The greatest lesson for me from the Barcelona Parliament was to see how religious communities are becoming more and more accepting of one other. This is a very encouraging step towards what I consider to be one of the goals of interfaith cooperation: for members of one religion to be able to vindicate the truth of other religions by recognising that, in essence, religion is one. It was a very confirming experience for me to meet new friends from various parts of the world, to compare notes and to hear first-hand how people from different continents have so much in common. I was also very moved to see that a few of my fellow Bahá’ís were at Barcelona as representatives of various interfaith affiliations rather than of their own religion.
I found the pre-Parliament seminar particularly helpful as it was more intimate and allowed for closer interaction and networking. I made friends with a Christian pastor and his wife from America and it was most gratifying when in 2006 he brought a group of students and teachers from his school to visit Botswana. Not only was this a wonderful exposure for the students, but it was an eye-opener for my fellow citizens who found it truly fascinating that we had enough in common to enable such a visit to happen even though we had met only once before. My visitors left an indelible mark at an orphanage by transforming a fallow patch into a luscious vegetable garden – an apt metaphor for interfaith collaboration!
