Ask Interfaith Mom: How Can We Make Grandparents Feel More Comfortable?

In a regular feature titled “Ask Interfaith Mom,” I plan to tackle your questions about raising interfaith kids. Here’s a great question from a comment on a recent post about interfaith grandparents:

Question: In raising my son both, I realize his grandparents will not always like or support how we are bringing the two traditions together and I am interested in ways to present to them that they should always feel free to opt out of saying anything or doing anything they don’t really believe. Thanks for any guidance you have!

One of the most liberating aspects of choosing both family religions is that you give yourself permission to pass on to your children that which is meaningful to you, rather than a required system of beliefs and practices. And in making your own choices, you set a precedent that your children will have the right to opt into or out of any of these beliefs or practices.

Discussing this freedom with your parents (the grandparents) will help them to feel comfortable making their own choices about whether or not to participate in any ritual or prayer they might encounter when celebrating with your interfaith family. Ideally then, the idea that they have permission to participate, or not, would be integral and natural, and would not need to be announced in a formal manner.

But of course, it may take time for extended family members to reach this state of appreciation. Grandparents who have spent a lifetime in a “monofaith” environment, and who may still feel sadness over the fact that their grandchildren will not be raised exclusively in their own religion, cannot always be expected to jump into interfaith practice with enthusiasm. What I can tell you is that many who have started out reluctant or even upset over the idea of an interfaith upbringing, over time have come to appreciate the way extended interfaith families are able to share spiritual inspiration, religious history, and cultures.

However, everyone in an interfaith family (or for that matter, living in our religiously pluralistic society) is going to have moments, often when visiting a more traditional place of worship, when they may want to opt out of participating in a prayer or ritual. Let’s get to some challenging specifics: for instance, taking communion at church. In some churches, the ritual of taking communion becomes a public declaration around who has the right to participate. In such a setting, it would be important to reassure interfaith family members in advance (whether a grandparent, spouse, or interfaith child) that it is fine to remain seated in the pew, and not go up to take communion. Explain that even some Christians abstain from communion at certain times or in certain places, for their own personal reasons, or because not every Christian denomination invites all Christians from other denominations to participate. While those who choose not to take communion may feel like they are sticking out by staying seated, in theory no one should ask them why they remained in the pew.

When you design an interfaith family celebration, this is your opportunity to make the rituals and prayers as inclusive as possible. Ideally, such a celebration would be so welcoming that no one would feel the need to abstain. Sometimes, this means recasting a prayer or ritual to be more radically inclusive, and explicitly inviting all to participate. Personally, I have seen Jewish people (and even a rabbi) take communion at a super-progressive Christian service in which the communion ritual was presented as a metaphorical table where all share food and drink together, based on the Jewish rituals of blessing over bread and wine, regardless of religious institutional membership or beliefs.

To take another example from the other side of the aisle, the bris, or Jewish ritual circumcision for baby boys, can be difficult for non-Jewish family members. Honestly, it is difficult for many Jewish people too, some of whom now oppose circumcision and have designed baby-welcoming ceremonies that do not involve cutting. It’s important to share all the different viewpoints on this ritual with non-Jewish family. I do understand why some interfaith families choose to have a bris, and the deep meaning it has for some Jewish family members. But I don’t think anyone (Jewish or otherwise) should feel required to attend the ceremony. And it would be important to communicate this permission to participate, or not, to everyone in the extended family as early as possible to avoid misunderstandings. Both the new grandparents and their intermarried children must make an extra effort to empathize with each other at this vulnerable moment around birth: the new parents must try hard to accept and not resent family members who choose not to participate, and family must try hard to accept and not resent the choice of the new parents to honor (or conversely, to move away from) such an ancient ritual.

Sometimes, grandparents may surprise you with their willingness to participate, and cross theological boundaries. For instance, I was worried about how my Jewish father would react to hearing his interfaith grandchildren say a traditional Christian prayer such as the Lord’s Prayer in our interfaith community Gathering. To my surprise, I saw my father reciting the prayer along with his grandchildren, and discovered that he said this prayer in his public school classroom everyday, growing up in the 1930s. Since the prayer does not mention Jesus, my father did not even realize until much later that this is officially a Christian prayer. As an adult interfaith child who was raised Jewish, my own appreciation of the Lord’s Prayer is heightened by the knowledge that many scholars have pointed out the parallels between the language in the Lord’s Prayer and the Kaddish and other central Jewish prayers. So a moment I had anticipated as possibly problematic became an opportunity for interesting theological discussion with my parents.

