to religious leaders,

urging them to take a deeper look at their theology and their sacred texts, advocating for inclusivity—not just in the physical building of a mosque or a church or a temple, but in the clerical and lay leadership roles as well—I hope that bringing those ideas into conversation will spark something.

I want to avoid the narrative that disabled folks need to be saved. They have been thriving in their own spaces for centuries. What I am trying to advocate for is not some sort of ableist savior complex, but instead just the idea of inclusion and inclusivity. I want to make it abundantly clear that disabled folks do not need nondisabled folks to save them. They just need to know that if they want to be part of a specific community, that there is an accessible way for them to do so without the risk of discrimination, harassment or any sort of undue burden.

not otherwise have regular access to their tradition. The “love thy neighbor” aspect of Christianity that is so present in the Gospel—how do you bring that into the work that you are doing in your church? How are you actively bringing that idea of loving your neighbor as yourself back into your practice? If I were talking to someone from a Dharma tradition, I would remind them that we are all God. If they were a non-dual practitioner I would remind them that we are all God and that we all come from the same source. We are all made of the same divine material.

We need to bring these ideas of loving our neighbors as ourselves and loving each individual and each creature on the earth as the divine back into the work that we are doing.

Victoria Price is a PhD student at the Graduate Theological Union.

There needs to be a wider conversation in religious traditions across the board about how to be more mindful of including more folks, especially those who have disabilities and would

SPIRITUAL CARE AND ETHICAL LEADERSHIP FOR OUR TIMES | Fall 2020: Student Reflections | 37

By Dianne Daniels | DECEMBER 18, 2020

Freedom and Knowledge within a Spiritually Fluid Faith Journey

“ You can have more

than one path, just like someone can have more than one career.”

M

y mother was a disaffected Baptist. She had a problem with the “woman as a second class citizen” attitude she was exposed to from some of the church leaders.

Women were seen as “less than” and expected to “walk two steps behind the husband,” that kind of thing. My father really didn’t have an active religious life that I knew of and they did not raise us with that, despite the fact that there was a church located at the end of the block we lived on in Detroit. As I grew up, I became more of a seeker. I was looking for what would feel right to me—in my heart and in my soul—and that would also resonate with my growing level of intelligence.

My parents were big on education, though neither one of them had the opportunity to pursue all of the education they wanted due to their race. They wanted to make sure that their children could pursue more than just basic education through high school—we were expected to go as far as our intellect would take us.

After moving to Norwich, Connecticut, and being unchurched for a couple of years, my family and I were invited to services at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Norwich. I lived right around

the corner from the church, so I was able to be very involved in the church’s activities, and extend the connection to the community. One of the things that mattered the most to me about the church was their insistence and their commitment to helping those less fortunate. Every month our church threw open the doors and hosted what they called a “Community Meal.” If you walked through the door, we fed you.

There was no need to profess anything or commit to anything religious or spiritual. If you wanted food and you were hungry, there we were. And we did that for many, many years.

The people I fell in love with from the pulpit, those ministers who came to speak to us and brought relatable, spirit-enhancing messages, overwhelmingly, were from Starr King School for the Ministry. So when I started to hear that “still small voice within” and that pull toward ministry and a potential career in ministry, Starr King was really the only choice for me.

One of the best things about Starr King is the summer education sessions.

We can participate in courses called intensives. I’m sure other universities and seminaries offer those as well, where you can get an entire

semester’s worth of education and class content in a week or two.

During one of my summer courses, the August 2020 Multi Religious Intensive, our professor assigned us a book written by Dwayne Bidwell entitled What Do You Do When One Religion is Not Enough? It explored the lives and religious and spiritual journeys of “Spiritually Fluid” people who claim and are claimed by multiple religious traditions. I received a much clearer understanding that religious and spiritual lines can be blurred as we go through difficulty, or through upheavals, I find a lot of people like me—I now describe myself as “Spiritually Fluid”—are realizing that one exclusive definition of religion and/or spirituality just doesn’t authentically describe us anymore.

For me, it hearkens back to my family history. I did not know, until I started doing some genealogy work, why my father did not recognize religion in the way that people who attend church regularly on Sunday morning think of it. He chose a different path, more of a seekers’ path. And my mother was the same way. She turned away from traditional religion and started looking more at a different path.

There are many of us out there, and the ranks of people who call themselves “Spiritually Fluid” are growing every year. Spiritually Fluid people want to explore all of who we are, and sometimes, a recognized or traditional faith does not do that. Unfortunately, people have been made to feel that you can only choose one path, and that’s not true.

You can have more than one path, just like someone can have more than one

 View Dianne’s video reflection at gtu.edu/scel/dianne-daniels Graduate Theological Union | 38

career. This will be my fourth career when I graduate and am ordained and become a minister. I started out in information technology, way back in the punched-card days. I continued with that for more than twenty years.

I’ve worked in management and have been a supervisor, leading teams of various sizes through my work. I’m now a Registrar of Voters in my home city, and when I finish my degree, I will be committed to the ministry. And there’s nothing wrong with any of that. We have to give ourselves the grace and the room to explore what touches our hearts and our souls, even if it’s not the path we thought we were going to follow.

Starr King did not ask me to give up any part of who I was in order to become a part of their community. There were no rigid rules or rigid structures about what I could and could not study. One of the things I love about the Unitarian Universalist faith is that they live and promote a number of foundational beliefs—the 7 main principles. The first principle—and to me one of the most important—is a strong belief in the inherent worth and dignity of all people.

That struck a chord with me because I’m an African-American woman.

There have been times in history when someone like me, African-American and female, would not have been treated with the care, dignity, and concern I deserve. If I were to adopt that as prevailing wisdom, and see myself as prejudiced “others” see me, I might not blossom to my full potential.

That can also happen with regard to religion. If you are ready to ask questions that your religion cannot seem to answer, first start by trying to find the answers right where you are. There’s a reason you are there.

