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.
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