Interfaith Journeys
  • Home
  • Interfaith Journeys
  • Stella Reekie

Jane Haining

20/7/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
Canonisation in the Catholic Church is a lengthy process. Only after investigation into the heroic sanctity of an individual is that person declared a saint to be venerated by the universal Church. There are stages towards sainthood – the person is declared venerable, then blessed and then saint. It’s not so complicated in other Churches. Recently the Scottish Episcopal Church agreed at its General Synod that from next year a woman called Jane Haining will be remembered on 17th July, the anniversary of her death.  She will not be called a saint but will be recognised for her heroic courage and Christian commitment.

It's good that she’s being remembered. Jane Haining was a Scottish missionary who came from a rural part of Dumfriesshire and served as matron of the Girls’ Home at the Scottish Mission to the Jews in Budapest from where she was taken to Auschwitz with her Jewish charges to die at the age of 47.  I’m interested in her story because my branch of the Council of Christians and Jews was so taken by a talk on her life that we have set up a project, not just to promote her life but to use it as a reflection on racism, antisemitism and islamophobia in today’s society.  Last week four of our group travelled to Dunscore where Jane was born to meet with a group of parishioners from the parish church who have set up a visitors’ centre and developed a trail around the area to educate visitors about the only Scot to have died in Auschwitz and named Righteous Among the Nations at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, Israel’s memorial to victims of the Holocaust. We were welcomed warmly and seeing the farm where Jane was born, the primary school she attended, the Church she walked to each Sunday, her name on the Dux table at Dumfries Secondary School where she boarded, brought her to life.

Jane is well known in the Church of Scotland and probably even better known in Budapest where she worked. Every year there is an essay competition on her life and work and the winners come to Scotland to visit the Central Offices of the Church, the village of Dunscore and Queens Park Church of Scotland in Glasgow where she worshipped before going to Hungary. There is a street next to the Danube in Budapest named after her, Jane Haining Rakpart, and just last year the village of Loanhead in Midlothian named a street ‘Haining Park’ in her memory.  Our project hopes to extend this essay competition or something akin to it to Scottish schools. We also have plans for a Jane Haining trail in and around Glasgow but one that will include the Jewish community and highlight some aspects of their history and how this relates to Jane’s life. It will also involve looking at challenging questions.  It was after all the Church of Scotland’s Mission to the Jews that ran the school in Budapest – what did that mean then, has the Christian understanding of mission and missionary changed, how is it now understood?  

Jane refused to abandon the Jewish girls in her care after the Nazi invasion of Hungary. She was on holiday at home when the Second World War broke out and returned to be with her charges. With the German invasion of Hungary, the political situation worsened, and she refused to heed requests by the Church of Scotland to return to the safety of Scotland, saying ‘If these children need me in days of sunshine, how much more do they need me in days of darkness?’.  She was in tears as she sowed the yellow star on to the clothes of the Jewish pupils. Dr Ninon Leader, a pupil at the school and Goddaughter of Jane, talking a few years ago at a Holocaust Memorial event in Glasgow, recalls the day when it was made compulsory for anyone Jewish to wear what was meant to be a badge of shame and how Jane “sobbed and walked with red eyes among us”.  She also told of how “acting in Miss Haining’s spirit and personality, irrespective of their religion, every single boarder in the Mission Home sewed a yellow star on their uniforms”.

We Scots can be proud of Jane Haining.  We can see in her life the tragic consequences of prejudice, discrimination, and hatred.  At a time when racism and antisemitism have not disappeared from our country hers is an example we want to emulate. As members of the Council of Christians and Jews we want to encourage understanding and respect, a recognition of our common humanity, our common citizenship not just of our country but of the world.  We have rooted our project in the value of loving kindness/chesed.  This for us is the foundation for our conviction that we belong to one human family; for our appreciation, reverence and respect for diversity and the uniqueness of each human being and our determination to work to overcome discrimination and to further understanding, acceptance, and kindness between cultures. This we believe is a step towards ensuring peaceful co-existence and stability in our world today. Surely there is no better legacy for Jane Haining than this.?
0 Comments

The Melody of his Flute

6/7/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
It’s impossible, I think, to engage in interreligious dialogue and have your faith remain the same. It’s not that you don’t appreciate your own faith, far from it, or have a desire to abandon it and convert to another. What it does do is help widen our perspective and appreciate the religious longings at the heart of humankind – a longing and attraction that has given rise to the various religions of the world. Its this recognition that helps those involved in dialogue to feel at home in places of worship and at the services of other faiths.  At first it may seem strange. It may not be how we express our faith, but the recognition of the devotion and commitment of believers gives a sense of belonging to a wide community of believers. There can be a sense of sameness despite obvious differences.  To engage in dialogue is also to recognise the universal truth at the heart of the stories found in different scriptures. It is to find ourselves responding to them with devotion.

