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Being homeschooled for virtually my entire life, I have always been aware of the fact that the entire world is my school. Although I may now be attending a typical private university, I have certainly not stopped learning from the world around me. In fact, if anything, the lessons I learn from society have grown in number and significance.
In the spirit of being the world’s student, I have always loved hearing people’s stories because I believe everyone has something to contribute to my life. However, I rarely let these conversations drift to the topic of religion. I always felt that religion was something personal, and if it wasn’t my religion, I probably shouldn’t pry. Today, I realize the mistake I’ve made.
Religion has become a part of our lives, whether we want it to or not. America has become the meeting place of a multitude of religions. Any major city is home to several different houses of worship, and we are inundated with headlines about Muslims in Iraq, Israel, and Palestine. Court cases dealing with religious rights and the separation of church and state arise on a regular basis. Every day we are surrounded by different religions, their followers, and the effects they have on our culture, yet very few of us have a good understanding of these different faith traditions.
This spring, I claimed the world as my school and used it to help me understand different religious traditions. Hendricks Chapel, the interfaith chapel at Syracuse University (where I am a student), organized a travel-study experience in which eighteen students and five chaplains traveled to Turkey over spring break. The participants were from Christian, Jewish, and Muslim backgrounds and we traveled with the intent of trying to understand how followers of different faiths can successfully live together and build one unified community.
As an officially secular country which was the center of the Ottoman Empire, the home to the Christian Orthodox Patriarchate, and the host of a Jewish community since before the Common Era, Turkey was a choice destination to explore the dynamics of a religiously diverse country. Months before our departure, we met to learn about different topics concerning Turkey and share our own religious traditions. The trip itself was filled with visits to different houses of worship and places of religious significance, presentations and conversations with professors, religious leaders, and others about issues of religious significance, and informal dialog among ourselves.
This trip let me take a step into the religious worlds of others, and it truly changed me. It is one thing to listen to a recording of the azzan, the Muslim call to prayer. It is an entirely different experience when you are listening to your tour guide, standing outside looking at a sculpture. All of a sudden you are stopped in your tracks by chanting which pierces your soul. It reminds everyone, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, that there is divinity in the world and we should remember the sanctity of life. Likewise, reading about what happens at a Catholic mass is much less significant than sharing in their service, witnessing the experience of the sacred; hearing about the way Jews welcome Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath, is much different from actually lighting candles and participating in the kiddush blessing. These experiences changed all of our perceptions of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. Stepping into the religious lives of others, even if only for a little while, gave us a rare opportunity to understand other people’s experience of the divine.
I also learned very valuable lessons from the people I was with. Although studying religion, doctrine, and scripture is important, it is not enough. As homeschoolers know, not everything can be learned from textbooks. Religion is a personal experience, and it is only through personal interaction that we can understand other faith traditions. Often, evening conversations would evolve to reflections about the day and about our personal reactions to sites visited. People’s reactions made me realize how personal religion really is – visiting a Christian Orthodox service was more alien to some of the Christians than to the Jewish and Muslim participants, which demonstrates that you cannot let one person or denomination represent the entire community.
Sometimes we would discuss our own theologies, and I was often surprised by the fact that my personal theology was more similar to that of people of other faiths than to people of my own religious background. By engaging in conversation with people of other religions and sharing in some of their religious experiences, I was able to begin to understand the beliefs, struggles, conflicts, joys, and celebrations which comprise the personal, individual religious experiences of my fellow participants and friends.
Although being in Turkey was an amazing experience, the beauty of our society is that you don’t have to travel across the world to share in different religious experiences. We live in one of the most religiously diverse countries in the world. We are blessed that there are so many different communities right next door, waiting to share with us their own experiences. We rarely talk about religion, maybe because we find it threatening to our own traditions. But learning about another’s religion will not undermine your own beliefs, just like learning to speak another language does not mean that you stop speaking in your native tongue. So I urge you, ask questions about others’ beliefs, visit places of religious significance, and engage in the religious diversity that is part of our society. Making a genuine effort to understand the different religions which are a part of our lives will bring us one step closer to building a unified society filled with compassion for all of humanity.
Claim the world as your school, and learn from everything it has to offer.
About the author:
Rachel Dudley is currently a junior at Syracuse University, wher she majors in religion with a concentration in interfaith dynamics in
addition to studying music. She was homeschooled beginning in the second grade, and graduated from Royal Academy in 2004. Despite being in a more traditional school setting, she continues to remain deeply committed to homeschooling principles.
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