The Parliament Ends

Well, it’s over! We finished up our amazing week today, with a rousing final plenary, replete with music, dance, prayers from many different traditions, words of thanks and exhortation and a speech by the Dalai Lama. When I arrived at the convention center this morning I was surprised to see a long line of people waiting to get in the main doors. Due to the presence of the Dalai Lama, they had put in a security checkpoint at the entrance and we all had to go through the metal detectors and have our bags checked before we could enter the convention site. It made for a slow start to the morning! In fact, I had decided to go to the Qur’an talk given by Dr. Tariq Ramadan, since he is a world reknowned Qur’anic scholar and he is not permitted to enter the US, and it turns out he was late for the session because he got stuck in the security line! His Qur’an study was on the principle of justice in the Qur’an and I was interested to hear him talk about interpreting the Qur’an contextually, which is not something I hear often from the Muslims I deal with in Rochester. He is part of the emerging modern school of Islamic scholars who are tending to interpret the Qur’an in light of the context in which it was written, allowing them some leeway to depart from literal application of everything it says when the cultural context doesn’t make the Qur’anic verses relevant to the modern context.

I went up to the Tibetan monks to see the final version of the mandala. I’ve included a picture of it. During the lunch session today they destroyed it and processed to the river to pour the colored sand into the river. I would have attended that ceremony but the security checkpoints made it inconvenient to keep trying to get in and out of the center, especially as the time for the final ceremony was approaching.

The final plenary was another wonderful fantasia of music, prayers, dance, and chanting from many different world religions. Bob Randall, the aborigine who was the subject of the documentary I watched yesterday was one of the keynote speakers, and the star of the day was the Dalai Lama. He is the most remarkable person. Very funny, very sweet, completely spontaneous and jolly. He and the tribal chief woman from the local aboriginal tribe had quite a little comedy routine going which was completely unscripted but had all of us in stitches! Among the many groups that performed was an Australian girls choir which was excellent. At the end of the program, as the Dalai Lama was being led out, three small children who were family members of the aboriginal tribal leader came across the stage to greet the Dalai Lama, and the youngest child who could not have been more than 2 ½ stole the show.

The Dalai Lama applauded the work of the Parliament, but exhorted us to go back to our home communities and do something with what we’ve learned here. He reminded us that it will not do justice to the work we’ve done here if we all simply go home and get back to business as usual. The Rochester contingent went to dinner together this evening at a Nepalese restaurant and spent some time talking about how we’re going to take back what we’ve learned here to our various interfaith activities in Rochester. And, those of us working on the big conference that we are sponsoring in April came up with a long list of do’s and don’ts based upon what we experienced here.

So I’m almost packed and tomorrow morning head off to the airport for a noon flight. What’s really weird is that I will arrive in Los Angeles on Thursday at 7:30 a.m. which is technically earlier than when I left Australia on the same day! It’s like traveling back in time when you cross the date line!! I then head up to Portland, Oregon to catch up with Tracy at a conference, returning to Rochester on Sunday. I’m going to miss the warm, balmy, sunny, early summer weather here. I’m trying to steel myself for the snow and grey that awaits in Portland and at home! I’m definitely putting Melbourne on my list of places to come back to, particularly during our winter. This is a terrific city and I’m eager to come back when I can have some time to go out and see the sights, both here and in the surrounding countryside.

A Dark Past and a Hopefilled Future

This was a day of contrasts. The beauty and excitement and energy of fruitful and creative interfaith engagement in two workshops, and facing into the abyss of colonialism and racism in two other events.

I began the day with Sikh worship. I enjoy Sikh worship because it is very musical. Much of the worship service is chanting Sikh hymns and the sound is quite beautiful. The worship leaders had prepared slides with an English translation of the Sanskrit chants and that made the experience more meaningful. Those of us who were not Sikh were given orange headcoverings to put on when the worship began. We also took off our shoes at the back of the room, as we would if we were in a Sikh Gurdwara. It was a peaceful and meditative beginning to the day.

