Interfaith Work is Human Work | Levi Walbert

    Interfaith work has been a center of my life for some time now; from shadowing chaplains around the hospital, to working at my university’s office of spiritual inclusion, and now here spending my summer with Interfaith Philadelphia.  

    When others ask me what this kind of work is about, I find many are often surprised when I tell them that outwardly discussing religion and faith is only a fraction of the work we do. I can’t blame their surprise, as I think back to when I first began my study of religion and the world’s faith traditions, I remember myself standing as an outside observer to them. I would spend my time drawing lines of connections between these grand concepts of metaphysics, ethics, history, and culture believing it to be the heart of religious understanding. It worked fine for academic purposes, but I would soon come to understand that theory alone is not comparable to the lived experience of interfaith work.

    When I began actually entering these spaces where faiths meet, I came to realize that it wasn’t the concepts or theologies of faiths that met, but rather the complex lives of people.  No one I’ve ever met, regardless of tradition, culture, or any other category, has ever fit perfectly into these grand concepts I dedicated so much time to study. Each person due to the innumerable circumstances of their lives related to their faith in a unique and individual way that could not be fit neatly into a box. The assumptions I had built up were shattered by that realization. 

    All the academic knowledge on theology, philosophy, culture, and history could not equal the realization that interfaith work has always been an evolving and living dialogue between people. Sometimes individuals, sometimes groups, sometimes whole nations – but always people. 

    And the truth is, people are complicated. The religious lives of people do not live in isolation from their cultures, community, education, family, history, and every other aspect of human life. When I stood on the outside looking in, the concept of religion was a single isolated part of people's lives, and now that I stand on the inside, I’ve come to realize that every aspect of one’s life (including one's faith tradition) touches upon every other part. If we are to unite people of different faiths to live together in harmony, we must serve their communities, their families - their human needs and desires at every level. 

    Interfaith work is to touch every aspect of our experience as humans; sometimes that’s bringing people together to paint a planter, sometimes it’s to bring faith and community leaders together, sometimes it is to candidly talk about our faiths, and sometimes it’s just giving people the opportunity to talk and be listened to. Interfaith work is to work with people just as they are.  

    My time so far working with the Crafting Community Project has been a perfect example of this; having the opportunity to learn from and work with communities as they together to express themselves has shown me how crucial it is to touch upon the living aspects of people's everyday life - not just the conceptual aspects of their faith. To me, the mundane and the sacred have been shown to be so intimately intertwined that the line which separates them has begun to fade.

Levi is a seminary student and Buddhist minister residing in the Lehigh Valley and a Summer Seminary Intern with Interfaith Philadelphia.