A welcome within

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The articles above are published in the May 2009 issue of Living City.

Overcoming prejudice and fear

When I was a small child, a relative took me to downtown Chicago. I was still little, because I remember holding her hand. A man was coming towards us down the sidewalk, and I looked up to smile at him. I remember him tipping his hat and, just as we had passed by, my relative slapped the side of my face. I don’t recall the words she used, but I remember the idea was that “we do not smile at them.” I was utterly shocked. It was the first time that I understood an adult could be wrong. What she was trying to tell me didn’t fit into my head. It was like trying to put a square peg in a round hole.

This clarity seemed to well up inside me, but it wasn’t until I was in graduate school, when I was on the receiving end of prejudice, that I experienced a beautiful confirmation of that innate solidarity I had experienced since childhood.

I was studying journalism in a school near Chicago. One of my projects was to analyze the media’s coverage of the issue of abortion and to determine how objective the media had been in presenting it to the public.

After reading the results of my study, which proved that the media had indeed been one-sided in its coverage, my professor called me in. He suggested in no uncertain terms that my religion (Catholicism) had perhaps influenced my objectivity toward the issue and that, therefore, the results of my study were skewed. He informed me that I would be receiving a C for the class, which meant, because it was graduate school, that I would fail the program.

I left the room feeling sick. It was the first time I had experienced prejudice because of my religion. I didn’t know how to proceed and went downstairs to the pressroom. A friend of mine came over and sat down. I remember looking at his hands, resting on his knees, when I asked him, “Mike, what is the cause of prejudice?”

Only then, looking at his skin, did I realize I was asking one who had probably known full well the receiving end of prejudice. His answer confirmed it. He said simply and immediately: “Fear.”

His explanation was one I never forgot. It pushed me always forward to break down the barriers of fear when I could, but I was always left with an overwhelming sadness, because I felt that everybody had to be in on this freedom, this sense of oneness with each other.

And that is what I experienced in Washington, D.C. in November 2000 at the Faith Communities Together event with thousands of Christians and Muslims. I felt it was a moment when God reached down and gave us, in the persons of Chiara Lubich and Imam W. D. Mohammed, a true helping hand. I felt that the divine was palpable that day and that, as someone said, “Nothing can stop this now, because it is from God.”

I remember at the close of that historic day, we slowly left the Washington Convention Center and, even in the parking garage, continued to meet up with people who had experienced that moment, that sense that nothing could stop us, because God was linking us.

Almost nine years have passed since that date. The grace of that moment has surfaced time and again in all sorts of gatherings — dinners, prayer events, birthdays and graduations.

Once some of us asked Imam Omar Shakir, resident imam of Masjid Bilal, a mosque in San Antonio, how he viewed his relationship with the Focolare over these many years. The imam turned to look at us and said with warmth in his voice, “Oh, with others we have pictures taken, and we take pictures. With the Focolare, with you, we come into one another’s homes.” He caught in words what is our mutual experience: the inner welcoming of a brother or sister because we are really one.

Mary Adams lives in San Antonio.