Something resonated with you right there where you are. If you cannot find those answers, then it’s time to start looking a little further afield. Because we are free people, you shouldn’t necessarily have to ask for permission to look further or dig a little deeper. And if you do have to ask permission to look outside your current situation, that for me would be a challenge, because why would leaders of a faith that supposedly want the best for you be afraid of what you might find?

The more I find out about other religions that I’ve studied because of my schooling, and the more people that I meet and talk with, the more I return to Unitarian Universalism. I know that it’s the right foundation for me because I’ve had the chance to explore, to listen, to learn and, yes, even to practice other paths. I’ve found that for me, a rigid path means that I’m taught to be afraid of what I might learn or be exposed to next. I really, really pursue knowledge as a blessing, because the more I learn, the more I realize I need to learn. That’s what helps keep me moving forward: being energized and excited about what’s coming next for me. I get to learn something new, and I can live into what my Mama often told me: “It’s a poor day when you don’t learn something new.” I know I’ll spend the rest of my life pursuing knowledge­—there’s SO much to learn!

Dianne Daniels is a Master of Divinity student at the Starr King School for the Ministry.

SPIRITUAL CARE AND ETHICAL LEADERSHIP FOR OUR TIMES | Fall 2020: Student Reflections | 39

By Mark Guevarra | DECEMBER 23, 2020

Voices of Hope Walking Together

“ Amidst this great crisis, this unprecedented

challenge that we’ve all confronted, amidst the grief and the anxieties, the frustrations . . . there is still hope to be found.”

M

y name is Mark Guevara.

I’m a second-year doctoral student in the Department of Theology and Ethics at the GTU. I’m very interested in synodality, a method presented by Pope Francis, recovered in the Christian tradition.

Going to school at the GTU was a choice that I made because I wanted to be in a place where all voices are heard and all voices are privileged. And so, to be able to explore my tradition from the perspective and a community of other traditions, really enriches my own. I think this is how we are to be in this world today; a world that is so diverse, that has different values, experiences, and histories. That the way to peace and bridge building is precisely dialogue. It is something within myself, to draw myself outside of myself, to hear and encounter the other, to engage peacefully, to listen before I speak, and then to walk together.

Synodality comes from the Greek words for walking together. The GTU is a beautiful place where such diverse backgrounds of people can walk together. So, if we can do it here amongst a community of diverse religions and other Christian traditions, then hopefully we can do it in our world so longing for unity, for harmony, for peace, and for a way forward amidst this brokenness amongst us.

In addition to being a student, I’m a fellow with an organization called Call to Action. Call to Action was founded in the 1970s to build a more inclusive Catholic Church and this cohort that I’m a part of is called Re/generation. It is igniting young adults to come forward in the wonderful task of inclusion. There are about 30 of us across the country and we are put into small groups with mentors who’ve been in social justice work for decades and we were given the task of doing a project together to build inclusion. It could be an educational project. It could be direct action. It could be some form of lobbying. What we’ve decided to do is an Advent calendar.

In the Christian tradition, Advent is the season before Christmas, and in that season we prepare for the coming of Jesus in the celebration of Christmas.

In this Advent calendar we have invited a variety of voices: pastors, educators, scholars, and artists to reflect on the scripture reading for the day. Sharing insight from their perspective and sharing their work in social justice, education, and advocacy so that the general public can hear from their perspective—their richness—that they’re able to bring forward from the scripture reading of the day.

My research interest, synodality, is a calling forth of voices. Synodality is a maturing of faith that says, “What truth

do you bring that I can listen to that might transform me?” And so during the COVID-19 crisis I’m thinking to myself, we’re kind of in it for ourselves, like with this mad rush to buy toilet paper. It became very survival of the fittest and we lost a sense of the common good. We lost sense of our connection to one another, and that was problematic for me. And so, I thought for a project, what we can do to build community, to restore a sense of siblinghood, is to hear voices, to draw ourselves out of ourselves by listening to the other. And so, we thought why not, in this season of Advent, do a daily reflection? Why not hear from those different voices so that we can rebuild a sense of unity, of communion, of togetherness? It might be just a superficial reaction, that says, “Oh, that’s nice.” But it might cause within us a sense of conversion to say you know there is something there that I do have a responsibility to care for the other. So it is a hopeful project because it calls us out of ourselves and it calls us to change the world.

We have managed to collect over 20 different voices and we’ve tried to privilege women, queer voices, indigenous folks, and people of color. We have folks who are scholars, educators, pastors, artists, dancers, activists, and visionaries. We are a couple of weeks into it already and you can go to our website Advent of Liberation from Call

 View Mark’s video reflection at gtu.edu/scel/mark-guevarra Graduate Theological Union | 40

to Action [www.cta-usa.org/news/ adventcalendar] and you can already access the different reflections. Some have posted music and videos and some have provided very challenging messages. We are very excited to feature some GTU community members including Professor Bernie Schlager from Pacific School of Religion as well as some alumni from the GTU and current students including Ish Ruiz, a friend of mine who is reflecting from a queer Latino perspective. So it’s very exciting that we have such a unique and broad selection of voices from folks who might see themselves as marginalized, from folks who don’t, from folks who see

themselves as well within the tradition.

It’s been great to be able to privilege those voices especially in our times when it is people of color, folks from less mainstream backgrounds that are suffering the most from this pandemic.

I think the overwhelming hope that I want people to take away from this project is hope itself: is that amidst this great crisis this unprecedented challenge that we’ve all confronted, amidst the grief and the anxieties, the frustrations that even amongst these marginalized, these fringe voices, that there is still hope to be found. In their work, their courage, their service, and

their education, we can find goodness incarnated, which is the message of Christmas—that light enters into a dark world. And hopefully in the lives and the stories, the work, the ministry, and the creativity of these individuals that becomes affirmed in all of us and that there is hope, that there is light, and that there is joy and peace in this dark time.

Mark Guevarra is a PhD student at the Graduate Theological Union.

SPIRITUAL CARE AND ETHICAL LEADERSHIP FOR OUR TIMES | Fall 2021: Faculty, Staff, & Alum Reflections | 41

FALL 2021: Faculty, Staff, & Alum Reflections

Graduate Theological Union | 42

What Is Spirituality?

