A global virus has done what we human beings have been incapable of doing – reducing carbon emissions. For the first time in a long time Beijing is without pollution and citizens can see blue sky, the canals of Venice are clear and fish and dolphins are returning. Is coronavirus the cosmos reaching out for equilibrium and will we humans learn from it?  So much of ordinary life has changed but nature goes on and there are signs of spring everywhere. Even religious services have been cancelled but there’s still much to celebrate in religion. Recently there’s been a rash of religious festivals, all around the 21st March.

On 21st March the Baha’i community ended their nineteen day fast with the festival of Naw Ruz, which is also the Iranian and Zoroastrian New Year. Taking place, as it does, at the spring equinox it symbolises the new life of spring and is associated with the Most Great Name of God. Sending greetings to the Baha’i community, Bishop Brian McGee, chair of the Bishops’ Committee for Interreligious Dialogue commented that there is a lesson for all of us in this, especially those of us who are believers: “For those of us who are believers the sovereignty of God is a counterpoint to the material and consumerist culture of our times.  Coronavirus, climate change and its consequences, conflicts between and within nations are indicative of a world in which humanity has forgotten that life is a gift, that we are all brothers and sisters sharing a common home with a responsibility of caring for creation and one another for the sake of future generations.”  Shall we be more aware of this when the present crisis is over?

Another spring festival which lasts over two days is the Hindu festival of Holi. Like all Hindu festivals there are stories attached to them – one is of a demon Holika who was burned on a pyre in place of Prahlahda who insisted on worshipping the God Vishnu. Another is of the Lord Krishna who being worried that Radha would not accept his blue skin was encouraged by his mother to rub any colour he wished on Radha’s face. So the carnival atmosphere during Holi involves the lighting of bonfires to symbolise the overcoming of evil and throw coloured paint and powder over one another. I was in India once during Holi. We danced round the bonfire but I retired well before the others who danced and sang all through the night. The next day we were bombarded with coloured water bombs that seemed to come out of nowhere. This year Holi was celebrated at the beginning of March, before the virus kept people off the streets.

At the same time as the Hindu community were celebrating Holi, the Jewish community were  celebrating the carnival festival of Purim.  Purim recalls how Queen Esther saved the Jewish community when the wicked Haman had convinced King Ahaseurus of Persia to issue a decree ordering their extermination. The story is told at Purim when the Book of Esther is read through twice in the synagogue. Every time the name Haman is mentioned it’s drowned out with rattles and hooters and boos from the congregation. Children also wear fancy dress and there’s a sense of hope and celebration, a bond of unity within the community and a belief in survival in the face of what in the story seemed a hopeless situation.  I’m sure this festival has taken on added significance since the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jews. It’s a lesson for all of us that life can come out of death, that hope can overcome despair, that communities that stand together can and do survive. 

Last year these three festivals fell on the same day. This year Purim and Holi were held earlier in March while Naw Ruz was celebrated on 20th. They’ve a certain amount in common, being Spring festivals. Purim and Holi have a carnival atmosphere and all of them a sense of new beginnings, a sense that light can follow darkness. As the world faces these dark days of isolation and quarantine their message can give us hope and confidence that this too will pass, that a new life is possible, that we will one day be able to celebrate once again with family and friends.   

A recent interfaith gathering in Birmingham celebrated the centenary of the birth of an amazing woman who might well one day be canonised as a saint within the Catholic Church.  That woman was Chiara Lubich, who was born in Trent Italy in 1921 and consecrated her life to God as a young woman of 22 yrs. in 1943.  Like nearly all founders of religious communities many young women were drawn to follow her way of putting the Christian Gospel into practice at a time when they were surrounded by violence, death and conflict.  They would meet in air-raid shelters during air raid attacks and eventually be the foundation stones of a spiritual and religious lay movement which would reach the ends of the earth and focus on fraternity and unity as its guiding principle. This movement, Focolare, is now present in 182 countries and more than 2 million people are affiliated to its work of spreading unity.  What is remarkable about this movement is that, while its foundations are Catholic, it includes among its membership people of other Christian denominations and faiths as well as people of no specific religion but who are inspired by the ideal of unity.

This call to unity is at the heart of many faiths, all of whom recognise the reality of the unity of the human race under God even if they do not always witness to it. Guru Nanak the founder of the Sikh faith overturned the distinctions between religions when he declared “there is neither Hindu nor Musselman” though,  in the 16th cy,  this led to the establishment of the Sikh faith and Mirza Husayn-Ali Nuri, the founder of the Baha’i faith and known as Baha’u’llah  advocated universal peace and unity among all races, nations and religions in the 19th cy. There’s no doubt that the world today needs this unity and it’s at the heart of the work of interreligious dialogue.  But it also needs a recognition of diversity and a respect for difference.  
  
Unity is not uniformity and we all have our own ways of being human and religious.  It’s so easy however, to retreat into our own ways of being human and religious and viewing others with suspicion and distrust. This leads to the building of walls rather than bridges, the isolation of groups, nations, cultures, religions; the viewing others as competition, looking out for our own advantage.  All this is obvious in the political climate of today. In spite of the World Wide Web our world seems as much if not more divided as ever.  We cannot afford to live behind our walls, having our view of the world skewed by the limits of the conditioning of our surroundings and culture.  

