The Conversation Within

How can we encourage diverse Asian/Indian-American women to take part in dialogue? Many women hesitate to speak up because critical perspectives are often treated as defamation; questioning and criticism are often treated as attacks. How can we get better at dialogue?

I hope to get this question answered, or at least addressed, next Wednesday by Tina Tchen, Executive Director, White House Council on Women and Girls, Deputy Assistant to the President and Director of the Office of Public Engagement at the White House . Headwaters/Delta has been invited by our team at Hindu American Seva Charities to take part in this call about Asian/Indian-American women in the United States. I’m inviting you to join us.

I’m interested in the answer to my question both from an interfaith and personal perspective. As a Hindu-American woman there are things about my culture (both the Hindu and the American parts) that I find empowering, as I wrote about in the Washington Post, and other things that I really struggle with. I’m often surprised to find myself engaged with inter/faith work, as I remain deeply skeptical about some aspects of religion and faith. My version of “being Hindu” is my own. Because of this, and despite my heritage and training, often when I am engaging with other Hindus, I do not feel I am Hindu enough. I am always striving for (and often failing to have) honest and productive dialogue within the Hindu religious tradition about my faith culture.

There are vast viewpoints within a religion: this is why I refer, not to my religion, but my faith culture. We each live in a faith culture influenced by a rich combination of things: religious, scriptural, cultural, national, ethnic, local and family traditions, philosophical, intellectual or scientific theories, our own experiences based on gender, sexual orientation, and so on. This illustrates something that makes educating the public about religion so challenging, and may be the most important point we can communicate in that education: the diversity of belief and practice within a religious faith are staggering. 

My friend and colleague Erik Schwarz, the Managing Partner at  Interfaith Works and Co-Director of the Institute for Faith and Service, once said that the “conversation within,” that is, the dialogue within a faith, can be far more challenging than dialogue between faiths. I agree. I also think it’s a difficult conversation, so we often avoid it or do it poorly.

The conversation within a faith is painful and challenging because it can feel like a battle for the identity of the faith itself, and by extension, our own identity. For example, this ongoing conversation about the controversial movie Sita Sings The Blues highlights many different ideas of what it means to practice Hinduism. It’s easy to think that different views are a dilution or distortion of one’s own views. Having our views critiqued is uncomfortable, and can feel threatening, like an attack. But, a different approach does not mean your approach is wrong. What initially feels like an attack on one’s faith culture can be viewed as an argument, a debate or simply a conversation. In reality, when we talk to those of our own religious tradition, we have, at times, attacked, argued, debated and conversed. We can consciously choose to take part in a conversation. We might learn something from it.

We all, as individuals and traditions, are made up of sometimes contradictory values, beliefs and actions. We don’t have to bring everything into agreement: tension is healthy and can fuel our passion and curiosity for life, but we do have to accept the contradictions, to respect that there are many questions to ask, and many answers to explore.

Within the Hindu American Seva team, we don’t all have the same definitions and experience of what it means to be “Hindu” or “American” or even what it means to do “seva.” How could we? And why would we want to? The most interesting, enlightening and productive conversations are when we discover and explore those differences together. Our work, in a way, is an exploration of these themes. And this work is already happening all over the country, in many different ways, as people strive to find their place, their voice and their identity. To discover, and through that process of discovery, continually create, what it means to be Hindu or Asian or American or just me.

So, if you are interested in taking part in the important and challenging dialogue, try it. Sign up to take part in this historic conference call. You might be surprised where it leads you, and what you find along the way. But when we say “everyone is welcome';” we mean it. Bring your questions: especially the difficult ones. Those are the ones we need the most.