I

n the Fall 2021 arc of our Spiritual Care and Ethical Leadership for our Times series, members of the GTU community discussed the nature of spirituality: how it’s expressed, experienced, and explored from its variety of contexts in the world today, ranging from the environment to technology and beyond. As we begin, we invite you to explore some of our participants' responses to the question, “What is spirituality?” as you ponder that question for yourself.

“ Spirituality is an extremely difficult “ When I think of spirituality, I think of term to define, and I want to embrace that. Anytime any of us tries to define a word like spirituality, we are showing our cards in some way. In my mind, spirituality is ultimately a matter of relations and connections —whether that’s a sort of attunement and presence in relation to other human beings, to the natural world, or perhaps even immaterial spiritual presences.”

—Sam Shonkoff

“ Spirituality is about understanding

or being in relationship with reality.

So, how do I be in a relationship with the reality of God, the natural world, and fellow human beings? All that is comprised under spirituality for me.

What I have been taught here is that my theology or my understanding of reality should not be confined within myself, but it should be used for the well-being of the world.”

—Chaitanya Motupalli

spirituality of mission. And I define that spirituality of mission as the Holy Spirit at work, in our hearts and in the world. The very nature of spirituality transcends any single religion. It’s bigger because religion represents our striving toward it.

And so, it’s not out of line to look for God in other religions and even beyond religions, even just in the world where, if we really believe that God is the creator of all things and the author of all that’s good, then we should be keen to those things, even as we adhere to a particular tradition.”

—Rev. Al Tizon

SPIRITUAL CARE AND ETHICAL LEADERSHIP FOR OUR TIMES | Fall 2021: Faculty, Staff, & Alum Reflections | 43

“ For me, I almost call it the spirituality “ We put up the artwork and you of science to recognize that ancient Christian traditions talk about two books of revelation, that God had two books of revelation. The first is the Earth and the second is scripture. And we’ve learned to read scripture, but most of us haven’t learned to read the Earth. And I was raised to value the humanities, not the sciences. So now I’m really looking at what the scientists are teaching us. The scientists are the ones who have learned to read the Earth. And so, what is science telling us about the vast systems of interconnectedness?”

—Cynthia Moe-Lobeda

“ Art in of itself can be your spiritual

practice. I think if that’s where you could really feel transcendent, above the everyday or some way to be meditative or quiet or contemplate something within yourself, then I think that’s wonderful.”

—Lydia Webster

can’t tell what the viewer is going to say. Someone walking into the gallery is going to find a certain piece compelling and see the spiritual in it and maybe see a completely different kind of spirituality than the artist intended. The gallery is what it is because of the people who come there and the interpretations and the thinking that they attribute to the pieces and how they feel in the space.”

—Elizabeth S. Peña

“ It’s difficult to have a single definition in part because spirituality itself, I think, is a highly individual sort of pursuit in some ways. So if you were to ask me to say in an elevator pitch what I think spirituality is, it’s that reaching beyond the individual, transcending what it means to be human, reaching out towards what our purpose is in the universe, questions of meaning, of purpose, and of how we define flourishing for us, either collectively or individually, and how do we achieve that or tap into that?”

—Braden Molhoek

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“ So today we tend to think about

spirituality having something to do with religion, and you’ll hear the phrase, ‘I’m spiritual, but not religious.’ And there’s a certain relevance to that. But if we remind ourselves that spirituality is more of an anthropological principle, then what we can understand about spirituality and its relationship to religion is that religion is a tool for developing the spiritual qualities of the human person. It’s a path, if you will, that can instruct or guide the human person to be the spiritual creature that in fact they are.”

—Christopher J. Renz, OP

“ The spiritual is about communing

“ I like the conversation around what’s

the difference between religion and spirituality. What’s important, for me at least, is to talk about how those are two sides of the same coin, in my opinion. Spirituality is what happens without you really trying. The stock thing is seeing the Grand Canyon or the sunset or falling in love or seeing your baby for the first time or playing with your cat, or whatever it is that like just pops that resistance away. I would say that spirituality is something that touches your spirit.

Religion is the end result of a lot of practices that attempt to get you to feel that more of the time.”

—Jhos Singer, Maggid

with a reality larger than oneself in such a way that one is then able to live in such a way that one no longer lives for oneself alone but in order to inch the world and its inhabitants just a bit closer toward their flourishing.

The spiritual is no longer a retreat but an engagement, no longer about a realm beyond the world but a way of living in it, no longer about the self but the whole web of creation.”

—Scott MacDougall

SPIRITUAL CARE AND ETHICAL LEADERSHIP FOR OUR TIMES | Fall 2021: Faculty, Staff, & Alum Reflections | 45

Sam Shonkoff | NOVEMBER 12, 2021

Spirituality x Daily Life I write so many essays and lectures. But to express this spiritual abandon, I want to try another medium. Here’s a poem.

Dr. Sam Shonkoff is the Taube Family Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies.

BUCKETS Sam Shonkoff

I stand knee deep in this river unfurling across forest floors,

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eflecting on everyday spirituality, I could write about the importance of daily practice. I could emphasize that exercise is no less essential for souls than for biceps, how spiritual growth takes discipline, or how contemplative techniques open hearts, attune senses, and deepen wonder in the world.

Sure, I believe all of that, more or less.

But it’s not where my heart is pointing right now. I want to think, rather, about how daily practice can also mislead and muddle. Rituals can massage our egos, assure us that we’re checking the boxes of sacred living, and thereby smother the wildness of holiness.

Spirituality must be embodied, of course. But therein lies the tension.

Sensory, somatic being is strangely elusive. Existence is in flow, dynamic, slipping through tentacles that try grasping too tightly. The ultimate question for a seeker, in my mind, is: Can I love? In other words, can I see beyond my own cerebral muck and petty games, can I belly laugh, can I cry, can I be moved and surprised? In part, this demands surrenders of control, which punctilious practice can help but also hinder. I like Walter Benjamin’s description of “that squandering of our own existence that we know in love,” which then paradoxically, “throws us, without hoping or expecting anything, in ample handfuls toward existence.”

a voice saturating sound itself,

whispering shhhhhhhhhh but I

hear only the drum of

what passes away.

