BY CAROLYN TOLL OPPENHEIM ILLUSTRATIONS BY BINA ALTERA
EACH FRIDAY MORNING, STUDENTS FROM GERMANY, INDIA, Malaysia, Pakistan, Turkey, the Middle East, and the United States gather on the second floor of the Ell Building, the group growing larger as noon nears. While some cluster in the hall chatting, others quickly rearrange the space in the aging, utilitarian campus chapel. Setting to one side the chairs left in place from the Christian Student Union prayer group and the Episcopal midweek services, the newcomers take small rugs from a storage closet and carefully lay them to cover the entire floor. By one o'clock, as many as two hundred students are prostrate on the rugs, facing the rear of the chapel, deep in Muslim prayer-men in front, the scarf-covered women in long dresses at the rear.
Across the hall from the chapel, a table outside the Spiritual Life office holds multicolored fliers promoting student religious groups affiliated with N.U. Some of these clubs would be more or less familiar to past generations of Northeasterners: the Episcopal Student Association, Hillel, the Roman Catholic Newman Club. Most are newer: the Baha'i Club, the Bhakti Yoga Club, Chi Alpha Christian Fellowship, the Hindu Students Council, International Students Inc., and several others. Another flier, prepared by the Spiritual Life office itself, serves as a kind of Rosetta stone for all. It is a calendar listing religious holidays of all faiths, beginning with Rosh Hashanah, followed by the Hindu holy day Ganapathi Jayanti and, farther down the list, All Saints' and All Souls' Days and Ramadan.
As the face of Boston has changed, the faces of this most urban of Boston's campuses have also altered. The Reverend Colin Gracey has witnessed this conversion firsthand. Northeastern's Episcopal chaplain for thirty years, he has watched the university grow from "a small, homogeneously Protestant Christian community to a vibrant, multifaith environment with Buddhists, Jews, Hindus, and Roman Catholics." It follows that the spiritual needs of the university have also changed profoundly. The Spiritual Life office's mission today, Gracey says, is to prepare N.U.'s mix of ethnicities, nationalities, and cultures "to live in a global community in an engaged way."
That statement is not as great a departure from the university's origin as it at first might seem. A seedling of the original Young Men's Christian Association in 1898, Northeastern College started out Protestant, of course, but was unique in Boston in its autonomy from denominational ties. Boston University still retained its official tie to the Methodists, Tufts University to the Unitarian Universalists. Northeastern acknowledged the growing diversity of its student body by inviting a Catholic chaplain to the campus in the 1950s and a Jewish chaplain in the 1960s. In a sea change in the late 1960s, the university abandoned its long-standing office of Dean of Chapel and invited the various chaplains ministering to the students to form a collective religious office, with the chairmanship rotating among them. Thus the current religious diversity, Gracey says, is a part of the university's original and continuing mission of educating those whose needs are not met by other institutions-Northeastern's "special niche."
MANY STUDENTS OF NORTHEASTERN couldn't find the Spiritual Life office without a campus map. But for others, it is a landmark, a refuge, even a surrogate home. Squirreled away in the Ell Building, the modest rooms are welcoming, the door always open. Alice Scott, the office secretary for eighteen years, sits at a desk prominently positioned for greeting visitors. Students wander in for appointments or impromptu meetings. The chaplains advise the student religious groups, counsel individuals, and refer students to nearby religious centers such as Hillel on Parker Street and the St. Ann University Parish and Student Center on St. Stephen Street. A coffee table and bookcase are covered with magazines and newspapers such as Commonweal, Christian Century, National Catholic Reporter, Jewish Advocate, Partnership (the newsletter of Islamic Relief Worldwide), and Sojourner, among others.
Although affiliated with the Spiritual Life office, the student religious groups operate independently. Most have ties to specific churches or denominations. Some, like Campus Crusade for Christ and Chi Alpha Christian Fellowship, are branches of national or international organizations. The Christian Student Union and International Students Inc. are specific to Northeastern. Not every group is welcome. One bright red flier from the Spiritual Life office, titled "Who would be so stupid?" instructs students on how to protect themselves from cults recruiting near campus.
