Anna Lueck

In the fall of 2017, I began getting to know members of the Muslim community in South Burlington. That winter, I wrote a narrative journalism piece entitled "Forty Houses" about interfaith efforts between the Islamic Society of Vermont and their community. Later that spring, I made a short film about a few of the mothers I met in the mosque, interviewing them and their children about what it means to be a Muslim immigrant in one of the whitest, least religious states in the country. That film, "Our New Village," is viewable here. 

Forty Houses

In the most godless state in the nation, Muslims and their non-Muslim neighbors grapple with how best to support each other.

It is around eight pm on an icy Wednesday in Vermont and two parents are trying to convince their children to eat. Platters of rice, chicken, and fish fill the table, passing quickly between hands. Two of the three young children are arguing, as children do. But unlike in many sibling disputes, the subject here is not a stolen toy or a perceived slight.

“You forgot to say bismillah before eating,” accuses Eyad, seven years old and squirming.

“So did you,” replies his sister Taqwah. At nine, she is more reserved than her siblings; she sits up tall at the table, and smiles gently whenever the adults laugh.

“Did not. I haven’t eaten my food.”

“You looked at it.” Unable to rebuke his sister’s latest attack, Eyad slides off his chair and leaves the dinner table. Their younger sister Hidayah, four, smiles at me and smears yogurt on her face. Their father Sajid sighs and leans over to clean the mess.

Bismillah—Arabic for “in the name of God”—is both the first word of the Qur’an and an invocation said by Muslims like Sajid and his family before eating or drinking.  Much like grace, it is a reminder to thank God, to make the act of eating itself one of worship.  It is also a signifier that this family, though gathered around a dinner table and squabbling like many of their neighbors, confidently taking up space on a winding street of neat green-and-grey duplexes, is distinct from the primarily white, often Christian people that live next door. 

Their ease is hard-won and harder held on to. Sajid and his wife Alia moved from Pakistan in August 2016 after Sajid got a job at Champlain College, landing in the United States at the center of a pre-election political maelstrom. Friends and relatives warned them not to go, frightened by stories of people who looked like them being set on fire or shot in their driveways. Sajid’s sister, an American citizen living in Connecticut, told him of finding the local police at her door within hours of her moving in; a neighbor had reported them, claiming there were “Muslims making bombs” in the house. According to FBI reports, nationwide hate crimes against Muslim doubled between 2014 and the end of 2016. In 2016 alone, the number of hate groups specifically identifying as anti-Muslim nearly tripled; a quarter of all reported hate crimes were motivated by an anti-Islamic bias. In the year since President Trump’s inauguration, the president has retweeted anti-Muslim videos and made three attempts at banning travel from primarily Muslim-majority countries; his top advisors have called Islam “the most radical religion in the world” and “a malignant cancer.” In a July 2017 report, the Council on American-Islamic Relations called the previous year “the worst for anti-Muslim incidents” since the organization began documenting such events.

Yet when Sajid and Alia arrived at their South Burlington street, nervous but determined to make this place home, neighbors arrived one by one with gifts, food, toys, a stroller for the children, each saying “Welcome to Vermont.” One such neighbor, upon learning Eyad was bored at home without toys, immediately sped away in his pickup truck, drove to Toys-R-Us, and purchased a soccer ball. He justified the gift without fuss, saying only, “a boy shouldn’t be without a ball.”

In Islam, Sajid tells me, great importance is placed on duty to one’s neighbors, classified as the forty houses around one’s own. If a neighbor is hungry or sick, it is your duty to help him. “Usually, when you go to a new neighborhood, you’re supposed to try and be the first to go ask a neighbor, how are you doing,” says Sajid. “And in our case, the neighbors came and asked us first.”

Vermont is an odd choice of refuge for devoutly Muslim immigrants and refugees. At over 94% white, with only 22% of the population identifying as “highly religious”, and with towns spread far apart, accessible by roads often blanketed by snow, the Green Mountain State offers little in the way of an easy or welcoming transition. Yet refuge it is, and has been for decades. European and French-Canadian immigrants have been drawn to Vermont for centuries, finding work in the state’s bustling agricultural industry. In the past fifty years, particularly with the founding of the Vermont Refugee Resettlement Program in 1980, Vermont has also taken in refugees fleeing war and oppression in places as far-flung as Sudan, Congo, Guatemala, Chechnya, Vietnam, Romania, El Salvador, Bosnia, Iraq, and, most recently, Syria, for a total of approximately 4,000 resettled people in the past several decades. While much of the state’s Muslim community comes from these large-scale migrations—migrations of people seeking refuge without much say in where they ultimately find it—there has also been a steady movement of immigrants like Alia and Sajid, individual families drawn by new work prospects.

