In celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, Upper and Middle School students participated in a special Chapel service this week. Chapel began with a moving presentation of a rubbing from the Vietnam Memorial Wall. Upper School teachers, Rob Maier and Topher Row, presented the rubbing to Dr. T.J. Locke explaining how their JTerm class visited the memorial and searched for the names of two EA alumni who died in the war. The class learned that John Long, '56 and Ed McIlvain, '65 died on the same day and are listed next to each other on the Memorial Wall.
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As Chapel continued, the audience welcomed Rev. Julia Sheetz-Willard, Ph.D., Associate Director of Campus Ministry at Villanova University. Rev. Sheetz is the first Protestant campus minister at the university and has a special focus on interfaith dialogue and outreach to students of diverse religious backgrounds.
Rev. Sheetz-Willard began her talk, "We are strangers to each other, you and I." She then went on to speak about the instinctual "friend or foe" evaluation we conduct when facing with a stranger.
"The work of Dr. King and his contemporaries is far from over," she explained.
Rev. Sheetz-Willard then transitioned to talk about injustice of all kinds, whether they are based on sexuality, gender, economic status, political opinions, or religious differences.
She shared one personal story about a time when she welcomed a group of Saudi professors during a conference. During their visit, an Amish family hosted the group for dinner during which they sang hymns and the Saudi professors read from the Koran. When the reciter misread a word in the passage, the other became animated, correcting him on the mistake he had made while reciting God's word.
"In that moment, I recognized that their regard for the Koran, as a vehicle of connection to their God, was every bit as deep and powerful as my regard for Jesus, as a Christian," explained Rev. Sheetz-Willard. "It was a moment of openness, a moment when we knew that there were places that were deeper than our difference and there was common ground on which we could meet."
She called for us all to be "interreligious bridge builders" and closed her talk with a quote from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.:
We have inherited a big house, a great 'world house' in which we have to live together – black and white, Easterners and Westerners, Gentiles and Jews, Catholics and Protestants, Moslem and Hindu, a family unduly separated in ideas, culture, and interested, who, because we can never again live without each other, must learn, somehow, in this big world, to live with each other.
Watch the full Chapel Talk below: