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Events for 2003

This talk was given by our President to the Fideology 2006 Conference on 18 February 2006

Fideology 2006.

9/11. Like so much, the thinking which has resulted in my book A Heart for the World started on that day - or perhaps more exactly on the following day when I received an e-mail from someone I did not know who lived in the outskirts of Washington. As he heard the grim news of the attack on the Twin Towers and on the Pentagon, he returned home, gathered his family and then picked up a copy of my anthology, Bridge of Stars, which had arrived that morning. He opened it at this extract from the Jain scriptures and tried to focus his thoughts on it:

I give friendship to all and enmity to none.
Know that violence is the root cause of all miseries in the world.
Violence, in fact, is the knot of bondage.
“Do not injure any living being.”
This is the eternal, perennial, and unalterable way of spiritual life.
A weapon, however powerful it may be,
Can always be superseded by a superior weapon;¹

However no weapon can be superior to non-violence and love.Soon after the attack on the Twin Towers, the Dalai Lama said that two responses were possible to those terrible events. One came from fear, the other from love. ‘If we could love even those who have attacked us, and seek to understand why they have done so... we would become spiritual activists’;². For this to happen, the Dalai Lama said, we need Divine help and mutual support to grow in inner peace and wisdom. Archbishop Rowan Williams, who was in the vicinity at the time of the attack, also said, ‘To seek to find reconciliation, to refuse revenge and the killing of the innocent, this is a form of adoration towards the One Living and Almighty God.’ⁱ
Sadly, the American government chose the response that comes from fear and launched the ‘war against terror.’ Many people have deplored that response but those who criticise it have, I think, an obligation to articulate an alternative vision, which is what I try to do. I believe there is an alternative: to seek reconciliation rather than revenge, to live more simply that others may simply live and to reverence all life with which we share this planet. This alternative is rooted in the conviction that every person is precious to God – that the terrorist as well as his or her victim is God’s child. Such teaching is to be found in all the religions, although often it has been obscured. It also flows from the mystics’ sense of the oneness of all life.
In A Heart for the World I discuss in some detail the teaching of the different religions on the use of force and suggest ways we can work together for a Culture of Peace. I also suggest how faiths can promote ‘Globalization for the Common Good’ – to coin a phrase – and respect for the environment.
But, of course, religion is part of the problem. It is reckoned that religion is a contributory cause in more than half of the 115 armed conflicts which occurred between 1989 and 2001.’ⁱⁱ. With some justice, it has been said, ‘the daily news seems a catalogue of holy hatred.’ⁱⁱⁱ In my view, the basic causes of violence are usually social, political or economic but religious differences then embitter the ensuing conflict. Nonetheless, if people of faith are to be ‘instruments of peace,’ they have first to clean up their act and acknowledge that religious people have often acquiesced in violence and have even encouraged it. It is too easy to blame extremists or those who hi-jack religion and evade our own responsibility.
Until religions are free from traditional exclusivism they will continue to underwrite division and religious tribalism. To be free from exclusivism, I want to argue this morning depends on our understanding of religious experience or the nature of faith, not primarily as knowledge about God but a relationship with the Eternal, a sense of our oneness with the Source of all life. This, I hope, contributes to the discussion of Fideology.

Theological.