Of course, life in Vermont is not without its challenges. If Vermont’s “godlessness” proves difficult for Christians or Jews who wish to discuss their faith more freely, this difficulty is compounded for Muslims by a simple lack of infrastructure to support their specific needs. Finding halal food is particularly difficult: while there are a handful of halal grocers in the Burlington area, they are often understocked and pricey, and several families I spoke to describe driving as far as Montreal to buy halal meat. Alia and Sajid, who have not yet been granted Canadian visas, travel monthly to Connecticut for halal food, and have a small chest freezer to store each month’s goods. If they run out before the month is up, they are forced to cook without meat or eat at one of Burlington’s few halal restaurants. (It is difficult to find truly halal dishes at more mainstream eateries; as Sajid puts it, “You get so sick of cheese pizza.”)

Worse than this is the isolation brought by Vermont’s rural character. Several Muslim students I spoke to at Middlebury College, all of them international, mentioned the difficulty of keeping up with one’s faith without a mosque just down the street, and the shock of boarding a plane at home, where they are part of the religious (and often ethnic) majority, and landing in Vermont part of the minority.

The Islamic Society of Vermont (ISVT), one of only two official mosques in the state, is in Colchester. (The other, the Islamic Community Center of Vermont, is three miles away in Winooski, and serves a small subset of the community, predominately Somali, who split off in 2011 because of dissatisfaction with ISVT’s leadership.) The “mosque” itself does not have a minaret, the tower from which the call to prayer emanates in Muslim-majority cities; it is housed in a plain brick building with a potholed parking lot, on a street also home to several auto shops, a pet spa, and the Vermont Refugee Resettlement Program office. The street is part of the former Fort Ethan Allen, a nineteenth century military complex whose original barracks and horse barns have been transformed into a residential and business complex neighboring Saint Michael’s College. The roads of the fort are curving and poorly marked, the sign to the mosque relatively small; you could be forgiven, if it was your first visit, for driving past it.

When I first stepped inside the mosque in October, I was surprised to be greeted by the sight of a number of older white women milling about the lobby, fidgeting with scarves wrapped inexpertly around their heads. I soon learned they were a Montpelier church group involved in interfaith work, visiting to learn how they could help. “Send us money,” laughed Mahmoud Hayyat, a Palestinian member of the mosque’s board of directors with small glasses and a grandfatherly voice, during a question and answer session after that day’s khutba, the formal sermon delivered during Friday’s midday prayer. We sat on folding chairs adjacent to the men’s section of the mosque, Mahmoud, a few other board members, the imam, a dozen white women, and me. (Both Mahmoud and the imam, the latter only very recently hired, would leave their respective positions a few weeks later; ISVT devoted the winter months to interviewing and trying out candidates for imam.)  Throughout the meeting, I was struck by how much excited gratitude pervaded the conversation: in his email inviting me, board president Taysir al-Khatib had punctuated his email with several exclamation points, and the Q&A session after the khutba began with both the church and mosque leaders almost outdoing each other with thanks.

The room was lit by a high window, through which afternoon sun shone, and waned, during the hour-long conversation. I had, somewhat shamefully, found comfort in being surrounded by other white people on my first visit, and chose to simply listen to their questions instead of asking my own. My fellow visitors were eager, twelve hands flying into the air the moment Mahmoud asked for questions. One woman, leaning closer to the imam so as to hear him better, wanted to know if the hajj was required for all members of the mosque, and how these trips were funded. Another woman, inspired by the presence of Sunday school in her own children’s lives, wondered if something similar was offered for the mosque’s children. The board members—generally Mahmoud and, for more scriptural questions, the imam—answered patiently and in great detail, only occasionally asking similar questions of the church members. One woman mentioned that her daughter had recently married a Muslim man and converted. She wrung her scarf in her hands as she spoke of wanting to understand, to welcome her new son-in-law and his faith, but fearing she might get things wrong.

