498 Square Feet

What do you do with the space that is available to you? That was an underlying question that came up in a meeting this past week. A few weeks ago, I attended an interfaith conference at Yale called Coming Together 7. On Monday, I met with my two friends Jaimie and Emily to share our experiences. We all appreciated the fact that Yale’s campus had separate spaces dedicated to different religious groups on campus, and we talked about whether an interfaith space could be implemented at BU. At that point, though, we ran into the obstacle of space.

Even though BU’s Charles River campus stretches for a mile and a half along Commonwealth Ave, it its heavily integrated into the city of Boston. As a result, space is a very limited resource. I learned an interesting fact during the meeting: if you took all the space in the university and divided it among its students, each one would have around 498 square feet of room.

That number stood out to me. When you think about it, it’s a little room: probably the size of a small apartment room. But then think about all of the things that must be placed in it. Similarly, BU has to accommodate classrooms, facilities, labs, and dorms. Taking that all into account, there isn’t much left over. Creating a space in which multiple faiths could coexist would take time, and it might not happen anytime soon.

So how do you use space currently available to facilitate interfaith ministry? Or for worship in one particular faith, for that matter? When there is no stable place to keep the things you need for worship, creating a place to practice your faith becomes incredibly challenging. It is especially difficult when some of the religious spaces on campus aren’t welcoming to all. Not everyone will want to step through the doors of a church, for example. But your beliefs are something that you carry with you, something that can expand into the space you inhabit. The space should therefore adapt to and accommodate them. I don’t quite know what this will involve, or how to achieve this in the near future. But I do know that everyone should have access to a space that welcomes all of them. Hopefully, they will be able to see those 498 square feet not as restricting, but liberating.

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