I then attended a screening of an Australian documentary entitled Kanyini. It is the story of a man now known as “Uncle Bob”, an Aborigine who was part of what is known in Australia as the Stolen Generation. From 1910 to 1970 the Australian government took 50,000 aboriginal children away from their parents and tribes and sent them to be educated in Christian missionary schools as part of the colonization of aboriginal land. The documentary was powerful because Bob was the primary narrator in the film and he is very compelling as he tells the story of his people and his own life. The film includes footage from the Lutheran archives taken in the early part of the 20th century of Bob’s tribe in their natural, pre-colonization state. They were hunter/gatherers who moved from place to place in the vast area of Central Australia that was their home, living off the land. They did not wear clothes and they survived disease free for tens of thousands of years, until the white settlers came and took their land and drove them off. As Bob explains in the film, the white settlers took their culture, their land, their family and their spirituality from them. The film documents the miserable consequences of this devastation of the aboriginal culture in the form of poverty, suicide, joblessness, disease, homelessness and misery for the aboriginal people. To this day they have not climbed out of that poverty and the scars of the taking of their land and culture are still very much there and indeed, are raw. Bob was there to answer questions after the showing of the film. In response to a question about what could we do to support him and his people, he replied, “Give us back our land.” Of course, all of us from the United States could not help but acknowledge the similar history in our country in the taking of Native American land and destruction of their culture, including the practice of sending Native American children away to Christian schools, depriving them of any continuous connection with their own tribe and culture. It was a very sobering film, powerful in its stark and graphic depiction of the destruction of a people and a culture. I left feeling ashamed of the legacy of my white forbears in their relentless murder of indigenous peoples all over the world.

Then in the afternoon, the workshop that I was leading was a screening of the film Traces of the Trade, produced by Katrina Brown, a descendant of the DeWolf family of Rhode Island who were the most significant slave trading family in American history. The film documents a trip that Katrina and 8 of her cousins took in 2001 to trace the history of their family’s slave trading activities, which took them to Ghana and Cuba. One of the cousins who is featured in the film, Dain Perry and his wife Constance, were here with me to lead the workshop discussion. They have been on a circuit all over the United States doing screenings of the film since it’s release about 18 months ago. The film is excellent as it documents the family’s journey into their own family’s ugly history and their very deep struggle with the issues of racism, white privilege, guilt, reparations and the legacy of slavery in American culture. The film is an excellent tool for getting people engaged in dialogue about racism in a pretty deep way. The group that attended this event today were very much engaged in the film as we showed it and pumped for discussion when it was over. We had one technical glitch in that we were supposed to show the abridged version which is 56 minutes long and somehow the techies cued up the full version, 90 minutes long, which meant there was almost no time for discussion. We managed to get permission to stay in the room 20 minutes overtime so we did manage a little Q&A but I was really sorry there wasn’t time for more because people were hungry for the opportunity to talk about the painful issues raised in the film. One African American rose to thank us for bringing the film to the Parliament, saying that she did not feel the Parliament was confronting racism in any significant way and this workshop was very much needed.

I must admit, that even though I have seen Traces of the Trade several times before, the emotional impact of watching it today, not long after having seen the film about the Aborigines in Australia, was intense. I just felt overwhelming grief and heaviness of heart being confronted with the unrelenting abuse of indigenous peoples by white people for so many centuries. It is hard to feel good about being a white person let alone a white Christian after seeing these two films. One of the most poignant moments in the film about the aboriginal experience was when the narrator, Bob, speaks of how he was forced to learn Bible stories when he was sent to the Christian school as a child. He laughed and said that as the white Christian missionaries read to him stories about Jesus and what Jesus said about how to live, he couldn’t figure out why they would tell him about Jesus and hold Jesus up as a model when they didn’t act in any way according to what Jesus preached. Tomorrow, “Uncle Bob” is going to be a keynote speaker at the closing plenary, along with the Dalai Lama. That should make for a pretty powerful send off for all of us! ( I’ve included a picture of Bob with this entry.)