For me this is true of the stories of the Hindu Lord Krishna. According to the Hindu tradition Krishna is an incarnation of the Lord Vishnu and there are many stories of his exploits in Vrindaban where he grew up with foster parents. He is depicted as a flute player who entices the young women of the village with his music. Attracted by his flute, the story goes, they leave their homes, their families, their husbands to dance the night away with Krishna who multiplies himself so that each one feels herself totally loved.  Hearing his call, they have no option but to follow even if to do so is to break convention and tradition. For these women the love of God, manifest for them in the melody of Krishna’s flute, is the heart of their faith. It is a call to love and devotion which they cannot ignore. The poet Kabir expresses it beautifully,
              I hear the melody of his flute and I cannot contain myself;
              The flower blooms, though it is not spring; and already the bee has received its invitation.
               The sky roars and the lightening flashes, the waves arise in my heart,
                The rain falls and my heart longs for my Lord.
 
Many religious people have heard and felt this call and it’s at the heart of my own vocation.  Deep within religious faith there is an attraction to that which is transcendent, a desire to respond to what life offers, to grow in love and service, to become all that we are meant to be. I recognise this call when I hear the story of Krishna, I recognises similar attitudes in my own religion and in the poetry and prayers of the Christian mystics. But I also recognise it in some people who claim not to be religious. One such person is the scientist Professor Brian Cox who amazes many of us with his television programmes on the universe.  What comes across is his awe and wonder at the majesty and mystery of this universe of which we are a part. He delights in it all. At the end of a recent programme he commented that he expected to continue to be so amazed by the universe that the only adequate response would be silence. There are many mystics within all the religious traditions who have responded in a similar vein.
 
It would seem to me that this call, this attraction to the fullness of life could be a human and natural one as well as a religious one. Is this the essence of evolution as life has responded and adapted to new possibilities? It might be called gravity, a magnetic force by some, the call of a God who may be named as Allah or Krishna by others but is it not the same call, a call to a love and wonder that will express itself in compassion and care for others and the world we live in. Is this not the heart of religion, is this not what the earth is crying out for as we see and experience the effects of climate change and the need for healing and reconciliation among the nations? It would be good if religion could take us beyond externals to help us see and hear the possibilities that are open to us. It would be good if it could help us look beyond the pointing finger to see the moon itself and to respond accordingly. But so too for science. I can resonate with Brian Cox’s wonder and awe. I understand his rejection of a Creator outside of time. I have difficulties with it myself. But I do feel that we both hear a similar melody at the heart of life and in that have more in common than might be obvious at first sight.  
0 Comments

Christian - Muslim Relations

20/6/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
​​ Islam is the second largest religion in Scotland. We’re used to women wearing the hijab, men wearing the shalwar kameez and mosques visible in every part of the country. For someone of my age this seems a fairly new development. I grew up in a country that was predominantly white and Christian but increasingly became multifaith and multicultural after a wave of immigration in the 1950s and 60’s when jobs were available in transport and industry. Muslims had in fact been in Scotland long before that but living in the suburbs of Scotland’s largest city I had never seen or heard of them even though many of the early immigrants made a living going door to door peddling merchandise. I do have a clear picture of a Sikh man walking down my street with a suitcase and being amazed at this stranger wearing a turban. No doubt he too was a peddler but he never came to our house. I must have been about 8 or 9 years old at the time and my first encounter with a different world, a world that was eventually to become so central to my adult life through the work of interreligious dialogue.

Part of the work of dialogue is to get to know the other which includes recognising and acknowledging our shared history. Like all history, this has good and bad aspects to it, aspects that can be dormant in our community psyche and influence our attitude to one another. This is certainly true for Christian – Muslim relations. Events such as Arab expansionism that defeated the Christian Byzantine Empire, establishing an Arab Empire that dominated most of the known world; the crusades that fought for Christian control of Jerusalem; colonialism that brought Muslim countries under European control can make us suspicious and unsure of one another. It’s not so long ago that there were calls for an apology for the violence of the crusades – something that has died down since the attack on the World Trade Centre.  

There is of course much good in the history of relations between our two faiths and indeed between Scotland and the Muslim world, an account of which can be found in Bashir Maan’s book, ‘The Thistle and the Crescent’, which outlines contacts between Scotland and the Arab, Muslim world through pilgrimage and trade. The society that pilgrims and traders encountered was a materially rich and culturally sophisticated one. It was the Arabs that translated many of the Greek works of Plato, Socrates and Aristotle into Arabic thus keeping them alive for such influential theologians as Thomas Aquinas whose theology was a dialogue between the philosophy of Aristotle and the truth of Christianity which he knew from the Latin translations of the Arabic texts. Duns Scotus too studied the works of Muslim philosophers as did many scholars and academics in medieval Britain. The great Muslim centres of learning, Cordoba, Toledo, Cairo, Baghdad were the forerunner of universities and gave much to the world. They established libraries, developed mathematics and astronomy, invented the telescope, compass and the pendulum. They brought the art of Chinese papermaking to the west in the 800s and set up pulp and paper mills for papermaking and money making.

