After 20 years covering religion, here’s the story the news cycle keeps missing

By Tracy Simmons | FāVS News Editor

The views expressed in this opinion column are those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect the views of FāVS News. 

I have spent more than 20 years covering religion in the Inland Northwest, and recently I had the chance to share what I’ve learned as a guest preacher at the Unitarian Universalist Church of the Palouse in Moscow, Idaho. What I told that congregation is something the news cycle rarely makes room for: faith communities are not waiting for permission to work for love and justice. They are already doing it. I see it every week from my desk at FāVS News. 

In January, on a cold evening in downtown Spokane, about 200 people gathered at the Rotary Fountain in Riverfront Park. They carried flowers and candles and walked 10 blocks through downtown and back. Some were Buddhist. Some were Christian. One man was a Rosicrucian who came with his dog. There were Tibetan nuns from Sravasti Abbey. There were people who probably couldn’t tell you exactly what they believed — only that they believed in this.

They were honoring a group of 20 Buddhist monks who had just completed a 2,300-mile peace walk from Fort Worth, Texas, to Washington National Cathedral — 108 days, sunrise to sundown, walking, as their leader put it, “to find peace for ourselves, to share that to our nation and the world.”

Ven. Geshe Thupten Phelgye, who founded the Universal Compassion Foundation in Spokane, flew to the East Coast just to walk with the monks for a single day. He came home with blisters on his feet. “Peace begins from ourselves,” he told our reporter. “We have to share peace, love, compassion and practice humility, compassion and forgiveness.”

At the Spokane celebration, a Tibetan Buddhist nun named Thubten Chonyi spoke about what the monks’ journey had reminded her of. She said the capacity for love isn’t something we have to manufacture or earn. 

“It’s embedded in our very psyche, as we enter this world,” she said. “What they’ve given us is a reminder of who we are.”

Asking hard questions about who deserves dignity

Around the same time, Catholic theologian Tracy Sayuki Tiemeier stood before an audience at Gonzaga University and asked a question that stayed with me. She was examining why some prominent Catholics were using degrading language about immigrants — despite the church’s official teaching on human dignity. She wasn’t talking about policy. She was talking about moral imagination. About the story we tell ourselves about strangers.

Her grandparents met while interned at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center during World War II — locked away by their own government because they were seen as “not like us.” That experience shaped how Tiemeier thinks about who we decide deserves dignity and who we decide does not.

“We can engage with faith in a way that embraces difference, and we don’t have to be afraid of it,” she said. “They don’t have to look like us, they don’t have to pray like us, to be treated with respect.”

The story I refuse to stop telling

I know this is not the only story. We are living through a moment when faith is also being used to divide, exclude and dehumanize. I report on that too. But I refuse to let it be the only story — because it isn’t.

The monks walked 2,300 miles. The theologian asked hard questions. Ordinary people showed up on a cold January night carrying candles and flowers for strangers.

This is what faith communities look like when they are doing what they were always meant to do. And it is happening right here, right now, in our own backyard.

I keep showing up to tell that story. I hope you’ll keep reading it.

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