The two regular workshops I attended were both excellent and stimulating to me as they relate directly to my interfaith work. One was a workshop highlighting creative strategies for doing interfaith work and I came away from that one with some really good connections with folks in the US who are doing this work, as well as some good, new ideas for things to do that are different and interesting. And the second was the final installment in the symposium I’ve been attending all week on Educating Religious Leaders for a Multi Religious World. That has been a consistently good seminar/workshop experience and has given me a lot of resources and ideas for ways to enrich the interfaith studies at CRCDS. In fact, Dr. Shafiq and I were talking after that session about making a renewed effort to combine the resources of CRCDS and CISD to do some more significant interfaith work with seminarians and clergy. Both of those workshops today were moutaintop experiences, brainstorming with people who love this work as much as I do and really enjoying the energy created by all of us bouncing ideas off one another. They were the kinds of workshops that make a conference like this worth the expense and time! It is truly a joyful experience to be with people of all world religions who are excited by and committed to the interfaith encounter, and who, like me, find our faith in God deepened, broadened and enriched by the wisdom, insights and practices of people of different faith traditions.

I finished the day having dinner with Dain and Constance Perry which I enjoyed immensely. I was delighted to hear about the work they are doing now around anti-racism as they travel all over the country screening Traces. As it turns out they have also been to Israel/Palestine a couple of times and they are also active in that issue, so we had lots to talk about. I’m sure that I will be seeing them again when we get back to the States, as we share passions and I suspect our paths will cross again. (A picture of the three of us outside the room where we showed the film is posted here!)

I also stopped by the Tibetan monks, still hard at work on the mandala. I’ve included a picture of its status as of late this afternoon!

Tomorrow is the last day of this amazing adventure. I’m still trying to decide what form of morning worship to attend as my final foray into new worship experiences. I’ve got the choice of Jewish, Muslim, various Hindu and Sikh offerings, as well as Buddhist and pagan! Not sure which I’ll choose. I’ll see how I feel in the morning!

Ahimsa

I think I discovered my “inner Hindu” this morning! I attended Ahimsa meditation led by Mother Maya, aka Sri Swami Mayatitananda Saraswati, a revered Hindu swami with a considerable worldwide following. Her spirituality is centered in the goddess Devi, the Divine Mother. She took us through a meditation for inner peace and harmony. We began with the mantra “Om manashivaya” which is a basic mantra in Hindu spirituality. “Om” is the sound that Hindus believe God made when creating the universe and the mantra, when repeated over and over, is believed to connect us to the archetypal, primordial creative energy pulsing in the universe. It certainly feels that way when a room full of people are chanting it together. We first chanted it aloud and then she had us chant it silently with occasional gentle instructions from her. I found this form of meditation much more effective for my considerably too active mind, than Buddhist meditation, because the mantra served as a useful focal point to minimize the wanderings of the mind. After the long period of chanting, we then took the vow of ahimsa, a vow to strive at all times for inner peace and harmony, and then everyone contributed to an earth mandala, made from all types of grains. I’ve included a picture of Mother Maya with this post. I have always found Hinduism fascinating and really found Mother Maya’s meditation and guidance meaningful and helpful. Her meditation could become habit forming!

The rest of the day was a real exercise in intellectual calisthenics! I attended the first of two sessions looking at the question “what is the religious imperative to treat the ‘other’ faithfully?” There was a large panel of theologians/religious leaders from the Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, and Christian traditions. Tariq Ramadan, the famous Islamic scholar from Oxford (who has been unable to enter the United States to attend conferences and teach because the Office of Homeland Security won’t allow INS to give him a Visa), was the Muslim speaker. I was very glad to have a chance to hear him in person. He is very well known around the world and it remains a travesty that our country does not permit him entry. The speakers were carefully managed by the facilitator, a rabbi who has done a lot of work in the area of the theologies of the religions and who was superb at keeping them to time limits and directing them to stay focused. They were each asked to speak to the question whether there is anything in their religious tradition that requires its adherents to treat those of other religions fairly. The Sikh, Buddhist and Hindu speakers were able to say yes, but the Muslim, Jewish and Christian folks had to admit to problems. This was a good session, so much so that it ran over by 30 minutes, although the convener was publicly criticized for not having included a single woman on the panel, something that had been bothering me from the minute I walked into the room. (There seems to be a lot of gender imbalance at this Parliament and tomorrow a group of women are convening to come up with a strategy to approach the board of the Parliament and make a formal complaint and a request for more balance when the next Parliament is put together. There is still a tendency to put women on panels dealing with “women’s” issues and populate the “serious” panels with men!)

