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The Just Society
Editorial Note: This article represents a paper presented by Joseph Romain at the Conference “Charting the Future: An EPIC Experience (Empowerment, Presence, Integrity, and Compassion) on February 23-26, 2003 in Toronto. It was a Joint Conference of the A.P.C. ; CAPPE/ACEPEP ; NACC ; NAJC. Anyone interested in gaining insight into the purpose and function of Ontario Multifaith Council and the Multifaith Information Service will appreciate this presentation.
Canada, your kinder, gentler neighbour to the north, prides itself on its determination to respect the values of freedom, equity of persons, and has as it’s social ambition a utopic Just Society. Lawmakers, lawyers and bureaucrats fall from grace and stumble up here, too, but generally, if one were to ask what defines Canada as a nation, I, for one, would answer that it is the pursuit of a Just Society.
I didn’t come here to run for office, or salute any flags; but it is important to have some flavour of the Canadian temperament to understand how it is that a service so unique and unexpected as the Ontario Multifaith Council exists, even in a climate of fiscally ‘responsible’ social spending. Ontario is a land of many peoples; we live cheek by jowl with people from every corner of the planet. We have a lot of differences. And difference is not always easy to manage; it holds the seeds of injustice and intolerance. But people have come here because they are seeking that ‘Just Society’ they heard of; those of us who have been here for a generation or two expect nothing less; we expect, for example, than that our social institutions respect our constitutional guarantees. And by and large, it may be argued, our social strategy is in compliance with the national will.
We are far from perfect in our social policies and structures. But in many ways, as a culture, Canadians have addressed some of those injustices which can be simply accommodated. We went through some national gnashing of teeth over such things as whether uniforms in defence, police, and so on, can accommodate religious head dresses, and we have discovered, as a people, that respect and accommodation works. Equality does not mean that we are all the same, but rather that our differences are equally respected. And one of our biggest and fastest growing ‘differences’ is in our pluralities of belief. It is not simply that people here hold to an unbelievable number of different faith traditions, but more importantly that we simply don’t understand each other’s needs.
But I am ahead of myself. We will get to the Multifaith Library, I assure you, though we will take the scenic route.
OMCSRC
The Ontario Multifaith Council is mandated to assist the provincial government in fulfilling some of the obligations of a Just Society. We help ministries and their agents with understanding and accommodating the faith requirements of those who find themselves as residents, willing and unwilling, of the Province. We assist and advise in policy development, Human Resource matters, security issues, dispute reconciliation and, most recently, the reintegration of ex-offenders into community.
The Council is comprised of 33 Faith Groups, all of whom have agreed to set aside their areas of dissimilarity in order to further a common goal of social recognition of the rights and needs of the faith group adherents.
Council members are appointed and endorsed by the Faith Groups, all of whom send one Councillor and one Alternate to represent their interests. This council meets six times in a year to review and guide the direction of the organization. Between meetings, our councillors often work many hours in a year providing a conduit between spiritual and religious care workers and their faith group.
RMCs
Across the province, Regional Multifaith Committees (RMC) represent the Council and by extension, the Faith Groups, and assist in the delivery of multifaith services across the Province. The RMCs help to provide connection between local faith communities, spiritual and religious care volunteers, and the chaplains working in the region’s institutions and community based programs.
These committees, all volunteers, provide assessment of Spiritual and Religious Care programs at institutions, screening and certification for multifaith competency, and various kinds of support to chaplains and volunteers in government run and ‘private’ institutions.
Origins/Purpose of OMC
Imagine a world where the idea that religious care is an important right; where this right is regarded as important enough by society that they provide care in institutions where the government pays the bills. Now, imagine that the government would pay a regulator to ensure that officials and agencies provide adequate and appropriate care as determined by the Faith Groups themselves. Now imagine what happens when you introduce, over a short twenty or thirty years, the multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, multi-FAITH population which we have fashioned. Who determines what is adequate? What is appropriate? Nobody knew. If justice is your goal, than knowledge is the surest means to get there. This is the challenge which led to the establishment of the Ontario Multifaith Council.
I do not mean to suggest that Ontario is some Spiritual Care panacea; simply that adequate and appropriate care is the stated goal of the people, government, and faith groups of this jurisdiction. And they contract with the Faith Communities to provide roadwork and maintenance on the path to panacea.
Services
The OMC is a fairly broadly based organization, and supports a variety of activities and services. Among the services we deliver are various forms of information to Spiritual and Religious Caregivers, faith volunteers across the province who visit institutions, healthcare professionals, government bureaucrats, and, arguably, the people of Ontario.
