Roman Catholics decorate star and crescent of Islam for Dalai Lama's visit

The Dalai Lama’s message of compassion long has transcended Tibetan Buddhism and enchanted people of all faiths — and no faith.

It’s an ethos that blends spirituality with humanism and logic, common ground on which most religious traditions tend to agree.

This weekend, Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th dalai lama and spiritual leader of troubled Tibet, will bring tidings to Chicago that address religious tensions head on and prescribe what it takes to ease them.

The anticipation of his arrival inspired a dozen religious communities to undertake an unusual artistic endeavor that will provide the backdrop to the Dalai Lama’s appearance Sunday on the campus of the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Framing the Dalai Lama on stage will be a dozen towering religious icons created by artists of other traditions. Roman Catholics decorated a star and crescent of Islam. Native Americans created the nine-pointed star of the Baha’i faith. An African-American Protestant congregation on the South Side incorporated the design of the 4,000-year-old symbol of Zoroastrianism, a tradition some didn’t know existed before the project.

“It’s an amazing show of support and unity that different people of different faiths actually came together,” said Nina Norris, a member of St. Matthias Catholic Church in Chicago’s Lincoln Square neighborhood. “The fact that it’s guided under the Dalai Lama is maybe the only way it could happen.”

Invited by the Theosophical Society in America, the group that hosted the monk’s first visit to the Chicago area in 1981, the Dalai Lama will present a public talk Sunday at the UIC Pavilion.

On Monday morning at downtown’s Harris Theater for Music and Dance, he will join a rabbi, a pastor and a Muslim scholar for a panel discussion titled “Building Bridges: Religious Leaders in Conversation with the Dalai Lama.” The panel will be moderated by Eboo Patel, founder and executive director of the Chicago-based Interfaith Youth Core.

Tim Boyd, president of the Theosophical Society in America, which is based in Wheaton, said the Dalai Lama thought for three seconds before he accepted his invitation during a private audience last year. After all, it was his introduction to the Theosophical Society in India 55 years ago that opened his eyes to the plethora of world religions beyond his own, Boyd said.

“It was the first time he had met people who believed there was value in the religions of the world and there was a certain essence they all shared,” Boyd said. “At that time, he was a 21-year-old monk. To him, Buddhism was all that he knew and all that he thought was appropriate. After that meeting, he left there a changed man.”

From the Anglican Diocese of Melbourne News and Views

Twenty-eight religious leaders will converge on Canberra on 2 June to pressure the federal government to act on climate change.  Representatives from many different faiths, acting under the banner of the Australian Religious Response to Climate Change (ARRCC), will meet with Julia Gillard, Greg Hunt, Andrew Wilkie and around twenty other Members of Parliament.

Bishop George Browning, a member of the delegation, said the time to act is now.  “Our generation has been given humanity’s last chance to avert a climate emergency. Our grandchildren will just have to bear with the results of what we decide to do now,” Bishop Browning said.  Formerly the bishop of the Diocese of Canberra and Goulburn, Bishop Browning, who is now the Chair of the Anglican Communion Environmental Network, said that climate change skeptics were preventing Australia moving in the right direction.  “The naysayers are holding Australia back from taking responsible action with their fear-mongering and misinformation. Not only can we act, we must act.”

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For more on the Australian Religious Response to Climate Change, please visit their website.

by Helen Spector, CPWR Trustee

When Rev. Dr. David Ramage recruited me in 1990 to serve on the Board of Trustees leading up to the 1993 Parliament, I was not engaged in or much aware of the inter-religious movement.

My commitment to the Council’s work caught fire when I joined a group of Trustees to travel to Cape Town in 1998, to meet with our organizing counterparts and talk with leaders from all the faith communities who would support the Parliament in 1999 in Cape Town.  From that visit and my work since, I have come to see clearly the power of the interfaith experience and the positive impact of Council’s community organizing approach.

During our visit, we each were asked to meet individually with leaders from different faith traditions. Although I am Jewish, I had done considerable consulting with the Episcopal Church in the United States, so I visited with the Dean of St. George’s Cathedral.  He spoke with great energy about the glory days of interfaith in Cape Town during the struggle to overthrow apartheid, when every few weeks, leaders from all faith communities would meet to map the next steps in their powerful strategy of standing and marching forward together.

When he had finished his story, it seemed that a great sadness overwhelmed him, and he sat quietly for a few moments. I asked him what he hoped would come from organizing and holding the Cape Town Parliament, and he said in a very quiet voice, “Since our victory in overcoming apartheid, we have not met again. I hope that we will find a way to come together again as leaders of faith and share our hopes for rebuilding our country.”

In the years since that meeting, I have had the opportunity to witness the formation of the Cape Town Interfaith Initiative, which just observed its 10th anniversary on May 10, 2010.  Gordon Oliver, CTII Chairman, credits the Parliament event as the organizing impetus for this vibrant and growing local inter-religious movement.

More recently, Dr. Gary Bouma, Chair of the Board of Management in Melbourne, has shared with us that “before PWR 2009, 3 or 4 cities in Melbourne (which is itself divided into over 20 separate cities with their own mayors, councils and local responsibilities) had interfaith councils; now all but one do. This is a HUGE result!”

While these stories show what tangible results look like when local communities get inspired and connected, I learned something else in Cape Town, something perhaps even more important about our work of interfaith.

In the lead up to the 1999 Parliament event, The Cape Times daily newspaper sponsored a 13-week special section—“One City, Many Faiths.”   Monday through Friday, the paper carried four full pages of stories and information about five different faith traditions—Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist and African Independent traditions—which have significant populations in the city.  The publisher organized discussion groups, luncheon meetings of leaders, and interviews with people on the street to keep this initiative highly visible and energized.

