Designing Multifaith Celebrations
DESIGNING MULTI-FAITH CELEBRATIONS
INTRODUCTION
For years, interfaith services held in communities and on campuses have tended to follow two distinct patterns. The first is a Protestant Christian liturgical format with a few spaces in the service offered for readings or music from “different” traditions. The second is a universalized celebration in which all particular forms of religious expression have been removed so as not to offend anyone who might be present. Most often both kinds of services leave participants at best uninspired and at worst with a deeper sense of alienation from one another and doubtful that meaningful interfaith celebration is possible.
We suggest that there are, emerging on campuses across the country, new models for multi-faith celebration that weave together authentic elements from different religious traditions and spiritual practices in a ritual that celebrates diversity while creating community. Wellesley College has, for more than a decade, been experimenting with a process for creating multi-faith celebrations with interesting results. In creating these ceremonies, examples of which are included in this section, we have found the following steps to be important.
Step 1. Defining the Purpose
The first step in planning a multi-faith celebration is to define the purpose of the gathering. Historically, community celebrations on college and university campuses marked a particular moment in the academic year. Examples of such services include: Welcoming the Community Back to Campus; Convocation; Founders Day; Alumni/ae Homecoming; Celebrating Winter Holy Days; Baccalaureate; Reunion. These are the kinds of annual moments in the life of an academic community that would call for a community religious/spiritual celebration, and each has a purpose that needs to be clearly stated before planning commences. For example, the purpose of Wellesley’s “Flower Sunday Service” that opens the academic year is to welcome the community back to campus and celebrate the importance of friendship in the learning process. On the other hand, the purpose of Wellesley’s Baccalaureate Service that occurs the day before Commencement is to offer the senior class an opportunity to reflect back on their journey and pause to give thanks before their graduation. When a clear statement of purpose is not provided, too often the answer to why are we doing a particular ceremony becomes, “because it is tradition” or “this is just the way we do things here.” This attitude tends to perpetuate practices based on a previous time when issues of diversity were not necessarily taken into account.
What we have found is that once we have defined the purpose of the event, then we can move to the next step of creating a community celebration.
Step 2. Getting to the Blank Page
For many of us responsible for planning religious/spiritual community celebrations, we are not simply starting with a blank page on which we can create anew, but rather we have been handed traditions which sometimes are a century or more old and carry with them the positive and negative aspects of such inherited structures. A crucial part of creating a religious/spiritual community celebration that will be meaningful for everyone is to not simply be satisfied with adapting the old form to make it slightly more inclusive, but to insist on creating a new structure which may eventually include traditional elements, but is not constrained by what has been done in the past. This requires creativity and a willingness to deal with potential conflict as longstanding traditions which may be beloved by some (while alienating others) are set aside so that something new can be born. This involves some important “pastoral” work.
Step 3. The principle of Equity of Voice, and Dealing with Protestant Disenfranchisement and Grief
One of the goals of multi-faith community celebration at Wellesley College is equity of voice. We believe that, in order to achieve our goal of a celebration that engages the whole community, we must create an experience where all religious and spiritual voices are visible (or audible) and where no one voice dominates. Doing this tends to be a problem for many Protestant Christians who are accustomed to having such rituals reflect their structure of a Protestant Service (while perhaps including elements from other traditions). When the community celebration no longer follows this Protestant liturgical form, our experience is that some Protestants react negatively to what they (correctly) experience as a change that has dislodged them from the center of the ritual. Over the years, I have come to understand this as dealing with the grief of the dislodged majority. Spending time acknowledging this change and helping the majority community to deal with the grief of loosing their position of power is crucial to the ability to truly create a new experience for the campus community. It is also important to note that getting unanimous agreement on such a change before the change happens is not what we are proposing. If our experience is any indication of broader patterns, there will be plenty of grumbling about such changes before people accept new patterns of celebration. Ten years ago, when we first changed our Baccalaureate celebration to a multi-faith service, there was a great deal of conflict (from students, faculty and trustees) over beginning the service with African drumming and dance. A decade later, the members of the Baccalaureate planning committee unanimously agreed that African drumming and dance must open the service because “it is tradition.”
Step 4. Starting with a Diverse Planning Team
The make-up of the planning team is one of the most important and often overlooked elements of the planning process for multi-faith community celebrations. Too often well-intentioned groups of people come together and plan a multi-faith service only to be met with criticism because the planning team (and the service it created) was predominantly Christian. We have found that one of the key elements to creating a multi-faith celebration is to have a multi-faith planning team. And multi-faith does NOT mean three Episcopalians, two Lutherans, a Roman Catholic and a Jew. When we say “multi-faith” this implies equity of voice, which means a balance among Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Unitarian Universalist and others including Humanist, Atheists, etc. We use the United States Senate model of representation rather than the House of Representatives model in our work, meaning that each religious community is represented, not proportionately by numbers, but equally (i.e. 3 Christians, 3 Jews, 3 Muslims, 3 Hindus, 3 Humanists, etc.). One of my favorite sayings to the Christian community(ies) is that just because they have historically had trouble getting along and have split up into denominations does not mean that they get more representation than other groups. It is useful to ask why, in this heavily Christian country, we think of Hinduism as a single religion and yet speak of Episcopalianism as if it were a separate religion.
