by Sr Celia Deutsch
I live in Brooklyn, a borough of New York City. This city has a population of nearly 9 million people, one million of whom are Jews making New York City the largest Jewish community in the world. It is also home to one million Muslims. 40% of the city’s people are immigrants, approximately 1 million of whom are without documents.
The challenges are enormous, and the richness and possibility even greater!
I live in a neighborhood in which the dominant Christian group is Catholics from Mexico and Central America as well as Haiti and the British West Indies. There are many Muslims from South Asia, Central Asia and the Mediterranean, and there is a large Jewish community, most of whom were born in the U.S. The liturgy in my parish is celebrated in Spanish, Haitian Kreyol and English. The challenges are enormous, and the richness and possibility even greater! U.S. born Anglos learn to celebrate the beauty of the festival of Our Lady of Guadalupe!
That is my context. What is my ministry? I do not have a single ministry. Rather, I have several ministerial commitments. All are about relationship – relationship with God in Jesus, relationship with God’s Word, with the Jewish people and all the other people who inhabit my world.
My interfaith ministry includes a variety of commitments nationally and internationally. Locally, I am co-coordinator of the Interfaith Coalition of Brooklyn, which includes my parish, and Episcopalian (Anglican) parish, a Muslim community, and two synagogues (one, Conservative, the other Reform). We are engaged in a variety of activities: learning sessions, social justice projects, and worship. The Christians and Muslims in the coalition are, for the most part, immigrants or the children of immigrants. Some of our activities are similar to interfaith activities all over the world: we learn about one another’s traditions and study texts often around a common theme. Sometimes we hold choir concerts and enjoy one another’s music. We also come together for museum visits or we visit the Botanical Gardens together. Two yearly events have a particularly American “flavor”: our annual Thanksgiving prayer service brings us together in prayer the Sunday before this country’s most important holiday. And our July 4 picnic gathers us for relaxation and good food in celebration of Independence Day. These activities are opportunities for Christians, Muslims and Jews to come together, crossing boundaries of religion, culture and language to be together, work together, and build community in this vast city, in a country that is polarized and divided.
Crossing boundaries of religion, culture and language to be together, work together, and build community.
The present government has enacted harsh measures against undocumented immigrants. Our Interfaith Coalition recently held a training session to inform people who have documents how to help and support our neighbors who are vulnerable. As one of the rabbis said, “This is the interfaith community,” emphasizing the commitment to solidarity in this time of crisis. Those of us participating in the session came away with ideas of practical ways in which to organize if government anti-immigrant activity intensifies in our area of New York City.
In addition to my work in Jewish-Christian and interfaith relations, I am engaged in a ministry of scholarship. I am working with Barbara Reid, a Dominican sister, on a commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, which is part of a feminist commentary series. I also give lectures, in person and on zoom and I participate in the monthly faculty seminar on the New Testament at Columbia University. This work is also a matter of relationships. First of all, it is focused on the Word of God, as that Word is revealed in Christian and Jewish traditions. It is a living Word that I discover even in the midst of the seemingly unconnected tasks of looking up Greek verbs, or consulting the published work of other scholars. Even the difficult and boring (!) tasks are “places” of encounter with the Word.
Scholarly work is also about relationships with other people committed to this study. There are the people whom I meet or consult; our conversations enliven my work, often challenging me to open my mind and heart to new ways of receiving the Word. The work is a place of interfaith encounter with Jews, Christians, and people of no religious affiliation. My scholarly work is also intercultural because the people with whom I engage as well as the other scholarly resources I use, come from a wide range of cultures and ethnicities. That richness brings new insights and shapes the ways in which I do my own work.
A source of hope in a very difficult and complicated period.
Finally, I accompany people of all ages who simply want to talk about their lives, their struggles and hopes. This is sometimes about vocational discernment, but often it is broader. This is a privilege for me, allowing me to walk with people who bear witness to God’s presence in their lives. I am always moved by their goodness. This ministry of presence and accompaniment is a source of hope in a very difficult and complicated period of U.S. and global history. People’s shared struggles, their search for meaning, for work, for housing, their desire to build community in a polarized and divided country – all of this inspires me, humbles me and challenges me to greater fidelity to my vocation as a Sister of Sion.