{"id":118996,"date":"2016-11-04T08:31:31","date_gmt":"2016-11-04T12:31:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=118996"},"modified":"2016-11-04T15:49:12","modified_gmt":"2016-11-04T19:49:12","slug":"uconn-reads-growing-two-religions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2016\/11\/uconn-reads-growing-two-religions\/","title":{"rendered":"UConn Reads: Growing Up with Two Religions"},"content":{"rendered":"

The UConn Reads theme for 2016-17 is \u201cReligion in America,\u201d with Eboo Patel\u2019s <\/em>Sacred Ground: Pluralism, Prejudice, and the Promise of America<\/strong><\/em><\/a> as the book.<\/em><\/p>\n

I grew up in a household with two religions. My mother, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, raised my brother and me in the Jewish tradition, celebrating Jewish holidays with family and sending us to Hebrew school to prepare to be bar mitzvahs. My father, the son of two Roman Catholics and the product of a brief stint in Catholic school, supported my mother in raising us Jewish. The rare occasions we went to church were for weddings and funerals \u2013 my father did not belong to a church or attend any regular services. His Sundays were spent working in the yard, visiting family, or watching Yankees games. We spent Catholic holidays with my father\u2019s family, and those are happy, secular, memories.<\/p>\n

Still, I struggled for many years to reconcile a Jewish faith with a father, whom I loved and respected deeply, who did not share these beliefs. How, then, could I take these teachings as truth? How could I find guiding principles? These feelings of self-doubt and confusion were tested early.<\/p>\n

The summer before my junior year in high school, a close friend died of leukemia, and I was wracked with guilt and shame \u2013 if I had only been a better friend, I thought, maybe he would have lived.<\/p>\n

In time, I worked through those feelings, and I studied philosophy, hoping to learn where I had erred and how to form my own foundational beliefs. I began to explore the teachings and philosophies of Eastern religions as an undergraduate at UConn. While George Harrison and the Beatles initially introduced me to Hinduism, I took courses with philosophy professor Robert Luyster to read The Upanishads <\/em>and the Bhagavad Gita<\/em>, looking for inklings of truth in the poetry: \u201cNever was there a time when I did not exist, nor you, nor all these kings; nor in the future shall any of us cease to be\u201d (Bhagavad Gita, <\/em>12.2). I found comfort in these words, and in the words and teachings of Buddhism and Taoism.<\/p>\n

Later, Abraham Lincoln\u2019s use of scripture in his \u201cSecond Inaugural Address<\/a>\u201d (\u201cthe judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether\u201d) provided moments of direction. With a patchwork of ideas and philosophies serving as a personal, spiritual foundation, I found relative peace.<\/p>\n

When my father died suddenly just over two years ago, we held a service in my parents\u2019 backyard, because we knew no church nor priest. A Jewish funeral home made the arrangements. We held no wake nor sat shiva \u2013 prayers were offered by well-wishers, but none were uttered. Instead, we offered the words of Bob Dylan (1997): \u201cI was born here and I’ll die here, against my will,\u201d which some Dylan scholars believe he borrowed from Ethics of the Fathers<\/em>, a Jewish text: \u201cFor against your will you are formed, against your will you are born, against your will you live, against your will you die\u201d (4.22).<\/p>\n

For weeks after my father\u2019s death, I went back to the Eastern philosophies I studied at UConn. In particular, I reread the Taoist story following the death of Chuang Tzu\u2019s wife. When a friend comes to offer condolences to the Taoist philosopher, Chuang Tzu is singing and banging on a drum. As the friend asks why Chuang Tzu does not mourn and instead disrespects his wife\u2019s passing by playing and singing, Chuang Tzu replies:<\/p>\n

When first she died, do you think I didn\u2019t grieve like anyone else? But I looked back to her beginning and the time before she was born. Not only the time before she was born, but the time before she had a body. Not only the time before she had a body, but the time before she had a spirit. In the midst of the jumble of wonder and mystery a change took place and she had a spirit. Another change and she had a body. Another change and she was born. Now there\u2019s been another change and she\u2019s dead. It\u2019s just like the progression of the four seasons, spring, summer, fall, winter \u2026 If I were to follow after her bawling and sobbing, it would show that I don\u2019t understand anything about fate. So I stopped. (Chuang Tzu: Basic Writings,<\/em> translated by Burton Watson, Columbia University Press 1996)<\/p>\n

While rereading these stories, I thought of and read others; and in this gathering of philosophies and parables, I found temporary relief. I was glad I had studied philosophy in college, and I was glad I had had the opportunity to share these ideas with my father on occasion.<\/p>\n

I often recall a conversation with my father as we drove back one summer night from Yankee Stadium. I shared the four noble of truths of Buddhism and the \u201cWay\u201d of Taoism, and he shared his perspectives on life, religion, kindness, and inevitable death. We talked about raising children (and being a child) in a home with multiple religions, sharing our experiences, difficulties, and perspectives. We explored our philosophies in an honest and open way, and we left with a new understanding and appreciation for one another.<\/p>\n

And so, when moments of despair arrive, I look to many faiths and philosophies for guidance \u2013 from East to West, from Dylan to Aeschylus: \u201cEven in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God\u201d (Aeschylus, Chorus in Agamemnon<\/em>). Against our will, we may know joy, plenty, and good fortune, but we may also know sadness, defeat, and loss. If we\u2019re fortunate, we can look to our faith \u2013 or the faith of others \u2013 to find comfort, if only briefly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The son of a Jewish mother and a Roman Catholic father, Brandon Murray describes how he has found inspiration in many world faiths.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":58,"featured_media":119006,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2225,2234],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[117],"class_list":["post-118996","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uconn-storrs","category-university-life"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-11 06:40:09","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118996","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/58"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=118996"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118996\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":119020,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118996\/revisions\/119020"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/119006"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=118996"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=118996"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=118996"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=118996"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=118996"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}