My afternoon was a double dose of the Luce foundation symposium on Educating Religious Leaders for a Multi Religious Society. The first session was another enormous panel of religious leaders from all over the world who spoke to the question of how they train leaders in their tradition and to what extent they address issues of pluralism and other religions when they are training people for religious leadership. The Muslim speaker was a woman from Indonesia who runs a school for women in which they are trained as Qur’anic scholars and in memorizing and reciting the Qur’an. In the course of the presentation I was delighted to hear her recite sections of the Qur’an. I have attended Muslim prayers many times and have never had the experience of hearing a woman reciting the prayers. It was really beautiful and she is truly skilled at reciting. The second session was a continuation of the series I’ve been attending every day where we have the opportunity for small group work. Today we had a case study on an interreligious issue. What I love about doing this small group work here is the diversity of the people in the group. We have a real mix of religious traditions and it is wonderful to have all the different points of view analyzing the issues.

I’ve included another photo of the Tibetan monks’ sand mandala which is really coming along.

Fortunately, I had the evening free so took some time to walk along the Yarra River and enjoy the balmy evening. Lots of people were out and about enjoying the mild, early summer weather.

Tomorrow morning, its off to Sikh worship before launching into the work of the day.

Sacred Envy, Music and Dance

Today was another jam packed day of learning, dialogue, conversation, music, dance and prayer. I began the day with Anglican worship at 8:00. Then I was on a panel entitled “Taking Our Place: Women in Society, Peacemaking and Interfaith Dialogue.” I was on a panel with a number of women involved in women’s interfaith dialogue here in Australia and in New Zealand. The other panelists included women of Hindu, Muslim and Bahai faiths, as well as a Roman Catholic and another protestant woman. The Australian and New Zealand folks spoke specifically about initiatives in which they are engaged and my role was to bring an “international” perspective, responding to their work from my experience of interfaith dialogue in the US. I did a brief presentation about women in interfaith dialogue in the US and used that as a springboard for responding to their comments. It was a lively panel and the audience was quite engaged. My only difficult moment was when a question was posed to the panel about whether our husbands were supportive of our interfaith work!! Fortunately, there were enough women on the panel that I managed to avoid having to answer. We were almost out of time and the moderator asked me to comment when the others had shared on that issue and I simply finessed the issue without saying anything specific. I did not think “coming out” would be helpful in that particular context!!

Then I attended a terrific workshop entitled “Sacred Envy-Exploring What We Love About Our Own Faith, What we admire in Others and what challenges us in Both.” The keynote speakers on that panel were once again, a star studded group, including the indomitable Sr. Joan Chittester, Rabbi Brad Hirschfield and Imam Feisal Rauf, a very well known and popular Islamic scholar and imam. Rabbi Hirschfield introduced us to a model for interfaith dialogue in which the dialogue goes through four different stages of discussion. First everyone shares (briefly!!) what is most precious or meaningful to them about their own faith tradition. Then they name and discuss what they find most appealing or beautiful or meaningful in the other faith traditions with whom they are in dialogue. Then each person shares what it is about their own faith tradition that upsets them, or bothers them, or about which they are ashamed or concerned. And finally each shares with the other what it is about that other’s faith tradition that concerns or worries them or about which they have questions or concerns. The panelists modeled the way to do that kind of dialogue beautifully. This method of doing the dialogue requires dialogue partners who have some level of trust with one another already and who know something about the other’s faith. It is an effective model for getting the dialogue to go to a much deeper level than such dialogues often go. I came away excited about the method and intending to use it with the Interfaith Forum in Rochester, as well as the Christian Jewish and Christian Muslim Commissions. Lynne Boucher and I also agreed we’ll want to incorporate it into the interfaith conference we’re putting together for CISD for next April.

