Stephanie Dorwick | Author | Your Name Is Not Anxious
Ordination as an Interfaith Minister

On 12 June 2005 Stephanie Dowrick was ordained at the Cathedral of St John the Divine in New York as an Interfaith Minister.

She says,

For me this was a wonderful celebration of my long-time commitment to interfaith – to respecting and honoring the teachings on love, tolerance and compassion from all paths, and the “”holy longing”” that goes beyond denominations. Like most of my classmates, I continue to have a “”home faith”” but I have benefitted hugely from my contact over several decades with teachers from many paths, and from the scriptures and insights of different faiths. I will continue to offer spiritual teaching, retreats and days of reflection from an interfaith perspective. And I also see writing as central to my interfaith work, bringing together the psychological with the spiritual and the social with the personal. I have been studying the different paths for many years – and will continue that throughout my lifetime.

My feeling about interfaith sings in these lines from the great
13th-century Sufi poet, Hafiz:

I have learned so much from God
that I can no longer call myself
a Christian, a Hindu, a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Jew…

and in these lines, from the equally sublime Sufi poet, Rumi

The sun’s light looks a little different
on this wall than it does on that.
But it is one light….

There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.