Toleration's Mystery
By Donna Foley
Volume 3 // Issue 4 // Spring 2022 // Lions & Lambs
A walk can sometimes become a pilgrimage. During a recent walk along the Wissahickon Creek, I found myself reflecting on certain encounters over years of working with nonprofits, with graduate theology students, and with spiritual care departments in medical institutions. Places of meeting, of vigil, of pain, and of celebration. Meetings in basements around housing or immigration issues, where hope of change was sustained. Vigils in intensive care units, at the gates of a nuclear weapons laboratory, and outside places of incarceration and execution, where hope seemed vanishingly small. Celebrations shared in different ways in different sacred spaces—generous invitations to engage other spiritualities, any one of which would take lifetimes of practice to comprehend. I find myself thinking these days about tolerance, specifically spiritual tolerance.
While I know a walk in the woods can itself be considered a spiritual practice, I myself have always needed to return to the rough reality of praying and working with others to check my meanderings and musings. It is good to be outside today, to breathe the cool air, and to step aside from the last two years of work. I provide pastoral care in a healthcare setting to elder women, vowed religious women—the people sometimes referred to as nuns. It is work I would not trade for anything, but it has not been easy lately. It is impossible to describe the effect of thick masks, face shields, and gowns on those who are vision- or hearing-impaired, or on those who are not neurotypical. It is impossible to describe what enforced isolation does to those whose lives are given to a physically gathered spiritual community. I am walking to fend off weariness. As I walk, particular phrases from many earlier ministries surface to create a kind of litany:
“Please stand here.”
“There will be no English.”
“Read this.”
“We don’t say …”
“Wear comfortable shoes.”
“Bring a candle.”
“Bring a blanket.”
“The headscarves are in that basket.”
“Welcome, Stone Person.”
“We believe he’ll be healed.”
“The body may not be moved until the chants are finished.”
“Dios te salve, Maria …”
“Can you pray with me?”
I am walking because I need to think about more recent, difficult conversations that question whether any belief in anything transcendent might actually be harmful. I am used to, and somewhat sympathetic to, charges of complicity with evil regarding my own tradition (Roman Catholic). Yet lately I find myself wondering whether, in some of my circles, any deeply held spiritual beliefs can be … tolerated.
Tolerance. Toleration. Such meager, unambitious terms, describing the creation of a space within us that lies somewhere between warm acceptance and necessary condemnation. How wide is that internal territory, and when do its boundaries shift for us? Alongside richly developed theories of radical inclusivity, is there any point in reexamining such a stingy notion as tolerance? Not to mention its older and even more grudging sibling, toleration. But perhaps—precisely because it contains that flavor of judgment and suffering with—toleration may be a concept to revisit.
There’s nothing virtuous in toleration itself. It is not indifference or affirmation. In fact, we can only practice toleration in the face of what we believe to be wrong. Toleration can be principled, assured of the divine seed present in the other. Or it can be pragmatic, simply recognizing that not all deeply held values can be reconciled among us. In either case, it is not a concept that will likely appeal to those yearning for a more utopian solution to differences. Toleration is modest, and makes no totalizing claims, even while it reserves judgment on some beliefs and behaviors. There may be places and times when it’s the best we can offer to each other. We can hope it’s only a temporary practice since it feels somewhat insulting to receive it, but I suggest we may be in such places and times.
Since an idea of toleration is only needed where there is unresolvable tension, I’ll try to briefly describe what it is like to serve people who identify as religious within the avowedly secular field of medicine. The tension between worldviews here is real, and healthcare professions often contain unexamined assumptions about religion. Considering tolerance in this one area, we might recall that medical science, like politics, did not supersede religion; it developed along with it. Given the intertwined nature of culture and spirituality, it’s important to recognize that medicine has its own unaddressed form of spirituality at play when it assesses patients’ religious practices. What bioethicist M. Therese Lysaught calls the “spiritualized Esperanto” of medicine is considered healthy, while the particular or peculiar beliefs of some individuals may be flagged as cause for concern. In response to a social worker’s question, “What is your goal for yourself?” an elder patient I know responded brightly, “To get to heaven!” This caused some consternation in the meeting, but the patient was not expressing any harmful ideation or pathology, just her life’s real goal. In this case, the individual’s beliefs could be fairly easily tolerated, if not understood or endorsed by her caregivers. In other cases, the messy contingency of working with those whose beliefs we will never hold can be more difficult. We can only face the mystery of another person and feel our own peculiarity.
Because I think about older bodies a lot, I’ve come to think of tolerance as an assistive device—the walker we need after society’s accidents and illnesses of recent years. Perhaps we will eventually recover and no longer need it, perhaps not. Toleration, and here I mean specifically spiritual toleration, remains a crabbed kind of thing. It cannot approach the beauty of authentic spiritual encounters such as I have occasionally experienced. Yet mere tolerance has its own kind of intelligence which comprehends something of injustice and violence, and its humble, vulnerable posture before others may be the best we can do in times and places beset by anxieties.
For now, I enjoy the ability to walk unassisted and reflect. I’ve arrived at my little pilgrimage’s destination. From Kitchen’s Lane along the Wissahickon in Mount Airy, you can also make a pilgrimage to Toleration if you want to. The paths are easily accessed nowadays. The rock formations themselves have the oldest and most powerful voices, but among them stands a statue of an unnamed person who appears to be Quaker. He utters a single word, as he has since he was placed among the rocks in 1883. It is carved in the base: “Toleration.” Like most places of spiritual import, the site has layers of possible meaning that you are free to investigate. A brief history of the site; the statue; its German-born artist, Herman Kirn; and the Quaker purchaser, John Welsh, is offered by Friends of the Wissahickon. A very different history is given by local writer Nate House. To respond to the latter’s assessment of time, place, and persons involved is beyond the scope of this piece. Yet House puts his finger on the difficulty some find with toleration when he writes of William Penn, “now is not the time for Bill’s peaceful toleration.” This is a significant conclusion to make regarding another’s religious principles. The argument that tolerance (or pacifism, or nonviolence) is somehow beyond the bounds of acceptable behavior at this special time (whatever that special time might be) is not new. Neither is the argument that tolerance is the sole purview of the privileged. Either of those points might be debated by people of good will. It is my sense, however, that whether the Toleration statue stands or falls, it will do so as an expression of spirituality, not pragmatism.
The statue presents an easy target for speculation and projection. Neither the sculptor nor the person who commissioned it are here to explain their processes in its creation and placement. Yet it was commissioned in a Pennsylvania where space for religious plurality was long-established by 1883. The figure was placed on the rock 200 years after the arrival of William Penn, a few decades after the worst of Philadelphia’s nativist riots, and just six years after the close of the Reconstruction Era. I believe it is meant to portray a concept, not a person, but, absent a written record of intent, I cannot be sure. We cannot know its meaning for those who first saw it. Even less can we understand what the location itself meant to earlier generations. In this, it shares some characteristics with better known and more ancient spiritual sites. It stands on layers of other stories and invites interpretation.
At the end of this walk—this brief pilgrimage—I am without any great insights, but refreshed. What if I return to the site and find the statue toppled? Would its spiritual significance endure? Yes, perhaps. I have seen the many ways people can reverence, or at least bear with, each other. The work of bearing with others, and of being borne with, turns out to be not so simple or passive. It can itself be active, transformative, and generative. That is toleration’s mystery. //
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