At lunch we struck up conversation with a young Muslim chaplain in the US Navy. He was a lovely young man and we had an interesting conversation about his experience as a Muslim chaplain in the military in this immediate aftermath of the Fort Hood event.

After lunch I had attended a session of Hindu Odissi religious dance performance. I had thought I’d just stop in briefly to see what it was like and then leave early and go for a walk, but it was so mesmerizing I wound up staying the whole time. I’ve included a picture of the dancers in action. Each dance was the enactment of one of the Hindu myths about their gods/goddesses and the chanting and music were really beautiful.

I then stopped by to see how the Tibetan monks were coming with the mandala. I’ve attached a picture of it as it has progressed thus far! I’ll be on the plane returning home when they do the ceremony on Thursday where they bless the mandala and then dump it in the river. I’d love to see that ceremony although I’m not sure I could stand to watch that beautiful piece of work thrown to the wind and water!

In the late afternoon I attended the next session of the series of workshops dealing with Education Religious Leaders for a Multi Religious world. Today we were examining the questions of what virtues and skills do we need to instill in our religious leaders to equip them for doing religious leadership in a multi-religious context. Of course, this is what I do at CRCDS and so I’m completely in my element in these workshops. When we did the small break out sessions, I was able to be in one of the sessions with the seminary students who are in the program that the Luce Foundation is funding so it was really rich. I also made a connection with a faculty person at GTU with whom I hope to have further conversations about interfaith education in the seminary. That whole track is proving to be a gold mine of information, ideas and resource sharing.

The day ended with a sacred music concert which was another smorgasbord of music and dance from every imaginable world religious tradition. Unfortunately, they forbade flash photography so I couldn’t take any pictures. It was simply too dark without a tripod. The highlights included aboriginal music from Australia, whirling dervishes, and the Tibetan monks doing the chant that they do where their voices somehow manage to sound more than one note at a time. The concert started 45 minutes late, so I left at 10 and they still had a long way to go. I simply had no more energy.

This was one l-o-o-o-n-n-n-g-g-g day and I am way tired. More tomorrow.

Monks, Goddesses and Gender

Another rich, full day. I started off attending Buddhist chanting and meditation offered by the monks and nuns of the Chung Tai Chan Monastery in central Taiwan. We started off with a brief introduction to the daily rituals of the monastery and then we went through a modified morning meditation and chanting ritual. We began by chanting for about 15 minutes. The monks and nuns gave us “cheat sheets” with the chants transliterated and translated, so it was easier than I expected to chant along with them. It was really beautiful, accompanied by drums and bells. Then we enjoyed 20 minutes of silent meditation. I was so not ready to come back to consciousness when the bell rang!! The session concluded with more chanting and a final blessing. I’ve included a picture of one of the monks who led the morning exercise for your viewing pleasure.

Then I went off to a workshop on The Divine Feminine, which was absolutely filled to overflowing. Literally people were standing along the sides and spilling out the back door of the very large room. The speakers included Sr. Joan Chittester, Sri Swami Mayatitananda Saraswati (Mother Maya), a truly brilliant and articulate Hindu swami, a wiccan priestess and a Buddhist nun. They spoke about the feminine divine in their respective traditions and it was a truly fascinating look at the continued presence of the divine feminine in human religious consciousness going back thousands of years, even in institutional religions that have succumbed to the domination of patriarchy and the masculinization of the divine, in some cases (Christianity and the other Abrahamic religions) to the point where God is imaged solely as male. Mother Maya talked of the thousands of years of Hindu tradition of worship of the goddess Devi and of the central importance of the goddess in Hindu worship. The Buddhist nun was very funny as she entitled her talk “Neither feminine nor divine” referring to the fact that Buddhists are non-theistic so there is no divine to be feminine or masculine, but she gave us a fascinating introduction to the images in the Buddhist tradition of feminine bodhisattvas and of some of the earliest paintings of the first Buddhist nun. I was struck as I listened to her and as I watched the monks and nuns from the Chung Tai Chan monastery earlier in the morning at how completely the Buddhist monastics manage to eradicate any outward, visible sign of gender. Truly, when the Buddhist monks and nuns are walking around there is no way to tell who is male and who is female. The shaved heads and the loose flowing robes make it nearly impossible to tell whether the person is male or female and you really only know when they speak! It is a real sacrament (to use a Christian term!) of their renunciation of the body and its defining characteristics. Sr. Joan was her usual ascerbic, funny self as she critiqued strongly the elimination of the feminine divine in Western religious traditions. Referring to religion in the West (meaning primarily the Abrahamic traditions that have so masculinized the divine), she observed, “We see with one eye, we hear with one ear and we think with one half of the human mind….and it shows!” And in reference to the controversy that erupts in Christian circles when anyone attempts to invoke the feminine divine, she quipped, “We may be confused about who God is but God is not confused. God has never had an identity crisis.”