I want to perceive this river with every

cell of my self, to know and be

known until I am

filled and overflowing into

I am so finite

damn it

I grab buckets and contain what I

can. White-knuckled,shallow breathed, buckets

upon buckets litter the banks, exhibiting

mute dusty water while river flows

past, tickling granite, gurgling,

softening ancestral trees to soil.

My knees unbuckle and I descend

the current, but

inside, dispersing like tea leaves, river

washing over all sweat, streaming between

fingers, between eyes, holding all

earthly breath, streaming,

streaming over me like over everything else.

 View the accompanying video reflection at gtu.edu/scel/sam-shonkoff Graduate Theological Union | 46

Cynthia Moe-Lobeda | NOVEMBER 19, 2021

Spirituality x Environment

“ Would it not be wise to listen and learn from the

creatures and elements about what they have seen and understood of God? Might we glimpse more fully just who or what the Sacred lifeforce is that some call God?”

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midst the mountains of tasks before me each day, I find it re-orienting to step back now and then to ask: “Just WHAT am I doing?” This question also pertains to us as a body of people associated with the GTU. Just what is it that we are doing? At the GTU, we might agree that we are exploring and shaping theological education for the world of today and tomorrow.

If so, then it behooves us to ask anew, just what is the purpose of theological education in the early 2020s in the Western United States? From my perspective, it is to form people capable of hearing and heeding the sacred force, energy, or spirit that some call God, active in the world to bring us into our destiny—fullness of life for all in communion with the Sacred and with all of creation. The Black theologian, Willie James Jennings, puts it beautifully: theological education ought to be formation in the art of cultivating communion. “Communion,” he writes, “[is] what God wants.”

Theological education ought to prepare people to call down, live into, and re-member the communion— both mystical and material—that God created and is creating.

Let us re-imagine this communion by giving thanks.

Slow down, breathe deep.

Notice: you are breathing and alive.

You would not be alive and breathing without a magnificent communion. The wild raucous communion of creatures within our bodies—trillions of them!— too tiny to see, scurrying about to keep us alive and well. Give thanks for it and for the communion beyond our skin: •T he thousands of organisms in a square foot of soil that grew the wheat, the oranges, and the coffee that I ate for breakfast to feed the trillions of organisms in my body.

•T he communion of water molecules, including in our bodies, recycling themselves throughout time. (Are we not about 60 percent water by weight?)

•T he trees of the Amazon serving as our external lungs.

Dr. John Chelladurai, Director of the India Peace Center in Nagpur, illumines as he writes: The oxygen we consumed just now was released a while before by a plant close to us. Before it was released, that oxygen was part of the plant’s body. Now it is

part of my body . . . Every day when we bathe, we remove a thin layer of our body—epithelial cells that are flushed out down the gutter. The cell that was ‘I’ travels through the gutter and reaches a canal or a pond in the outskirts, settles in the tank bed, disintegrates into aminoacids and sucrose, glucose, etc. Now ‘I’ am absorbed by the grass that grows on the banks, and the grass is now eaten by a cow, now the milk of that cow is sold in our neighborhood . . . This way there is a definite passage of our individual body into different bodies around us . . . We do not know how much of our body parts are exchanged with our neighbor with whom we are ill at ease.

Einstein said as much. “A human being is part of a whole, called by us the universe . . . He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.”

Recently, one biblical text flooded me with wonder. “Ever since the creation of the world,” Paul writes to followers in Rome, “God has been understood and seen through the things God has made.”

What? God has been understood and seen for billions of years before our late-arriving species appeared on the scene? Who or what was understanding and seeing God then? This startling text suggests that the elements of this

 View the accompanying video reflection at gtu.edu/scel/cynthia-moe-lobeda SPIRITUAL CARE AND ETHICAL LEADERSHIP FOR OUR TIMES | Fall 2021: Faculty, Staff, & Alum Reflections | 47

earth, which existed eons before plants and animals came into being, have been “seeing and understanding” God. What a staggering claim! Implications abound. For one, would it not be wise to listen and learn from the creatures and elements about what they have seen and understood of God? Might we glimpse more fully just who or what the Sacred lifeforce is that some call God? For centuries Christians claimed that God provided two books of revelation: Creation itself and the Scriptures.

How is it that we learn Greek and Hebrew to read the second book of revelation, but not how to exegete trees or waterways in order to read the first?

Lately, I have been giving it a try. Trees, some scientists say, talk with each other by forming a vast system of underground fungi, connecting their roots to one another. Through these fungal highways, tress exchange nutrients. A Douglas Fir may share excess sugars with a neighboring birch in the spring and fall, for example, and in return the birch sends sugar to the Doug Fir in the summer. This underground fungal network is a way to communicate, like the internet or telephone lines. One article calls it the “Wood Wide Web.” The chemicals coursing through this underground network are the same as human neural transmitters. Canadian biologist, David Suzuki, writes of a “vast story of cooperation and quest for communion that enabled life to emerge on earth and then to evolve into more complex forms.” This account of nature’s

cooperation and quest for communion resonates with Dr. Jennings’ claim: the purpose of theological education is to form people along the contours of God’s hunger for communion.

Further reason to hear the sacred in the other-than-human parts of creation emerges in the claim—present in some ancient streams of Christianity and the Judaism from which it grew—that God dwells within and among earth’s creatures and elements; within the mountains, winds, and waters, the holy Mystery speaks, acts, guides, teaches.

If one sees the Sacred as not only the fundamental creating energy of life, but also the healing and liberating energy at work in the cosmos, then the winds, waters, trees, and their kin are healing and liberating as well as creating and revealing. Therefore, a question of spirituality becomes: How are we to learn from God “flowing and pouring through all things?” (Martin Luther’s words.)