A great friend of the Focolare is Sheikh Dr Mohammad Ali Somali, Director of the International Institute for Islamic Studies who has known and lived the spirituality of the Focolare for more than twenty years. At the Birmingham celebrations he said, “Unity is more than dialogue. 'Dialogue' is no longer a good term when you reach unity. We are no longer in a state of dialogue with the Focolare. We are united. And through our unity we want to bring God first between us but also to the whole world."

I’m not too sure unity is more than dialogue, if by that we mean that we are friends with no need to talk about our differences or suggest they’re not important. There’s a danger that a lot of interfaith dialogue can be superficial, though if it engenders friendship then that is a good foundation for what must eventually come about – the more difficult dialogues about issues that are in danger of setting us apart from one another.

It’s possible to have a unity that doesn’t ever touch on controversial issues or differences in belief. For example it’s possible for Christians and Muslims, as with Jews, to dialogue about the unity of God which we all believe in but never discuss the Christian insight into the Godhead as Trinitarian or grapple with how this relates to Oneness.  It’s not so long ago that a Jewish friend was surprised when I said Christians believed in One God or would want to say the Shema, “Hear, O, Israel, the Lord our God is one”.  Unity which goes beyond a superficiality needs us to understand the other, where they come from, why they believe what they believe, stand in their shoes and understand what they believe, even being able to articulate it.  It’s also true for all the complex issues that living in a post-modern society throws up.  If we are to live together in society, build a home together, celebrate our unity as citizens and avoid an apparent unity that keeps us living side by side we need to continue to deepen a dialogue that helps us engage with one another and face our differences – not easy but essential if dialogue is to be a genuine contribution to unity

 This week on 27th January people all over the world remembered the horrors of the Holocaust and subsequent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur. This year was the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi death camp and the 25th anniversary of the massacre of 8,000 men and boys in Srebrenica which had been set up as a safe zone by the United Nations Security Force.
 
These memorials are always very moving. Over the years we’ve heard many stories – stories of horror, survival, courage, despair and hope.  This year we heard from Janine Weber who was born in 1932 in what was then Lwow in Poland but is now L’viv in Ukraine. Janine’s family were moved out of their home in Lwow after the invasion of Germany in 1945, her father was shot and the family were forced into the ghetto where her mother died of typhus.  Janine and her brother were given refuge by a Polish farmer but her brother was betrayed and shot, while Janine managed to run away, eventually finding her way to Krakow, Paris and eventually the UK where she married and had a family.    
 
We also heard the story of Hasan Hasanovic who was born on 7th December 1975 in the village of Bajina Basta in Serbia but was forced to move with his family to a Muslim-held enclave around the town of Srebrenica when the Bosnian War started in 1992.  There was no electricity, very little food, and people were killed every day by Serb artillery fire. He was 19 when Srebrenica fell to Bosnian Serb troops.  Hasan, his father and twin brother, Husein decided to flee from a massacre that murdered 8,000 men and boys. During a 100 kilometre march through hostile territory Hasan was separated from his father and brother and never saw them again. Today he is the curator of the Memorial Centre in Srebrenica, keeping alive the story of what happened there.
 
These stories can be difficult to listen to but what came across is the resilience of both Janine and Hasan in their struggle to come to terms with what happened to them and their families.  Janine no longer has nightmares, doesn’t start when she hears strong footsteps and Hasan has overcome the hate he felt in his heart.  This transformation came about at the sight of a young child whom he realised he could not hate even if the baby was the child of a war criminal.  Now he and Janine tell their stories with peace in their hearts but determined to keep alive the memory of what depths we humans can sink to if we are not careful. Their hope is that what happened to them might never happen again and yet it has happened. In this century we have seen the massacre and displacement of the Rohingya in Myanmar and the Yazidis in Iraq. What is it that leads us to hate those who are different so much.
 
The reality is that if there’s one human being who can perpetrate such horrors then we are all capable of it. But we are also capable of standing up for those who are oppressed. The theme of this year’s Holocaust Memorial is Stand Together and there are many examples of people who did stand with the Jewish community and they too have to be remembered. My own countrywoman Jane Haining was one of them. Jane came from farming community in the south of Scotland and went as a missionary from the Church of Scotland to work at the Scottish Jewish Mission School in Budapest in 1932. The school had 400 pupils, most of them Jewish. She was on leave when war broke out in 1939 but immediately returned to Hungary to do all she could to protect the children at the school. She ignored orders to flee the country when it was invaded by the Nazis. She was arrested by the Gestapo in April 1944 and murdered in Auschwitz a few months later, at the age of 47. The only Scot to have been murdered there.  Another Scot though, who stood with the Jews and Poles after the war was my friend Stella Reekie who, as a member of the Red Cross, was at the liberation of Belsen and worked with young children in Poland. Stella was actually born in England but came to Scotland as a Church of Scotland deaconess to work with the Asian community, established the first interfaith group in the country and, to my mind, is the pioneer of the interfaith movement which continues to grow to this day.

And then there was a sister who belonged to my community, the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur whose story I only heard about this year. Sister Maria Anthony was the child of Italian immigrants who was sent to Rome and became principal of a kindergarten there. When war broke out the convent became part of a network of safe houses in the city. Sr Anthony took in Jewish children and hid them in the school and garden until she could provide false papers to smuggle them out. She never spoke about this and it only came to light when a Jewish survivor mentioned her in a book about his war time experiences. She is named as one of the Righteous among the Nations for having “risked her life to save persecuted Jews”.
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So many horror stories and so many heroic stories which hopefully will be an inspiration to us to stand with those who may seem different from us but who share our common humanity.  The future of our race depends on this.