Avi grew up in Calgary, as part of a Jewish family that encouraged intellectual query. He went on to study philosophy and teach meditation and that passionate spirit of inquiry is a major driving force behind his spiritual practice.
“I describe my religious belief as inter-spiritual with Jewish roots. I believe that all the world’s faith traditions have wisdom about how to live richer lives and improve the world. Also crucial to my belief system is the Socratic injunction to continuous inquiry, rejecting all fixed dogmas and doctrines, save for the dogma of trust in the endless inquiry itself. I am largely a pragmatist when it comes to religious belief systems. I don’t so much ask, ‘is this true?’ as ‘how does this work to enhance one’s life and the lives of others?’”
Kate was raised in a very traditional Catholic home in Scarborough, and continues to consider herself Roman Catholic. The desire to experience connection with God fuels her compassion for people and she has a couple of degrees in Theology. Kate says she has a pragmatic approach to learning about diverse spiritual practices:
“If a religious teaching makes no sense to me, I dive deeper to find the good in it. One of my most central beliefs is that there’s goodness at the heart of things: that people and the world are all essentially good, and are in various degrees of turning toward or away from the source and fullness of that good. My belief is that all our curiosity and passion and desire and creativeness and sexiness and inventiveness and tenderness, all our love of knowledge and learning, all of the qualities that make us most brilliantly human, are inextricable from our longing for what I call God. We come from love, are made to magnify love, and will return to love.”
Love, and in particular romantic love, are also central to Avi’s spiritual practice:
“I believe in God as a benevolent shapeshifting cosmic intelligence who takes many forms and many names, manifesting for each culture and each individual in the form that is most needed. My own favorite form (Ishta Devata in Sanskrit) is the God Eros. Eros speaks to the endless romantic passion that animates all creation, the force that drives all great human endeavor and which inspires devotion through endless delight, enthusiasm, and curiosity.”
Kate and Avi share an approach to prayer that characterizes the mystical traditions of various religions. Avi did lots of reading to help him understand the tradition of Catholic mysticism and imaginative prayer that Kate was steeped in. Since she fell in love with Avi Kate has started meditating and has begun participating in Jewish rituals. Kate says,
“I’ve had mystical moments during the Amidah at a synagogue, after receiving communion, and during a mountain meditation. I will welcome any practice that helps me let God in.”
Both Avi and Kate have careers in spiritual care - Avi as a spiritual director and meditation teacher, Kate as chaplain and psychotherapist (of a spiritual bent). They first met in 2014 at a professional conference in mental health and spiritual care at University of Toronto’s Hart House.
“I took notice of Avi a couple of times during the day, but he really caught my attention when he asked a particularly elegant question. It was about how to support a person with bipolar disorder as they integrate their experiences of illness- some of which may be spiritually significant- into their overall sense of identity.”
Kate figured he must have a background in philosophy and waited to chat with him after the conference was over.
“When I finally got my chance to talk to him, the intellectual spark was immediate- we discovered that we had the same favourite philosopher, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and I shouted “We have to be friends!””
Avi explains how he doesn't usually meet many Merleau-Ponty fans, so he agreed that they should be friends. Kate wrote to him that week expressing her interest in continuing the conversation, and Avi replied saying: “you are the most interesting person I have met in a very long time”. He suggested they meet the next day.
Their first date lasted six hours because they kept refusing to end the conversation and they both were nearly falling over from exhaustion. They had discussed prayer, meditation, mental illness, sexuality, prisons, singing and “a million other things”.
Early on Avi identified a “cultural difference”: Ashkenazi Jews drink considerably less alcohol than Irish Catholics. After pointing out this difference to Kate, he said, “But there are things I love about Irish culture, like the Irish flute!”. Little did he know, that Kate had grown up playing the Irish flute and she soon discovered that he was interested in Celtic folk music.
Avi and Kate admit that their families are concerned about the religious identity of their future children. People have commented that their kids will be “confused”, but they say they are not worried. According to Avi:
“We both made our careers out of our love of prayer, ritual, tradition, and serious thought. Our shared spirituality is so in sync - we even question whether we are interfaith. We may come from different home faith traditions but I've never met somebody whose faith is a better match for mine: growth, exploration, going deep, breaking the rules, devotion, the sacredness of sexuality, imagination, aspiring to see the good in all people.”
Jokingly Kate explains that there hasn’t been one event they’ve attended, of any faith or background other than Ashkenazi, at which Avi has not commented, “If this were a Jewish event there’d be more food”.
“Somehow, without looking, each of us found a partner who prized a relationship with God above all else, who had reached so many of the same conclusions about living and about relationships.”
Kate and Avi will be married on Valentine’s Day, 2016.
“We still think of God as the “third person in the relationship”, and pray together regularly. Usually with great gratitude for the amazing and unexpected gift that we were given in each other.”
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© 2016 Colin Boyd Shafer, All Rights Reserved.
