By Nicholas Collura
For Today’s Catholic
“So...did they convert you?”
That's the first question a few of my Catholic friends asked me after I’d brought our parish youth group to visit five places of worship in five different religious traditions during their Spring Break. The second question I heard was, inevitably, “Did you convert them?”
Of course, the questions were asked with tongue in cheek, but it was precisely to staunch any fledgling “us vs. them” attitude towards world religions that my colleagues and I at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church on the West Side of San Antonio took a dozen middle school and high school students on these field trips. On Monday we headed to Helotes, where Vee Jyothi, a university professor and Hindu layperson, showed us around his wonderfully ornate temple perched atop a hill on Bandera Road. The next day, in front of the beautiful iconostasis of St. Anthony the Great Parish, the Very Reverend Father Leo Poore explained the historical and dogmatic points of divergence, and commonality, between Orthodox Christianity and Catholicism. On Wednesday we gathered around a basin at the Islamic Center of San Antonio, where layperson Mike Martin washed his hands and feet in ritual preparation for a solemn and intimate daily prayer which he graciously allowed us to observe. Thursday was a bit more laid-back, as Doria Gutierrez-Cross led us through a history of Buddhism and a lesson in centering meditation at the Shambhala Center downtown, and on Friday, Rabbi Leonardo Bitran spoke to us about Judaism before inviting us to Shabbat services at the Congregation Agudas Achim.
Our students’ initial impressions usually had to do with the external features of these unfamiliar places. “There aren’t any seats!” one of them exclaimed in dismay, standing in the midst of the pew-less Orthodox church. (He was satisfied at the synagogue, though, settling into the cushioned pews and sighing, “They’re even better than ours back home.”) Dividing into separate rooms for men and women at the mosque also set off a firestorm of controversy. “It’s because guys are cooler,” offered one of our (male) students. When Mr. Martin asked the ladies what they thought of that, they responded in unison, “No, it’s because girls are cooler!” After a little conversation, one of our students admitted quietly, “It’s true that it's hard to concentrate on God when people of the opposite gender are there distracting you.”
As easy as it was to identify differences between our tradition and our hosts’, our most valuable reflections as a community focused on elements that all of the religious sites and services had in common. One of our students noted that each place of worship required an entrance ritual, be it aspersion with water or the removal of shoes. All five religious services that we were privileged to witness involved song or chant. And in one or two cases, an ecumenical openness was explicit: Ms. Gutierrez-Cross, whose family frequented our own church when she was growing up and recognizes Our Lady of Guadalupe as its patroness, taught us how Eastern centering techniques might be used to pray the Catholic rosary with greater discipline.
Some in our parish community worried that it was unwise for us youth ministers, many of whom are also catechists, to risk “confusing” our kids by exposing them to new ideas. At the same time, a number of adults confided to me that they wished they had an opportunity to find out more about these religions, about which they knew so little. “After all,” one of them remarked, “if someone from another religion wanted to find out more about Catholicism, we'd think it was just great!” I do believe that neurotic or reactionary fears of Otherness may come more naturally to some adults whose religious, political, and ideological views are already firmly entrenched than they do to youth our students’ age who reacted to these new experiences without guile, and observed not a trace of guile in our hosts’ hospitality. “They were really nice,” commented one of my students. “That was really fun,” said a few. And all admitted they’d learned a lot. This didn’t prevent one or two from telling me, when we attended Mass together that Sunday, that it still felt pretty good to be home.
Nicholas Collura is a Jesuit Volunteer Corp member at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in San Antonio.