Regardless of their differences, the groups attract students for common reasons: fellowship, community, and continuity with religious traditions from home. Freshman Holly Salach began coming to Newman Club gatherings because "I can just come in and it feels like I've known everyone my whole life . . . It's like my mom's here." Matt Schlager, a senior and a former president of Hillel's Student Council, grew up in "an active, observant home. My parents were very involved in our synagogue and I went regularly and was involved with the youth group. I first came to Hillel to be able to go to Friday night services, be with other Jews, and observe Shabbat and the holidays," he says. Sophomore Anna Bouteneff, a Christian Student Union member from an Eastern Orthodox background, finds "some kind of peace of mind" in joining with other committed Christians. That sense of kinship extends beyond group meetings. "When I see other members on campus, we smile at each other and talk-they're not faceless people. It's a feeling of community . . . the people are very open and accepting," she says.
For foreign students, religious groups are sometimes a focal point of their lives in an alien culture. Abdullah Baaj, a senior who is president of the Islamic Society, recounts turning to the group for support after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, in the period when Muslim radicals were suspected. "I felt like I didn't want to be me," he recalls. To Samer Abu-Ghazaleh, a senior, the Islamic Society acts as a retreat from America's secular society, which he finds saturated with anti-Muslim images. Gathering with his fellow Muslims to break bread and pray, he can come closer to the meaning of the word "Islam": peace with God.
Yet this religious diversity, as valued as it is at Northeastern, also brings challenges for all parties. For students, even something as simple as setting up the chapel requires cooperation. "When several faith groups use a common space, they have to respect each other," Gracey says. For the six chaplains of the Spiritual Life office, meeting the needs of all faiths while remaining true to their own-Baptist, Catholic, Episcopal, Jewish, and (until recently) Muslim-requires a balancing act.
"Many, many students, including Catholic students, tell me, 'I'm not very religious,' but when I ask them, 'What about spiritual?' they don't hesitate to say 'yes.' Being in touch with their inner selves, even in touch with God, was somehow not seen as 'religious' if they couldn't identify with a specific denomination or religious group."
-Sister Rosemary Mulvihill, Catholic Chaplain
CONSIDER A MULTIPLE-CHOICE QUESTION: When a student uncertain of his or her beliefs walks in the door of the Spiritual Life office, should the chaplains (A) each take a crack at convincing the student of the rightness of Islam/Judaism/their particular brand of Christianity, (B) offer prizes for converting, or (C) divide the student literally, in Solomonic fashion?
Northeastern's chaplains answered this dilemma by committing in the late 1960s to an interfaith approach. "No individual church prepares the students for the global experience that they will need to live in a multicultural and multifaith world," says Baptist chaplain Thom Thornton, the current chairman of the Spiritual Life office. Instead, Thornton and his colleagues respect affiliations professed by students, divide the counseling of uncertain students in whatever ways seem most appropriate for each, and point all to the affiliated student religious groups. Above all, the chaplains profess eagerness to create a comfortable community in which students can explore their spiritual inclinations. As Gracey puts it, "Every person on this campus is a bearer of faith in some way"-not just his small flock of Episcopalians.
The interfaith approach has fostered community among the chaplains as well as the students. Beth Meltzer, the new Hillel director, finds the monthly "Reflections" meetings among the Northeastern chaplains stimulating. She hasn't encountered such substantive interfaith discussions among chaplains at other universities. "It is exciting to work with colleagues from other backgrounds and it has inspired me to think of joint programming with Jewish and Catholic students, for example," she says.
Both driving and complicating the interfaith policy is the lack of loyalty many students today feel toward any one denomination-a tremendous break with the past. "This generation is not denominationally pure," notes Thornton, now in his third year at N.U. The Christian Student Union, which he advises, includes students "from Baptist to Greek Orthodox. Most students are more likely to identify simply as Christian than with any particular tradition."