Step 5. Defining Your Goals by Drawing on Campus Traditions and Culture
Once a diverse planning committee has been established and given a clear statement of purpose for the event, the next step is to define goals for the planning process. Our goals usually include things like: including the ideas of all planning group members in the process; ensuring inclusion of, and a balance of, religious/spiritual traditions; making sure to include things both familiar and unfamiliar in the service; having opportunities for active participation by those gathered; not asking people to act religiously (particularly pray) in traditions other than their own; having fun/light as well as serious moments; including music from different traditions and in different styles. In addition, we always ask the question, “How can we draw in the traditions and culture of our campus to make the experience meaningful?” For example, we will often use the Ode to Joy by Beethoven somewhere in the service because it has been used in services at Wellesley for over 100 years and is a connection with our forbearers. This creates a nice balance with new traditions like African dance and drumming and the singing of a Hebrew round.
Step 6. Collecting ideas ~ Brainstorming without critique
In the planning process, in order to ensure that all ideas get out onto the table, we have found it important that group members brainstorm ideas first without critique and without any move towards decision-making by vote. In this case, the planning of multi-faith community celebrations are not a democratic process, but rather a facilitated process of consensus building guided by a skilled leader. In our planning process, the leader/facilitator collects all ideas before any discussion happens about which ideas to eventually include in the service, AND then, as the group moves towards the next phase of transforming the ideas into a coherent service, the facilitator needs to be watching for issues of equity of voice and balance. In every planning process I have ever run, someone’s unique idea has been met by a “No, I don’t like that” from another member of the group. Too often this outburst serves as a kind of veto of a creative idea that may be unfamiliar to other members of the group. My response to such an outburst is to first remind the group that we are (at this point) trying to get all ideas out on the table, not trying to get only ideas that are unanimously agreed upon. Then at the time in the planning process when we are sorting through ideas, I will bring us back to that “outburst” moment and lead a conversation about the difference between creating a multi-faith celebration that includes both the familiar and unfamiliar and creating a generic celebration using only elements that any one of us finds appropriate. These moments serve as welcome opportunities to deepen the group’s understanding of multi-faith community.
Step 7. Choreography and the Creation of Ritual that Works
In addition to being a facilitator who helps the planning team generate ideas that will eventually form the content of the multi-faith community celebration, the person leading this planning process serves as a kind of director and choreographer, helping the group to weave together elements of a ritual so that each part has integrity and yet holds together as a total experience. There are times in the planning process when the facilitator needs to make decisions about content to be included and the flow of the service with an eye towards the broader issues of equity of voice and balance. Another issue that faces the facilitator and the planning group is the challenge of creating a multi-faith community celebration that feels like a sacred ritual in which those gathered are participants, rather than a performance in which those gathered are the audience. This can be a fine line sometimes, but an effective multi-faith celebration engages people as participants rather than spectators.
Step 8. Running to Kinko’s at 2 a.m. the Day Before the Service.
One of the realities of creating now forms of multi-faith community celebration is that the process takes time. The planning process for such rituals at Wellesley ordinarily takes from one month (Flower Sunday) to six months (Baccalaureate). There is an organic aspect to how these planning processes unfold. Each of the steps outlined above takes time. Sometimes during the planning process, confusion or conflict may erupt within the planning group and it is crucial to take these moments as learning opportunities even if it delays the planning. This may mean that on the evening before the community celebration you find yourself at Kinko’s at 2 a.m., getting the programs printed for the next day. When I first started this planning process for multi-faith celebrations at Wellesley, I ran into conflict with the college’s practice of having programs printed a month before the actual event. This may seem like a small thing, but it is just one of a thousand ways that institutions have to adjust to the change from longstanding annual celebrations that have always looked the same, to the annual process of creating new and original multi-faith community celebrations.
Step 9. Enjoy the Process and the Final Result will be Enjoyed by Everyone
If there is one central learning that I can share from the past decade of facilitating the creation of multi-faith community celebrations, it is that a focus on the process leads to the creation of a meaningful ritual. Although there are many challenges in this work, the learning that emerges through the process is unparalleled, both for the individuals involved in the planning process and the community that takes part in the final celebration.
Victor H. Kazanjian, Jr.
Dean of Religious & Spiritual Life
Wellesley College
