A paper given at the Peace Studies Association Eighth Annual Meeting at Earlham College and School of Religion, April 20, 1996

As Dean of Religious Life at Wellesley College, I have the privilege and joy of sharing in the lives of more than 3000 students, faculty and staff and some 33,000 alumnae as we attempt to create a learning community which both respects and draws upon the great diversity of human experience among us. I was only at Wellesley a year when I was approached by Arun Gandhi as to the possibility organizing and co-hosting a conference celebrating the 125th birth anniversary of his grandfather, a conference which we held in October of 94 and which drew nearly a thousand academics and activists to Wellesley to consider the strategies for addressing the underlying causes of violence in our world. After years as an activist and community organizer, this was my first introduction to world of peace studies and it has been a similar joy during the past year to become co-director of this program and begin to consider ways of shaping this program at Wellesley. It has become clear to me that as we attempt to grapple with the issues of injustice and violence in our world, we must reach beyond the usual process of intellectual discourse and tap into a deeper source of understanding if we are to cross the barriers that have historically divided human beings one from another. It has also been in this work of considering the relationship between peace & justice and religion & spirituality that I have begun to understand tolerance as being a major barrier to attaining a healthy, just, peaceful human community. So I want to spend a few minutes this morning with your help considering what lies beyond tolerance as that which binds together the human community.

I am basically a story teller, so I would like to begin with a kind of parable that has emerged from our work at Wellesley. It is called "The People of the Wells." So take a breath, relax, open your minds for a moment and imagine this scene.

Imagine a small community of people, living together in a harsh, dry, barren land. At the center of this community is a well, dug deep into the ground, from which the people who gather around it draw the water that sustains them in the harsh environment of their lives. The people of each well believe that they have found at their well the only way to survive in the desert of their lives and they celebrate their discovery and carefully guard this precious water that gives them life. Now in fact, there are scattered across this desert many communities, gathered around many wells, but because of the distance and danger that separates them, each community lives in relative isolation from the other. From time to time travelers from other parts of the desert visit with stories of other wells which also provide water and similarly sustain the lives of other people. But the people of each well generally discount the possibility that any other well could provide the kind of nourishment that theirs does. In their separation, their lives go on and each community develops a life and culture centered about their well.

Over time improved methods of transportation increase the ability of people to cross the desert. People of different wells began to encounter one another with greater frequency and learn more about each other. At first there is great fear and confusion at the discovery of these other foreign communities with their strange rituals and different wells which provided water of slightly different consistency and flavor. But amidst the confusion and occasional acts of aggression, a general attitude of tolerance begins to emerge. While publicly and politely practicing tolerance of each other's claims, each community continues to privately maintain the superiority of their water. Each remains convinced that there own experience is evidence that their well is the only true well of the water that sustains life in the desert. For many years, this tolerance continues, until... one day... a diver, exploring the deepest parts of one of the wells, makes an amazing discovery. Far beneath the surface of the earth, beneath the harsh reality of the desert, is found an endless sea of water which is the common source of all the wells.

For us to begin to understand the creative possibilities that are held within the diversity of human experience and embrace the complexity of the human community, we must take the plunge and dive deep into the waters that lie beneath the surface of our lives. We must move beyond exclusive claims of truth, whether they be religious, political or ideological and embrace a relational understanding of how truth becomes known only as we encounter one another. We must move beyond the tendency to settle for tolerance as the ultimate goal for human encounter and risk the possibility that our lives are in fact connected and that it is possible to celebrate one's own experience without negating that of another and conversely celebrate another's experience without diminishing one's own. We must move beyond tolerance in order to discover community.

What then is tolerance?

Tolerance is conflict arrested. It is a great harness applied to the destructive forces of ignorance, fear and prejudice. It provides a wall between warring parties. At best it is a glass wall where protected people can see one another going about parallel lives. But nonetheless it is still a wall dividing us from each another. As such, tolerance is not a basis for healthy human relationship nor will it ever lead to true community, for tolerance does not allow for learning, or growth or transformation, but rather ultimately keeps people in a state of suspended ignorance and conflict.

