When the Rev. Catherine Gregg and UNLV professor Frank “Gard” Jameson first entered the spare room of the Paradise Park Clinic on Harrison Drive in central Las Vegas, it was little more than a glorified storage cabinet.
With no windows and overflowing with outdated medical equipment, it wasn’t what Gregg considered a welcoming place.
“If you had seen the before picture, it was literally a closet, a dark, scary closet,” Gregg said. “When you have a room with no windows and brick walls, and you want to make it an interfaith contemplative center, how do you do that?”
The answer, Gregg and Jameson found, was to fill it with warm lights, shelves of books on various faiths and Las Vegas residents eager to learn about new cultures and one another. On Saturday, they did just that: A little over two dozen locals gathered for the opening ceremony of the Southern Nevada Interfaith Contemplative Center at Paradise Park Clinic for a day of new understanding.
The six-hour event began with blessing ceremonies from various faiths to help ordain the center as a comfortable and holy space for people of different backgrounds to meet. Included in the rituals was a Southern Paiute smudging, a ritual designed to cleanse a space and honor those who came before.
The Native American Tudinu, ancestors of the Las Vegas Paiute tribe, occupied what is now Southern Nevada for hundreds of years before settlers came into the desert.
For Gregg, the smudging was the most powerful part of the day’s activities and indicative of the center’s mission.
“I felt like it was very permission-giving for everything that needs and wants to unfold: love and healing and compassion,” Gregg said. “If we disconnected from that ground, that source, the roots of this place now, I think we would have missed something. I think we would have layered on something, but we wouldn’t have connected to the deep roots that are already here.”
Much of the day centered around three speakers from the different Abrahamic religions, who were invited to help introduce members of the Las Vegas community to the ideas of interfaith. Self-described as the “Interfaith Amigos,” Rabbi Laura Duhan-Kaplan, Imam Jamal Rahman and Pastor Don MacKenzie have been traveling together for over a decade to share their experiences with interfaith dialogue and community.
Rahman said throughout all the places he’s visited for interfaith events, Las Vegas stands out particularly because of Jameson’s work. Beyond being a philosophy professor, Jameson is well-known for his philanthropy and community work, having established the Volunteers in Medicine of Southern Nevada with his wife, Florence, which paid for the center’s creation.
“I feel the interfaith work that he does in Las Vegas is really very extensive, very important, and I would say far-reaching effects on very specific projects on the marginalized,” Rahman said. “I and the Interfaith Amigos, we’ve traveled to most of the states in America, but I find the work that Gard does has a particular deep resonance.”
Jameson said the inspiration for the new center in Nevada came from Texas’ Institute for Spirituality and Health in Houston, and after seeing its community outreach based in both science and spirituality, wanted to bring that mindset to Southern Nevada.
“The recognition is that we’re not just bodies and minds, we’re also spirits,” said Jameson, who is president of the Interfaith Council of Southern Nevada. “And so real health comes from addressing the body, mind and spirit.”
The meeting was filled with both lectures and activities designed to make attendees comfortable with themselves, their peers and the ideas surrounding the connectivity of spirituality. Speakers and attendees sang songs and chants in English, Hebrew and Arabic, greeted one another and meditated in various exercises all made to probe and challenge their preconceived notions.
One of the major tenets of the Interfaith Amigos’ lessons during the event was the five stages of interfaith connection, the first of which is “meeting and greeting.” Rabbi Duhan-Kaplan said she often heard people refer to their initial attempts at interfaith connection as “superficial,” but said that was almost always the first step to deeper connection.
“When we try to meet for interfaith, no starting point is too small,” Duhan-Kaplan said during the event. “Did you really think you were going to get together on day one and discuss the war in Israel and Gaza, before you even put on your name tags? You don’t have the foundation. And sometimes simply getting together and breaking the ice is a great accomplishment.”
The Israel-Gaza war was used as a reference point several times throughout the event as an example of mutual concern and advanced discussion that interfaith circles often work toward. Duhan-Kaplan and Rahman stressed that conversations about difficult topics like the war could be strengthened by mutual respect and understanding of others’ ideas and the faiths that drive them.
The event also featured local community members like Jameson and the Interfaith Choir, which sang two songs that featured lyrics in English and Arabic.
Jameson and the Interfaith Amigos said they hoped the center would become a more popular place for open dialogues on interfaith to occur in the coming months.
“Getting to know the other is what leads to trust,” MacKenzie said during the meeting. “That leads to the trust that can help us to hear the other person’s story, they can help us to hear something of that vast combination of elements that are in the soul. And then can help us to say, ‘I have that too. How can we help each other?’ ”