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On a glorious Saturday morning made all the more glorious for it being the only sunny day of the week, thirty-some people of all ages dug, hauled, planted, chatted, and laughed together.  The venue was the backyard of the REEP House for Sustainable Living and the people sweating it out were a mix of Muslims and Mennonites, brought together by Mennonite Central Committee Ontario's Interfaith Bridge Building program. The participants of the Interfaith initiative in Waterloo Region have been meeting for four years over monthly breakfasts and community events like the garden-planting at the REEP house.
 
“The day's event was a perfect opportunity for both REEP and the Interfaith community,” said Jane Snyder of REEP.  "It was one of those happy combinations of us needing a project done, and the Interfaith group wanting a project to do together.”

With help from Liam Kijewski and Crystal Bradford of Wildlife Gardening, a total of  three trees, five shrubs and one-hundred and twenty native plants were planted.

For Abu Tarek, imam of the Islamic Centre of Cambridge, planting a garden together with Mennonites made perfect sense. "Our scriptures tell us that we have a responsibility to preserve the earth, to care for it and guard it for future generations; we also have the responsibility to nurture peace and respect with those from other religions."
 
This nurturing of peace and respect was evident this day not through discussions of religion or environmentalism, but rather from the comfortable lack of it.  These were just friends and neighbours coming together on a beautiful day to do a community-building project and the peace and respect were as deeply embedded as the trees and flowers they planted.

“The mutual respect comes from a firm understanding of, and commitment to our own faiths,” says Josie Winterfeld who works for MCC's Interfaith program. "We are always finding new grounds of connection and commonalities in our faith and life, but we also encourage each other to embrace what is unique about each of our own faiths. My Muslim friends help me to look at issues of faith from a slightly different perspective, which often leads to a deeper understanding and appreciation of my own Christian faith."

Imam Abu Tarek shrugged off the idea that this Interfaith initiative was ground-breaking (forgive the pun) or new. "As the leader, I along with all leaders, take the responsibility to spread this idea [of interfaith dialogue]. This isn't something new that we are coming up with, it's in the scriptures!'