In the face of a world punctuated by acts of intolerance, how could tolerance possibly be an unworthy goal for which to strive? Throughout history tolerance has been the goal towards which forward thinking people have worked in seeking to respond to conflict amidst the diversity of human experience. This work has been carried out while intolerance has led to the massive destruction of life in all corners of the earth. At a time when tolerance has often been replaced by overt acts of hate in our communities and our world, when the bodies of women, men and children lay strewn across Lebanon, Israel, Africa, and America, a little tolerance seems a worthy goal. History, however, tells us otherwise. Tolerance as the ultimate goal has not and will not lead us to the healthy, peaceful, just society we seek.

In many societies tolerance has historically been either democratically legislated or forced upon people by less democratic means, but in both of these situations the result has been far short of achieving any sense of healthy, interdependent community. During the past several years, we have seen the results of forced tolerance in the horrific ethnic conflict which has followed the unraveling of the former Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia. Long-standing inter ethnic conflict was suspended by the imposition of a forced state of tolerance under the guise of a new nationalistic common identity, but as we have now learned, the conflict did not go away. Rather it stayed festering until the walls of tolerance were taken down, unleashing the fear, frustration and rage that had grown beneath the calm surface afforded by tolerance .

In the United States, tolerance although democratically legislated has had a similar affect on our society. Tolerance, particularly religious tolerance, was an ideal articulated by the authors of the American constitution and Bill of Rights (at least in the limited scope provided by their experience). They believed that it was the role of government to enact laws that would guarantee the rights of individuals (propertied, white men) to exercise personal freedom and that this freedom was to be protected under the principle of legislated tolerance.

An expanded understanding of this legislated tolerance forms the basis of our civil rights laws today, institutionalizing in our society the principle that particular expressions of gender, race, religion, physical ability and soon I pray sexual preference should be protected as individual freedoms. However, even with these democratically chosen principles of social tolerance in place, religious prejudice, xenophobia, racial, gender, sexual orientation related violence and other prejudice inspired acts of ignorance and hate continue to plague American society. Tolerance has not led to the formation of a healthy, interdependent community, but rather a country divided by walls of tolerance, only occasionally crossed and usually for destructive purposes. Tolerance has not protected us from acts of hate but rather cast us in a frozen state of societal fragmentation with no apparent change in sight.

The current unraveling of social policies regarding racial justice in our society is a stunning reminder of the limits of tolerance. After nearly 35 years of legislated tolerance, it has become clear that very little has fundamentally changed in terms of our society's understanding of racial identity and prejudice. The racial Balkanization of America holds the same lessons as the ethnic fragmentation of the Balkans, tolerance forced or legislated does not lead to mutual understanding, societal transformation and community. But what choices do we have? How can we approach the nurturing of community in the face of such conflict?

Perhaps we are reaping the seeds of what we have sown in our deification of individualism at the expense of a common life, which is precisely what Alexis de Tocqueville foresaw in his early 19th century book Democracy in America in which he warned that an over dependence on individualism might eventually isolate Americans from one another and thereby undermine the conditions of their freedom.

I believe that into this situation of chaos and confusion, separateness and struggle, there must come a chorus of voices articulating a new vision of community life and common life-sustaining principles for all humanity... a new vision of life as a global web of interdependence in which our futures are undeniably linked to that of others... a new vision of a world in which the particularity of human experience is valued and in which common principles are affirmed. This kind of dreaming is certainly not fashionable in the cynical world of today nor perhaps even practical given the investment that has been made in defining races and religions, countries and cultures in contrast to one another. In reality it never has been fashionable or popular to offer an alternative dream of positive human encounter. Women and men of such vision were most often rewarded with societal condemnation and individual rage for their vision of the wholeness of humanity. Mere tolerance was certainly not the message of these prophets, but rather that we should seek a balance of love and justice of personal and societal transformation that is necessary for life to flourish. Hope in the face of despair was the message that has echoed through their lives and the lives of countless numbers of women and men whose names and faces are not recorded in historical texts and yet who dared to suggest such foolishness as a global vision of peace and justice. One of these prophets whose life and work most influenced my life was Howard Thurman, African-American mystic, author and Dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston University. Although I knew him only as child knows a great-uncle, his gentle spirit which I knew as a child has become embodied in his words as I have encountered them as an adult. Howard once wrote,

There is a sense of wholeness at the core of humanity
that must abound in all we do;
that marks with reverence our every step,
that has its sway when all else fails;
that wearies out all evil things;
that warms the depths of frozen fears
making friend of foe;
and lasts beyond the living and the dead,
beyond the goals of peace, the ends of war!
This we seek through all our years;
to be complete and of one piece, within, without.

