The Irony of Being Interfaith

Studying scripture and worship music as well as the blues has helped to highlight how music, held within it as a story felt, heard, and understood beyond understanding and literacy of the musicians’ experience specifically or entirely, but by the divine communication translated through the humanity of life’s trials and tribulations itself more holistically and universally. From my orientation, I have encountered and embraced the blues for my entire life. The blues for me began as a child, being moved between divorced parents’ homes and lives. Then my blues-like life continued unexpectedly when my sister died in a tragic car accident in 2006. And again, my blues state surfaced, set in, and solidified in the last four years of my life, when I got married and divorced, before and during the time of the global pandemic. These moments in my life are incredibly defining for me as it relates to the blues because I have understood that one of the most important ways I’ve been able to get through these very challenging times, is by having the courage to communicate and claim my story as it is, and having a deep seeded desire to turn my pain into greater purpose for greater health on this planet, for myself and for others.

It has only been through my life’s challenges that I’ve found myself, my power, and my salvation through my interfaith background being a practicing Jewish and Christian woman, and attempting to bring these together, for myself and the world more broadly in my theological research and my brave ability to practice both of my faiths openly in a world where the majority still misunderstands the true essence of interfaith identities. Understanding the ironic tenacity in my identity has been a new frontier of spirituality that illuminated for myself, my family, and the people who know me and my heroic life’s journey of overcoming grief again and again, how one’s practices beliefs can and does shape us to be who we are inside and outside our faith communities, and more broadly in the context of the public life arenas where our culture has deemed religious affiliation seemingly is separate, when in fact, it is everything but.

James Cone urgently reminds us through his work that race is socially constructed, and so then is religion similarly, constructed based on its signification for the people that uphold it, and my life has shown that for me, this is accurate and true. I have learned through this research that life is fired in the beauty of oppression, and to always ask three questions for truth, that are: Am I prophetic – will I speak truth to power, am I Socratic – will I raise critical questions, and am I blues-like – am I in touch with human suffering. When I answer these questions, this is how I know that the blues speaks to the crises that I have suffered in my life.

The ironic tenacity in my experience is that my faiths should be separate and distinct from one another, but that it is only through all that I have lost and experienced, that my faiths have come together as the full expression of where I come from, why it matters, and how these traditions are not at all separate, but just a beginning and continuation of their true origin.