6 minute read
Ida’s Journey
Ida Glaser (Central High, 1959-1968) has accomplished great things in her lifetime, but not without a great deal of early trauma. Writing from her home in Houston, Texas, Ida explains how her journey of faith has shaped her career.
From the age of 12 (LIV), I had no doubt that I was going to be a pure Mathematician. At 16 (LVI), the new Physics teacher (Mrs Silipo – she had a basset hound called Emma which trod on its ears when negotiating stairs) said she thought I should do Physics instead. Being a contrary teenager, I rejected the idea, but then thought, ‘Pure Maths is a wonderful game with ideas in my head; but maybe I should do something which will apply the game to the world outside me’; and Physics I did, eventually getting an MPhil in theoretical space physics from Imperial College, London.
By 66, when I took formal retirement, I had spent a decade as a member of the Faculty of Theology and Religion in the University of Oxford and an associate staff member at Wycliffe Hall. I had been on the founding team of the independent Centre for Muslim-Christian Studies, Oxford, as its academic director and then its director. I had published four books and an edited volume, and more papers than I can recall, and, at 70, I continue to head two writing projects. One is producing a series of Bible commentaries from Muslim contexts, and the other is developing the ‘Routledge Reading the Bible in Islamic Context’ series. As I write this, I am also writing the introduction to the next volume: a collection of papers around the topic of ‘Reading the Gospels in Islamic Context’, which I am co-editing with a Muslim from Iran and a Christian from South Africa. Oh yes! And I am writing this from Houston, Texas, where I am, with my husband, launching a new Center for Muslim & Christian Studies. In response to COVID restrictions, we have taught three online courses with 82 students from 14 countries – ‘Qur’an and Bible 1: Torah’, ‘History of Muslim-Christian Dialogue’ and ‘Contemporary Issues in Muslim-Christian Dialogue’. Watch the website for developments! CMCS Houston, the Center for Muslim & Christian Studies.
People often ask how I made the journey from Physics to the study of the Qur’an and the Bible and Muslim-Christian relations (I did a PhD in comparative theology from Durham on the way). I usually cite the well-known physicist-turned-anglicanpriest, John Polkinghorne, in his observation that the main difference between physics and theology is that physics is easy and theology is difficult. Both are observing reality and seeking truth; but physics is the study of material which we transcend, whereas theology is the study of what transcends us. If you like, I have continued to use that mathematical brain of mine to study reality, and have moved step by step towards applying it to increasingly complex systems. I’d like to record here my
appreciation of the school Latin and French which gave me a basis for much of the language study I had to do on the way.
I had about a decade of teaching Physics in the UK and in Asia, and thinking about education and how human beings of different backgrounds learn. Then I spent seven years working for a small church in Elswick, reaching out to the new immigrant families from Pakistan and Bangladesh, opening my home to local children most afternoons, reporting crimes for victims who were too afraid to contact the police, running street parties, visiting homes and thinking about all the problems facing humanity in what was then the most ‘deprived’ parish on Tyneside. It was during that time that people started to ask me to preach the Bible and to teach about Islam and Christian-Muslim relations. I continued to live in that wonderful Elswick community (yes – there is nothing like deprivation and difficulty for building amazing community!) as I went on to direct interfaith work in the UK for Crosslinks (an Anglican mission agency) and to teach more widely, and it was in that context that I disciplined my thinking by doing a part time PhD on Genesis 1-11 and parallel Qur’anic narratives. Those 13 years in Elswick were also taking me back to home territory: I could see the house in which my mother grew up from my back window. I had spent little time in Newcastle since I left my childhood home in Gosforth for university in London, and returning gave me the opportunity to reown my personal history. I even attended a face-to-face Central High reunion! Why ‘re- own’? Because I had, at a very deep level, disowned it. At the age of 15 (LV), about a month before my O Levels, we had a car accident and both of my parents and my only grandparent died. I guess that, if something like that happened today, the
school would be flooded with counsellors. In those days, we all just muddled on as we could. School was, for me, a refuge of stability in a world which had shattered, but I still left as soon as I could, and started afresh in London and pushed the past out of my mind. The journey since then has been long and painful, but with huge positives: this, as well as the fact that my father was a Jewish refugee who named me after his mother who had died in Auschwitz, has been at least as important for my work as have been my educational and community experiences and my academic studies. Academics on this Muslim-Christian interface are useless if they do not relate to real people and their pains!
Here, I want to say that I am deeply grateful for the teachers and classmates who coped with me through those last 27 months of my school days. Many years later, one of those teachers told me that she now realised how little they had known of how they might have helped, and how hard it was to guess how they should react. But I want to say that they did what they could, and gave me a measure of stability and care which was invaluable.
School also had a great impact on developing the roots of faith which have been foundational to my whole career. It was writing an RE essay in the LIV which convinced me of the existence of God and that, if He existed, that should make a difference to my life. It was my best friend (Barbara Colebrook, now a poet in Canada) who persuaded me to go on a Christian holiday in the summer following my parents’ death; and it was the teacher who organised the small Christian group (Miss Graham) who let me talk about my home situation. It was during those difficult months that I understood that, if my shattered life was to mean anything, it would have to be through God using it, so I handed it over to Him, to do whatever He wanted with me for the rest of my life. I wonder what He will lead me into next!