After the Cape Town Parliament was over, I talked with the publisher, asking him what results he had seen from this massive initiative. “None,” he said. I was stunned. This was a huge investment of energy and resources! What did he mean he hadn’t seen any results?!

Then he told me the lesson that we all must remember: “We cannot tell you what the results are, because we have no way to count the number of hate crimes, attacks and killings that did not happen because someone walking on the street no longer saw a person who dresses differently or worships differently as someone to be feared.”

The world is full of stories like these that we will never hear. Yet we know that the inter-religious movement helps us to see each other as people with whom we share human experiences, even while we know we differ on how we worship and what we believe.

Mrs. Helen Spector joined the Board of CPWR in 1990 to help plan the 1993 Parliament Centenary Celebration. As a professional facilitator and Organizational Development consultant, Mrs. Spector has used her skills to further the values and goals of CPWR. She served as co—chair for the Site Selection task forces for the 2004, 2009 and 2014 Parliament events. She now lives in Portland, Oregon and continues as a Trustee of the Council.

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From State of Formation

After a three-month sojourn in India, I return to State of Formations with renewed vigor.  I also return with sustained interest in the possibilities of representing Hinduism, Sikhism, Jainism, and other Dharmic traditions within Western institutions.  This post marks the first in a series about the pivotal, intermediary role that cultural and religious brokers from Asia and Africa play in North Atlantic universities.  At the risk of sounding too unclear, academic, or opaque, I draw upon examples from my experience as the Hindu Fellow  – otherwise known as “The Hindu Chaplain” – at Yale University.

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Mandala at 2009 Parliament of the World's Religions

by Jenn Lindsay
from State of Formation

I spent a lot of time at the Gyuto Monks’ mandala at the 2009 Parliament of the World’s Religions in Melbourne, Australia. The mandala is the traditional Tibetan Buddhist form of sandpainting, practiced by Native Americans in the Southwestern United States, by Indians, by Australian Aborigines, and by Latin Americans on certain Christian holy days. In modern day Mexico and the United States, sandpainting is most often practiced during Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead). Streets are decorated with sand paintings that are later swept away, symbolizing the fleeting nature of life.

At the opening plenary service for the Parliament of the World’s Religions the audience watched a sandpainter’s hands on a screen as he created fleeting symbols for each tradition, like the Hindu OM, the branches of a Jewish menorah, a Buddhist friendship knot, a Shinto yin-yang, and natural images celebrating the Australian Aboriginal population.

Six Union Theological Seminary students traveled to the Parliament with Dr. Paul Knitter and we were exposed to a wealth of religious practices and new concepts. I spent day after day sitting with the Gyuto Monks and their mandala as it grew by their painstaking efforts. I found the mandala to be an apt representation of the anatta concept. In Buddhism, the purpose of a mandala is to attain enlightenment and to attain a correct view of reality.

For Buddhists, cessation of delusion is enlightenment. Thus, a correct view of reality is a cessation of the illusion that everything, including the self, is fixed or permanent. Everything is always changing, and if we grasp at experience to keep it permanent we will suffer. Thus, cultivation of detachment and of mindfulness can help lessen grasping and lessen an obsessive fixation on a concretely defined end goal. Detachment and mindfulness can help us lessen attachment to the fruits of our labors, instead helping us to concentrate on the experience of living itself. The focus is on the process rather than the goal.

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From State of Formation

Last December, I had the opportunity to attend the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Melbourne, Australia. The Parliament seeks to promote harmony, reconciliation, and understanding in the world through both intra-religious and interreligious dialogue. In short, it sustains a collective hope that religion will truly be a purveyor of peace and not a conduit for violence and fundamental extremism in its various forms. Yet hope, at times, seems lost in the fog of recent wars, namely the “war on terrorism” that was unabashedlylikened to a “crusade” by former President George Bush on the South Lawn of the White House in 2001.

Having been raised in a religious military family, I’m naturally drawn to academic discussions about violence, militarization, and religious ethics. So I attended a Parliament session entitled “Religion and the Future of Torture” facilitated by George Hunsinger, professor at Princeton and founder of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture (NRCAT). During the allotted two hours, Hunsinger shared sobering facts about the United States’ government’s complicity in torture during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. He especially highlighted the revisions the US Army Field Manual for Interrogations in 2006 as a response to political discourse about the definition of torture after the Abu Ghraib scandal. In case you’re wondering, one positive revision in the field manual was the named prohibition of waterboarding as an interrogation technique. However, several concerns remain, such as the addition of Appendix “M” and the semantic separation of the term “torture” from what constitutes “cruel, unusual, and inhuman treatment.”  Another concern is that even though sensory deprivation is banned, it is also cleverly redefined as deprivation of all the senses simultaneously, which still leaves room for interrogators to obstruct one or two of a detainee’s senses at a time.

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Polarized debates around migration, national identities and integration of Muslims in today’s society are increasing in Europe and North America.
The UN Alliance of Civilizations has invited two prominent personalities for a conversation on these issues: the New York Times journalist Roger Cohen, and the Philosopher and Muslim Scholar Tariq Ramadan.

The discussion will focus on the reasons immigration is perceived as negatively affecting coexistence in Europe, and why Islam is often depicted as incompatible with Western values. Together with the in-house and online audience, discussants will explore ways to better acknowledge European and American Muslims’ contributions to their societies, and examine what role these groups can have in supporting the integration of recent Muslim immigrants.

The conversation will be held on Monday, December 20th in London, UK, from 2h to 3h30pm, at the St Ethelburga’s Centre for Reconciliation and Peace (78 Bishopsgate).

The in-house and online audience will be invited to put forward questions to the speakers in real time, by email or facebook.

Click here to learn more and view the event online