Map Your Journey: Conversation, Action, Faith, and Education at Tufts

In my current role as Program and Outreach Specialist for the Tufts University Chaplaincy, I have the privilege of partnering with some amazing students in coordinating an interfaith social justice pre-orientation program for incoming students. The Conversation, Action, Faith, and Education pre-orientation—or CAFE, as it is called—is a six-day program led by University Chaplaincy staff, student coordinators, and student peer leaders. In the 2015 spring semester, I worked closely with the University Chaplain and a student planning team to think about what it would look like to resurrect CAFE after its hiatus during a chaplaincy leadership transition. We spent months hammering out the resurrected CAFE's objective and goals; part of its mission is to “welcome, gather, equip, and network the religious, spiritual, ethical, and interfaith leaders of the incoming class.”

To this end, over the course of the week, the students will visit local religious and philosophical community centers, participate in social justice training workshops, and reflect in small groups—but on the first night, we facilitate an activity called “Mapping Your Journey.” The goal of this activity is to provide an opportunity for students to reflect on their own journey—to create a life map as a visual representation of the shaping of their current self, using pictures, words, blurbs, or symbols. Once students have started deconstructing their own context, they are invited to share their stories and hear the stories of others. It is a powerful experience that sets the tone for the type of vulnerability, open discussion, and connection that we facilitate throughout the rest of the program.

Each time we invite students to reflect on their journey, values, identities, and how that journey led them to Tufts, I realize how important it is for student affairs professionals to also be engaged in this type of reflection. As I began to think about this blog post, I started to map out my own student affairs journey (though I’ll admit my map was a mental one), from adolescence to where I find myself today through ongoing professional development. What stood out to me most was how important meaningful encounters with religious and philosophical diversity, reflections on how religious and philosophical identities intersect with other complexities such as power, privilege, and values, and consideration of my own values and religious and philosophical identity have led me to where I am now.

As for me, I grew up in a nonreligious household. Neither of my parents are religious, and religion was not a common topic of discussion. When my family moved to North Carolina, I became more interested in religion, almost as a stranger observing a fascinating phenomenon in my friends’ lives. During my time as an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I registered for classes in the Religious Studies department that caught my attention; it was a few semesters before I noticed that a Religious Studies major was developing on my transcript. I learned about the history of ancient Judaism, how to analyze the New Testament from a historical perspective, and how scholars have understood religion over the years. These courses were incredibly enlightening, but I mostly engaged with their content as a third-party observer, rarely ever participating in religious and philosophical life on campus and seldom engaging with religious diversity on campus beyond class requirements.

Outside of the classroom, when I wasn’t attending a Tar Heel basketball game, I was busy getting involved on campus in other ways. My journey into student affairs may sound familiar to many in the field. During my time at UNC, I served as a “Career Peer” for the Career Center, served as a community governor and vice president for the Residence Hall Association, and mastered the art of walking backwards on uneven brick paths as a tour guide for the Office of Undergraduate Admissions. Through these roles on campus, I encountered mentors who encouraged me to reflect on my leadership style, pushed me to think thoughtfully about social justice issues, and taught me how to think about the development of others and serve as a mentor.

But if you told me when I began graduate school at Boston College that my first desk job in higher education would be in a chapel and that I would be the only person in my office with a master’s degree in higher education/student affairs, I wouldn’t have believed you.  

And yet my graduate assistantship at Harvard Divinity School (HDS) put me again in old stomping grounds. I was excited to be an environment where students were learning about some of the same topics that interested me, and that my role was to facilitate their conversations. One of my main responsibilities was to organize the logistics for a weekly “Community Tea” program, a weekly time for HDS students, staff, and faculty to gather over good food, share announcements, and learn more what was happening in the community. Week after week I got to know students from different religious and philosophical traditions and hear them talk about how their traditions inspired them to serve others, to work toward racial justice, and live well in the world. Community Tea was just one program that provided a space for students, including myself, to engage with others, be inspired, and collaborate.

It was during this time that I started to see how my passion for student affairs might intersect with religious and philosophical life. I joined the SRHE KC, and after graduate school, took a fellowship position at the Humanist Community at Harvard working on interfaith community service and dialogue programs. From the newly opened Humanist Hub taking root above the buzzing Harvard Square, I moved to the stained glass sanctum of Goddard Chapel on the Tufts University campus. This space, too, is home to a pluralist energy. Our chapel hosts Buddhist meditation, Catholic mass, and Hindu Student Council pujas among other lectures, weekly gatherings, and interfaith dialogue programs. My supervisor is an ordained Unitarian Universalist minister and my colleagues include a Buddhist monk, the United States’ first university-funded Humanist in Residence, and chaplains from Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, and Protestant traditions. Together, we provide pastoral care, support religious and philosophical student communities, educate about spiritual and ethical issues in the society and world, and promote multi-faith engagement. I believe my role in supporting the work of our chaplaincy team and student communities, and the inspiration, community, and nurture, that they provide, influences the journey of our students, staff, and faculty at Tufts in important and profound ways that play out on campus and when students graduate. I continue to be challenged, supported, and nurtured being in this space.

One of the projects I work on with my colleagues and students is the CAFE Pre-Orientation program, which works to help students understand the world around them, to start to think about the various threads of their lives coming together into something of a journey. To see students learn from each other’s stories and traditions, to be mindful of the way identity and power work in different religious and philosophical spaces, and to begin to articulate how they want their journey to unfold at Tufts is inspiring. I see students moved to tears on the final day of the program because of how close they have gotten to each other in six days, because of how open their peers have been with them. Programs like CAFE provide a space for students to share their stories, reflect on their values, and act upon their reflection in accordance with their values. CAFE nurtures a campus culture where we engage religious diversity and build authentic communities where we can pursue social change.

Coinciding with the success of the CAFE pre-orientation, a CAFE student group is emerging and thriving out of a desire to continue these types of hard conversations and bring other Tuft students into these spaces. This is just one of many signs that there is a real hunger for interfaith dialogue, for accountable and genuine community, and for religious, spiritual, and/or philosophical growth. Mapping Your Journey is an activity we do at the beginning and end of CAFE, but it can also be an ongoing experience. I’ve been lucky enough to engage in many of these types of activities, which have been so crucial for my own journey and development. I hope, as higher education professionals, we continue to look for ways within our field to support programming and initiatives that encourage the sharing of stories and self-reflection, enable authentic connection, engage religious diversity, and create social change.