Prayer in America

When I was a little kid, I grew up in an old neighborhood in Tehran. I refer to that neighborhood as Jerusalem. There, people of all major religions in Iran live side by side peacefully. Although it's a predominantly Muslim neighborhood, you could walk a block or two and see churches, synagogues and also a Zoroastrian temple. I knew Indians had a school not so far away from our neighborhood but I'm not sure if they had a place of worship nearby.

However, to meet people of other religions, you didn't need to walk too far away. We had Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians and Indians in the vicinity. Actually, first time I heard Hebrew was a night I was walking home from some shopping errand. And I had an Armenian friend at school. And my English teacher over my first grade at Iran-Swiss school was a lovely Indian girl. And seeing Sikhs with their turbans and tightly bound beards was a common occurrence. Although my fondness of this neighborhood was not merely a result of these things and I had other reasons to love my years there, living in such a highly diverse environment over those early years was a very interesting experience to me (that I took for granted).

My sweet childhood years didn't last long however. When Saddam invaded our country in 1980, almost all the world stood behind him and deluged him with all sort of support. And as if a war-time economy did not give our country enough hardship, the free world (led by the US) put further sanctions on us who were defending our country against that lunatic criminal.

And in times of economic trouble, people who live on a fixed meager salary (like my parents who were teachers), feel the heat the most. We began moving all around Tehran from one place to another to another. And each year, rents would go higher and higher with our home growing smaller and smaller. And add to that the stress of finding a place matching my parents' paycheck which gave us ever lower renting power each year. Not fun at all.

Despite all the stress of being a wandering jew, looking at the silver lining (or full half of the glass), living in different neighborhoods all over Tehran (though mostly in middle-class neighborhoods) was a rich experience for me as a future sociologist and it was further reinforced by my father taking me around Tehran as explained in my post after a year.

Yet, all over these years, I cherished my fond memories from my early childhood time in my little Jerusalem. And over my last year in college (which was probably one of the worst years in my life as mentioned in my commencement post), it was a great blessing to me when we ended up again in the same neighborhood after 14 years.

Every night, when I came home from school, although I was exhausted from my day at the computer lab struggling with my thesis and course projects, I would choose the longer route when I took the late night bus from my college to downtown where I had to walk for about 1.5 mile. Walking that long distance through the neighborhood would let me vent off a lot of my daily stress. And I would always think to myself, if I ever get so rich to buy a home in Tehran, it would be definitely here.

So, it should be no surprise that despite coming from a very religious (yet open-minded) family and having most of my pre-college schooling (grades 3-12) in Alavi School (an elite evangelical school which taught us an exclusivist view of Islam, more or less like evangelical Christians here), I've remained a pluralist; although in my personal life, I'm conservative, somehow orthodox (I was ultra-orthodox for some period in my life). And trivially, one of the major incentives for choosing the US to continue my education was its religious and ethnic diversity (compared to EU countries or even Canada).

And when I landed in Toledo, I was temporarily brainwashed by negativist ever-nagging people around me who kept repeating to themselves (and others) like a mantra: Toledo is a boring place. Well, compared to a megacity like Tehran where I spent almost all my life, Toledo is more like a village and it certainly lacks the glamour of cities of that size.

But as I began to spread my wings and started riding my bike around, I realized that despite its size, Toledo is a decent place to enjoy life; you just need to stop negativism and look around to find things and places to have fun. And specifically for me, it was a very good place to study religion and religious diversity. As I'm about to leave Toledo this August for my PhD, I'm already beginning to miss the variety of churches here. Toledoans, bragging as they are in everything, claim to have the highest church per capita in the nation. Sounds plausible to me.

One of the religious bodies in Toledo is the Multifaith Council of Northwest Ohio. I visited their Multifaith Thanksgiving last year and it was an interesting experience. And when I got to know about their panel discussion on Prayer in America, I found it hard to resist (although I was kinda busy this afternoon). I had already watched the documentary on WGTE last year. I was familiar with the topic and specifically, I found it interesting to know more about the perspectives of people from other faiths about prayer and the Constitution in a group-discussion setting.

The most interesting (and to me, oddest) view came from the Jewish panelist. He maintained that although Jews pray a lot in their life, they are against prayer in public places. And the main reason? They find Christian prayers offending to their beliefs and kinda reminding them of brute efforts to proselytize them all over their history. Well, I beg to disagree. Jews in this country are generally secular and liberal. Al least, if you believe the vocal Jewish (and non-Jewish) intelligentsia or even liberal rabbis like Michael Lerner.

In my group, I guess we had the most diverse composition: Christians, Muslims (Arab-American and Iranian), Hindus (one American and the other one Indian) and the American Zen-Buddhist panelist (who got into Zen while she grew up in Amherst over her student years). She believed that new things show up first in the Coasts (East and West) and when they show up in the heartland, it's a proof that they've been established (and by that she meant Buddhism). Not a very politically correct comment in a group discussion that is about diversity. Or maybe she still carries some of her East Coast baggage.

And oddly enough for a proclaimed Buddhist, she asked at one point, is it true that Hindus have thousands of gods? And this led our Indian friend to defend and explain about Hinduism. And this turned our group discussion (which was supposed to be on finding a constitutional solution for public prayer) into some sort of theological roundtable.

And when it came to public prayer, he believed that a neutral, generic prayer to God is tasteless and does not make sense; although he (as well as the Hindu panelist) had earlier boasted about prayers from multiple religions in Indian schools. So, he suggested not mentioning God altogether.



(Our Indian friend heatedly explaining about his Hindu beliefs and his views on public prayer. The Blade/Andy Morrison)

Eventually, our group concluded that the best way for public prayer is a moment of silence. That way, nobody (including atheists who believe in no kind of deity) would be offended. And our recorder (who was a Christian) commented that such a solution would be constitutional; believers could silently pray to their God (whoever He is) and atheists could think about whatever they want at that moment.

If you are looking for a multifaith way of prayer, a moment of silence is not a form of prayer. The solution could be either a generic prayer or a combination of prayers from different faiths. Personally, I find the latter more multifaith and pluralistic. When you have prayers from various faiths in succession, each of them would preserve their identity (and taste) and people learn to know and respect (not merely tolerate) others. In each religion, you can find phrases that are not offending to others.

But in a country like America, how many prayers would you include in a prayer session? And in which order? And taking into account the concerns of atheists in a multifaith framework? It brings us back to the issue of constitutionality; atheists have the right not to pray or believe in anything. So, believers have to censor themselves and not pray in public. That seems to be the easiest solution. But is the easiest solution always the best?