We humans are masters of avoidance and denial. We deny and avoid truth about the role that many of us are playing in this communion of life. Perhaps that is why the Hebrew prophets, Jesus, and so many others have insisted on truth-telling—about what we are doing to obscure or block the communion, thwarting life in its fullness for all.

The truth is that we are racing madly in a deadly direction. The extractive, profit-maximizing, and fossil fuel-based economy that we have accepted as normal is threatening the holy communion through climate change

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and its corollaries. This direction demands “sacrifice zones,” areas in which economically impoverished people and people of color are “sacrificed” for the sake of profit. Assumptions of white supremacy weave inextricably through the climate catastrophe.

We have terrifyingly few years to change direction. Doing so—and there is no surety that we will—requires unearthing spiritual resources we did not know we had. Religions are a wellspring of spiritual resources for radical and rapid reorientation of how we live on earth. So, too, is the earth.

What an astounding gift it is to be alive at this moment in time, when human decisions and actions will determine the fate of life for centuries, if not millennia, to come. Today, the world needs religion to foment in human creatures a holy passion and power to join the winds, waters, trees, and heavens in reaching toward holy communion, building beloved community for all in the earth’s marvelous and mysterious web of life. Those of us working in theological education have the great gift of guiding the formation of leaders for that role. May we do so with fear and trembling, and in companionship. May this give us joy and hope.

Dr. Cynthia Moe-Lobeda is Professor of Theological and Social Ethics, Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary of California Lutheran University and Church Divinity School of the Pacific.

Jhos Singer, Maggid | NOVEMBER 26, 2021

Spirituality x Ritual

“ We tend to those ritual items with care and

diligence, because through [them] . . . we transcend time, space, and death, elevating the mundane to a level of holiness that defies ordinary boundaries.”

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ife unfolds. A creature is born, it struggles and plays, it rests and strives, it grows and shrivels, and eventually dies. That’s the drill.

But every drill exists to hone a skill, a capacity, or to heighten awareness.

Human beings invented rituals to put a glinting polish on those sharpened edges.

Many rituals arise out of a spiritual need to mark a moment—birth, coming of age, confirming an identity or relationship, and death. We hit one of those nodes and there is an incredible urge to stop, notice, acknowledge, and celebrate. The formality of saying the same words of one's forebearers who also stood in one of those crossroads provides a sense of continuity, a connection across the generations. It’s a way of time traveling.

To drink from the same wedding cup as your great, great, grandparents is to feel with your own flesh what their flesh felt at the same moment in their lives.

And that same wedding cup holds you in its memory for your great, great grandchildren on their own wedding day. We tend to those ritual items with care and diligence, because through the simple ritual of drinking from that particular cup, we transcend time, space, and death, elevating the mundane to a level of holiness that defies ordinary boundaries.

I remember that exact moment at my own wedding. I was marrying into a Jewish family who had been well

off in Germany before the rise of the Third Reich. As the situation was undeniably deteriorating for them in the late 1930s, they made the difficult decision to leave. Like Abraham before them, they left their land, their city, and their father’s house. Just as the scripture puts the leaving in the wrong order— certainly one cannot leave their land and city without first leaving their family home—so, too, did my new relations shed much of their national and regional identity. But they brought along with them remnants, objects, reminders of their father’s house, including the wedding cups that have been in the family for at least two centuries. As I stood under our chuppah (wedding canopy) looking at my bride, holding that cup in my hands, listening to the same blessing that had been intoned under every chuppah in the family for hundreds of years, I was being sworn into a moment of connection with people long dead. That ritual changed my story, altered my destiny, put a new stitch into the tapestry of humanity. No other sip of wine could do that. Those cups are never used except in the context of a wedding. That is rarified ritual space— potent, powerful, and protected.

awareness, appreciation, and acknowledgement that we are walking in grace. Like peak ritual moments, the everyday blessings and sacred rites we observe afford us the chance to elevate the ordinary. It slows us down.

We see more clearly. It is the perfect seasoning to sprinkle on this life’s feast.

Jhos Singer, Maggid, is a visiting faculty member at the Richard S. Dinner Center for Jewish Studies.

Other rituals ground daily life—a moment of gratitude upon waking, a blessing said before eating, the way we sign off on a phone call with our kids or parents—they spark brief moments of

 View the accompanying video reflection at gtu.edu/scel/jhos-singer SPIRITUAL CARE AND ETHICAL LEADERSHIP FOR OUR TIMES | Fall 2021: Faculty, Staff, & Alum Reflections | 49

Rev. Al Tizon | DECEMBER 3, 2021

Spirituality x Organizations As a Christian, and, furthermore, as a missiologist, I define spirituality as the Holy Spirit at work in our hearts and in the world; it is the power that enables the church both to experience God and to engage in the mission of God; it serves as the basis of holistic transformation; and it conveys the joy that sustains us in the suffering of mission.

A

s a missiologist, I am not asked very often to reflect on spirituality. It is not inaccurate to understand missiology as activist in nature, but it is (or should be) activism grounded in love for God and God’s diverse world.

As a Christian, I have a particular perspective on what spirituality means.

That said, spirituality goes beyond any single religious tradition. For much of my spiritual journey, I was counted among the Pentecostals and Charismatics.

In fact, I did my undergraduate and masters level education at what is now called Vanguard University of Southern California, a four-year, Christian, liberal arts college and graduate school in the classical Pentecostal tradition. One of the things I’ve learned from that branch of Christianity is the boundless, unpredictable, and positively wild side of God in the person of the Holy Spirit.

The personality of God who is the Holy Spirit blows where she wills and will not be bound by religious traditions, even the Christian one. There are markers of the Spirit at work, however, in all religions—a passionate pursuit of God, unconditional love for all, inclusivity, gender-ethnic-and-class diversity, advocacy of peace and justice. In the Christian tradition, all of these are embodied in the person of Jesus.

Spirituality enables any organization to transcend the business, the corporation, the ministry machine, or the religious system that it can so easily become. When pragmatism, efficiency, financial stability, and preservation drive an organization, then we know that the Spirit has left the building.

