Agents of Opening

[Taken from a December 8th reflection by Nicholas Hayes for the Episcopal Chaplaincy newsletter]


These last two months I have been hard at work building a leadership team for Hope in Action at Harvard, the faith-based environmental and social justice campaign I am organizing on campus through the Chaplaincy as its Justice Minister. The work reached a new high point this past weekend, when six students and one Cambridge community member joined me to receive intensive training in leadership and community organizing from Leading Change, Marshall Ganz's community organizing training group at the Kennedy School. Over one and a half very intensive days, we formed a shared purpose, divided our roles, and began the difficult work of strategically planning a spring campaign, centered on interfaith coalition building for green justice in Cambridge.

Most meaningfully, however, we engaged in the work of sharing stories with each other, stories of why each of us was called to this work. Our stories had several common strands, but as I listened to them, what I heard emerging most clearly from all of my leadership team members was a desire--perhaps a vocation--to be agents of opening. We were a diverse group--from Episcopal, Catholic, Methodist, Pentecostal, Evangelical, and Humanist backgrounds--but all present came to the table holding a story of deep frustration with the religious--or in one case, atheist--communities they'd found around them (or found themselves within) earlier in life. And everyone's frustration had a common root: it was frustration at the way in which so often faith communities close themselves--even define themselves by closing themselves--to those outside their boundaries, to their Other. Whether it was the story of a church preaching the Christian gospel while closing its doors to the community of discomfortingly poor workers nearby, or the story a humanist community affirming to its members that they could be "Good without God" while denying the possibility that others could be "Good with God," each one of us had shared in an experience of painful awakening to our own community's self-enclosure. I call it awakening, because it was that experience which ultimately brought each of us to a table together, hoping to bear witness to a different kind of community, hoping to cross those boundaries deliberately left uncrossed by others with open minds, open hearts, open arms--hoping to be agents of opening,

I believe what we named in our common story that Saturday was not only our vocation, but the larger vocation of Christ's Church. What was Christ if not a profoundly boundary-crossing agent of opening? I pray that our work this coming semester will lead us further down this path, and shed more light for us and others on what still unbroken walls Christ's followers might yet be called to break open.

Though these words were written almost three months ago, the sense of call I articulated in them for the first time has only since grown.--Nicholas