What experiences have you had in including interfaith grandparents? Or, what is your perspective as an interfaith grandparent? And what questions do you have for “Ask Interfaith Mom”?

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Being Both: The Final Stages of Book Labor

Two shiny, colorful, three-dimensional copies of Being Both arrived at my house this week. These Advance Reader Copies (ARCs), or galleys, have not been through the copy-editor, proofreader or indexer yet. They don’t yet have cloth covers, or dust jackets. But they are tangible proof that, after a decade of dreaming and advocating and writing, the book is about to be born. And as with any birth, I am excited, but also a tiny bit terrified: I need to think about breathing slowly and deeply.

In order to calm my nerves, I head over to my new author website, susankatzmiller.com, to read the responses to Being Both from early readers. I am deeply humbled by these words: “an inspiring and gorgeous testament to the power of love,” (Reza Aslan, author of No god but God), “it may help you live more courageously” (Rabbi Rami Shapiro, author of The Sacred Art of Lovingkindness), “a must read” (Sheila Gordon, President of the Interfaith Community), “engaging, comprehensive, nourishing” (Mary Heléne Rosenbaum, co-author of Celebrating Our Differences) and “a singular contribution to the future of religion in America” (Joanna Brooks, author of The Book of Mormon Girl). I am so grateful to these readers for their willingness to spend time thinking about Being Both.

I also want to take this opportunity to thank the wise advisors who read complete early versions of the manuscript, including Marika Partridge, Rabbi Harold White, Reverend Julia Jarvis and Reverend Ellen Jennings. And for support and fierce editing through the many earlier years of book gestation, I must thank my writing group, the Calliopes, including Colleen Cordes, Christine Intagliata, Robyn Jackson, Mandy Katz, Diane MacEachern, Susan Fishman Orlins and Karen Paul-Stern.

Starting on publication day (October 22 2013), I plan to spend much of the next year traveling and speaking, reading from the book and listening to your interfaith questions and stories. If you are interested in hosting an event, scheduling an interview, or reviewing the book, please contact publicist Travis Dagenais at Beacon Press, at tdagenais@beacon.org. After living for so long in this online interfaith community, I cannot wait to meet as many of you as possible, to continue our interfaith discussions in person, and to celebrate the birth of this book together.

An Interfaith Celebration of Grandparents

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When interfaith couples choose to celebrate both family religions, both sets of grandparents can freely share religious traditions with their grandchildren. Nevertheless, grandparents may not understand, at first, the new concept of an interfaith families community. They may worry about whether their religion is being honored and respected, and whether their grandchildren are getting adequate religious education.

So on Grandparents Day, we invite them to see for themselves: to come and experience our interfaith Gathering, and then go with their grandchildren to interfaith Sunday school, or meet in a group with the rabbi and minister to ask questions about the program.

Of course, grandparents are welcome in our community at any time—anyone is welcome at any time. And we have many grandparents who have become regular visitors, or even community members. My interfaith parents love visiting when they are in town. We have at least one interfaith couple who are senior citizens who intermarried later in life, and chose our community as their own. Meanwhile, some of our original members now have grown children, and are becoming grandparents themselves. But also, we have young interfaith couples who have brought along parents who became members.

For instance, we have a Moroccan-born Jewish grandfather who plays doumbek (a Middle-Eastern hand drum) in our house band at each Gathering. I love that his interfaith grandchildren get to see him there each week, and that he adds to the joy for all of us with his drumming.

On the most recent Grandparents Day, Jewish grandparents visiting for the first time may have felt reassured when we began our service with the familiar song “Hine Ma Tov” (“how good it is for people to dwell together in harmony”).  We said the central Jewish prayers: the Shema and the V’ahavta. We sang the Hamotzi (the blessing over bread) in Hebrew and English. And the three and four-year-olds got up to sing a good morning and good night song, showing off the fact that they are learning some conversational Hebrew.

Jewish grandparents, and Christian ones too, were probably also glad to hear our rabbi, lively at 81, reflect on the wisdom that comes with age, and to hear the specific words of wisdom he chose from each of the five books of the Torah.