The chief vehicle for the delivery of these information services is a substructure of the OMC which we call Multifaith Information Services. Multifaith Information Services. is comprised of two and one half ‘full time equivalents’ who attempt to do the work of several times that many. We are, from youngest and smartest to, the other end of that spectrum, one techno-wizard, one half-time librarian/bibliographer with professional experience on three continents, and one librarian/manager. Two of our staff hold post graduate degrees in areas of religious study, and all three of our staff have years of library training and experience, and are capable of understanding the difference between a question we can find an answer to, and a question which requires the intervention of a Faith Group representative.
The Multifaith Library
The chief program of M.I.S. - aside from managing several websites and the technical support requirements for a community of 20 field Chaplains and support workers - is something we call The Multifaith Library. And that is what I’m here to speak with you about this afternoon. Forgive me that it took so long to get here, but you never get the lie of the land by taking the short cut. Context is everything.
The Multifaith Library is a budding physical and virtual library whose mandate flows from the need to provide the information infrastructure to allow the Province of Ontario access to authoritative information on religious rights, religious r-i-t-e-s, spiritual care, and related issues. That is, to enable the government to be in compliance with their own stated policies. If a public service worker is expected to deliver that service in accordance with the accepted norms of a faith tradition, they need a place to find authoritative information regarding those norms.
Our clients are varied and their needs are sometimes simple, but none-the-less real and often immediate.
Reference Services
A chaplain called me from a large northern Ontario town. She was in more than a little distress, “I’m having my first Hindu at the Maniwaqi Lodge; She will arrive on Monday, and I don’t know anything about Hindus. Do they eat meat? Isn’t meat holy for them? Or is that only beef? Will she be offended by the crucifix in the dining room?” - this was Friday afternoon at four o’clock. For the staff and the chaplain at the Maniwaqi Lodge, the transfer of this patient was a complex and frightening prospect; spiritual care is, as you know, an important part of life in a senior’s home, and has implications in many aspects of residential life.
For the staff at the Multifaith Council, this was a very simple, and rather routine request; it took half an hour to collect and fax a dozen pages of practical information about Hindu customs, diet, some simple recipes, and enough theology to get her through her own evident discomfort. “No,” we assured her, “the Hindu lady won’t have a problem with a crucifix. The aim here is not to achieve luke-warm religious care…”
Between this small docket of facts, and the Multifaith Information Manual which we produce and distribute, the chaplain at Maniwaqi conquered her fear and launched into her own ‘multifaith odyssey’. We contacted the local RMC, who agreed to provide information and support from the many local faith groups, in ensuring that the new resident was looked after, and that the care of current residents would not be adversely affected. Difference can be frightening, but it can also be the catalyst for renewal.
We also answer questions from judges, teachers, principals and school boards, cooks, hoteliers, prison superintendents, nurses, pharmacists, librarians, and senior government mandarins. These are not people who might normally have a reason to wonder about the high holidays of the Unification Church, or about the burial arrangements for Tibetan Buddhists, but they are all people for whom questions of ritual, custom and culture have become important: generally, something has happened, and our caller feels that they are either the first person to need to know whether Jews perform any public ritual for a one-year anniversary of death, or they feel relieved that we would certainly provide their employer with a letter indicating that Guru Nanak’s Birthday is recognized to be a Sikh holiday.
Some of our clients’ needs are more complex, and require research over days or months. If a government bill will have direct or detected implications for faith groups, it is the responsibility of the Ontario Multifaith Council to consult with the faith groups and bring forward a consensus opinion and the attendant paperwork to the government body responsible. The library provides research and ground control for some of these reports, while others find their way to or from OMCSRC Committees, the Human Rights Commission, or the Provincial Ombudsman’s office. Generally, our role is to determine the ‘adequate and appropriate’ response, and to prod our partners into accommodation.
The reason these things are important is because out there in the real world, ritual rubs shoulders with the mundane. When, for instance, a Rastafarian man found himself under arrest for practicing his preferred religious ceremony in a provincial campground up north, he didn’t have the benefit of the culturally seasoned correctional officers to which we have become accustomed here in the confines of urbane Toronto. The Rastafarian was unceremoniously booked and relieved of his head-gear as if were a gangland kerchief.
Fortunately for our forlorned brother, he was detained on Sunday, and on Monday he was able to convince the visiting clergyman from the local Gospel Alliance Church that he felt shamed before God without his head-dress, and the good pastor, who had seen our ‘Spiritual and Religious Care Awareness Week’ poster in the lobby, called us to see if we had ever heard of such a thing. We had, and the hat, much to the amusement of the correctional officers, was returned to their guest. (To my knowledge, no charter argument for a religious dispensation from the legal consequences of cannabis possession has been made, so there is nothing we can do about the fact that the Rastafarian was locked up for performance of a sacrament. There was a time in Ontario when attendance at a native sweat lodge could result in jail, too, but we got past that hurdle long ago.)
