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| Kim Hillebrand (Rev. Ai Su) |
Could you give a brief background of what the Kaufman Institute does, its mission, and its importance?
With the mission of promoting interfaith understanding and mutual respect, the Kaufman Interfaith Institute offers a broad range of programming (over 200 events/initiatives each year) that creates a more inclusive and equitable West Michigan Community for persons of diverse cultural and religious/secular/spiritual identities. The Kaufman Institute works in the community and on area college campuses to advance this mission and to establish models for similar communities to embrace and foster intercultural and interfaith understanding. More about the Kaufman Interfaith Institute can be found at www.interfaithunderstanding.org.
How about your own history with the Kaufman Institute?
I joined the Kaufman Interfaith Institute in October of 2019. For the first several months after joining the Institute, I researched organizational history, assisted with planning and implementing events, and integrated myself into the organizational culture and workflow.
With my environmental education and ten-plus years of environmental advocacy work experience, in April I jumped in with both feet to assist with the planning of the city-wide Earth Day 50 event and the Grand Dialogue in Science and Religion, an interfaith convening sponsored by the Kaufman Institute focusing on climate action through an interfaith lens. Both of those events were postponed due to the pandemic.
Currently, I’m working on the beginning stages of a collaborative three-year project supported by the Fetzer Institute in Kalamazoo, which you’ll read about below.
And your own spiritual formation? What/who were your influencers?
I have always been one to seek out and learn about things that were very different from my own experience. So, at Western Michigan University, I chose to live in a year-round dorm that was favored by many international students. My roommate was Japanese, and she introduced me to many other students from many other cultures and religions. I enjoyed a wildly diverse college experience!
During that time, I worked at Western Michigan University’s bookstore, and one day I came across the book “Being Peace” by Thich Nhat Hanh. I sat down on the floor of the bookstore, read this little book cover to cover, and then used my food money to purchase it. From that moment on, a big piece of my life snapped into place. I had found the religious tradition that resonated with me, and all I was missing was belonging to a community of practitioners.
After college, I moved to Washington, DC with the hopes of breaking into entry-level non-profit environmental work. While there, my cultural and religious curiosity was satiated by visiting embassies, taking part in cultural festivals, and visiting many places of worship. The day that I walked into a Tibetan Buddhist temple, my life was forever changed. The feeling I had experienced years before related to identifying the faith tradition that resonated with my very being was affirmed, and I had found a community of practitioners (Sangha). I felt at home.
After almost twenty years of Buddhist practice, and several years of intense training, I was ordained as a Buddhist Dharma Teacher at the Grand Rapids Buddhist Temple. I appreciate opportunities to speak and write about the Buddhist tradition and relish opportunities to join friends from other traditions in interfaith panels and discussions.
The influencers who have all made a profound impact on my life are my first teacher, Lama Kalsang; Thich Nhat Hanh; Archbishop Desmond Tutu; Martin Luther King, Jr.; Rumi; Richard Rohr; His Holiness the Dalai Lama; and so many more.
I understand that the Kaufman Institute is reaching out to Kalamazoo to do interfaith work there. Could you give us a sense of what's happening?
Absolutely! The Kaufman Interfaith Institute is partnering with the Fetzer Institute, a non-profit based in Kalamazoo. My role in this work is to develop a transferable model for community-driven interfaith understanding, respect, acceptance and honoring of all, based on the interfaith model that has been implemented in Grand Rapids by the Kaufman Interfaith Institute over the past decade. The goals of this project are not only to eventually develop a useful model for other communities to consider as an interfaith resource, but also to offer the resources and connections of the Kaufman Interfaith Institute in service to the interfaith work already happening on the ground in Kalamazoo and, more broadly, in Southwest Michigan. I look forward with humility and excitement to partnering with Kalamazooans and surrounding communities to support their interfaith efforts.
In your experience, what are the ingredients necessary to make interfaith efforts work?
In any recipe, the ingredients make the dish. Interfaith work is no different. The openness and inclusivity of the space in which interfaith gatherings happen directly correlates to the finished dish, or what emerges from the conversation. The ingredients necessary to help foster interfaith work revolve mostly around creating the space for people to manifest in real-time their unique authenticity, to speak openly without judgment, and to be curious and learn about worldviews and ways of being that are very different from their own without any pressure to change or convert.
So for the Kaufman Interfaith Institute, our most important role in interfaith work is to serve our community as a convener, working to build, cultivate, and nurture spaces in which interfaith understanding can flourish.
Given the current divisiveness across America, and really, the world, would you want to speak to what you see as some of the causal factors, and how interfaith work is helping?
From my perspective, divisiveness is born of an inability or unwillingness to honor a lived experience that is different from one’s own…an unwillingness to truly see a person very different from oneself. From the rejection of another based on political beliefs, LGBTQ views, religious or secular traditions, gender identities, race or ethnic identities, etc., a lack of compassion and empathy follows until it appears that no commonalities exist. The perceived differences between “us and them” creates the illusion of separation which breeds fear, apathy, and ultimately, hatred.
We see this every day in our political landscape, in the ways that we are divided on racial inequities that are finally at the forefront of our national consciousness, and even in our decisions about whether or not to wear a mask during a global pandemic. We witness divisiveness all around us. We feel divided. But divisiveness is only as strong as the will to think of oneself as better or righter than another.
When we can release the heavy burden of our attachments, opinions, and prejudices that we carry with us every hour of every day, and we can reject those delusions of separation that are born of our dualistic thinking (me and you, us and them, good and bad, right and wrong), then truly seeing someone very different from ourselves is possible. If we focus on our commonalities, we will no longer see “the other”. We will realize that there is no other. What remains is understanding, unity, and love.
Interfaith work is a model for bridging across any religious, spiritual, or secular differences, to break through perceived differences and the dualistic thinking that is so pervasive in our society. The ingredients that help bring understanding across religious differences are the same ingredients that can bring understanding across any perceived difference.
The bridge to understanding is always there. We only have to take one step forward toward a person we perceive as “other” to begin to build peaceful, equitable communities in which everyone can thrive.
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