Faithful journey: Colorado students explore religions along Wasatch Front

Inside the Kaisendo, or ancestors room, Monk Simon Heale points out the urns of human ashes that reside there, the remains of Zen Buddhist teachers who have helped guide the destiny of this spiritual retreat in downtown Salt Lake City.

Nine high school students and two teachers are visiting on a Wednesday afternoon, listening intently as the monk — clad in a fleece jacket, khaki shorts and tennis shoes — describes the importance of tracing ancestry within Buddhist teaching.

When the explanation is finished, the students head upstairs to the meditation room, or "Zendo," at the Kanzeon Zen Center, seating themselves in a half-circle on floor cushions with legs crossed. They listen as Simon asks them to think deeply about several questions he asks as part of the "Big Mind" class conducted regularly here.

The experience is one part of a weeklong, multidenominational tour along the Wasatch Front, which began earlier this month at the Krishna Temple in Spanish Fork in the south and ended with the Khadeeja Mosque in West Valley City before the students spent a day driving home.

The expedition, dubbed "Crossroads of the West: Religion, Diversity and Culture in Salt Lake City," was a field trip for students in Kelly Habecker's humanities class at Silverton High School in southwest Colorado.

Why only nine students? "They're the entire high school," Habecker replied, noting the town has only about 450 residents, so it wasn't difficult to get parents to agree to the trip once they learned the philosophy behind it.

The issues that often arise when public schools want to talk about faith didn't materialize for Habecker. "I expected a lot more (questions) than I got. We started the year with parent meetings, explaining the purpose of the course and that it would be unbiased and equal opportunity for all the faiths we visited.

"The parents were all very encouraging and supportive of their kids learning about different traditions, and there are a variety of faith traditions among students. For the most part, we really avoided personal perspectives. We tried to focus on what we were looking at."

Most people don't peg Utah as religiously diverse. In fact, they see it as spiritually monochromatic, dominated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And that was the draw for Habecker.

"We wanted to see how diversity works when you have a very big majority of one religion," she said. "We were really surprised at the diversity and communication between religions that happens."