Many & One: Let us be that city

Mark Greenleaf Schlotterbeck

Many & One Rally 10th Anniversary Callahan Hall / Lewiston Public Library / Lewiston, Maine January 11, 2013

t times in life I have thought I was a Christian, but I have never been very good at praying. Most Christians I know, and most Muslims and Jews and Bahais, are better pray-ers than I am. My

atheist friends are better at praying than I am. When I have prayed I mostly havent even used words but have prayed in some other, foolish way. I can only say that one of those offbeat ways of praying contributed to this Many & One business. It went like this. In the summer of 2002, besides interacting with Somali people and teaching at the Adult Learning Center on Birch Street, I was a neighborhood worker at the United Methodist church on Sabattus Street. So sometimes on a summer morning I made a pot of coffee in the church, took it out back to the picnic table, sat down and said, OK, God. That was it. My prayer had about two words and really consisted mostly of making coffee, taking it out to the table, looking at the city around me and listening and waiting. If I wrote down all the things that happened as I sat there at the picnic table, under the apple tree that hadnt yet been cut down to make a parking lot, if I wrote down all those things, well, it would be like the Book of Acts.

2 The Book of Acts is a part of the New Testament that tells the marvels that the Divine does among ordinary nincompoops. So one day late that summer Im out there. Ive got my coffee pot, Im whittling a piece of wood with a little knife, and Ive said, OK, God, or Ive looked up into the leaves of the apple tree and said, Do what you will do. And a van pulls up. Its Ibrahim, the young first imam at the new mosque in Lewiston. Turns out he wants to ask me something. And then I remember to ask Ibrahim something I had forgotten about. See, the previous December, December 2001, I had traveled with some friends to a little urban theology center in Sheffield, England. I was trying to figure how to live out my faith in the small city of Lewiston, and for some oddball reason I went to England to figure it out. But while Im there in Sheffield one day, talking with other people in an extraordinarily cold coffee shop, I decide Ill take a little time off and go across the city to a foundry that makes woodcarving tools, since I like to ruin perfectly nice pieces of wood. But I am such a terrible pray-er that when I telephone for a taxi, God doesnt even hear me. I wait for a long time outside the coffee shop. It is very cold. But the cab I called for never arrives. So much for prayer. So I wave my hand, and another cab, the wrong cab, picks me up. This cab is driven by a young British Muslim. I tell him I would like to go to the foundry. He tells me that a 90-year-old Afghan woodcarver has just moved to his community and become part of the young drivers mosque. This old woodcarver, he says, has been making folding Quran holders for the

3 mosques religious school. I am learning this from the cab driver because I, the lousy pray-er, couldnt even take the right taxi. Flash forward to the next summer, when I am sitting out at the picnic table in Lewiston and Ibrahim stops by. He asks me his question, and then I tell him about the cab driver in England and the woodcarver and the Quran holders. Do you need things like that at the mosque in Lewiston, I ask Ibrahim. Are you kidding? Ibrahim says. We need about thirty of those things. So in short order we cook up a plan. For three late afternoons in a row, church kids and mosque kids and neighborhood kids, and grown-ups, get together. We sand and paint the Quran holders, or Bible holders, or cookbook holders, though we dont get all of them done. We listen to one anothers traditions. We run around the church yard and play games and have snacks. Qamar Bashir was there with her kids Asha and Omar and Mohamed, who were so much younger than they are now. We had a terrific time. So at the church a couple months later, one Sunday in October, we expect that in the hour before worship, the Sunday School kids and the Sunday School teachers will get little red wagons and walk the completed Quran holders over to our friends at the mosque. But before that Sunday arrives, Mayor Larry Raymond publishes a letter to our Somali neighbors that causes great consternation. So we invite everybody to join us on this little

