mmh Blog
MMH Festival Recap!
In a welcoming café of South London, in-between squirrels and the train rails, MMH met in person! It was an incredible feeling to actually be sitting around a table with old and new friends that share similar lived experiences, and a passion for fostering interfaith conversations and push boundaries.
As I look back to Sunday, I keep thinking about the many stories we heard. They all seem connected by the same fearless way of looking at identity, interrogating it from every angle like a Rubik’s cube, never taking anything for granted. We all adopt labels, change them, discard them. What families and individuals of mixed backgrounds teach us is that these labels are porous, the boundaries between them can be made, unmade, creatively played with, reinforced, or dissolved throughout life.
Our speakers shared about how being mixed, or creating mixed families, often made them feel like troublemakers, agents of confusion and mythical figures with two faces, a Trojan horse! Mixed families and people are often seen as halves, as belonging neither here nor there, or as professional cherry pickers. The reality is that we often develop deep love, belonging, and knowledge of the traditions we inherit or partner into. It is true: creating a mixed-faith family breaks the status quo, but not because we bring confusion, but because we resist a logic that wants us all divided into neat boxes.
Here’s what some attendees had to say:
🗣️ Josephine, Participant: “It’s really eye opening for me, meeting likeminded people who understand my questions and lived experiences as someone in a mixed-faith marriage, and it’s reassuring for me with my mixed-faith children.”
🗣️ Sophie, Speaker: “As someone not from a mixed faith background, it was inspiring to learn about people’s diverse experiences of faith ‘outside the box’. As more people understand and experience faith and culture as fluid and complex, we need to share these stories and learn from each other.”
I hope this event showed that there’s no need to shrink ourselves into tiny boxes, and that there are others who share these experiences. More than that, I hope it reminded us the beautiful gifts we can bring to the world, and to interfaith conversations and work specifically: listening skills, interreligious knowledge, empathy, and compassion among many more.
We’ve already broken the status quo, let’s not stop here!