The Christian grandparents may have felt reassured when we began our Gathering by passing the peace (a Christian tradition of greeting those sitting near you), and that we sang the Shaker song “Simple Gifts.” We also said the Kindness Prayer from the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, and the Lord’s Prayer.  A Jewish community member, a young mother with a toddler in her arms, got up to read from the Gospel of Luke. And since the theme of this gathering was “The Treasure of Wisdom,” we also sang along with the band to “Let it Be” by The Beatles. (The song feels Christian for many, since it refers to “mother Mary,” although Paul McCartney has said that it refers to his own mother, named Mary.)

At this Gathering, many of us felt moved as we realized once again that we can do this. We can share our traditions with each other, and we can feel sustained by a partner’s rituals, or a son-in-law’s rituals, even if our theologies and cultures differ. At times, as we sing or clasp hands, we will experience an endorphin rush of pleasure–a specific and electric form of spirituality we experience as interfaith families. And grandparents, and siblings, and friends, can share this pleasure with us.

Boston, and the Power of Interfaith Services

I’m a Bostonian. My first memories are of chasing pigeons and ducks in the Public Garden, and dropping coins to an organ-grinder from the balcony of our apartment on Charles Street. The Red Sox are my team. I do not follow any other team, or for that matter, any other sport.

Boston is world-famous. Watertown, on the other hand, was a quiet, working-class suburb, at least until this week. Yet Watertown also plays a central role in my family history. My father, a chemical engineer, worked his entire career for a water treatment company in Watertown. For my first summer job, I rose before dawn with him every morning, and ate breakfast at a diner in Watertown alongside contractors, plumbers and electricians. At the plant, I worked alongside local Armenian-Americans and Portuguese-Americans. At lunchtime, I would go out to explore the nearby shops in search of lahmejune, the addictive Armenian flatbread pizzas.

So last week, with the rest of the world, I watched coverage of the bombing of the Marathon, and then the gun battle, and then the Watertown manhunt, in a state of shock. It was surreal to see so much media attention trained on the humble and familiar streets of Watertown.

But even before the drama of the chase and capture of the second suspect, the residents of Boston, and people across the country, were organizing interfaith services and vigils in churches and temples. I cannot help myself: I see the world through an interfaith lens. And what struck me in the wake of the tragedy in Newtown, and in Boston, is that we crave connection across the lines of religion, in the form of interfaith services. Our primal urge in times of crisis is to reaffirm our shared humanity, our ability to see beyond our differences, our desire to join hands across religious boundaries.

Twenty years ago, these services might have been ecumenical or interdenominational–interchurch rather than interfaith–still embedded in the subtext of a Christian America. Now, we reach out to the growing Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist populations. The tent continues to expand: when the secular humanists felt excluded this week, they spoke out, wanting to grieve with the rest of the Boston community.

We do not need to share a conception of God in order to comfort each other. No matter our religious beliefs or lack thereof, we can still pause to sing together, meditate together, hug each other.

I write as someone who chooses to live fulltime in this “interfaith space.” Interfaith families raising children with dual-faith education experience the benefits of interfaith celebration and contemplation and mourning–the synergy, the joy, the healing of reflecting together as an interfaith community–week in and week out. And as we model interfaith love, and radical inclusivity, we hope to play some small part in preventing intolerance, alienation and violence in the world.

‘Til Faith Do Us Part: Book Review

The world needs many more books documenting interfaith marriage and interfaith children in the 21st century. However, Til Faith Do Us Part by Naomi Schaefer Riley takes a strangely pessimistic stance. And I don’t believe this gloom and doom is supported by the author’s own data. A few years ago, Riley wrote a piece warning against interfaith marriage in the Washington Post, and was met with strong critiques. Her work is funded by various conservative organizations and foundations. Quoting conservative Jewish, Christian and Muslim sources, Riley seems to be trying to dissuade people from intermarrying, despite the fact that she herself married a man raised as a Jehovah’s Witness.

How might conservative funding affect Riley’s perspective and conclusions? She states that interfaith couples are ignoring the challenges of intermarriage because of “our obsession with tolerance at all costs.” She claims that her survey shows that interfaith marriages are “generally more unhappy” and “often more unstable.” She then goes on to state that she would be “sorry if too many people entered into marriages that were unhappy or unstable.” But I found her statistics unconvincing, and her personal experience relevant.