Eventually, someone asked outright what we had all been avoiding: did this mosque face the kind of discrimination we had heard about on the news? Mahmoud acknowledged that after 9/11, tensions were high; some women were afraid to wear hijab in public, and parents worried about what their children might hear at school.  In response, mosque leaders met with Burlington police and dozens of neighboring churches; they opened their doors proactively, before any possibility of their gaining a reputation of hostility or standoffishness could arise. Mahmoud says they were prepared to do the same after Trump’s 2016 election. Their fears seemed to be realized on December 1, when an anonymous letter—postmarked in Massachusetts and addressed generically to “Islamic Centers of America” — arrived at the mosque. The letter, while not directly attacking ISVT, expressed a feeling that Islam was “inconsistent with American values” and supported Trump’s so-called “Muslim ban.” The letter’s arrival coincided almost exactly with the one-year anniversary of a mass shooting in San Bernardino carried out by a Muslim couple; in an ISVT Facebook post the day after the attack, all members of the Vermont congregation, especially “those who dress visibly as Muslims,” had been reminded to take extra care, in particular avoiding walking in public alone.

In response to the letter, ISVT’s community met them halfway. Vermont Interfaith Alliance facilitated an interfaith Friday prayer session, inviting 200 people from various faiths to participate and ask questions. As the letter had been anonymous, the mosque had no opportunity to respond to or educate its writer; this gathering was a chance to do some of that same work with the mosque’s immediate neighbors—and it seems to have worked. After the hate mail made the news, the mosque was for weeks flooded with anonymous gifts and love letters.

“We don’t worry about that letter,” says Mahmoud. It had been just one voice, quickly drowned out by a chorus of “You are welcome, and you are loved.”

In recent months, the mosque has been struggling with low attendance numbers. Few people enter its doors for daily prayers, as is preferable in Islam; even weekly khutba attendance has been slipping. This is due in large part to the absence of an imam; Imam Islam Hassan, who had been with the mosque since 2011, left in June 2017. After his departure, many families, frustrated with poor communication between ISVT’s board and the rest of the congregation, as well as the sluggish pace of the process of finding a new imam, stopped visiting the mosque as a form of protest. This dip in attendance belies a disconnect between the mosque and its congregation, whether spiritual or practical in origin, that has put the whole organization at risk. Lejla Mahmuljin, born and raised in Middlebury by Bosnian Muslim parents and currently a junior at the University of Vermont, is an example of the former; she uses Islam not as a strict rule book, but as an “overarching umbrella term for [her] personal beliefs,” using aspects of Islam that resonate with her—a focus on charity and time spent with family—to inform a more generally spiritual worldview. While she has visited the mosque several times, her parents never forced her to attend services, and she does not feel connected to it.

Sometimes, this disconnect is also practical in origin. Mahmoud, who has lived in Middlebury for thirty-eight years, remembers the days before the mosque’s foundation looking similar—two or three families gathering in hotel rooms for improvised prayers or larger celebrations like Ramadan. These days, he says, Muslims in places like Montpelier and Rutland, both cities a sizable distance from Colchester and lacking a large Muslim community, are doing the same. While ISVT seeks to help with transportation, many car-less families remain isolated.  

During a January visit to the mosque, an older woman with rosy cheeks approached me, grasping my hand and smiling. She had seen me during prior visits, and invited me to pray alongside her when the service began. When I explained what I was doing, that I was not myself Muslim but was here to learn, she seemed satisfied. “It is good you are here. People are scared to visit the mosque, I think,” she told me. “Even some Muslims, if they do not practice all the time.”

Indeed, the through-line of one’s duty to attend mosque, and inspire one’s children to do so as well, ran through the imam’s khutba that day. “What are your excuses [for not attending]?” the imam asked. The answers he offered, and dismissed, were unescapable truths of life here: school, work, the structure of both completely at odds with the schedule of Friday prayer.

