Resonance

Some friends of mine from here in South Bend attended the 2014 Unitarian Universalist General Assembly in Louisville, Kentucky, and found themselves listening to Eboo Patel, a Muslim from India, tell this story about an experience he had at a Catholic University in South Bend, Indiana. 

That's an important phrase in my life. Look for the resonances. It was actually formative in my own development as an interfaith leader. It's something that my father told me when I was really just a boy. My family is in this country because a Catholic University in Indiana, Notre Dame, allowed a somewhat wayward Indian Muslim student into their MBA program in the mid-1970s. That man would be my father.

And in his three years in South Bend, Indiana, he developed a fierce devotion to Fighting Irish football, and did enough work to skate by in that MBA program. And when I was a kid, he would take me on I-90 out of Chicago to South bend to Fighting Irish football games on Saturday afternoons. And our first stop would always be The Grotto. The Grotto was the shrine to the Virgin Mary at that university established by French Catholics 175 years ago. 

And my dad, who was not a particularly prayerful person, would stand in front of that shrine, and he would kind of rock back and forth, sometimes light a candle and put it in there. And I kind of like, dutifully followed along when I was seven, eight, nine years old. By the time I was 10 or 11, I finally got up the gumption to ask my dad a question. I was like, hey Dad, aren't we Muslim? What the hell are we doing? 

And my dad points inside this cove with all of these flickering candles and he says, remember that the Koran says that God is like light upon light. And he put his hand on my shoulder and he said, always look for the resonances. Always look for the resonances. 

This story sparked my interest In Patel's book Sacred Ground.  I read much of it on my seven-hour plane ride.  More about the book later.