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Preserving Integrity: Lessons on Interfaith Prayer from the University

The modern university is an exciting place to do ministry. Students are experiencing many firsts as they move away from home and the watchful eye of their parents. This new environment also becomes the context for intense experiences of vocational and religious discernment. These life-defining moments make the ministry of a university chaplain a very rewarding one. But a university is also an exciting place to do ministry because of the intentionality of academics to promote difficult discussions and situations at the edges of mainstream society. At one level interfaith prayer is often an esoteric enterprise created by religious elites and foisted upon unwilling worshipers for undefined reasons. The university is good at this part. Academics seem to like the challenge of doing something that they think should be done but is difficult to do. I generously hope that this is done in the spirit of honest inquiry and with the acknowledgment that the university has some resources that make it better equipped to do a difficult task well than may be available to the average church or community group. At another level interfaith prayer is the unavoidable stuff of everyday life in a pluralistic world. We gather for a great many events that we think should include prayer of some kind that we recognize to be composed of something other than a unified religious community. We think that there should be some kind of prayer for the presidential inauguration ceremony. But who should pray and to what god? Retirement celebrations and community anniversaries and national holidays are more typical examples of the same. We think these are considered basically holy occasions that warrant prayer, but the details become a little fuzzy. We also gather regularly for explicitly religious occasions that have been tinged with enough cultural secularism that they no longer are comprised of a unified religious community either. How do we pray at the office Christmas party when we know that many of our coworkers are not religious at all, though at least a few are faithful to religious traditions that we know little or nothing about? As a university chaplain these occasions are the norm. I want to offer some reflections on these types of occasions from my experience as a university chaplain with hope that they provide some light for the path for the many occasions of interfaith prayer happening far from campus. I often tell those students involved in interfaith leadership that