Though the khutba focused on attending mosque as a duty to God and to one’s family, there is also the truth that a community as small as ISVT’s congregation cannot survive if people do not show up. If the community dissolves, so does the emotional support offered by being surrounded by people of the same faith. The consequences of this loss came into stark focus that Friday, when the imam announced there was a funeral to attend to, that of Suad Teocanin, a Bosnian man who had died of exposure in Middlebury because he did not have a family or home to weather the winter with. Sajid tells me that nobody from the mosque knew he was Muslim before he died—his family had disowned him, and he was alone. He had been shut out, cut off from reaping the benefits of the neighborly duty so prized by what could have been his community. As a hearse waited with his body outside, three rows of women rose around me and murmured along with the imam: Allahu Akbar. God is great. Children, unaware of the gravity of the moment, rummaged through their mothers’ purses looking for chocolate bars. The women moved in unison; I grasped my hands together, unsure of what else to do.  Inside the mosque’s brick walls, it was so very warm.

Of course, it would be idealistic to say the mosque, even when well-attended, is a fully cohesive community. Though everyone who walks through the door is called “brother” or “sister”, it is a gathering place for Somalis, Syrians, Iraqis, Pakistanis, Palestinians, Egyptians, Bosnians, local converts, and families composed of a mix of these identities alike. Differences in cultural traditions and norms have, throughout the mosque’s history, caused fractures in the community.  Before Friday’s khutba, a Somali woman acknowledged cultural backgrounds varied greatly; however, she assured me, “we all believe in the same thing.” Perhaps this is true in terms of religious matters; bureaucratic matters, however, are another story.

The Saturday after Suad’s funeral service, I attended a community dinner at the mosque ostensibly intended to help familiarize the community with this week’s candidate for imam. The candidate, Imam Majed Sabke, was finishing a youth lecture when I slipped in, boys and girls fanned out in front of him in two separate groups. When dinner began, two lines of hot buffet trays were quickly emptied. As people were going back for seconds, board treasurer Youness Jamil took the microphone to announce the appointment of two new board members. When he asked the audience if there were any objections, the room erupted in argument; the community had not been notified of these selections, and felt it unfair to judge the candidates without getting to know them first. Imam Sabke attempted to cool tempers by reminding the congregation of how the Prophet solved arguments among his companions, but to little avail. Internal disagreements like these, worsened by the laboriousness of finding a new imam (and finding money to pay him) have hindered interfaith and public relations efforts in recent months. Without an imam to serve as both an example to his community and a public face to non-Muslim neighbors, the responsibility to get to know the neighbors has temporarily shifted away from the mosque itself and onto its individual members.

After mosque that Friday, I followed Alia and Sajid home to meet with a neighbor of theirs who has been a fast friend since their arrival. Jane, a part time nurse in her early seventies, was born and raised in Burlington, and has lived in her current home for thirteen years. She rang the doorbell as we were eating dinner, and the children ran to greet her, grasping the legs of a woman with wispy grey bangs and a brightly striped sweater. She complimented Taqwah’s dress, asked Eyad about his schoolwork. “Who’s the most beautiful four-year-old in the world?” she asked Hidayah, and Hidayah smiled, knowing it was her. Jane, a lapsed Catholic, tells me the Alia and Sajid are the first Muslims she has ever met.

Over (Pakistani) tea and (American) cookies, Jane mentions the cookies remind her of communion wafers. As a girl, she remembers her church enforcing a daylong fast for anyone who wished to receive Communion; though she got through her own first Communion without event, she remembers several friends fainting.

“You have to fast just like us!” Alia says. A discussion ensues about the differences in fasting for Communion and for Ramadan. Sajid asks for specifics—is it just the first Communion that requires a fast? How often does one receive Communion? Jane admits that, decades disconnected from Catholicism, she cannot remember precisely, but recalls her church later lifted the fasting requirement. Conversation moves to discussion of her new marble countertop.

At one point, Sajid and Jane begin talking about Trump in the way many of us do, laughingly traversing the well-worn topics of his tweets, his hair, his relationship with Putin. Hidayah, standing by her father forming black Play-Doh into Christmas trees, bursts in.

“Trump scary,” she says.

We all look at her for a minute. “Yes,” says Jane finally, “he is. And none of us know what to do about him.”

The night Trump was elected, a few months after the family's arrival in America, Sajid found himself unable to sleep. Before, Trump had been nothing more than a human face for his relatives’ fears about America; now Sajid found himself afraid of what the morning would bring. What it brought, in reality, was neighbors. The same neighbors that had approached them with “Welcome” a few months earlier now approached them with “Sorry.”  Champlain College sent out an email re-affirming that its immigrant faculty were valued and welcomed. As hate crimes spiked across the country, Vermont did not remain unscathed (just in Middlebury, Muslim students at the college report finding hateful graffiti on their dorm door whiteboards, and a female student reports hearing slurs from a passing car), but it has fared better than other parts of the country. “If anything, people are more vocal now,” says Jane.

