Patel Mentors Helped Mold Eboo Patel by

Patel Mentors helped mold Eboo Patel by giving shape to Patel's dreams and shedding light on the paths that the author might take to reach his goals. Working with mentors also gave Patel insight into diversity, and revealed worldviews previously hidden from everyday sight. Patel honors his mentors for their varied contributions to his intellectual and spiritual development.

In Acts of Faith, Patel spends a great deal of time discussing his mentors because he also wants to show his readers that their success depends on the cultivation of deep and meaningful relationships with other people. Mentors are guides, teachers, and confidents. They can serve in the role of coach, by inspiring and cheerleading. Mentors can also offer constructive criticism when those in their tutelage need it the most.

Although Patel honors a plethora of people that inspired and motivated him to create the Interfaith Youth Core, he focuses on a select few who made a special impact on his character development. One of those mentors is Brother Wayne. "Brother Wayne Teasdale had two great hopes for me: that I would start an interfaith youth movement and that I would take mushrooms with him. He got one," (Patel 59). Perhaps more than any other mentor, Brother Wayne made a huge impact on Patel's personal path.

At first, Patel was simply intrigued with the wacky Brother Wayne, who had a hippie New Age-infused brand of spirituality blending traditional Catholicism with Eastern mysticism. As their relationship deepened, Patel begun to realize that the qualities of interfaith fusion that Brother Wayne exemplified were the precise qualities he sought to manifest in his own life. One of the reasons Brother Wayne became Patel's primary mentor was because Brother Wayne helped the young Patel develop a sense of personal identity.

Prior to meeting Brother Wayne, Patel was inspired but lacked a core ego. "I loved my work as a teacher, and I loved the people I was living with, but however I combined community, justice, and creativity, it did not add up to identity," (Patel 69). Patel continues to muse, "and that was one of the key reasons I was attracted to Brother Wayne. He might have had his head in the clouds, but he had a very clear sense of his role in the cosmos," (69).

Brother Wayne therefore helped Eboo Patel discover and fulfill his role in the cosmos, which was to be a powerful and influential interfaith leader. The learning process was challenging at times. Even though Patel describes Brother Wayne as being laid-back, there were times that Wayne challenged Patel's consciousness in ways that caused him to reflect on his sense of self, his culture, and his identity. One of the first challenges given to Patel was to come to terms with his Muslim heritage.

In his youth, Patel eschewed the religion of his ancestors in order to embrace what he viewed as a more personally liberating and universal spiritual path. Patel loved Buddhism, especially of the Tibetan variety. He looked up to Brother Wayne because Wayne had met the Dalai Lama and worked closely with the Dalai Lama's brother. Brother Wayne meditated and had spent time in an ashram in India. Patel wanted to identify with Buddhism and to one day call himself a Buddhist.

Yet at a conference one day, Brother Wayne introduced Eboo Patel as a "Muslim." The word triggered a psychological reaction in Patel. Sure, he was a Muslim in the sense that his parents were Muslim, but Patel himself felt "adolescent discrimination against the familiar," and did not wish to be "boxed into the traditions of our birth," (70). From that point on, Patel learned how to integrate the tradition of his birth with every other tradition he would encounter on his path.

Brother Wayne's designation of Patel as a Muslim meant that Patel could better communicate how to be a Muslim in a diverse world. Patel was able to later start the interfaith group because he had a stronger foundation of personal identity. Not all of Eboo Patel's mentors were people with whom he worked, or people he was close to like Brother Wayne. In Acts of Faith, Patel frequently mentions Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi became a spiritual and intellectual mentor for Patel, by helping Patel shape his visions.

From Gandhi's life, Patel learned how to fuse religion and politics, so that the spiritual became practical and meaningful to the daily lives of human beings. Moreover, Patel and Gandhi shared a common homeland: mother India. As a youth searching for identity, he looked to Gandhi as a mentor because it helped Patel reconnect with India. "I relieved India of the burden of being my haven, and I relieved myself of the responsibility of being the reincarnation of Gandhi.

My heritage as an Indian in America gave me a special relationship with the country of my citizenship," (Patel 89). Contemplating Gandhi helps Patel understand his own personal relationship with India and his identity as an Indian and an American. Gandhi also teaches Patel about the core values of interfaith. "Gandhi, a devout Hindu, had long maintained that Hindu-Muslim unity was just as important to him as a free India," (Patel 93).

Patel uses the tragic assassination of Gandhi (as he does with Martin Luther King Jr.) to draw parallels with Muslim fundamentalist terrorism. Indeed, part of the purpose of founding the Interfaith Youth Core is to prevent terrorism that is religiously or ideologically motivated. Patel came to see that the root cause of terrorism was social, and that the alienation of Muslim youth was bolstering membership in terrorist organizations. These organizations helped young people find an identity: both spiritual and social identities.

Patel was no stranger to the need for identity, which is why he recognized immediately the need to embrace his own Muslim identity with his penchant for universalism. This is precisely why the Dalai Lama became Eboo Patel's mentor, too. Patel met the Dalai Lama for the first time when he was with his Jewish friend Kevin in India. The.