After that talk, Dr. Shafiq showed up and he and I and Lynne Boucher tried to recruit the Buddhist nun for our April Interfaith Conference at Nazareth. She told Lynne that she was not available due to being on sabbatical, but Shafiq, (not one to take “no” for an answer!), worked on her some more and she began to relent! We got a picture of the three of us with her, and Shafiq will be following up to see if he can entice her to come to our conference as a keynote speaker! I’m posting that picture with this entry too.

After that exciting session I went to a session dealing with LGBT challenges and wisdom in the world religions. This was a groundbreaking event because the Parliament has never had a workshop or presentation dealing with LGBT issues and at this Parliament there are only two such workshops out of more than 500 total workshops. The issue of LGBT inclusion is truly the “unmentionable” subject in the interfaith dialogue arena. Much to all of our surprise that session, too, was packed. The organizers had expected perhaps a handful of people and there were well over 100 in the room if not more. I’m hopeful that this was a beginning and that at the next Parliament in 2014 we can manage to have a whole “track” on the LGBT issue. While it is easy for some of us in religions that have been working on this for years to feel complacent about the issue, it is still the case that the vast majority of religious traditions in the world condemn homosexuality and ostracize those who come out as gay within their tradition. The stories that the members of the panel at the workshop told were testament to the continued persecution and discrimination against LGBT folk throughout the world in religious groups of all kinds.

In the afternoon I wandered over to where the Tibetan monks have set up their space to create a sand mandala. They were just laying it out when I first passed by and then a couple of hours later they had gotten the inner piece under way. I’m including a couple of pictures of one of the monks who was working on it today.

I finished my afternoon attending a very stimulating session on Educating Religious Leaders for a Multi Religious World. This was one of a series of panels that arise out of a cooperative venture between 15 theological schools in the US, funded by a Luce Grant, in which the seminaries are engaging in intentional multireligious education with seminarians and reporting out on their experiences. Since this is what I do for a living, I was most interested in the session. It turned out to be a wonderful opportunity for dialogue and conversation. There was a short panel discussion to introduce the topic for the day and then we broke into small discussion groups. Today’s questions were around what are the obstacles and what are the resources for multi religious education in your seminary. I had a wonderfully diverse small group, including Jews, Muslims, Bahai, and various Christians from Australia and we enjoyed a lively discussion about the role of interfaith education in training religious leaders. I’m definitely going to attend the rest of the sessions in this series over the next few days.

The day ended with an International plenary during which we were treated to performances by various groups from around the world. The Buddhist monks did one of their drumming/chanting/dancing performances and there was a Hindu group from Bali that performed an exotic dancing/chanting ritual. We also had blessings from the local Aboriginal leader and from the Zoroastrian community.

I’m off to bed now. I’m tired and tomorrow morning I am on a panel talking about women taking their place in the interfaith movement. Since I’m on at 9:30, going to church somewhere in the city is not an option, so I will avail myself of the Anglican worship being offered as one of the religious options for the early morning session! Since it is a Sunday, in Advent, and also happens to be the anniversary of my ordination, I thought I’d stick with my own tradition for the day and resume my sampling of other traditions on Monday!

