By: Tawfiq, Community Engagement Coordinator
Now that some time has actually passed, I have experienced a bit more community work from somewhat of a religious perspective and it has been very interesting as someone who of little faith. Particularly when collaborating with more faith focused outlets such Scott Mission where the religious undertones are quite frankly more like overtones, I had some difficulty adjusting. To provide a bit of background on myself and my beliefs in this regard, I come from somewhat of a religious family. My parents have since fallen out of it and are now more spiritual rather than religious, but were of the Isma’ili faith at the time and as you would expect they made me attend religious gathering, weekend school, etc. Like any child forced into something, I hated it, rejected it and stopped going. Many kids from religious families go through this and in my experience, the majority of them end up finding their faith on their own later in life. I didn’t.
Aside from any academic reasoning for not being religious which I do have, over the course of life until now I had what I would consider to be an overwhelming majority of negative experiences. This as one would expect, is what primarily influenced my belief system and overall outlook going forward. In that time I tried more times than I can remember at my lowest points to reach out for some kind of sign, from any of the thousands of deities that may exist and felt nothing. After that I had a long period of hostility towards the idea of religion. While I have become much more agnostic, respectful and reasonable about it now, I still have many struggles with it and relapse every now and then.
Back to working with Scott Mission with that context in mind, I am not often around people openly discussing and celebrating their faith, if at all. The part that was difficult for me was specifically having people talk to me about their faith as a part of their faith which as they don’t know, I’m not. I had to decide whether to be open about myself or to just go along with it, smile and not bring the mood down and stir up some likely uncomfortable discussion. I chose the latter. While my goal of keeping spirits high was met, I certainly didn’t feel very good about it for a good while after the event was over. I don’t plan to change what I did the next time I work with them since I feel being honest in that situation is a bit inappropriate, but It is something to think about going forward. However, I do think this was a good experience to have and am overall pleased with the things I’m learning and experiencing out of my comfort zone.