My current jigsaw puzzle, also a mandala, also reminiscent of a covid sphere. Does anyone else feel like these final days of 2020 are moving in slow motion?
We're "on vacation" with nowhere to go, no one to see. The psychopathic demagogue in the White House is using every final moment of 2020 to wreak more havoc. The pandemic continues to roar through like a tidal wave, and lifeboat vaccines seem to sweep out of reach. Honestly, it is hard to focus on interfaith families (or anything). Though of course family, any family, every family, remains crucial in this time of unbearable stress and trauma.
So this was not a year for big accomplishments, unless you work in medicine or public health, or you are a teacher who managed to transition successfully to working online, or entirely outdoors. Myself, well, I sure did a lot of jigsaw puzzles-a "mindless pleasure" my family likes to indulge on vacation together, but something I had never let myself do alone at home before. Finding a missing piece, fitting the pieces together, is a balm now, and a meditative practice, and I see no reason to deny myself the hours of "unproductive" puzzling.
But I also feel I owe it to my readers to look back on this year as it ends, and think about how interfaith families are weathering this moment in history, a topic I wrote about here, and then here and here and here. What else? I gave some keynotesand talks that were supposed to be in person, on zoom instead-others got postponed.
Back in the spring, the facebook group I founded, the Network of Interfaith Family Groups (NIFG), got excited about meeting up on zoom, for awhile, until we all got zoomed out. And I helped some of those families connect to online worship and interfaith religious education for kids, through IFFP in DC, the Brookville Multifaith Campus, and the Family School in Chicago. So all of that was satisfying.
Especially, to be perfectly honest, the jigsaw puzzles!
After blogging for more than a decade, I took some months off, but then found a lot of energy for writing short reports and essays in the final weeks of the year. Since it launched in 2009, this blog has been visited by over 195,000 people, with over 366,000 views, and 382 essays on interfaith families.
My top posts in 2020 had nothing to do with the pandemic, and may surprise you:
- The Interfaith Family of Kamala Harris. This was the feel-good story we all needed in 2020. An interfaith kid raised with both Christian and Hindu traditions grows up and marries a Jewish man, and goes to the White House! Surely this example of what I call an interfaith trifecta family will help to normalize the beauty of our complex, rich, multireligious heritages and extended families, going forward. While many in the Jewish (and South Asian) press wrote about Harris's interfaith family from monofaith perspectives, this post got a lot of hits because I pointed out that we-those of us who grew up in interfaith families-are a demographic force to be reckoned with, and we are showing up in leadership positions, even at the very top now.
- Ten Reasons to Teach Interfaith Children Both Religions. This is exactly what Kamala Harris's mother did! I love that this little essay, written ten years ago now in 2010, continued to hold down the #2 spot for popularity on my blog ten years later in 2020. It lays out the argument in my first book for giving interfaith kids an interfaith education, in a condensed list of ten points. As a growing segment of the population is celebrating more than one religion, this post is only becoming more relevant.
- Interfaith Marriage and the Rise of the Religious "Nones." This is another older post (from 2012) that is only becoming more and more relevant with time. The religious "nones" (atheists, agnostics, the spiritual but not religious or SBNRs, anyone who doesn't affiliate with a single religious identity anymore) continue to grow. Families spanning Christians and "nones" are the largest segment of interfaith families in the US, and the fastest-growing. Recently, I reviewed a new memoir, Blessed Are the Nones, that is a dispatch from this world. This is a topic I will return to in 2021, and beyond. So, onward through the unknown.
As pandemic fatigue sets in, keep your interfaith family safe-and that means keep everyone safe, because as I like to point out, we're all interfaith families now. Keep your mask on outside your house. Stay inside, or outside in the wild, if you have that privilege. Me, I am trying to get beyond jigsaw puzzles, to some creative new endeavors. And that may or may not happen in 2021. And that's okay.
Journalist is an interfaith families speaker, consultant, and coach, and author of Being Both: Embracing Two Religions in One Interfaith Family (2015), and The Interfaith Family Journal (2019). Follow her on Twitter @susankatzmiller.