Many mystics who claim to have experienced the holiness and presence of God agree that language fails them to describe the Holy One – even if many of them have written at length. By what name shall I call upon you,
Who are beyond all name!
You, the Beyond-all, what name shall I give you?...
All names are given to you and yet none can comprehend you.
How shall I name you then, O you, the Beyond-all name?
;³
So the Church Father Gregory of Nazianzus (329-89). Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335-c.395) said, ‘This is the seeing that consists in not seeing, because that which is sought transcends all knowledge, being separated on all sides by incomprehensibility as by a kind of darkness’⁴. It is, he added, a ‘luminous darkness.’ In Judaism, the concept of Ein Sof was applied to the Being of God as ‘that which is not conceivable by thought.’ The Sufi tradition in Islam has a similar emphasis on the experience of the Divine Mystery which is never fully captured in words. Despite the longing to see God with the eye of the heart, people will only see what God chooses to show them and not see God as he sees himself⁵. Mahayana Buddhism’s teaching about Emptiness implies that ‘Truth transcends our ability definitively to grasp, name, or conceive it.’^iv Hinduism speaks of nirguna Brahman – Brahman without attributes and beyond human description.
This emphasis on experience of God who can never be fully known implies that doctrines about God, even scriptures are secondary authorities. They are like fingers pointing to the moon.
The Sufi Rumi put this in a memorable sentence when he said of the religions, ‘the lamps are different but the Light is the same; it comes from beyond.’^v This means that we can learn from spiritual traditions besides our own. Rabindranath Tagore said that to reject any part of humanity’s religious experience is to reject truth. Likewise Rumi taught that ‘There is a taste of Divine Being in the heart and soul of every religious community.’^vi

Philosophical

I am aware of the logical difficulty of saying absolutely that we cannot make any absolute statements – but, as Leonard Swidler has said – our understanding of truth statements has been ‘deabsolutized.’⁶ I don’t think I need labour this. Most of us would probably agree that all statements about reality are conditioned by a person’s historical setting, intention, culture, class and sex. Yet many religious statements claim an absolute authority or an unchanging truth – even though they were shaped at a particular time in history by people with their own special interests.
Moreover, we recognise the limits of language. Reality may be observed from many perspectives, but language can only express one perspective at a time.
The inadequacy of our language does not make me doubt the reality of the Real nor do I think that we live in our own island and that communication between people of different faiths is impossible. Moreover, to recognise that religious statements are provisional, should not stop us committing ourselves to the truth as we see it. Doctors, for example, know that new treatments may become available, but they prescribe according, one hopes, to ‘best practice.’ There was a recent headline, ‘Scientists place their bets on relative certainty.’

