Composing a Further Life

Muslims and Jews did this. It was wonderful.”
    Again and again, Jim emphasized to me that
interfaith
did not mean arriving at uniformity or even at a common denominator, that it meant finding ways to work together without blurring the differences and ongoing loyalties. More recently, I find myself preferring the word
distinctiveness
, to emphasize both difference and uniqueness combining in what makes a tradition irreplaceable.
    Jim’s twenty-five years at the cathedral expressed the holistic understanding that had developed through his childhood and earlier career, as architecture and performance, faith and social activism were braided together and matched to his concept of what a cathedral should and could be—much like what a life could and should be. Not an easy job to leave. Since his retirement, Jim has created a new institution, the New York Interfaith Center, that expresses one of the many themes of his lifework, the possibility that collaborative programs for the different faith communities in the city would both serve their needs and build trust and mutual recognition. Instead of leaving his work, he scaled down, focused in on the element that seemed to him most important among many, something he was uniquely able to do. Having gotten it established, he has now found an executive director for the center and has a modest office to one side, continuing as a member of the board as he works on his memoirs. On Sundays, Jim goes to an Episcopal church where he feels at home in the congregation, no longer onstage, and is careful to keep a tactful distance from the cathedral and from diocesan headquarters.
    The Interfaith Center is not primarily a place where the leaders of the city’s different faiths gather to debate theology. Rather it is a place where they gather sometimes to worship and sometimes to learn how to deal with the practical urban problems and challenges faced by their communities—the public school system, the health care system, the courts. The center has struggled to find a sustainable location. Most of its programs are fairly small, without a lot of newspaper headlines, but they are designed to have significant multiplier effects as the leaders of different religious communities are provided with the tools to guide and support their members in solving the problems of life in a new country. In a small way, but only a few miles from the United Nations buildings on the East River, the center is testing whether the global communities of Christianity and Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism can work together to address the problems of poverty, war, and environmental degradation, and the crises of epidemics and climatic disaster.
    The Episcopal Church, like the other liturgical forms of Christianity, affirms that God touches human lives through the things of everyday life—bread, wine, water, oil, the material signs of the sacraments. Throughout his life Jim has been drawing out the meaning of material things given and shared to meet human needs and shaped into works of art. A very practical guy, this right reverend, not someone who believes that the “things of the spirit” should be separated from the concrete needs of daily life but someone who recognizes the sacred in both the curvature of a shell and the offering of a meal or a place to sleep. Moving from a “big place” to a little place, he continues to serve a holistic vision, using the experience and dedication of a lifetime to create a new model for mutual caring.

CHAPTER VII
Pleasure and Responsibility

    W HEN I AM INTERVIEWING PEOPLE about their lives, I don’t follow a set sequence or questionnaire. Most people seem to have an established pattern for thinking about their own histories, and these personal patterns tell me more than a chronology of dates and places, so instead of imposing a framework (which might be helpful in making comparisons), I let people frame their own narratives around the implicit plots or through lines that represent their theory of what the story is really about, what in fact their life has been about, a central passion or a recurrent challenge that acts as a landmark as they move from stage to stage. For some it is achievement, for others it may be victimization, while for others still it is continuing discovery and learning. Some connect the eras of their lives to demonstrate continuity, while others remember a series of interruptions and discontinuities.
    Back when I first conceived of this book, I felt