4 Friendship Walk from the church to the mosque. About three hundred people come. Kids Muslim, Christian and otherwise are going to lead the way. We plan to pass by Trinity Episcopal, where Trinitys parishioners will make the Friendship Walk their nine oclock Mass and come out to join us. And were going to end up at the mosque and make fine speeches and declare our solidarity with one another. But before we start our Friendship Walk, two young white men, representing a white supremacist organization, stand across the street with posters that say and depict insulting things about the Somali people. In the following week another white supremacist organization, the World Church of the Creator, will declare its intention to hold, on January 11, 2003, a rally in Lewiston to tell Somalis to go away. In the meantime, on a Sunday afternoon a few weeks after the Friendship Walk, we have a little service at the church. Our minister, the Rev. Ruth Morrison, says a few words. ZamZam Mohamuds son, Jama Ahmed, a foot and a half shorter than he is now, reads from the Quran. Sheri Olstein, from Temple Shalom, reads from the Hebrew Bible. Tim Griffin offers a blessing from the Bahai community. And two boys, Hossain Naji and my son Markus, act out a prayer with no words. They lay a piece of cloth across my shoulders. It is red and white, and it came from the A&R Halal Market on Bartlett Street. Their actions, and our gathering that day, are a prayer that God, Allah, the Divine, might act in this moment in our community. So it was entirely unsurprising the next day when the phone rang at

5 the church. Some friends were over at City Hall. Lets get together, they said. Lets do something. So we met and an hour later said we are Many & One, and on January 11, we too will hold a rally to say that this community, Lewiston, Maine, is a place for everyone. And the day came. At the Many & One rally, thousands of people gathered to say that whether you are Somali or Vietnamese or U.S. born, whether gay or straight, whether you have this ability or that disability, whether you are this or that, Lewiston is your town. The rally was just a start, it was just a day in a string of days, but it was pretty fun. It was thrilling. It was enough to give a person hope.

When I go to heaven, I want to get credit for my better moments. I hope that my lesser moments kind of get overlooked. When I am met at the pearly gates by Rosa Parks, I hope she doesnt tell me to stand in the line for dads who yelled way too much at their kids. I hope Saint Rosa doesnt bring up the way my youngest child regarded me when she was in middle school and high school, when she felt that her dad didnt affirm her or maybe didnt like her and sometimes said harsh things to her. I hope Saint Rosa skips ahead to the days when I learned, much too late in my career as a dad, to let my actions and words, my listening and my patience, my celebrating and my smiling, reflect better the preciousness of that daughter whom all along, in the bad days and the good, I loved more than life itself. And I hope that somehow before that time, back on earth, my girl will have found her better dad, found some healing for those hard days and found some joy in our

6 walking arm in arm. I havent always been her better dad, but I am getting there. I am on this journey. Maybe we are all on a journey from who we have been to who we may become. Our city, Lewiston, is on a journey from being a community of Native Americans who lived across the river in New Auburn; to being white people who came up the river and killed women, men and children from that community; from being people with mostly English surnames who worked and raised kids and built mills and needed new workers; to being a meanminded throng who, down on Lincoln Street, burned the little Catholic chapel of the French-Canadians who wanted to live here and work in those mills; from being an ethnic mix of mostly European Americans who filled the mills or worked as housekeepers and merchants and built churches and snowshoe clubs; to being a community where the mill machinery stopped running and people launched into new endeavors; from being a city that held the Many & One Rally; to being a city that, a year and a half later, named a park at the doorway to the community for the mayor who told the Somalis to stay away. We can become our better selves and our better community. We have not always lived up to the promise of being a community for everyone, but we who are here are alive and we can do it now. We need leaders mayors and former mayors and rabbis and business people and publishers and teachers and mothers and fathers and aunts and uncles who will rise to the occasion. We need leaders who, like other humans, have not always done so well but now catch a vision for doing better. We need leaders who will look

7 out on our streets and see our sisters and brothers and children. We need grandmothers, cousins, teenagers and retirees who will say good morning to their different neighbors more freely than they have before, or take the radical step of inviting them over for dinner, or hire them, or ask them to contribute their time and wisdom to what we are doing. We need people who determine to say more things that build up and fewer that tear down. People are indeed doing these things every day in Lewiston, and we can do them more and more, until we become the city that shines on the hill, and in the streets, and along the river that God has given us.

Mark Schlotterbeck lives in Lewiston, Maine, where he teaches English language and employment skills. He was a co-founder and the first leader of the Many & One Coalition.