Toleration's Mystery
by Donna Foley
Excerpt //
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.
…
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. //
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