More tomorrow.

Wondrous Riches

Whew! What a day! I started off with an introduction to Jain morning worship. Our leaders explained the basics of Jainism, which is an ancient religion of India, (similar to Hinduism but different in significant ways). A very important aspect of Jainism is reverence for all forms of life. Their commitment to “ahimsa” or non-violence means that they will not intentionally kill an insect. They demonstrated how they prepare for prayer by clearing a space to pray on the floor using a very soft brush that can sweep away insects without harming them. When you think that they come from a hot climate that has a lot of insect life, it amazes me that they can be so tolerant!! We had a chance to chant along with the leaders as they projected transliterations of their morning chants on the screen so that we could join in. At the conclusion of the session, their guruji gave us a final blessing. In the hallway the Jain community is exhibiting Jain religious paintings which are absolutely stunning. I took pictures of some of them which I’m posting for your viewing pleasure. I can assure you that these photos do not do justice to the real paintings, which are quite mesmerizing.

Then it was off to another plenary on the issue of how faith communities can be effective in pushing our governments to work towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals particularly with respect to eliminating poverty. The panel started off stating that the notion that we will always have the poor with us must be banished forever and a commitment to eradicating poverty must be the priority of the religious communities around the world. The panel was interesting in that it included three representatives from the United States, a “donor” country and three representatives from “recipient” countries, including Cambodia, Sri Lanka and Thailand. It was a very rich discussion, the more so because Sr. Joan Chittester, Jim Wallis and Rabbi David Saperstein were among the panelists, so it was one of those religious Who’s Who panels. Chittester was remarkably challenging in her call for churches in the United States to get serious about MDGs and to acknowledge the sexism that lies underneath the lackadaisical efforts to eradicate poverty (noting that 2/3 of the people in the world who are living in poverty are women). I was struck with how the panel felt frustrated at the low level of commitment to the MDGs that they perceive, not only by the US government and other governments of the wealthy nations that signed on in 2000, but also by what they feel is lukewarm attention by religious communities. My experience in my own diocese and in the Episcopal Church USA is that we have made the MGDs a big priority and that lots of churches and dioceses are working very hard on MDG related missions. I felt lucky to be part of the religious community that is taking them seriously.

Then I went to a panel on how spiritual progressives can work to move religious communities from a focus on individual salvation to concern for societal transformation. One of the panelists was Rabbi Michael Lerner and I enjoyed seeing him in person, having worked as a member of the Network for Spiritual Progressives clergy advisory group with him for a couple of years. The other two panelists were equally compelling, particularly a Hindu swami who told his story of growing up an “orthodox” Hindu and coming of age questioning some of the basic tenets of Hinduism, particularly the caste system and its acceptance of and perpetuation of discrimination against those it calls untouchables. This man has moved from that traditional form of Hinduism to a more radical form in which the caste system is not acceptable. Swami Agnivesh has worked all over the world in impoverished communities. His testimony about his own journey was truly fascinating. The third panelist was another American rabbi who also was a powerful story teller and engaged in significant anti-poverty work in various places around the world. The Q&A session was also lively, as one Hindu man took issue with the Swami’s criticisms of “traditional” or “orthodox” Hinduism.

During the lunch break I came back to the hotel and when I returned to the Convention center, the Buddhist monks were doing a spiritual dance featuring monks in lion costumes who were dancing to the beating of drums. It was quite a performance. I’ve included a picture with this post to give you a flavor!!

My afternoon sessions included a panel discussing how Jesus is viewed in non Christian religions, looking at some parallels between the life of Jesus and the Buddha and how Shia Muslims regard Jesus and what the Qur’an and Shia hadiths have to say about Jesus. That session made for some interesting conversation, to say the least!

The final session I attended was part of a symposium at this Parliament focusing on religious leadership, particularly the role of interfaith dialogue and education in training and preparing religious leaders. We were a small group and were able to engage in lively dialogue which I found very stimulating. That particular session will be continued on Sunday and Monday and I’m looking forward to the next sessions as we get to pursue the topic in more depth. I particularly enjoyed the discussion format as it gave us the opportunity to dialogue with each other rather than merely listen to presenters speak.

