Background: Trishla Jain, an undergraduate student, interviewed Wendy Hamilton, a Chaplain-in-Residence at Georgetown University, on March 19, 2013. In this conversation, Hamilton reflects on her personal faith journey and what drew her to chaplaincy, as well as the importance of interreligious dialogue, both at Georgetown and in our larger society.
How has your personal journey brought you to your work today, as a Chaplain-in-Residence?
I would first like to share my whole faith journey in terms of my denominational affiliation; I identify religiously as a Protestant non-denominational. My desire and the opportunity to become a Chaplain-in-Residence came out of my faith journey. I got involved in a local church in Ohio, which is where I am from originally, and I found myself wanting more knowledge about faith and God and about the faith journey in and of itself. It was along my own journey that I felt an internal call to service on a more fundamental level. So for me, my seeking became a desire to help others who were seeking and want to understand their faith better.
How did you end up at Georgetown?
My interest in becoming a chaplain sprang out of my experience in Divinity School at Howard. When I was approaching graduation I began to think about what I wanted to do now with my master's in religious studies. I did not really feel called to pastor a church at that time, but I did want to do something with it and chaplaincy was one of the options they had presented to us and I decided to explore it. It gave me a more one-on-one and more personal opportunity. In order to be trained as a chaplain, one route you can go is to enroll in CPE (Clinical Pastoral Education) programs and a number of local hospitals offer those programs. That is an initial training—chaplaincy is a broad field and includes university chaplains, military chaplains, and sports chaplains, among others. I was familiar with the hospital program so I decided to apply to a few of those and Georgetown Medical Center accepted me into their summer intensive program last year. In the midst of completing that program, I found out about the university’s chaplaincy program.
What made you interested in interreligious dialogue?
Attending Howard Divinity School and being formally introduced to other faith background was the first time I became interested in interreligious dialogue. I say formally introduced because when you come up in a certain faith tradition, you learn that different faith traditions have their own interpretations and explanations of other faith denominations and practices. So, before attending Howard I had gone along with what I had been taught and learned from others, and it was not until I got to seminary that I was actually given an opportunity to engage the information.
At Howard, we had to take a world religions class in divinity school and visit the service of two other faith traditions that were different than our own for a comparison and contrast with our own faith tradition. Before coming to divinity school, I had never envisioned myself doing that and, to be honest, I actually feared it because I had been told by the people around me as I was growing up that they did not really understand these faith traditions and I should just stick to what I knew and pray for those others.
When I went to divinity school I learned that actually everyone was on equal footing. In order not to fear something, it is easier to try and understand. At school, they told me to choose a faith tradition other than my own to go visit. Being in the Washington, D.C. area, every faith tradition that you can think of is represented. So I went to visit a Sikh temple and it was fabulous. I called them up and told them that I was a seminary student and I had an assignment in my world religion class to come visit your faith tradition. They were up in Silver Spring, Maryland and they were very welcoming. They greeted me when I got to the door, they took me on a tour of the facility and they showed me to their prayer room, and they insisted on feeding me. I also visited a Jewish synagogue as well. Those experiences helped to diminish whatever fears I had about someone worshiping differently; they were very open and welcoming. It served to break down any perceived barriers that I might have had and sometimes that is what it takes—being able to actually go and see and experience as opposed to going off what you hear or what you are being taught by others.
Why do you believe that it is important for students at Georgetown to engage in interreligious dialogue?
Georgetown, to me, is truly a microcosm of the world. It is sort of like its own self-contained global village and really the thrust of its curriculum is centered on social justice and service to international as well as national populations. If you attend Georgetown and are a part of this environment and understanding the melting pot philosophy that exists here, it requires an understanding and respect for differences among us—religion being one of those differences. I really feel like you can serve people more authentically if you more fully understand them. Social justice is a common thing that runs through faith traditions, so if you are going to be about social justice and authentically serving people and who they are—the Cura Personalis—then you have to be able to acknowledge and respect their differences.
What does interfaith work mean to you? What impact can this kind of collaboration have on our society?
Interfaith work means the ability to be in service to one another and ourselves despite our differences. Interfaith work for me is about focusing on our similarities and those things that bring us closer together and bond us as interconnected human beings. For me, interfaith is about interconnectedness because there are more things that bring us together. We have lots of things in common; we all want to see poverty eradicated and we want to see the environment cared for and we understand that sustainability and viability for the future is contingent upon all of us and not just one a specific group. Interfaith collaboration makes us stronger as a society and it will reduce violence, poverty, discord, and division and it will give us a real opportunity to address some of the most pressing issues that our society faces over the long term. We all want to make the planet better for our future generations and I think that we all can reach a place where we can agree upon certain steps forward.
What can the Georgetown community do to help? What’s your message to the average Hoya?
The Georgetown community can help by continuing to provide platforms like this one for discussion, interaction, collaboration and education. I think that what we do not understand, we fear and so I believe that education is the key to bringing people more comfort and increasing their ability to understand others better. It is an ongoing process and it will not happen over night. It is not part of a two-, three-, or five-year plan, but how can we keep this part of an evolving conversation that should be ongoing.
My message to the average Hoya is something that I carry into the courses that I teach (I am an adjunct professor at Morgan State and the University of Phoenix), is that my openness to learning about world religions presented me with an opportunity to teach about world religions. If I had decided to keep my mind closed or not be open to learning about other religions when I was in divinity school, I would not have been able to take advantage of opportunities later that involved me introducing world religions to others. In those courses and in life in general, my mantra is that different does not mean inferior, it simply means different. If someone speaks differently than you, looks differently than you, believes differently than you, or worships differently than you, that does not make them inferior to you, that makes them different than you. Different is not right or wrong, it is just different.