Institutions have a bad habit over time of thinking they’re all that, that they need to be fed and served. Healthy spirituality will keep the institutional nature of an organization in check, constantly reminding it of its place as a servant of others, of a cause greater than itself.

In the global mission organization I recently left, we started each day in prayer together as a staff. We prayed daily for our global personnel, the international ministries, and global partners. We prayed daily for crises that arise in our community, nation, and world. We prayed for our church, and we prayed for each other. Beyond that, we cultivated friendships amongst ourselves. We sought to practice God’s mission as true friends, beyond being mere professionals working on a task together, as we sought to bear witness to God’s peace, justice, and salvation in the world. It’s so much more fun to “change the world” together as friends!

These are just some examples of how we practiced spirituality as a team.

There is a handful of spirituality questions that has guided my leadership experience through the decades. If fellow leaders will find them, then

 View the accompanying video reflection at gtu.edu/scel/al-tizon Graduate Theological Union | 50

it will have been worth sharing: • Are the vision and goals bigger than I am? They should be! Do they represent an agenda that transcends human agendas? Spirituality enables me to dream beyond myself, beyond reality.

• How do I view my team members and staff? They are more than employees or co-workers, more than business or ministry associates. They are friends, family even, sisters, and brothers, made in the image of God, called of God to do their part in our shared work.

• Is the organization remaining true to its original purpose to serve? As I said, spirituality enables us to know the organization’s place: it exists to serve others.

• Do people want to be a part of this organization? I want everyone, including myself, to want to come to work, because we can all find fulfillment and joy in our work. Is it characterized by deep conversations, fellowship, genuine caring, and laughter?

• Does the organization bear witness to the love, peace, justice, and righteousness of God? Does it point to and work toward a better world for all to see and experience?

Rev. Dr. Al Tizon (PhD '05) is the Affiliate Associate Professor of Missional and Global Leadership at North Park Seminary in Chicago. He was named the 2021 GTU Alum of the Year.

Elizabeth S. Peña and Lydia Webster | DECEMBER 10, 2021

Spirituality x Art as the new cathedral, occupying a third space in our society that can offer us solace, community, and the opportunity for spiritual learning.

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he Center for the Arts & Religion’s Doug Adams Gallery is currently closed and will re-open in its new location in Fall 2023. This hiatus provides us with time to reflect on some of our past exhibitions and think about how our visitors infused their own spiritualities into the gallery, giving new meaning to the art. Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising, considering

that our focus is on art and spirituality, but we have continually been amazed by the depth of transformative experience felt by visitors.

The Doug Adams Gallery has been our very own sacred space, a space apart, where students and faculty can let their minds and spirits wander. This idea is not new: the museum has long been conceptualized in this country

Art Window exhibition featuring Breonna Taylor Was Murdered

by Police (2020), Tahirah Rasheed and Meryl Pataky.

“The museum setting, almost by definition, displays ritual objects out of context,” says Joan Branham, “thereby stripping them of circumstance and purging them of original function and significance.” And yet, when we reflect on the very first exhibition we as a team put on (Summer 2017), “Sacred Garments: Orthodox Christian garments from around the world,” an exhibition of finely embroidered clerical vestments acquired

by Metropolitan Nikitas Lulias (former Director of the Patriarch Athenagoras Orthodox Institute) during his years of service around the globe, we were struck by how many Orthodox believers approached the garments with awe.

They had seen the garments and ritual objects from a distance in church, but getting close to the items in the gallery allowed them to experience sacrality in a museum space. The tinkling of the vestments’ many bells was a giveaway, as we listened from our nearby office, that someone had been unable to resist the powerful urge to touch the beautiful robe hanging on the gallery wall.

In Spring 2018, with “Religion and Resistance,” we pivoted to a more politically engaged perspective, compelled by the recent election to reinforce the connection between faith, art, and social change. Protest posters, both contemporary and from the archives, showed how religion and spirituality have worked in the public sphere for decades, and how believers have used tenets of their faith to try to make the world a better place. While the objects on display would not be considered sacred, treating protest signs as art, and placing a protest T-shirt in a museum case contribute to a feeling that these objects, too, carry a kind of sacrality. In the Doug Adams Gallery, we wanted to provide

 View the accompanying video reflection at gtu.edu/scel/elizabeth-pena-lydia-webster SPIRITUAL CARE AND ETHICAL LEADERSHIP FOR OUR TIMES | Fall 2021: Faculty, Staff, & Alum Reflections | 51

a place to seek solace and to demonstrate the role of faith-based activism in the ongoing struggle for social justice.

With the brutal exposure of institutional racism in the summer of 2020, we realized that while COVID prevented us from inviting people into the Gallery to have critical conversations, we could still “invite people out.” In “Art Window,” artists of color from our Bay Area community displayed their work in our street-facing window. Passersby could engage with these art installations, which considered topics from the senseless murder of Breonna Taylor to the landscapes traversed by migrants on their perilous journeys in search of a better life. The quasi-sacred aura of the Gallery was transposed to the outside.

This trip down memory lane has helped us to recognize the ability of the Doug Adams Gallery to act as a space for learning, reflection, and inspiration for our GTU community. As we look toward the next couple of years online, we must wrestle with the question of

“ The Doug Adams Gallery has been our very own

sacred space, a space apart, where students and faculty can let their minds and spirits wander.

This idea is not new: the museum has long been conceptualized in this country as the new cathedral, occupying a third space in our society that can offer us solace, community, and the opportunity for spiritual learning. ”

how to provide this sacred space in a virtual environment. There is no going back to our “ordinary lives,” but what’s next? In our new gallery space, we’ll work to integrate lessons learned from our online exhibitions with the power of “in-real-life” shows. There are so many ways to approach spirituality in the gallery; we look forward to exploring and learning more.

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Dr. Elizabeth S. Peña is the Director of the Center for the Arts & Religion (CARe) and the Doug Adams Gallery.

Lydia Webster is the Assistant Curator for the Center for the Arts & Religion (CARe) and the Doug Adams Gallery.