The Nature of Faith

The emphasis on experience of the Divine changes our understanding of belief. Faith is not agreement with doctrines we do not understand, but trust in the Real. This, I would claim, is orthodox teaching in several traditions, although it has often been obscured.
[Michael Ramsey wrote of the Bible that its status ‘lies in the claim to convey “the truth of God”’. But he went on that ‘it is important to study the meaning of this phrase, (“the truth of God”) in the Bible itself. It there means the reality of God himself, made known in the impact of his righteous purpose upon Israel. To this impact of the reality of God the various books of the Bible bear witness… No words, even inspired words, are wholly adequate to convey the reality of God.’⁷ ]
It is the known presence of God to which scripture points and which it can re-ignite that gives it its authority. Archbishop William Temple said ‘revelation does not offer truth concerning God, but the Living God Himself.’⁸ This is why I think for at least some Christians scripture has a secondary or derived authority and why all statements about God have a provisional nature.
Such a distinction seems to present in Hinduism. Raimundo Pannikar says, ‘Vedic faith is not primarily an intellectual assent… Vedic faith is previous to thinking and anterior to willing and deciding.’^vii In Buddhism too, ‘Enlightenment is not a matter of intellectual content, beliefs, words or ideas’ writes Rita Goss. ^viii
Some comments suggest that such a distinction is to be found in Judaism and Islam. In a recent ‘Thought for the Day’, Mona Siddiqui said, ‘To know Scripture is not necessarily to know God.’ Would others echo that remark? Wilfred Cantwell Smith quotes a hadith in which God says ‘when someone recites or reads the Qur’an, that person is, as it were, entering into conversation with Me and I into conversation with him or her.’ ⁹ Irfan Khan in his Insight Into the Qur’an insists that God wants to talk to us directly and this is what He is doing in the Qur’an, but, he says, many Muslims merely recite it or read other people’s commentaries and do not open themselves to direct revelation. He also argues that the application of the Qur’an has to be rethought as the circumstances of life change. ‘It is a very serious mistake to consider that the Book should always be understood in the perspective of the human situation which was its first addressee and with the minds of the people whom it first addressed.’ The Revealed Guidance in the Divine Words ‘equally directly addresses all people and their changing life situations.’ That is to say the Qur’an speaks directly today to the faithful, who need not be tied to past interpretations.
In Judaism, there is the story of Rabbi Elisha Ben Avuyah. His father invited many prominent citizens to his son’s circumcision, including two scholars Rabbi Yehoshua and Rabbi Eliezer. During the festivities, the two Torah scholars sat in a separate room and studied Torah, to the extent that fire from Heaven surrounded them. Avuyah asked the sages, ‘Why did you come to burn my house down?’ They responded, ‘We are sitting and engaging in words of Torah’ When Avuyah realized that such is the power of Torah, he decided his son Elisha would devote his life to Torah. I need not go into why Elisha’s status as a Torah scholar did not endure. But does the passage suggest that the study of Torah becomes a vehicle of God’s presence? In a similar way, during the Passover seder the wise son recognizes that what God did in Egypt ‘he did for me.’
In his General Introduction to the Torah, Gunther Plaut writes ‘We believe it is possible to say : the Torah is ancient Israel’s distinctive record of its search for God. It attempts to record the meeting of the human and the Divine, the great moments of encounter. Therefore, the text is often touched by the ineffable Presence. The Torah tradition testifies to a people of extraordinary spiritual sensitivity. God is not the author of the text, the people are: but God’s voice may be heard through theirs if we listen with open minds.’¹⁰
So what I am suggesting is that ‘absolutist’ claims for religious doctrines or for an ‘infallible’ scripture not only are a cause of strife, but that by their static view of Truth they quench any expectancy that the Living God may speak afresh to us today. In brief, they misunderstand the nature of faith. A truer understanding of faith impels us to dialogue and to practical co-operation.
This leads me to the third reason why it is urgent for faiths to abandon their exclusive attitudes and this is the suffering of millions of our fellow human beings and threats to the environment.
Mystical experience, varied as it is, is usually not only a sense of oneness with the Divine, but with all life. Francis Younghusband, spoke of his experience at Lhasa as not only feeling in touch with the flaming heart of the world, but of a mighty joy-giving power at work in the world – ‘in me and every living thing.’ He concluded, ‘Never again could I think evil. Never again could I bear enmity. Joy had begotten love.’^ix
Holy people, traditionally, have withdrawn from the world in their search for the Divine. In recent years, a new pattern of spirituality, which draws inspiration from all the great faiths, has emerged in which the pursuit of holiness takes place in the midst of a non-violent struggle for peace and justice, in the service of the poor and the protection of the environment.
Mahatma Gandhi said once that ‘Man’s ultimate aim is the realization of God and all his activities, social and religious, have to be guided by the ultimate aim of the vision of God. The immediate service of all human beings becomes a necessary part of the endeavour, simply because the only way to find God is to see Him in His creation and be one with it. This can be done only by service to all… If I could persuade myself that I could find Him in a Himalayan cave, I would proceed there at once, but I know that I cannot find Him apart from humanity.’ ^xMa Gohsananda, a Buddhist leader, came back from a monastic life in exile to help his people of Cambodia in their agony. The Dalai Lama has said that he has been inspired by the Boddhisattva’s vow,
May I become at all times, both now and forever,
A protector for those without protection,
A guide for those who have lost their way,
A ship for those with oceans to cross,
A bridge for those with rivers to cross,
A sanctuary for those in danger,
A lamp for those in need of light,
A place of refuge for those in need of shelter,
And a servant to all those in need.
The Qur’an recognises that ‘It is not righteousness that you turn your faces towards the East and the West’ but besides the basic beliefs of Islam, the righteous person ‘gives away wealth out of love for Him (Allah) to the near of kin and the orphans and the needy and the wayfarer…’ ^xi Jalal al-Din Rumi tells of the time when God rebuked Moses, saying, ‘I am God, I fell sick; but you did not come.’ Moses asked God to explain. God said again, ‘Why didn’t you kindly ask after me when I was sick.’ Moses answered, ‘O Lord, you are never ill. I don’t understand: explain the meaning of these words.’ God said, ‘Yes, a favourite and chosen slave of mine fell sick. I am he. Consider well: his infirmity, his sickness is my sickness.’ This is reminiscent of Jesus’ parable of the Sheep and the Goats. The righteous are surprised when the king says to them ‘I was hungry and you fed me, thirsty and you gave me a drink; I was a stranger and your received me in your homes, naked and you clothed me; I was sick and you took care of me, in prison and you visited me.’ Then the king explains, ‘I tell you, whenever you did this for one of the least important of these brothers of mine, you did it for me.’^xii
The real test of our work is what it does to relieve suffering and to help the poorest of the poor. In my book, I try to move on from the generalised agreement on morals enshrined in the Global Ethic to see what the faiths say on issues such as the use of force, globalization and the environment. There is enough agreement for us to present a radical alternative to the policies being pursued by our governments. As Hans Kung says in his Foreword there is a loss of hope, we need to recapture this and present a vision that will empower people to work for change and, in Wayne Teasdale’s words, ‘a civilization with a heart.’
A prerequisite of this is to abandon exclusivism, to recognise the validity of other faith communities and to learn from each other. The mystic’s vision, I believe, gives a spiritual dynamism to the interfaith movement, which is missing from the necessary and welcome but limited promotion of good religious relations. This is why a small voluntary body such as the World Congress of Faiths still has a distinctive contribution to make to the world-wide interfaith movement.