Riley admits to feeling “lonely” attending Jewish services without her husband. Indeed, it can be difficult when a spouse does not participate in religious activities. It can also be difficult, as Riley documents, for an interfaith spouse who promised to give up their own religion and later regrets it. Both of these situations can be solved in an interfaith families community that encourages the celebration of both religions. Riley acknowledges this solution, while implying (incorrectly, I believe) that such dual-faith pathways are necessarily superficial or excessively difficult.

More importantly, I don’t believe Riley’s own statistics support her anti-intermarriage conclusions. She found “no discernible difference” in divorce between intermarried and same-faith marriages among Christians overall. She did find that evangelical Christians, specifically, were more likely to divorce if intermarried–an effect I attribute to the overlap between evangelical and fundamentalist views, rather than the risks of interfaith marriage. Those who believe the Bible is literal truth will find it hard to be married to those who believe otherwise.

Riley also found more divorce among intermarried Jews, but because her sample was so small she admits the finding is “tenuous.” To bolster her claim, she goes back to Evelyn Lehrer’s 1993 study of stability in interfaith marriages. Given the dramatic recent shifts in attitudes towards marriage (whether interfaith or gay), I am not compelled by statistics from an era twenty years ago when Jewish families were still commonly disowning children for intermarrying.

In terms of marital satisfaction, again, Riley found that the evangelical Christians were most unhappy in interfaith marriages. Those with a creed centered around being “born again” and saved may find it difficult to be married to anyone who thinks otherwise. No surprise there. The surprise, for me, was that Riley found that Jews actually reported being happier in interfaith marriages than in same-faith marriages, though the difference was not statistically significant. Or, maybe I’m not surprised, given the rarity of divorce in our interfaith families community.

Riley states that “those who marry outside their faith tend to take religion less seriously or lose their faith entirely.” In my own research on interfaith families communities, I found the opposite effect. For instance, many a Christian spouse has testified to the fact that their Jewish spouse is far more engaged with Judaism after intermarrying.

While Riley’s profiles of interfaith couples are a contribution to the literature, I found myself simply disagreeing with many of her conclusions. She writes that the “cultural pressures of pluralism” are “pushing people toward interfaith marriage.” Based on my experience and my research, my observation is that interfaith marriage is still something we choose in spite of cultural pressures, not because of them.

In her conclusion, Riley writes, “There is nothing about having diverse perspectives in a marriage that will make it inherently better–in fact, it may be less likely to succeed in the long run.” I don’t believe Riley’s own statistics support that statement. My own experience, and my research on interfaith families who chose both religions, brings me to the opposite conclusion. Diverse religious perspectives can lead to deeper questioning, deeper communication, deeper empathy, deeper bonds. And happy interfaith families.

My Easter with Christians, Jews and Muslims

We celebrated Easter this year with our community of Christian and Jewish interfaith families. Our minister started off by pointing out that Easter is not in the Bible, and that our holiday traditions make reference to ancient goddesses, and the fertility rites of spring. She then gathered the children together and talked to them about the Buddhist metaphor of a cup of tea representing the comforting memories of life after the tea bag (or body) is gone. She’s not your typical minister.

Next, our rabbi gave an adult sermon about the themes of intimacy, transcendence and unity in the story of the resurrection of Jesus. Somehow, the idea of life beyond death, of renewal and regeneration, seemed completely universal to me as he spoke. As a Jew, I do not feel I need to believe in a messiah or a personal savior in order to celebrate these Easter messages. Our rabbi spent his career at Georgetown, knows his gospels, and has been called a “closet Catholic” by Catholic friends. And yet, he’s an erudite, dedicated and deeply spiritual Jew. He’s not your typical rabbi.

In addition to the Lord of the Dance and older traditional Easter hymns, we sang Bob Marley’s One Love. Then, we had a pancake breakfast that included matzoh brie (matzoh fried in eggs) for those of us who aren’t eating leavening until the end of Passover. This type of radical culinary inclusion is the norm in an interfaith families community. And it is part of what makes this community so comfortable, and so precious, for me.