Braden Molhoek | DECEMBER 17, 2021

Spirituality x Technology

“ Spirituality deals with questions of purpose, it is a

search for how we define what flourishing means for our lives . . . it should not be a surprise that technology interacts with spirituality because technology itself is also a form of humans reaching out to the world.”

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here is disagreement between scholars as to how to define spirituality, but I see it as a reaching out beyond individual and collective experience, to find that which transcends our place in the universe. Spirituality deals with questions of purpose, it is a search for how we define what flourishing means for our lives. If we think of spirituality this way, it should not be a surprise that technology interacts with spirituality because technology itself is also a form of humans reaching out to the world. Technology is just an extension of human tool making; a tool can be as simple as a branch to ward off predators, or it can be a predator drone. Both spirituality and technology come from our nature as humans: we are beings capable of self-transcendence who seek out meaning and purpose. Ethicist Brian Patrick Green, in comparing the work of cognitive scientists and Aristotle’s understanding of purpose (telos or teleology), eloquently states that “teleology is deeply natural to us and prized by us, and that teleology is active in both practical and theoretical aspects of human thought.” Technology is one way in which humans explore purpose in a practical sense, whereas spirituality is a theoretical exploration of purpose.

It should also not be a surprise, then, that there are attempts to use technology to further explore our spirituality.

Again, this happens in practical ways,

such as applications that remind us to put down our devices and be more mindful of the moment, or even to use these devices to help us be more aware of our heartrate and to assist in guided breathing or meditation. There are theoretical methods of help as well, such as providing people access to information, beliefs, and traditions they were not previously aware of but that can play a role in their journey.

Sociologically speaking, science, religion, and spirituality all play a role in what Berger and Luckmann refer to as “universe maintenance.” Universe maintenance is needed when there are strains or cracks in the symbolic universe of society, when the view of life presented is no longer taken for granted as reality. This happens because socialization is never complete; mechanisms of universe maintenance help shore up the symbolic universe. I would argue that, for some, religion contributes to the breakdown of the symbolic universe, because people do not believe in the systematization of symbols it presents, or because of its failing as a human institution. Spirituality, which is inherently more individualistic, does a better job of maintaining the universe for these individuals because it allows them to create their own set of symbols that help explain and give meaning to life.

have highlighted is whether technological connection is as meaningful as in-person connection. Online interactions have provided a greater sense of community during the pandemic than many believed possible, but there is still a general view that it is not a full substitute for face-to-face interaction.

As a social species, humans experience loneliness and reach out to others and to the universe in a variety of ways, some of which are technological. It is my hope that we remember that part of our purpose is to acknowledge and respond lovingly to this reaching out from others as we do the same ourselves.

Dr. Braden Molhoek is a lecturer in Science, Technology, and Ethics at the GTU and incoming Director of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences.

A big question the last two years

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Christopher J. Renz, OP | DECEMBER 24, 2021

Spirituality x Beauty

“ Experiences of awe

induced by beauty activate the 'spiritual self' and the possibility to admit that 'the world is not as I thought it to be.’”

I

n the worldview of Greek classical philosophy, there would be no concept of “spirituality” as we think of it today. Instead, there was the idea of “soul,” though, too, not understood as today. The ‘soul’ of an animate being makes the thing “be what it is.” Thus, the concept of “dog soul” or “horse soul.” Humans are unique because we have a “rational soul,” with powers for discursive thinking and self-reflection. We can “think about thinking,” we can imagine things that don’t yet exist, and we can think “forever.” This capacity for imaginative and creative thinking places humans in the particular category of “spiritual beings” because it allows us to transcend the physical limitations of time and space.

The engagement of our imagination to create useful things—like a boat—sets us apart from most other animals. While there are a few other species that use tools, only humans enhance tools to a level that renders them either impractical or useless. Consider a functional boat versus a “miniature boat in a bottle.”

In this classic distinction between craft (making a boat that floats) and fine art (the making of a beautiful boat), the person elevates a skill beyond practicality. This type of creativity belongs to the “liberal arts,” not because of a political alignment, but because in its exercise the artist becomes “liberated from” the physical and practical

limitations of the craft. Thus liberated, the artist is now free to engage the powers of the rational soul to a “higher” terminus, the Transcendentals: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, whose attainment requires the life-long habituation to certain behaviors and ways of thinking—virtues. The person who is a practitioner of liberal (fine) arts must develop not only technical skills related to the craft, but also the intellectual skills required to recognize and behold Beauty. If they achieve the capacity to consistently create beautiful things, this artist is called a virtuoso, someone habituated to a virtuous life focused on the cultivation and expression of Beauty.

In contrast to our contemporary use of this term, the virtuoso is capable of expressing the very essence of what it means to be human through a relentless and loving pursuit of Beauty.

As the twentieth-century philosopher Jacques Maritain noted, “left to its own devices the [human] soul strives to engender in beauty.” We do this because the striving leads to a profound self-awareness: we long for beautiful encounters (whether it is natural or created beauty) because there we realize our own inherent beauty.

awe engages both the body (physical feelings) and the mind (wonder), which together draw the subject into a deeper awareness: of their own subjectivity (the “small self”) and the need to accommodate their worldview. Put another way, experiences of awe induced by beauty activate the “spiritual self” and the possibility to admit that “the world is not as I thought it to be.”

Through this lens, to speak of “spirituality in art” is to encourage people to cultivate a life that is “free” (liberal) enough to see beyond the confines of a spatio-temporal existence toward a world inhabited by Beauty. For those skilled at a particular craft (visual art, music, writing, architecture, dance, etc.), this habituation will be driven by Beauty, producing not simply “objective creations” (the piece of beautiful art) but also “invitations” for spiritual encounters between persons—a shared experience of awe and wonder that invites a revelation of a new way of being human.

Dr. Christopher J. Renz, OP, is Professor of Liturgical Studies and Science & Theology at the Dominican School of Philosophy & Theology.

