As I wrap up the ICJS Congregational Leaders Fellowship, I reflect on experiences I had during one of the most difficult periods of my life that laid a strong foundation for my interreligious story and upon which the fellowship built years later.
A journey of profound interreligious sharing began when my wife Jill was diagnosed with terminal Stage IV cancer. During this time of what often felt like a harrowing free fall, we reached, out of deep necessity, for insights, words, practices, and relationships that could help us make meaning, understanding, and even sometimes joy out of this passage.
With a new level of intensity, we tapped into our own Christian traditions of prayer and communion. Our church community at St. Bartholomew’s wrapped us in a range of support, prayer, and other gifts of the spirit, both familiar and unexpected, that somehow were able to penetrate the waves of uncertainty and fear that we often felt.
At the same time, in the intentional community where we live in Baltimore City, we were already in fellowship with neighbors who are Muslim, Jewish neighbors, and Christian from a range of traditions. For several months while I stayed in the hospital with Jill, a practice of interreligious neighboring developed which was simple, profound, and very moving. Each evening, one of our neighbors would come to the hospital to visit with Jill so I could go home, shower, check on the house, and spend some time with our middle-school age daughter who was staying next door with close friends.
For whatever household was visiting that night, our Muslim neighbor would cook a delicious family dinner. She gave this gift, amounting to many hours of effort, with utter humility and a matter-of-fact selflessness rooted in her faith. She simply said, “This is what the Qur’an says we do for our neighbors,” and proceeded to offer this generous support day after day.
She provided a Qur’an, carefully identifying passages that she thought would be most spiritually helpful. We also gathered with Jewish neighbors and friends who shared prayers, stories, and laughter from their tradition. The Psalms and the book of Job became a source of sustenance that offered new meaning with each reading. Mindfulness meditation based in Buddhist practice also became essential parts of daily practice.
This interreligious experience was not driven by intellectual curiosity or personal friendships—although those also were present—but from the lived experience that all these traditions have deep ways of bringing the presence of God into the most difficult of moments of life, including walking through what the psalmist calls “the valley of the shadow of death.”
The ICJS Congregational Leaders Fellowship has been a wonderful opportunity to add more experiences, more context, and more understanding of these well-springs of spiritual life. It has deepened my gratitude, based on that earlier experience, for the capacity of all of these different faith traditions to gather people together, to express and share love, to dissolve fear, and to build community in ways that they have been doing for millions of people for thousands of years.
Michael Sarbanes is a member of St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church and was a member of the 2024 ICJS Congregational Leaders Fellowship. Learn more about the ICJS Congregational Leaders programs here.
Opinions expressed in blog posts by the ICJS Congregational Leader Fellows are solely the author’s. ICJS welcomes a diversity of opinions and perspectives.