After our Easter morning with Christians and Jews, I made a quick change out of my pastel dress and Easter bonnet and into a bold print Senegalese outfit, in order to join a community of Catholics and Muslims for our second Easter event of the day, a gathering of the local Catholic Senegalese association. We had the great fortune to be invited to this event by two Senegalese-American friends, one Catholic and one Muslim, who are cousins from an interfaith family, and who know that my husband and I crave Senegalese food and company ever since our years in Dakar. Intermarriage between Muslims and Catholics is not uncommon in Senegal. In fact, both of the Muslim Presidents of Senegal I interviewed as a journalist (Abdou Diouf and Abdoulaye Wade) had Catholic wives.

What struck me at this Easter feast, and touched me deeply, was the way the Catholics made sure to accommodate the dietary restrictions of Muslim family members and friends. All of the main dishes featured mutton or chicken, rather than ham, and the one dish with pork in it was carefully labelled. Our Muslim friend reminded us how people of all religions in Senegal share another local culinary tradition on Good Friday: ngalax, a dessert made from peanut butter, vanilla, sugar, and the fruit of the baobab tree, served with raisins over millet couscous. Typically, Catholics make the dish on Good Friday and deliver it to neighbors, friends and family of all religions, just as Muslims in Senegal share the mutton from the Tabaski (or Eid al-Adha) feast with neighbors of all religions.

I often use the Passover dish of charoset as a metaphor for my interfaith family: a mix of nuts, fruits, spices and wine, with flavors melding over time. Now I have a sweet new metaphor: the nuts and fruits and grain of ngalax, bonding interfaith families, neighborhoods, and countries.

Interfaith Marriage in America: Past and Future

In case you missed it, here’s my most recent Huffington Post column…

Many books have characterized interfaith marriage as a challenge, a risk, a threat, or worse. Georgetown University’s Erika B. Seamon bring a new perspective to the topic in her recent book Interfaith Marriage in America: The Transformation of Religion and Christianity, part of a series entitled “Christianities of the World.” This important academic work chronicles the history of intermarriage, and the effects of contemporary interfaith marriages on religious institutions, when viewed through a Christian lens.

“Christians have been marrying non-Christians all over the globe for centuries,” Seamon writes. Of course, historically, it is not only Jews who objected to intermarriage: under Constantine in the fourth century, those who intermarried faced the death penalty. In medieval times, Christians were not allowed to dine with Jews, let alone marry them. And in 1222, an English deacon who converted in order to marry a Jewish woman was burned at the stake.

Seamon goes on to describe how Protestant reformers including Martin Luther and John Calvin helped to pave the way for greater acceptance. Luther said of intermarriage, “Pay no attention to the precepts of those fools who forbid it. You will find plenty of Christians—and indeed the greater part of them—who are worse in their secret unbelief than any Jew, heathen, Turk, or heretic.”  As Seamon notes, “Luther did not just open the door to religious intermarriage; it is as if he came blazing right through the door with all his might.” She goes on to describe the resistance to interfaith marriage by both Jewish and Catholic religious leaders in the immigrant communities of America in the 19th and 20th centuries.

In order to explore contemporary interfaith marriage, Seamon draws on interviews with 40 intermarried people, conducted by a team of Georgetown students. (I should note that one of the couples belongs to my interfaith families community, IFFP.) The couples, she notes, describe how their marriages were “greatly enhanced not in spite of, but because of their religious differences.” From a Christian perspective, Seamon describes how, although they may not necessarily get married in the church or always baptize their children, “aspects of Christianity remain vital” to these families.

Seamon points out that theologians and religious authorities have sometimes inappropriately “projected secular identity” onto interfaith families. At the same time, they have disparaged what they saw as “syncretism” or reductive religious blending in these families. Instead, Seamon describes interfaith couples as “complex,” and as using “legal, theological and social freedom to creatively reformulate the role of religion in their lives.”

Seamon concludes that interfaith families are changing the religious landscape, creating what she calls the Interfaith Space. In short, she has discovered the world in which many interfaith families live, the world I chronicle in my blog and upcoming book. It is encouraging to note that this year, for the first time, the American Academy of Religion will have a Group at their national conference devoted to Interreligious and Interfaith Studies. Building on Seamon’s work, I hope that academia will continue to explore the intersection of interfaith families, religious pluralism, and interfaith dialogue.

“Interfaith marriages are the material representations of the shifting boundaries among religions and between religious and secular space,” Seamon writes. She concludes that scholars of Christianity can no longer ignore those of us living in this Interfaith Space. I would add that Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Pagan and other religious scholars will find this book equally illuminating, and even essential.