In contemporary cognitive science, encounters by test subjects with beauty induce an experience of awe, an “aesthetic emotion.” A complex emotion,

 View the accompanying video reflection at gtu.edu/scel/christopher-renz Graduate Theological Union | 54

Scott MacDougall | DECEMBER 31, 2021

Spirituality x Activism

“ Here, the spiritual is not about inner self-

improvement. The spiritual is about communing with a reality larger than oneself in such a way that one is then able to live in such a way that one no longer lives for oneself alone but in order to inch the world and its inhabitants just a bit closer toward their flourishing.”

P

eople often understand “spirituality” as a personal discipline focused on the cultivation of the interior life. Commonly, but not always, this inner life is formed with some reference to a reality that transcends the self, a larger reality within which one’s life takes on a significance and meaning that might otherwise go unnoticed. To be spiritual, according to this understanding of the term, typically entails adopting particular practices of prayer or contemplation. Such actions align the self with that larger and more ultimate horizon. They calm the thoughts and appetites of the practitioner, whose focus is redirected away from them, from the self and the everyday world, toward what is understood to be far more important.

Contemporary Western ideas of spirituality, even those that are deeply secularized, arise largely from notions that are common currency in popular Christianity, especially the view that there is a division between each person’s “spirit” and their body. The spirit, of course, is the prized element and the body is that which needs to be subordinated to it. Added to this residue of cultural Christianity to create our most typical ideas of spirituality are two other elements: first, the potent Platonic notion that the truly real is found only by ascending the levels of being, escaping from base materiality to the highest realm where all things, released from

their material prison, are spiritually one; and second, the line of dualistic thinking generally associated with René Descartes that maps rationality and thought to the spirit and a base, strictly biological carnality to the material body. Stemming from this mix of ideas, Western spirituality often becomes a highly individualized concentration on raising the self to higher levels of reality by seeking to enrich the inner life and to leave the cares of the workaday world behind as far less important, certainly a distraction, and possibly even an illusion.

flourishing. The spiritual is no longer a retreat but an engagement, no longer about a realm beyond the world but a way of living in it, no longer about the self but the whole web of creation. In this way, spirituality can provide a pathway to actively working to better the world.

Scott MacDougall is Associate Professor of Theology at Church Divinity School of the Pacific (CDSP).

The social and political quietism to which this version of spirituality can lead, however, is not the only one on offer.

Instead of understanding the spiritual and the material as two opposing principles that compose an ontological dualism, one can see the spiritual and the material as two thoroughly interpenetrating aspects of reality forming a single, integrated whole. One can consider the spiritual to be a transpersonal source of orientation for navigating the specificities of one’s material reality as one lives within it. Here, the spiritual is not about inner self-improvement.

The spiritual is about communing with a reality larger than oneself in such a way that one is then able to live in such a way that one no longer lives for oneself alone but in order to inch the world and its inhabitants just a bit closer toward their

 View the accompanying video reflection at gtu.edu/scel/scott-macdougall SPIRITUAL CARE AND ETHICAL LEADERSHIP FOR OUR TIMES | Fall 2021: Faculty, Staff, & Alum Reflections | 55

Chaitanya Motupalli | JANUARY 7, 2022

Spirituality x Global Community

“ Spirituality, which is concerned with how we relate

and respond to reality—the Sacred, ourselves and our fellow beings, the natural world, etc.—can help us reconnect with the earth, reorient ourselves, and mend our broken relationships.”

E

very once in a while we are called upon to set our differences aside and come together to address an issue so grave that not addressing it would threaten the existence of the entire planet. The global climate crisis is one such problem of our times.

Reacting to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which addresses the most up-to-date physical understanding of the climate system and climate change, António Guterres, the General Secretary of United Nations, called it “code red for humanity.” Even as the terror of the COVID-19 pandemic is tapering away, it is time to refocus and address the atrocious violations caused by global climate change.

Scientifically speaking, we are in this predicament due to the astronomical rise in the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, especially Carbon dioxide, which has the potential to remain in the atmosphere for thousands of years.

While it is true that science can help us understand the complexities of climate change, religion also plays an essential role in shedding light on the issue from a moral and spiritual standpoint. In fact, at the root of it, climate change is a spiritual problem, as it is about how we relate to the earth and its environment. Instead of having a sense of respect and producing what is needed without destruction, we have alienated ourselves from the

intricate web of life to usurp the earth’s precious resources to fulfill our greed.

Spirituality, which is concerned with how we relate and respond to reality— the Sacred, ourselves and our fellow beings, the natural world, etc.—can help us reconnect with the earth, reorient ourselves, and mend our broken relationships. For someone spiritual but not religious, such reorientation may be driven by core values and attitudes, whereas for those of us who are rooted in religious traditions, religions can provide the needed language and narratives to understand ourselves and our relationships with nature and fellow beings. Of course, that happens when we reexamine religions in light of the current realities of the environmental crises and climate trauma. Such reexamination can happen by rereading the scriptures with a particular focus on the earth and the elements of nature that have long been relegated to the margins as a backdrop for the stories of human actors and the divine. Further, our reorientation can happen through spiritual exercises such as prayer, as we attempt to widen our sphere of concern to those on the margins, including the earth.

Instead, it needs to be manifested in the public sphere to inspire every earthling to care for its common home. It could be a small gesture, such as standing on a street corner with a placard, as a few GTU students, along with members of the Berkeley Presbyterian Mission Homes, did on October 17, 2021. It could also be writing to the members of Congress to put pressure on the government to act on climate policies, or writing an op-ed piece elucidating the dangers of the inevitable and irreversible changes of the earth’s climate. Whichever way we choose to live out our spirituality in the public sphere, it is critical to respond to the tragic reality of anthropogenic climate change. In the words of Christian Ethicist Daniel Maguire, “If current trends continue, we will not.”

Dr. Chaitanya Motupalli is the Director of Student Life and Liaison for International Students & Scholars.

Given the alarming impacts of climate change, however, the change in our orientation cannot be confined to private spaces and to merely reinterpreting the scriptures and spiritual exercises.

 View the accompanying video reflection at gtu.edu/scel/chai-motupalli Graduate Theological Union | 56

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