Marcus Braybrooke

1. Quoted in Bridge of Stars, ed. Marcus Braybrooke, Duncan Baird, 2001, p. 197
2. Quoted in The International Interfaith Centre’s Newsletter, Oxford, December 2001.
3. English translation is by Mary Rogers in World Faiths, no 99, Summer 1976.
4. Life of Moses, 2.163
5. Sachiko Murata and William C Chittick, The Vision of Islam, Paragon House, 1994, p. 277
6. Leonard Swidler, The Meaning of Life at the Edge of the Third Millennium, Paulist Press, 1992.
7. New Peake Commentary on the Bible, p. 6
8. William Temple, Nature, Man and God, 1935, p. 322.
9. Hadith Qudsi is recorded in Badi’u-z-Zaman Furuzabfar. Quoted by Cantwell Smith in his translation in What is Scripture, SCM Press 1993, p.90.
10. The Torah: A Modern Commentary, Ed. W. G Plaut, Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1981, p. xix.

ⁱ Address of Rowan Williams at Al-Azhar al-Sharif, Cairo 11.9.04.
ⁱⁱ Oliver McTernan, Violence in God’s Name, Orbis, 2003, p. xiii.
ⁱⁱⁱ James A Haught, Holy Hatred: Religious Conflicts of the ‘90s, Prometheus Books, Amherst NY, 1995, quoted in the Parliament of Religions preparatory paper ‘Overcoming Religiously Motivated Violence’, p. 69. No page reference is given. .
^iv Sallie King, The Myth of Religious Superiority, Ed Paul Knitter, Orbis 2005, p. 97 .
^v R A Nicholson, trans, Rumi: Poet and Mystic, Unwin, 1978, p. 166. .
^vi Rumi, Mathnawi, II, 3606, quoted by Mahmut Aydin in The Myth of Religious Superiority, p. 224..
^vii Raimundo Panikkar, The Vedxc Experience, Darton, Longman and Todd, 1977, p. 178..
^viiiMyth of Human Superiority, p 82.
^ix Wider Vision, p. 22..
^xHarijan, August 29, 1936. .
^xi The Qur’an 2, 177..
^xiiMatthew, 25, 35-40. .

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