Humanism is About Community
I can remember the response I got from a fellow grad student Humanist at Harvard last year when I told him that yes, I was a Humanist from the Divinity School – “Are you here to put us on some kind of black list or something?” It was around then that the idea of organizing a Harvard Divinity School Humanists group began to look pretty good to me. We Div School Humanists are something of anomaly, even for Humanists, as people studying religion while seemingly stepping away from that lifestyle personally. Still, as someone who studies religion and public life, I wanted to see how we Humanists could adopt a public life for ourselves within the dynamic interreligious atmosphere of Harvard Divinity School. When one of my fellow HDS Humanists suggested that we fully integrate ourselves into the spiritual life of the school by leading one of the Noon Services offered by a different religious groups at HDS each week, I was immediately all in. What better way to engage ourselves in interreligious dialogue than to open our practices for public experience?
Of course, figuring out what exactly those practices were was a different matter. The first steps were easy – shifting the service locale from the school chapel to the community room, informing our coordinators that we would need coffee during the service, not just after – steps that were only too natural. It was only when we sat down to actually plan the service that we ended up staring at each other (over coffee, of course) with nothing to say, for the first time in the short history of our group. The first thing that we all agreed on was that we had barely anything in common. There was our resident hard-core atheist, or, as he prefers to describe himself, the “friendly” atheist, who still manages to piss off our religious compatriots in class pretty regularly. There was the self-proclaimed atheist “by faith,” the one who has been prohibited from mentioning care ethics in any of our future meetings. Our Jeffersonian Deist was the one who had suggested the service at all; he balks at calling himself a Humanist but he’s come around. Then there was my poor roommate, raised Catholic but falling away, dragged along to these meetings in which she wonders how she got there –what do these loud men have to do with her spiritual, naturalist love of the world? Finally there’s me, the Unitarian Universalist agnostic and alleged group leader, feeling like I was herding cats most of the time.
Yet the answer to our dilemma was right there, staring us in the face – our very diversity was a unique conception of community. For what sort of community are we, anyway? Held together by mere disbelief, drastically different from any other religious community, which are generally held together by belief. Can we really be a loving, nurturing community with so little in common? We decided that what we wanted to share most was how we hang together despite the odds – we wanted to show the broader Harvard community that we Humanists are diverse, yet still somehow unified. Moreover, we wanted to push our outside community to examine their own community lives – what held them together, what pushed them apart, how communities define our deepest selves.
The service itself was simultaneously an exercise in discomfort and yet the most natural thing in the world. With none of us accustomed to speaking “worshipfully” about our spiritual journeys, we nonetheless elected to open the service with sentences of belief – each of us wrote several sentences expressing the ways Humanism reflects us. For there are few of us who are totally comfortable with the term; we find other words better suited to describing our innermost beliefs. However, there is something common – communal, I daresay – that we find in adopting the term, and so we attempted to articulate the reasons why for our audience. Then, two of our braver members spoke at more length – our hardcore atheist and spiritual agnostic, just to demonstrate our diversity. Two other members of our group shared readings that spoke to their own Humanism. Finally, we asked the broader community to join us in examining their own communities and how we define community at the Divinity School through a writing and then spoken meditation.
We chose an atypical format, even for eclectic HDS Noon Services. We set the room up in a circle of tables, so that we could see the many human faces in the room – facing in, focusing on each other and talking about our shared experience. This interactiveness came as a surprise to many, but when is Humanism about complacent listening? We are thinkers; we are doers, and we demanded the same from our visitors. I was so pleased to see several faces from the broader Harvard Humanist community present. I wanted to share this unique Divinity School experience – the opportunity for us non-believers to express our belief in something: in each other.
In the end, the experience was gratifying. I apologized to my fellow HDS Humanists for forcing them into an uncomfortable situation, but even the hardcore atheist said the experience was positive and affirming. We were – dare I say it – proud of ourselves and of each other, proud to be a community. As I muse over these final reflections, I realize that the very function of Humanism is to provide community. Although we are often barely united in common disbelief, we are also united by the human call to companionship. We can disbelieve alone, we don’t need each other for that. We can be moral agents alone, as well, if we try. However, as long as we continue to seek each other out, we will be Humanists in the true sense, and we will keep working together to define that ever-evolving term.
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Mary Ellen Giess is a second year Masters student at Harvard Divinity School. She studies religion in public life, including religion and government. She plans to pursue a career educating about their intricate relationship.