Before I delve into constructing a picture of some of the practical possibilities of such a vision of wholeness for the human community, fed by the spiritual waters of love and justice, I would like to share with you just a bit of my own experience that holds my feet to the fire of reality. I am the grandchild of survivors of the Armenian genocide, raised on the stories of the atrocities committed against the people whose body is mine. Images of mass slaughter, of families separated, of communities displaced and in Diaspora haunt my dreams. Stories of escape and separation, of loneliness and loss, were a part of my childhood anthology. As an adult I have listened to and been sickened by the denial of these experiences by governments, both foreign and domestic. I carry these stories as memories etched upon my soul, inscribed upon my flesh, never to be forgotten, always remembered as that evil of which human beings are capable. Yet beside these memories is the image of my grandfather, his face shining with hope, love, compassion and life. Devastation and hope side by side, reality acknowledged and yet possibility undenied. Here was a man who had experienced the depths of human cruelty and emerged with a belief in the possibility of the healing of humankind.

It was years later, in my young adulthood when I recognized this again in the faces of the people who lived around St. Ann's Episcopal Church in the South Bronx in New York City where I lived and served as seminarian. Here was a community all but forgotten and dismissed by society, except for the police who reluctantly carried out their orders on these streets. Here were the throwaway people of America, the disposable ones, blamed for their own demise. These beloved people were to become my teachers, my guides and sages towards a deeper understanding of hope. Jonathan Kozol writes about this community in his powerful telling of life in the South Bronx in a book called Amazing Grace . Here he writes about what I lived, on St. Ann's Avenue, love and despair, life and death occurring simultaneously. As I read his words, I could once again see the faces of children beaming with joy even as their bodies wasted away with illness and malnutrition. I could once again hear the wails of parents weeping at the loss of a child to the streets. I could smell the odor of greed always in the air as building after building was burned for profit. I could relive the moment when I discovered that the mutilated bodies of women who had received radical cancer-related hysterectomies turned out to be nothing more than a plan to sterilize poor women of color by doctors who had taken social policy into their own hands. As a community organizer for most of my life, I have no illusion about the difficulties of a dream of a just and peaceful society and yet it was precisely the emergence of the human spirit out of the devastation of genocide and injustice that has confirmed my belief that any real change must emerge from an inner transformation, a spiritual awakening to the radical possibilities of the human heart loosed from the oppressive chains of resignation to the status quo.

All to often I have heard well meaning folk present such proclamations of a new vision for a better world without the slightest hint of practical ways to realize this dream. While I will not offer a remedy for all that ills this world, I will share with you a final story of one community's attempt to explore that which lies beyond tolerance and embrace a new vision of interdependent life sustained by a spiritual source. It is simply a story about one community's exploration of the possibility of community amidst diversity by taking on the issue of religious pluralism and community life.

In 1993 Wellesley College made the rather startling announcement that it was reexamining as essential the role of religious life and spirituality in its educational experience. After nearly a century of shedding the often oppressive constraints placed upon academic institutions by their religious founders, this was an unusual step to say the least for a leading secular liberal arts institution. At a time when most academic institutions, confused by a mono-religious and mono-cultural institutional history and a multi-religious, multi-cultural contemporary community have all but abandoned even the rather harmless service of providing religious support for students, Wellesley's efforts seemed incredible. In addition, to suggest that spirituality even free from its institutional religious context plays an essential role in a college's basic educational mission was certain to be seen as blasphemous or at very least regressive. This, however, is precisely what Wellesley set out to do by creating a multi-faith religious and spiritual life program under the direction of the new position of Dean of Religious Life. The original goals of the program were to develop a pluralistic multi-faith community in which all particular expressions of religious faith were celebrated and in which dialogue about common moral and ethical principles was nurtured.

