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What a Spider Taught Me About Fear, Faith and Love

What a Spider Taught Me About Fear, Faith and Love

This article was written by Rev. Aurelia Davila Pratt ,
Pastor of Spiritual Formation at Grace Baptist Church in Round Rock

 

Rev Aurelia Davila PrattThere was a spider at the bottom of the pool. I was already sifting the leaves out with the pool net so I went ahead and caught the spider too. It was big; it made my skin crawl! I carefully lifted the net out of the water and set it on the concrete. Then, I garnered my courage and with one flip-flop in hand, “splat”! The spider was no more. Finally, I could swim in peace. When my cousin came out to join me, I relayed the spider saga to her, insisting, “I had to kill it. It scared me!”

The words were spoken casually, but as soon as I said them, they sunk in deep. Because that’s what we do, isn’t it? When something scares us, we want it gone. If it doesn’t fit with our understanding of reality, we see only threat. And instead of exploring why we are afraid or if fear is the appropriate response, we simply react.

When I first began coordinating our church’s interfaith conversations, I did it because I thought it would be a good learning experience for our congregation and a good way to connect with people in the community. It would be a time to ask real questions, a safe space to have potentially hard, controversial discussions. I saw these conversations as a pathway to greater unity, even if uniformity was out of the question.

Along the way, I discovered that what we were doing was novel, but why? Why does the concept of a Baptist Church regularly hosting interfaith dialogues seem original? Why is it newsworthy that a group of people who hold fundamentally different core beliefs choose to meet together to find common ground? Perhaps it is because these occurrences are rare. Perhaps ordinarily we don’t make an effort to understand one other. Instead, we keep our distance; we react when anything unknown or uncomfortable dares to threaten our paradigm.

But our church is different; at least we try to be. At Grace, we value asking hard questions and thinking hard thoughts. We cherish and protect the fact that our community does not always have to agree. And when we say we are called to love ALL people, we mean it, even though we know how hard this call can be. We pushed past our fears; we pushed past our discomfort; we pushed past our innate tendency to stereotype. We kept these important conversations going all year. And here is what I learned:

I learned that when a theoretical idea becomes an actual person with a name, a face and a story, I am much less likely to feel threatened or react out of fear.

I learned that because I am a Christian in a predominantly Christian country, I haven’t had to explain why I believe what I believe all that much. And I recognized how patronizing I have been toward people of other religions as a result of my own privilege.

I learned that while I knew very little about other religions, my interfaith friends often had an impressive understanding of Christianity, the Bible and other traditions.

I learned my own faith could be richer, because the more I learned about other religions and faith perspectives, the more deeply I was challenged to consider my own.

In May, as we wrapped up our first year of interfaith conversations, we invited all of our guests back for a reception and panel. As I looked around the room, I saw representatives from various faith traditions ranging from Christianity to Baha’i to Buddhism to Judaism. My heart swelled with the realization that all our faiths were deeper simply by knowing each other; simply by knowing that we were actively being a part of not letting fear win.

Perhaps this is when I realized that the differing core beliefs often keeping us from interacting or attempting to understand one another in the first place really aren’t that different after all. In fact, most of the time we are more alike than we are different. And we don’t have to agree in order to love each other.

We don’t have to agree in order to love each other. Let’s use this realization to make the world a better place, starting now, together.