The Ontario Multifaith Council doesn’t wave the ‘human rights stick’ at anybody; the litigious stick is a serious and expensive tool, and everybody knows that it is there, and generally, when an employer/teacher/bureaucrat understands what it would take to satisfy the employee/student/inmate’s religious accommodation, and they have some assurance that the request is legitimate, agreement is by and large just around the corner; no sticks.
Counting and Accounting
Our clients are extremely varied, and we are forced to tabulate each one, in order to determine who we are serving and what they are looking for. This both encourages our government partners, who thrive on service delivery statistics, and gives us something of a rudder for our collection development, and overall direction.
We serve client chaplains in Hospitals, Correction and detention centres, Government policy analysts, Community Chaplains, Schools and school boards, personnel departments, clever librarians who think around corners, employers and employees of both public and private institutions. The number of things they call us for are beyond belief, and the inquiries number in the thousands per year.
The Human Library
Simple inquiries would include such things as dates and observances for festivals and holy days, prayers and liturgies for specific purposes, verification of dietary restrictions, basic theological outlines. But our collection is not limited to static resources; we provide links between people. A healer is needed for an Ojibwa family in Oakville; a hospital in Mississauga needs a volunteer to visit with a Roman Catholic woman who speaks only Tagolog; a police department in Windsor needs a Yoruba contact person to help interpret the dietary requirements of a immigration detainee. Normally, the resources which librarians consult are bound, printed or at least ‘virtual’; this part of our ‘collection’ is comprised of humans. And we catalogue them. We can’t mail you a Southern Baptist preacher, or a Grey Nun, but we can and do connect our clients to faith communities, volunteers, services and clergy across the regions of Ontario.
The Virtual Library
Our approach to virtual librarianship is, to the best of my knowledge, unique. Every library worthy of the name has a ‘virtual’ component these days. These virtual libraries range between simple ‘bookmark’ management, to sophisticated lists of recommended web sites.
A library is not an amalgam of things; or a room full of books on shelves. A library is what you get when you apply a system of knowledge management standards to analyse and access a body of information. In my view, a ‘virtual’ library should be no different. In our own catalogue, we have begun to catalogue web resources in exactly the same way we catalogue our books: according to the accepted bibliographic standards of professional librarianship. When you search our catalogue, you will find books, tapes, articles, and websites, all weighted equally. We do not have one catalogue for books and one for videos, so we see no good reason to apply different standards to the internet.
A typical library record in our collection has notes, sometimes extensive notes, on the item. We try to provide tables of contents, individual authors within collected works, extensive subject descriptors (both LCSH and Natural Language [for those of you who care about such things, we run two authorities, searchable both separately, and together, so bibliographic purists can relax.]) Modern technology has allowed us to capture and clean up cataloguing information on most of our monographs, and, where available, we have included extensive notes and sometimes full text of books, articles, and, of course, websites.
Taming of the Web
The Internet is chaotic. That’s one of the best things about it. We know that there is a lot of chaff. And a lot of wheat; Its like a gigantic second-hand bookstore: You know there’s something that you want or need in there, and its great fun to ramble around in the stacks, keeping an eye out for that biography of St. Cuthbert, scanning spines and flipping pages. In the end, maybe it doesn’t’ matter if you find St. Cuthbert or not. It was fun, and you got out for under twenty dollars. But, folks its not a library.
And neither is the ‘virtual library’ that you hear so much about. I don’t understand why my colleagues treat web-based resources any differently than they treat St. Cuthbert’s biography. The same holds for journal and magazine databases, electronic newspapers, and the rest. Of course you don’t have a shelf to set the web site on, but you do have a ‘hyperlink’ which brings the information to the patron’s desktop, whether they are sitting across the room or across the world. To me, the solution to the management of internet resources is simple. I can see no reason (beyond one or two technical matters which clever programming could easily overcome) why web sites should not be a vital and growing part of our collections, and integrated into library collections everywhere.
Libraries struggle with what they call ‘taming the internet’. I don’t really think that ‘taming’ such a Cerberus is either possible or desirable. Neither is it my own metaphor of choice. I would like to go back to the used bookstore for a moment and for a metaphor. Does anybody want to ‘tame’ a second hand bookstore? Of course not, since the bookstore is exactly what it is: a rambling shamble of items roughly sorted in a fashion understandable only to the proprietor.
For a librarian, well, for this librarian, the internet is like a huge second-hand bookstore right next door. A bookstore almost anybody can get lost in. Even though there is a great ‘googly’ proprietor who can help guide you through the morass, he can do little more for you than point you to the right aisle - and there may be several hundred thousand items in the aisle. You can certainly find gems in that hodgepodge. Full text illustrated bibles, the audio Koran, downloadable spiritual assessment studies, and a lot of junk. A big lot of junk. But when we find a gem, I take it out and send it to our cataloguer Mohamed, and he catalogues it. Cataloguing is expensive, so we have to evaluate whether or not this item is liable to last, is authoritative, has advertisements everywhere, etc. Of course we make mistakes, and the process is slow. We intend to have five hundred items added to our catalogue this year.