The day ended with “Communities Night” where we all went off to be entertained by our own faith tradition here in Melbourne. The Anglicans walked over to a little church right on the river that has been the locus of ministry to seafarers since the late 19th century. The church is tiny, but the pulpit is huge as it is shaped like the hull of a ship!! We had evensong and then a reception with tea, sandwiches, wine and cheese and a chance to talk with local Australian Anglicans about life here. I met Dain and Constance Perry with whom I’ll be presenting the film “Traces of the Trade” on Tuesday and we enjoyed a chance to get to know each other a bit and to figure out how we’re going to lead our session together.

So another full day and I’m going to call it a night, do a little light reading and get to sleep early. I’ve got Buddhist chanting and meditation to start off my day tomorrow!

Opening Night

Opening Night

Just returned from the opening plenary of the Parliament. What an experience!! The convention hall was packed – at least 4000 people, probably more. Walking through the convention center is like a trip through the “Who’s Who” of world religions. I passed Dr. Arvind Sharma (Hindu scholar of world reknown), Jim Wallis from Sojourner’s, Dr. Paul Knitter from Union (my own personal theological hero!). I also ran into Dr. Shafiq who had just arrived from Rochester and then found Lynne and Mike Boucher from Nazareth College with whom I sat through the plenary.

The opening plenary featured a number of keynote speakers and local dignitaries and politicians. All of them spoke of the importance of interfaith dialogue and cooperation on all the issues that face the global community, from poverty, to justice for those living under oppression, to climate change. This parliament is focusing heavily on the issue of climate change and global warming and it is fascinating to see the diversity of offerings that are available on how people of different religious traditions are coming together in communities the world over to work for a sustainable environment.

The most exciting and delightful part of the opening plenary was the “blessings” that were said and sung and chanted from many different world religions traditions. We heard blessings from the Zorastrian tradition, Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh, Jain, Shinto, Aboriginal, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Bahai traditions. A number of the blessings were accompanied by dance. During each blessing, an artist was crafting a sand “painting” of some symbol that represents the religious tradition that was offering the blessing. It was truly spectacular and immensely colorful and rich. There is nothing quite like a gathering of such diverse religious traditions in one place – the color and sound and beauty of the religious diversity of the world is truly magnificent. I’m posting some photos of the opening blessings just to give you a flavor.

Two of the keynote speeches were particularly engaging. One was by Dr. Sakena Yacoobi, a Muslim woman from Afghanistan who founded 80 underground schools for girls in the 1990s and who continues to work to empower women in that war torn country. She spoke quite bluntly about the terrible conditions under which the people of Afghanistan are currently living. Life is “jihad” she said, meaning life is a “struggle.” She expressed her firm belief that people of faith must be prime movers in any and all efforts to bring peace in her country (and elsewhere in the world) and also gave witness to the strength her own faith gives her to continue the struggle for survival in a country torn apart by war and government corruption and violence. Her speech was truly riveting and I found myself wondering if Obama’s pledge to send 30,000 more American troops into Afghanistan will help or hurt that troubled land.

His Holiness Sri Sri Ravi Shankar from India gave a very moving talk based on his deep commitment to “ahimsa” or non-violence. He used the metaphor of a symphony or choir, where every member is intent upon doing their own part very well, and each member has a different role to play in the sound that is ultimately produced, but all are able to make the beautiful music because they are intent upon watching the conductor and doing what the conductor wants to have done. He sees all the world religions as instruments in an orchestra or voices in a choir, all working together to make a beautiful sound by concentrating on what the conductor, i.e. “the Divine reality” calls us to do.

While the opening plenary was wonderful, it also ran overtime by 75 minutes, so it is now very late and I am exhausted. I’m not completely adjusted to the time change yet and need to get on to bed if I am to be up and back at the Parliament for morning worship. I’ve decided that each morning I will attend worship in a different world religious tradition. Tomorrow I begin with the Jain tradition. Until then, good night.