At Georgetown, Bigotry Is Met with Prayer, Symbolism

Sometimes symbolism is “just” symbolism.  And sometimes symbolism is the thing itself, which gives expression to an insight or a condition or a way of being that can’t be expressed any other way.

The latter was the case at Georgetown yesterday, when believers from half a dozen religious traditions took part in an interfaith prayer service convened by the university’s president, John J. DeGioia.   

Just weeks past Islamist terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino and from Donald Trump’s suggestion that Muslims should be banned from entering the country, here were five hundred people whose presence together in Gaston Hall was itself a refutation of the idea that American Muslims are somehow separate and distinct from the American population as a whole.  

Pres. DeGioia – a Roman Catholic – was there.   Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde – an Episcopalian – was there.  Pastor Cheryl Sanders – Church of God – was there. Cardinal Donald Wuerl – a Roman Catholic – was there.   Georgetown student Khadija Mohamud – a Muslim – was there.  Imam Talib M. Shareef – a Muslim – was there.   Rabbi Batya Steinlauf – a Jew – was there.   Rabbi M. Bruce Lustig – a Jew – was there.   Bhai Gurdarshan Singh – a Sikh – was there.   Georgetown student Laila Brothers – a Muslim – was there.  Vice President Joseph Biden – a Roman Catholic – was there.  Metropolitan Tikhon – an Orthodox Christian – was there.

At the reception afterward, I was asked: What difference does it make that they were there?  It made – and will make – all the difference.   

How?   Let me count the ways.   Brought together by adversity, religious people of good will are getting to know each other – and each other’s traditions – better.   In public, dressed in their distinctly different religious regalia, these people made plain to the naked eye that they are different from one another, beginning with their apprehension of the divine – but that those differences don’t stand in the way of their standing together.   Assembling in the nation’s capital, they represented the American people in our ethnic and religious diversity.   Convening for prayer, first of all, rather than for anguished self-defense or aggrieved denunciation, they showed that the way to be together, to stand together, and to stand against violence, bigotry, and discrimination, is to be religious together, sharing what they share: the humbled inclination toward the holy that is prayer.  

Vice President Biden, speaking at the top of his voice, declared that he has absolutely no doubt that the American people will move past the ugly present and affirm the commitment to diversity that characterizes this country.

It seemed to me that he put things too strongly – as if to meet Trump’s forceful assertions with some forceful assertions of his own.

I think it is far from assured that the American people will move past this this latest ugly episode of religious nativism and demagoguery.  That is why the prayer service at Georgetown was so vital and so symbolically apt.  It didn’t – couldn’t – quite say that this is what America looks like.   What it said – turning hope into affirmation – was that this is what the American future looks like.  

• 17 December 2015
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