Letters on WSU chapel, Muslims, cost of lobbying, quilt of valor

At least WSU chapel is being used

As a Wichita State University alumnus, I read the story on the WSU chapel controversy with great interest (Oct. 7 Eagle). I spent four years on the WSU campus as a student. I wasn’t even aware that a chapel existed. Despite my atheism, I seriously doubt I was unique.

Indeed, given the generally amoral nature of your average college student, I’d think people would be pleased that somebody – anybody – is using the chapel. That they worship Allah instead of Yahweh is an ultimately minor technicality, one that ideally shouldn’t factor into the equation.

There are only three solutions I can see to this dilemma: WSU is going to have to either rearrange the chapel so that the Muslim students can use it, expand the chapel to accommodate both forms of worship, or build a separate mosque. The latter two are more expensive than the first, but considering that WSU is paying a man $3 million to teach kids how to run back and forth while bouncing a ball (Oct. 6 Sports), I’m confident it can scrape up the money somewhere.

Change a mosque?

After reading the article about the changes made to Grace Chapel at Wichita State University, so that Muslim students there could use it as a place to worship, I had a thought, albeit a hypothetical one. What if I and several other Christians needed a place to worship and pray but lived a couple hundred miles from the nearest church, and what if the only place closer – say, about 2 miles away – was a mosque? Would we be able to request that a few pews, an altar and maybe a cross or two be added for our own worship purposes? Would the Muslims who worshipped there accept and cater to our requests?

Probably quite a few people who read this will think I’m prejudiced, which might actually be true. This nation was founded on Christian principles, and little by little those Christian principles and rights are being taken away and completely removed.

Start giving an inch and they’ll take a mile, so to speak.

Gracious Muslims

In 1881, my grandmother was baptized as a young adult Christian believer in the Kyk Ota Mosque in the village of Serabulak, about 20 miles from Bukhara on the ancient Silk Road in what is now Uzbekistan. The Unruh family was part of a caravan of Mennonite immigrants fleeing Ukraine looking for safety, religious freedom, farmland – and to prepare themselves for the imminent “return of Jesus Christ.” When the khan of Bukhara, mindful of the bloody Crusades, learned about the group’s millennialist agenda, he prevented the group from settling and also from proceeding through his region and beyond.

My ancestors were grounded, homeless, unemployed, out of food – and becoming hopeless. The gracious Muslims of Serabulak took them in, provided shelter, food, medical care, work, dignity, friendship and an open welcome to use their mosque on Sundays for worship, weddings and funerals for a period of nine months until my people were given safe passage to move through the great Kara-Kum Desert into the province of the khan of Khiva.

In 2007, about 125 years later, on the first retrace of that epic migration to Central Asia, we found the mosque, unchanged. When the imam heard our story and recognized our photos of this holy place, he gave us joyful liberty to explore, to worship and to find the gravestones of relatives – all while an aged man prayed for us ceaselessly near the entrance.

The accommodation of the Wichita State University chapel for all faiths is a beautiful, timely and imperative development.

Cost of lobbying

Since January, lobbyists have wined, dined and entertained, at a cost of more than $500,000, Kansas lawmakers who protest that freebies don’t sway their vote (Oct. 4 Eagle). That’s quite a bit of money anted up to influence sterling lawmakers who can’t be bought.

When I was in the Air Force, we were absolutely forbidden from accepting any freebie at any time for any reason. Shouldn’t our lawmakers at local, state and federal levels be equally constrained? That might signal the beginning of a much-needed effort to get money out of politics.

A kind ‘thank you’

At the September meeting of Quilts of Valor-Greater Wichita Area, a gentleman read a note that he found on his car while parked at the grocery store. It read: “I saw your Quilts of Valor sticker. My husband received one after being medevaced out of his last deployment. It has become one of his most precious possessions. Thank you so much for what you do. Bless you!” The writer of the note should have seen the tears and goose bumps in the room that day.

This story was originally published October 9, 2015 at 7:04 PM with the headline "Letters on WSU chapel, Muslims, cost of lobbying, quilt of valor."