A Call to All Shakers and Movers: Reflections on the Interfaith Youth Core’s annual conference

Sitting on a weather-worn wooden bench.  Drooping branches, heavy with leaves the color of dying embers.  Trees withering like phoenixes ready to burst into new life.  The world changes, creation is in a continuous process of death and rebirth.   And in that process, there is brokenness. 

Brokenness.  This is what I found myself contemplating today day in the garden, sitting on the weather-worn wooden bench.  Two-thirds of the world lives in poverty while the other third, my world, flourishes.  For every me, sitting comfortably in lush offices, indulging in fine coffees, luxurious clothes, there are two others struggling to finish school, not enough money for books and uniforms; to eat, there’s no money in selling candies or bike-repair services on the street; to stay healthy, the diseases far outnumber the doctors who can treat them.

Despair clutching at my throat, I remembered two significant moments last weekend during the Interfaith Youth Core’s annual conference.  Reverend Jim Wallis, when speaking about his call to radical Christian living, said “I had to get out of the house more.”  Translation – interacting with a diversity of peoples and articulating his clear Christian vision amidst difference, strengthened Reverend Wallis’s faith.  It meant plunging through the façade of our world to find the other two-thirds of humanity.

In equal profundity, Rabbi David Saperstein highlighted our most important task as people of faith – to make religion relevant again.  Rabbi Saperstein argued that our children and our children’s children will remain in faith only if we seek to address the social inequities of our time.  Faith is our catalyst for just living.  It should be the spark that nudges us, whispering “You gotta get out of the house more.”

Creation is broken, but as religious leaders and people of faith, we have the divine tools and inspiration to be shakers and movers, to be agents of change.  In the words of Wallis, let’s get out of the house, our comfort zone, and seek solidarity with two-thirds of the world.  Let’s make religion relevant again.