Asheville author urges more openness about religious beliefs and practices

When Asheville author, educator and reverend Vicki Garlock was hired to design a multifaith curriculum at Jubilee! Community in 2008, she figured her academic skills and doctorate in neuroscience and cognitive development would be all she needed.

“I really thought I could sit in my office and I could read about the sacred texts, and then I would know them,” she recalls.

But she soon ran up against a problem: how to teach abstract religious texts to young children. And that problem led her to an interesting question: How do religious communities teach their own children about their traditions?

She decided to find out for herself. Thus began an educational adventure she’s been enjoying ever since, attending services and holy day celebrations at sacred spaces in Asheville and beyond.

But when COVID-19 shut down businesses and houses of worship, Garlock tried her hand at writing children’s books. Her most recent, ABCs of the World’s Religions, won the International Impact Award last year. Garlock, who is also the founder of World Religions for Kids, says she writes and teaches about religions because it’s fun — and because she believes that by ignoring people’s religious identities, we are missing connections that could strengthen our communities.

“[People] might see a hijab at the store, and they just go the other way,” she says. “They might know their neighbors are Jewish, but they don’t know what the proper greeting is so they just ignore it. And what I consistently try to tell people is we kind of tried that with racism, right? Let’s not talk to kids about it, let’s just tell kids, ‘You shouldn’t pay attention to the color of people’s skin.’ It didn’t work out very well! …. We have to figure out a way to talk about this and to bring it up and acknowledge it and honor it.”

Garlock hopes her books will play a small part in teaching people to work across perceived boundaries, making future generations more adept at solving problems together.

‘Lived religion’ in Asheville and beyond

Raised Lutheran in a small town in Illinois, Garlock attended religion classes six days a week as a child and later enrolled at a Catholic high school. She notes that unlike the Bible, which is told primarily through stories, many other religious texts such as the Quran are written in poetry. So in developing her 2008 Jubilee curriculum, she wondered, “Are kids reading the Vedas? How does this work? Because my background in cognitive psychology has told me, ‘Wow, these are really abstract and difficult-to-understand texts; they probably don’t make a lot of sense to a 5-year-old.’”

She found that while she could learn about the tenets of a religion from its texts, she had to step into its rituals to experience what she and others in her field call “lived religion.”

In 2014, Garlock began visiting many Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic, Baháʼí and Wiccan sacred spaces, including Congregation Beth Israel, Great Tree Zen Temple, Chabad-Lubavitch WNC, Mother Grove Goddess Temple and several African American Baptist churches, among others. She says she continues to regularly visit Sri Somesvara Temple, Urban Dharma, Great Tree Zen Temple and Chabad-Lubavitch WNC. She also visits Sikh and Jain holy spaces outside Asheville.

Garlock notes that people don’t realize how much variety of form exists within every religion. For example, she says, the Islamic Center of Asheville is home to Muslims from Pakistan, the Philippines and several African countries, so the hosts for a specific event determine what kind of food is served. She adds that each synagogue celebrates holidays with slightly different traditions, and every year the Hindu temple celebrates Krishna’s birthday in a different way.

Through her ongoing visits, Garlock has discovered that all religious traditions teach their children in a similar way: By listening to stories and participating as they can, children eventually “get closer” to the sacred texts and come to understand them.

That’s what Garlock did, too. Every community has welcomed her, and she’s learned that making mistakes is part of the process. She feels honored when people trust her enough to correct her. “I do believe that your intention matters. … When I ask questions, people know I’m asking questions because I’m trying to learn.

“I consider myself a pilgrim,” she says.

A book that crosses boundaries

In ABCs of the World’s Religions (illustrated by Raman Bhardwaj, an artist based in Greensboro), each letter of the alphabet stands for an element of religion. The left page gives a rhyming couplet, intended for young children, and the right page offers images and prose for slightly older children. For example, “D is for Diwali,” a Hindu festival of lights, and the right-side page shows lights-related holidays from other religions such as Hanukkah and Christmas.

Most religion books for kids, says Garlock, are devotional, intended to guide children to practice a certain religion. Hardly any educate about multiple religions as hers do. She says her books are appropriate for public schools as well as parochial and private schools because they do not attempt to convert but simply present information to encourage understanding.

Garlock assigned several letters to each of the six major world religions: Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Her book honors both the differences and similarities between them. “For example, you might think that Islam and Hinduism — what do they have in common?” she posits. “But it turns out they have some really interesting things in common, like everybody takes their shoes off before they enter the sacred space.”

Like many parents, Garlock wanted to offer religion to her own children as a way of coping with life’s challenges. But because not everyone ends up feeling comfortable in their home religion, she preferred to expose them “to a variety of practices and belief systems so they could figure out what resonated with them.”

Her children, now 18 and 24, joined her on visits to sacred spaces, visited temples in other countries when they traveled, and talked about and compared different traditions over the dinner table. “How they incorporate that into their lives as they become adults is really up to them.”

Garlock has also published two other children’s books: We All Have Sacred Spaces and Embracing Peace: Stories from the World’s Faith Traditions. ABCs of the World’s Religions was, for her, a fun way to make those concepts more accessible to a wide audience. She says the feedback that has most surprised her is from adult readers — who say they learn just as much from the book as their children do.

Why talk about religions?

Garlock believes people tend to undervalue religion as an aspect of identity and ignore the religious diversity around them. “People are uncomfortable,” she says. “They don’t know how to handle it. And teachers are afraid to talk about religion in schools because there’s not been good education for teachers about what the separation of church and state really means.”

She sees Asheville as a religiously tolerant place overall, despite some incidents. But she notes that if she stopped someone in Ingles and asked what time of year Yom Kippur or Ramadan happens, for example, most people would not know the answer.

“The more ways that we can remember that we’re all in this together, the better off we’ll be. And it’s a very long haul, it’s not going to happen in my lifetime, it’s part of human evolution,” says Garlock.

But she thinks kids are a great place to start. Kids want to talk about religions, she says, and if you ask them what they think about religious stories, they have a lot to say. “We need to give them an opportunity, we need to help them understand,” she points out. “It’s OK to wonder about that stuff.”

In the big picture, she says, all religions are “trying to deal with the problem of being human.” The Asheville area’s recent experience of Tropical Storm Helene, she says, is a perfect example of what religions are for. Some of the oldest rituals we know about, she notes, were created in response to the land getting too much or not enough rain. The flood story in Genesis is not even the oldest; “The Epic of Gilgamesh” is the oldest recorded one, and there are many others from indigenous traditions.

“Right now we are having a quintessentially human experience, which is that humans have always had to figure out how to live with Mother Nature,” she says. “Despite everything we know meteorologically, and despite weather forecasts, we still have these inexplicable, hard-to-understand, devastating things that happen to us.”

At their best, she says, this is what religious traditions, religious stories and spiritual practices are for: to bring people together, not only in times of celebration but in times of crisis.