Toting Tolerance

Yassim is a bright-eyed student leader who attends a high school in Brooklyn, N.Y. She’s also a devout Muslim and was much challenged by an insensitive school rule; ‘to hold elective office, you are required to attend school dances.’ Like my former high school Baptist friends, dancing was forbidden. So Yassim was forced to resign her leadership position, but definitely unwilling to let it go at that.

Her story is recounted in Moustrafa Bayoumi’s riveting survey of growing up Arab in America, How Does It Feel To Be A Problem? As he tells it, “this heavyweight fighter stuffed into a tiny, ninety-five-pound frame wearing the hijab” battled that school rule for over two years of letter writing, soul searching, and googling. Finally, a pro bono lawyer attracted to her case skillfully led the school to reverse its decision out of court. The coordinator of student affairs, a sharp, principled man, finally acknowledged the inexcusable harm done to this outstanding student. Today, amazingly, they are good friends.

I find this story one of shining perseverance as well as exemplifying hopeful possibilities for change in unbending institutional environments. Mostly I think Yassim’s youthful struggle represents the ever-enfolding story of learning to honor God’s different faces.

As far as I can remember, my convent years of being totally wrapped in religious garb never brought on anything like Yassim’s incident of hurtful prejudice. Even earlier, during my school days at Winter Park High surrounded by a bevy of Baptist friends, I rarely ran into any of the anti-Catholic taunts making the rounds during the fifties. Blessedly, some of the mindless hatreds we lived with then, e.g. the Pope is the Antichrist, burned themselves out in the wide bin of falsehoods.

More recently exist hatched versions of inhumane mindsets still making the rounds. At a Rollins College diversity workshop a few years ago, my Muslim friend Luby, shared how she found herself suddenly ostracized from public school chums after years of close classroom and extra curricular experiences. Christian companions were suddenly mouthing attitudes fresh off a minister’s pulpit: “Luby, my Bible is the only true source to finding God. I’m sorry we can’t be friends anymore.” 

Luby, pondering how the winds of global conflicts had inevitably blew onto her own environment, wound up years later conducting lectures and seminars she calls Connecting Cultures, now much in demand to clients the world over. Ah, how those winds of change sometimes blow in our favor.
     
Some years ago, I again heard another plea for evenhandedness at a New Year’s ecumenical retreat. A Jesuit priest and a white bearded rabbi, led the evening’s session, calling us to take turns speaking from raised symbols of our particular messages. Holding up a handkerchief, one beloved Jewish friend announced, “this represents the hundreds of tears shed over religious discrimination. Christians quote Jesus saying: ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life.’ Why can’t that divisive statement read “I am A way rather than THE way?” 

That heartfelt plea deeply affected me. Could Jesus, love itself, have really intended to separate us from our brother Jews and non-Christians. More recently, having seen the documentary of James Carroll’s book, Constantine’s Sword, I realize how our Christian tradition has chosen to separate itself from, and inexorably had moved even to exterminate our close Jewish neighbors.  

Though I walk and deeply appreciate the traditions of Catholicism, I hold that God’s presence vibrantly lives in diverse religions: Jew, Hindu, Moslem, or Baptist. And best selling religion scholar, Karen Armstrong, has written extensively on this subject of tolerance for the other. She notes the basic truth that abides in all beliefs: LOVE. “Do not do unto others what you would not have done unto you.”   

Perhaps this tolerant love happens only one person at a time. Perhaps, as Yassim shows, it can even be launched at a little high school in Brooklyn.  





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