Tulsa at Prayer
If you came to Tulsa, you would change your mind. You’d get off the plane expecting a red-state circus. You’d leave wondering why you didn’t live here yourself, and how you could survive without the onion strings at Wild Fork. Or root beer at Weber’s or the trout at White River Fish Market. We are the Midwesterners who will revive your soul.
That sweetness extends to more important spheres. We just elected our first Black mayor in a city with an electorate that is barely fifteen percent Black. There’s a glimmer of hope that the highway which serves as segregating barrier will finally be demolished in atonement for urban “renewal.” Downtown has emerged from its comatose torpor in a burst of public and private energy.
The same in the arena of interfaith relations. Here, at least, we have never lost ground. A couple of months back, I attended an interfaith service held in the sanctuary of Trinity Episcopal Church. It was planned as an act of mutual reassurance. The Blue Dot residents of Red State Oklahoma needed the stabilizing experience of holding hands. As always, Trinity rose to the occasion, convening religious progressives in a broadminded gathering.
I might not have called it a hotbed of resistance, but it was people who have already had enough of everything—stupidity, jingoism, cruelty, intolerance—that marks each day of the new administration. I heard myself pray for our president and his cabinet, hoping that they would experience enlightenment. It was a little bit like Jewish Torah Service prayers for the governments in both the U.S. and Israel. Sometimes it’s a struggle, but it’s the right thing to do.
As always, there were moments that gave me lots to think about. That lovely propensity for leaving everything to God ran smack into my prevailing liturgical skepticism. For all the comfort and security of my life, I remain a Jew praying in the shadow of Treblinka. I do not believe in an interventionist God who requires my trust and humble deference while He takes care of the business of the universe. That God has been conspicuously absent for my people.
The handout liturgy tried to say something more comforting. It asked that I try to imagine a potency that I can never expect to command, myself. Only God wields such power. This may be one of those places where we agree to disagree, where Jews and Christians sense the border between us. This is no knock against the beautiful people of Trinity whose faith looks enviably luminous and whole. But it’s a distinction in temperament and religious rhetoric.
But what I felt most acutely was the congregation’s exquisite sensitivity, a kind of gentle courtesy that exceeds normal expectations. Not one, but two rabbis were called to the podium to lead the interfaith congregation in prayer. We beamed at the worshippers and they beamed at us. At the close of the gathering, we sang a hymn (“This Is My Song”) that perfectly captured a theology of inclusion: the land of our birth is a landscape of wonders, but so is the birthplace of everyone else. Like many hymns, it moved from the general to the particular, in this case the presiding glory of Jesus. Plain as day, it was there in Verse III, excerpted from the hymnal of the congregation.
Every Jew has to reckon with this circumstance: prayerful music that captures someone else’s theology. We do it first as children in choir and it continues through every holiday pageant and celebration. What if the song doesn’t really belong to us? Should we sing any verse with a note of particularism, or ride it out while the congregation continues?
But in this case, there was no choice to make; someone had already made the choice for us. In fact, it was marked at the top of the page. At the end of Verse II, the organ crescendoed and then brought the gorgeous composition to an end. The message was that Trinity loved us all. No one would sing the third verse of the hymn, not in the setting of an interfaith gathering. It’s because Trinity didn’t want to impair the moment, a moment of perfect accord and fellowship.
I have rarely felt so tenderly included, but every time I’ve felt it, it’s been at church in Tulsa.