My initial work at Wellesley was to develop a new multi-faith model of religious life in which all religious traditions and spiritual perspectives were valued and in which no one is seen as normative. This in contrast to usual religious life programs in which there is one dominant religious tradition, usually Protestant Christian, around whom everyone else must orient themselves. In establishing a collaborative multi-faith program involving thirteen different religious traditions, and in which I am institutionally charged to nurture all without representing any one religious tradition, we have begun to explore the possibility of religious pluralism in the life of a community. We now have a multi-faith team of advisors and student leaders who work together to develop new models for religious life and community worship in which each religious tradition is respected and in which no one voice dominates. We work together as a team, supporting each other's individual group life, while exploring in depth the possibilities of interdependence and inter religious cooperation. Our primary work, however, is not theoretical but relational, the intentional nurturing of relationships with each other and within the community. This has precipitated a shift from a dialogue in which people attempt to tolerate each other's claims of truth to a process in which truth is seen as residing somewhere in between us and where we understand that through our relationships with one another, we gain a more complete understanding of ultimate truth. To this end we are attempting to live out an ethic described in the work of Diana Eck in her book "Encountering God" where she speaks of the importance of religious pluralism a she describes the different responses to dealing with religious diversity.

"First there is the exclusivist response: Our community, our tradition, our understanding of reality, our encounter with God, is the one and only truth, excluding all others. Second, there is the inclusivist response: There are, indeed, many communities, traditions, and truths, but our own way seeing things is the culmination of the others, superior to the others, or at least wide enough to include the others under our universal canopy and in our terms. A third response is that of the pluralist: Truth is not the exclusive or inclusive possession of any one tradition or community. Therefore the diversity of communities, traditions, understandings of the truth, and visions of God are not an obstacle for us to overcome, but an opportunity for our energetic engagement and dialogue with one another. It does not mean giving up on our commitments; rather, it means opening up those commitments to the give and take of mutual discovery, understanding, and, indeed, transformation."

Although this concept of a shared truth is the hallmark of our work, it should be noted that those who hold claims to exclusive ownership of the truth are not excluded from this process. This is not simply a group of like-minded, liberals celebrating relativism and universalism, but rather a structured place of encounter for all people where serious dialogue can occur in the context of deepening relationship.

Now at first glance this new way of nurturing religious life may seem to you either like an obvious way to support the great diversity of religious experience in a community or like a kind of naive, utopian dream which will quickly fade away in the face of age old barriers. While I feel as though this process is both obvious and fantastic, I also believe that it offers the possibility for both affirming the particularity of human experience and bringing us to a new level of understanding about our common humanity. This model is about transformation. It is about transforming ourselves and others by reaching beyond self-serving ideology, learning from each other's experiences and thereby coming to understand that the future of human kind depends on our ability to realize that our lives are inextricably linked to one another in a way that is inescapable as we enter the next century.

Recently this program has taken another rather dramatic turn as Wellesley has begun to explore the role that spirituality beyond institutional religion has in its broader educational mission. What we have found is that as a community risks moving beyond the seeming safety provided by contemporary notions of tolerance as a means towards achieving social harmony, far deeper questions about interdependence begin to emerge which require not simply intellectual analysis but also spiritual insight. I have come to define this spirituality in the context of education as that which animates the mind and the body, giving meaning and purpose to our thoughts and actions. Howard Thurman used to speak of spirituality as that which waters our roots in times of dryness. Wellesley's President Diana Chapman Walsh, without whose vision of a holistic education this process would never had occurred, speaks of the spiritual nature of education as the reweaving of mind, body and spirit in pursuit of truth. In a recent address to the community, she said that Wellesley's mission was to create "a community that practices truth... founded not on false unanimity or illusory value consensus, but on profound mutual respect for the fragile essence of each of us." Defined in this way, spirituality has a role which reaches beyond inter religious dialogue, even beyond discussion of models of education, and into the realm of the sustaining of the human community. Seen in this way, spirituality and justice are necessary components of any movement towards peace.

As we journey along the path towards discovering community amidst the wondrous diversity of humankind, there is a particular role for those of us who teach, whether we be faculty or student, community leader or community member. As a society, we can condemn and even punish acts of hate and injustice. We can also establish laws which demand tolerance as necessary for community, but we can only teach that beyond tolerance there lies the possibility of a different mode of human encounter, one based on principles of love and justice. Therefore as educators, we bear the burden of teaching the possibility of such interdependence as the only sure way of dismantling the walls that separate us, of moving beyond tolerance and realizing true community among human kind.

1 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence, ed. J. P. Mayer (New York: Doubleday, Anchor Books, 1969, p. 287 as quoted by Robert N. Bellah, Habits of the Heart San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1985 p. vii)

2 Jonathan Kozol, Amazing Grace, (New York: Random House, 1995)

3 Diana L. Eck, Encountering God, (Boston, Beacon Press, 1993 p. 168)

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