“Religious Listening is Important”
    by the Rev. Dennis McCarty
	I spent five years studying for Unitarian Universalist ministry, but my most important learning came outside the classroom. I served for fifteen months as a hospital chaplain,  three months at a hospital in Salt Lake City, Utah, and a year’s residency at a hospital outside Chicago.
	I grew a lot in both places. I became a daily witness to life’s greatest trials, tragedies and triumphs:
people injured in car accidents, suffering from cancer, women having miscarriages, frail and elderly people at the end of life’s journey. Some died and I helped console grieving families. Others recovered and I was there to witness and applaud their victory.
	My own sense of faith grew and deepened even more because of constant discussions with people who had beliefs different from mine. My supervisors had told me, a chaplain’s job wasn’t to try to convert someone else to my belief. Rather, it was to help each person search for what their experience meant within their own religious framework.
	A Pentecostal Christian, a Jew, a Buddhist, a Disciple of Christ Christian--each one might see different religious meaning in suffering, impending death, or recovery. My task was to help them reflect, to help them make some sense of what it all meant in their own faith journeys. 
	That wasn’t easy. I didn’t always agree with them.
Sometimes it made me uncomfortable. I didn’t realize until later that being uncomfortable was good for me.
It helped me grow. When you stop to think about it, making people uncomfortable was what got Jesus crucified. 
	At Lutheran General Hospital, I was the only Unitarian Universalist on the staff. Sometimes it was hard to discuss my faith with our staff rabbi or the Catholic priests who served the hospital. My fellow residents included chaplains of the Episcopal, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Methodist, and Jewish faiths.
Sometimes our conversations got intense. Sometimes we argued.
	Challenged that way, I had to take time to go back and examine my own beliefs--and disbeliefs. What really mattered to me? What did I really believe? If I was skeptical where someone else believed strongly, how could I express that in a respectful way? How could I honor their faith while remaining true to my own?
	These are difficult questions. But in a world that grows smaller every day, they’re also important questions. There’s too much war and killing over religion in the world. We’ll never be able to cure this sickness of killing, as long as people insist that everyone else has to share their particular belief. What’s more, I suggest that until each of us puts some work into understanding the faiths of others, we don’t really even understand our own.
	Because of this, our own Interfaith Forum Columbus
(IFFC) is a crucial local religious organization.
There’s no higher religious calling, than the work they do to help different religious traditions listen to one another and understand one another.
	The Interfaith Forum is made up of local people of
faith: Methodist, Catholic, Presbyterian, Unitarian Universalist, Hindu, Hebrew, Islam, Buddhist. Anyone can attend meetings the third Tuesday evening of each month, on the top floor of city hall. 
	I blushingly have to confess, I don’t make it to many meetings. Working a minister’s schedule, I don’t even make it to all of my own church’s meetings. But when I do get to join in, I learn new and useful things. Not unlike the discussions I used to have with my fellow hospital chaplains.
	The Interfaith Forum also sponsors an interfaith prayer service the third Sunday afternoon of each month. Each month, a different faith tradition presents the service: Christian, Hindu, Lakota Sioux, Islam, Baha’i. These different expressions of faith don’t all “do church” the same way I would as a minister. But that isn’t the point. The point isn’t to agree or to be the same, it’s to listen to one another. To try to understand and respect one another, even in areas where we don’t agree.
	It seems to me, it’s the easiest thing in the world to preach our own faith, to tell someone else what we believe and how important it is, and how it makes “us”
“better.” It’s easy, but it’s not useful. We’ve been doing it for thousands of years and it hasn’t made the world a better place.
	It’s much harder to listen to someone else’s belief, and to try to respect, accept, and understand. That’s tough work. Sometimes it’s just plain uncomfortable work. But as long as we find excuses not to do it, we’ll continue to have a world where people kill one
another and claim it was God’s idea.     

The Reverend Dennis McCarty is a Unitarian Universalist minister living in Columbus. His opinions are his own, and not necessarily shared by members of his church. He can be reached by e-mail at columnists@therepublic.com