Alia shrugs as she remembers the days after the election and the panicked calls she got from relatives abroad. “I was comfortable… I told them, if my neighbors are [this] concerned, we are happy here.”

But racism and Islamophobia do pervade Vermont, in ways subtler than travel bans and hate mail. Lejla, though outwardly appearing “an average white girl,” noticed her religious identity setting her apart most markedly in high school. “People knew I was foreign and from Bosnia, and that was cool,” she says. But when her classmates realized Islam was the dominant religion of Bosnia, they were surprised, and not pleasantly so. “I 've gotten a lot of ‘shoot, what does that mean, are you a terrorist?’” Lejla also recounts being saddled with the burden of being the only Muslim in her class. Teachers asked her to tell her family’s story when teaching certain parts of history. Classmates asked ignorant questions, which she did her best to answer honestly and patiently. “I’ve had experiences where I almost had to give a brief synopsis of Islam and my life.”

Sajid echoes this. “I don’t feel like I’ve been asked to be a spokesperson for my religion. But I certainly am a spokesperson, just by virtue of being Muslim.” For him and his family, this identity is compounded by their being Pakistani; Sajid sometimes feels he is expected to assume responsibility for his country’s history, a deficit in Western knowledge of this history leading to his being labeled a terrorist.   

As I listened, wondering about deficits in my own knowledge, I began to reflect on the conversations I had been part of in the mosque, and around Alia and Sajid’s dining room table. They had been lively, respectful, and illuminating: they had also been somewhat one-sided. I wondered if—no, how – my own questions had missed the mark. My questions felt new to me, but to someone who lived every day with their answer, were they last in a long line of white non-Muslims just not getting it?

I asked Jane what she thought about this. It felt more like I was asking for advice than interviewing her. Her brow furrowed; she shook her head as if confused at my question. “I think it helps to learn about people…  I think knowledge is really wonderful, and the more knowledge you have the better. It’s a way to not live in your cocoon.”

“God is too big to fit in one religion.”

This is how Reverend Dr. M’Ellen Kennedy, ordained a Unitarian Universalist minister fifteen years ago and a Sufi minster five years after that, explains her faith. She is a small woman with grey hair and a frank way of saying things. When we meet, she is dressed entirely in green—a green pendant necklace and a pea green fleece, a forest broken only by two amber teardrop earrings. Dr. Kennedy is the founder of Peace and Unity Bridge, an organization devoted to “cultivating friendship and understanding among Muslims and non-Muslims.” Throughout our conversation, her soft, assured tone is punctuated by moments of frustration, after which she stares intently at me, eager for me to understand.

Like Jane, Dr. Kennedy was raised Catholic, but has devoted much of her adult life to leading interfaith gatherings in churches and hospitals around the country. She was inspired to begin her interfaith work with the Muslim community in 2011 when Florida pastor Terry Jones gained national infamy for publically burning a Qur’an. “I thought, let’s read the Qur’an instead of burning it,” says Dr. Kennedy. In response, she hosted an open event at a church in Barre, which attracted about forty people, among them a single Muslim. Driven by her conviction in “the power of small groups,” she facilitated an evening of reading and non-judgmental discussion, without the “coercion” she often finds in faith-based gatherings built around a secretive agenda of conversion.

In the years since, Dr. Kennedy has continued to perfect her method, splitting her time between working as a Unitarian Universalist minister and travelling to promote her interfaith work. Her workshops are now a well-oiled machine, following a streamlined agenda: she begins by giving a short introduction to Islam, then splits the attendees into groups with an equal mix of Muslims and non-Muslims. Guided by a sheet of quotes and response questions, these groups undergo a non-judgmental “faith exchange.” Sometimes the session stops so the Muslim attendees can pray, and non-Muslims are invited to pray alongside them, or simply observe. A dinner, usually filled with dishes from Muslim-majority countries, and then a panel of Muslim voices, conclude the event.