Many Christian students, who remain the majority among students professing a particular faith, move with ease among the various student organizations. Three Christian groups-the Christian Student Union, Campus Crusade for Christ, and International Students Inc.-are interdenominational, catering to this disinterest in labels. Another student group, Chi Alpha Christian Fellowship, is sponsored by the Assemblies of God, an evangelical Pentecostal church headquartered in Missouri, but encourages participants from all backgrounds. Freshman Meghan Coller, for example, began attending Chi Alpha gatherings her first semester. She returned, despite having no previous affiliation with the Assemblies of God, "because they were so nice, I really felt welcomed." Friendliness, rather than doctrine, also draws freshman Rhoda Serafim. "This is where I found true friendship," she says. "People I can count on no matter what. I can call them anytime."
This crossing of lines and unmooring from traditional religious affiliations extends to the concept of religion itself. The current generation of students prefers to emphasize spiritual fulfillment rather than religious identity, says Sister Rosemary Mulvihill, one of two Catholic chaplains at N.U. "Many, many students, including Catholic students, tell me, 'I'm not very religious,' but when I ask them, 'What about spiritual?' they don't hesitate to say 'yes,' " says Mulvihill, a Sister of Mercy who has been at the university for six years. "Being in touch with their inner selves, even in touch with God, was somehow not seen as 'religious' if they couldn't identify with a specific denomination or religious group."
For that reason, the chaplains changed the name of their office from Religious Life to Spiritual Life in 1994. The secular connotations of "spirituality" notwithstanding, the effect of the new name on students "was like throwing open the doors," Gracey says. The numbers of students entering the office greatly increased. Those turned off by organized religion no longer automatically tune out Spiritual Life. Gracey believes that the name change conveys that the staff "doesn't just want to recruit students for certain groups or faiths," but instead is open to spiritual searching and journey-activities that are eternally of interest to college students. The chaplains have worked to instill their office into campus life in other ways too. Along with physical fitness, good posture, healthy eating, environmental awareness, and a host of other items, spirituality is represented at the university's annual Wellness Fair.
Yet as student participation in Northeastern's spiritual life grows, the chaplains' ability to fund that interest is shrinking. The churches that pay the chaplains' salaries are cutting back. Beth Meltzer's position at Hillel was reduced from full-time to part-time recently. Muslim students struggle to organize their large group themselves because the imam ministering to them through last summer could not continue to work for free. Thornton, Mulvihill, and Father Paul Kilroy, the other Catholic chaplain, all face tighter budgets from their denominations. The university itself, faced with its own financial belt-tightening, has not picked up the slack, the chaplains assert. In fact, Northeastern's $58,000 funding of Spiritual Life this year is little more than its $50,000 allotment thirty years ago-a sharp decrease in real terms. In comparison, the contributions of the Episcopal Church, Hillel, the Lutherans, and others this year come to about $250,000.
The chaplains fear that this trend of eroding budgets has had disastrous consequences for interfaith cooperation. "To justify our budgets, we have to come up with more programs nurturing the identity of the faith group we are being paid to serve and less time doing interfaith work," Gracey says. "In the last few years, the work has shifted from eighty-five percent working on projects together to only fifteen percent joining in multifaith programs." Thornton worries even that small percentage could wither away. "Our denominations don't pay us to work for the university. I could come here and work only with Christian students. I choose to work ecumenically because I believe in that approach, but I am not paid for it," he says. "[Sister] Rosemary is doing a job at St. Ann's that three people used to do. How long can this go on?"
The dismal state of the university's lone chapel is both a symbol and a consequence of the financial trials. Despite the removal of the pews, everyone agrees the chapel leaves much to be desired as an interfaith place of worship. It is the dream of Gracey's three-decade career at the university that sufficient funds will be raised to renovate the chapel (see related story) and provide a concrete demonstration of the worth and promise of multicultural relations at Northeastern. But so far, very little money has come in.
Still, there is hope. The chaplains continue to counsel students and advise the student groups. They run discussion groups for faculty and staff, aiming to nurture the spiritual life of the entire campus community, not just students. They plan interfaith projects for Holocaust Memorial week in April. They prod the university to increase its financial contribution and launch a capital campaign for renovation of the chapel. In the Spiritual Life office, there is always hope.
Carolyn Toll Oppenheim, a free-lance journalist in Boston, has written widely on religious issues. She taught at Northeastern's School of Journalism in 198586.
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