Here the bookstore metaphor finishes, for instead of depleting the bookstore’s stock, we have left it intact. In fact, each item in the catalogue leads our library user right back to the bookstore, where they are free to use the material as if it were our own.
Useful Resource Services
So, in the many thousands of pages available at the swipe of a google, we have begun to collect and catalogue what we regard as some of the more reliable, authoritative, useful and interesting resources.
Though our own virtual library of spiritual and religious care is still in its formative stages, many a happy chaplain has clicked and grinned at our site, where she found the full text of the Nag Hammadi codices and keeps a full text searchable bible at her electronic elbow, while she amuses herself with panoramic views of sacred sites around the world. And she is not doing this on coffee breaks! She uses the searchable King James to prepare her sermon, and reads up on the history of the Gnostics because she has a client who is convinced that the end of times is at hand, and he assures her that it was clearly forecast in the Gospel of Philip. He is convinced that transmitter devices have been placed at sacred sites around the world, and they will unite in a cleansing conflagration. So, ask me again why we would catalogue the Nag Hammadi Library and panoramic views of sacred sites…
Agreements
For you, the client, a library is a place where you go to find stuff out. For me, the librarian, it’s a place to put things that I think you will want to find. And so we have an agreement; I will always put Cook Books at 641, and you will always look there to find them. You and I agree, for the most part, about what should be put where. Philosophy in the 100’s, Religion in the 200’s, Social Science in the 300s, etc., and so on; it gets very tedious, the debates over the intricacies of classification and John Dewey’s system, (even more so in the Library of Congress array) but generally, libraries and their users have a good arrangement which mostly serves us all well.
So, when you want to put something where your client will find it, put it in the place we agreed to put such things, and describe it in the language which we have agreed to use as our standard.
When new resources are made available by the information gods, the idea of putting them into a new ‘catalogue’ or list, or treating them somehow differently than all the other resources, is a temptation it is well to resist.
This is really a debate more for the librarian than for her clients, and I assume that most of you are clients, not librarians, so I will tie up this hobbyhorse with a final comment on the matter:
The inclusion of web-based resources in our catalogue is intended to afford access to tools of the chaplain’s trade, and to make these resources available to anyone who needs them. Our manner of doing so, we believe, is unique, and a genuine, if humble, advance in our profession.
The Just Society, Again
And so, through the wisdom of some long-thinking bureaucrats - some of whom have become my own mentors - we have shucked down a paving stone on the road to fair and informed government legislation and policy, and begun to provide support to Soul Workers and bureaucrats who are struggling with the attendant challenges of a blooming multicultural landscape. We have also, along the way, made some interesting progress in the professional practice of library science.
We provide information and resources to some of the most overlooked members of our society: The sick, the indigent, the imprisoned. The comfort of a bible, an understanding of and respect for the sacred, however it reveals itself, is the dignity we owe to those whose needs are great and whose power is not. It would take the Wisdom of Solomon to stitch together a social infrastructure wherein these souls are provided with advocacy, information, and, well, simple justice. And though we’ve got a David and a Mohamed, we have no Solomon as yet. But we’re looking.
Which brings us back to where we began today. To justice and the Just Society. The world is impatient for justice as if it were a destination, rather than a process. We want everyone to have access to their rights, and to have them acknowledged with respect and open mindedness. Right now. But the world doesn’t work like that; the process has tried the patients of even the greatest of saints.
I have a friend, a Muslim chaplain, who has spent the last half-dozen years duking it out in the courts and newspapers with a judge who found the Imam in contempt for refusing to remove his kufi in court, where the clergyman was called as a witness. Of course a Muslim Cleric has the right to wear his kufi in court; but it seems that the judge has some rights, too. Or so it appeared after the last appeal. I have lost track of the details, but I believe they are still at it, trying to determine where religious rights stand in the pecking order of rights and responsibilities.
And, here we all are on this odyssey to find justice in a new world, Catholics and Protestants, Hindus and Muslims, Humanists and Pantheists, cults and sects of every stripe, the richer and the poorer; we are cheek by jowl, like backseat rug rats, noses pressed to the windows, amazed at the rapidly changing landscape of our society, and maybe secretly revelling in the wonders of this emerging world, and asking, for the umpteenth time: “Are we there yet?”
Thank you
Joseph Romain is the Director of Multifaith Information Services - Ontario Multifaith Council on Spiritual and Religious Care.
Posted by editor on September 30, 2003 10:47 AM