Of course, reality isn’t as easy as this procedure would have you believe. Dr. Kennedy is based in Springfield, Vermont for the moment, a town where “just getting Protestants and Catholics to talk to each other is diversity.” Additionally, she is bothered by a trend of “superficiality” in the interfaith community—what she describes as people of different faiths sitting at the same table, each offering a prayer, and calling it good. That isn’t enough. “My work is about inviting people to share from the truth of their experience,” she says. While she acknowledges those dinners “have a place” in the greater scheme of interfaith work, her constant, gentle pushing for more is what has gained her the trust of Muslim and non-Muslim congregations across New England.

Most importantly, her method is based in self-reflection and constant efforts to learn. She had emailed me resources before we met, and showed up with a folder of more printed out; together we perused one of these pages, a study showing that Islamophobia in the United States is backed by eight well-documented (and well-funded) hate groups. Our fingers traced bar graphs showing that, when compared to Christianity and Judaism in America, Islam has the most racially diverse congregations. She is deeply aware of her own role in the workshops she leads— “Non-Muslims usually hear me easier than someone they think looks like a terrorist”—and spends a great deal of time educating herself on how to use this platform well. She is mindful of what resources are appropriate for which audiences: in less culturally sensitive congregations, for example, a conversation with Muslim panelists would be unproductive for all involved (and “a set-up” for the Muslims). In this case, a film or lecture might be more appropriate to begin with. Above all, she reminds me, it is important to “be compassionate, and realize I was there at one point,” with “there” being the level of total ignorance often found in sheltered communities.

At the end of Dr. Kennedy’s Qur’an reading seven years ago, the sole Muslim in attendance (a man she later learned was named Ahmad) “stood up with tears in his eyes.” It was the first time he had seen his religion represented in such a respectful way. It was then that she knew she needed to continue this work.

“It called me,” she says. “I didn’t choose it. But I realized it was important.”

Recently, Jane has started working at a food bank. She does not feel she has the “stamina” to attend rallies and protests; volunteering is her small way of giving back and bettering her world. Though the food bank is in Burlington, where she was born and raised, working there has introduced her to a wide swath of the community she had never interacted with before. “It broadens my horizons,” she says. “The people I think about aren’t just white.”  

Lejla is similarly broadening her horizons. “I don't see my identity with Islam… affect me in any way as far as exploring other religions,” she says. She attended Palm Sunday services with a friend last year, and a Christian funeral for a friend’s mother. She consulted her parents before each visit, feeling “weird” about exploring outside her own religion. Her parents encouraged her curiosity. “They said, you're never going to know, just like no one will know about Islam, unless you go try and see what it's all about,” she says. At the funeral, she found herself astounded at how similar some of the Bible passages were to values found in her own religious upbringing.

Sajid also shared a story of visiting a church, and of leaving with a sentiment similar to the one I left the mosque with: the desire to do more. The family was in Edinburgh, and Taqwah needed to use the restroom. The only public restroom they could find was in a church. “I speak English and I’m familiar with Christianity—I have Christian friends. But I still felt a bit hesitant going in,” he says. But when they approached the church, he noticed “Welcome” written above the door in several languages, including Urdu. Inside, they were greeted by a public sitting area and a cafeteria. “I told Alia, it’s such a pity that our mosques are not as open as this church. What we need to do is open up and allow people to come in, and just look at what we’re doing.” Sajid acknowledges the efforts ISVT has made to invite groups like the Vermont Interfaith Alliance and its associated churches, but argues it is “not enough… We need to just open up.”

It is unsurprising that no one I spoke to told me they felt burdened by these conversations—it’s unlikely they would have entered into them if they did. For every person who approaches and embraces me at the mosque, there are of course a handful who do not. Why should they? They have come to pray, and chat, and seek guidance from the imam. They don’t owe a single thing to visitors like me, visitors who shift uncomfortably from foot to foot in the corner of a place that does not belong to them. But it is my opinion that we owe those who do approach us something: time, compassion, and a willing admission of how much we do not know. And to those who stay silent, we also owe compassion, because, put simply, this work isn’t for everyone.

During my conversation with Jane, when one of us off-handedly mentioned the phrase “building bridges,” Hidayah cut in confidently, saying “Building bridges to walk on them.” Though her voice lilted upwards at the end, it seemed like a statement, not a question. She is four years old, and she is wise. Building the bridges is not itself enough; we must also be willing to walk on them, into the church or mosque, whether we worship another God or no God at all, and meet somewhere in the middle, ready to learn.