It was through contact with the Muslim world that coffee, the ‘Mahometan Berry’ was brought to Britain by diplomats, travellers and traders in the 17th cy. It was advertised as a beneficial for health. “Its proponents argued that coffee made the drinker, more active, more hard working, more productive” and “the drink of the Protestant Work Ethic because it stimulated the mind of the drinker“(Maan P.128). There were also detractors who denounced it for resulting in what they called Turkish and not Protestant sobriety, leading even to conversion to Islam. The introduction of the English translation of the Qur’an, translated by a Scot, Alexander Ross and the wearing of Turkish dress in the coffee houses added to this notion.

Alexander Ross was not the only Scot who was enthralled by Islam. Michael Scot (1175 – 1232) a famous Scottish philosopher, translator, mathematician, and astrologer studied in Muslim Spain at Toledo. He learned Arabic and was one of those scholars who translated Arab treatises into Latin, thus making them available to Europe. Bashir Maan tells how he accompanied Emperor Frederick, for whom he worked, on his crusade of 1228 and, because he could speak Arabic, played an important role in the negotiations for the peaceful recovery of Jerusalem between the Emperor and Sultan Al-Kamal whose offer of peace had been refused.  Al-Kamal is the same Sultan whom St Francis Assisi met when he travelled to Damietta in Egypt, hoping for martyrdom but finding instead a fellow man of God. One story goes that Francis and the brother accompanying him stayed for a week, another that they stayed for three weeks but all are agreed that they recognised one another’s holiness and spent their time talking of the things of God.  This is often taken as an example of interfaith dialogue and St Francis seen as the patron saint of dialogue. It’s good and intriguing to know that we Scots have a connection with that event.  

There’s much more to the history of Christian – Muslim relations. Knowing just a little of it reminds me of our interconnectedness and hopefully adds depth to our dialogues and encounters.   
0 Comments

Remarkable Women

7/6/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
I have just watched a very moving film of the work of my community. It was a video filmed 27 years ago when we celebrated the centenary of the Sisters of Notre Dame in Scotland.  At that time there were 77 sisters, now there are 27 and we are all a lot older. Over the years sisters have died, some have moved to our communities in England, and some have simply left religious life, deciding it wasn’t the best context for them to live and grow.  And no young people are joining anymore – at least in Europe – so we are an ageing group of women. But what amazing women we are! And what an inspirational community we belong to though of course in the hustle and bustle of everyday life with its ups and downs we’re not always aware of that.

As it happens, I had been thinking of it recently when I was asked to be part of a panel of inspirational women which is a project of the Religions for Peace UK Women of Faith Network. Joining me on the panel – virtually of course – were two remarkable young women. Zara Mohammed, a young Scottish who has recently been appointed as the youngest, first Scottish and first female Secretary General of the Muslim Council of Britain, whose appointment caused a lot of media interest and Umetesi Stewart, a survivor of the Rwandan Genocide who now lives in Scotland with her husband and two beautiful daughters. Umetesi’s story was particularly difficult to listen to – how she hid in the fields under banana trees during the rains to escape the killers who went from house to house, killing everyone. She lost 40 members of her family, including her mother and brother.  Yet now she is grateful for the gift of life, saying it was not her time to die, and is determined to be an ambassador for peace, telling her story in the hope that one day our world might be rid of such atrocities.

Each of us was asked to speak about how our faith had supported us through the barriers and challenges we had overcome.  Just as human beings, all of us must face barriers and challenges but mine seem nothing compared to that of Umetesi.  Working as a woman in a religiously conservative institution like the Catholic Church, however, there have been challenges and criticism as women changed their understanding of religious life and a lack of understanding about the importance of the work of interreligious dialogue – at least at the local level though Catholics including Bishops and clergy must give notional assent to it as it’s now an important part of Church teaching.

Reflecting on this question I was aware what strength there was in belonging to a community of women committed to service and the growth and development of people and the planet. Although situated within a patriarchal, hierarchical, religious society, women religious have a certain independence to determine their own way of life and to pull resources, both material and spiritual. They have been given opportunities for education and self-development and the possibility for engaging in social action.  This has given them a vision and sense of belonging to something greater than themselves and the support and confidence to challenge unjust structures and weave a meaningful life for themselves even in the face of male, clerical disapproval. Perhaps you remember ‘Nuns on the Bus’ during Donald Trumps campaign?

Within the Catholic Church, religious life has always offered women an alternative to marriage and like all institutions it has gone through changes according to the time in which it lives. My own community was founded during the French Revolution to educate poor women and girls at a time when education had suffered, and women needed an education to be self-supportive.  The first schools opened by the sisters were in the new industrial towns and taught skills that would be able to give women an income if they needed it. The way of life became institutionalised over time and the sisters lived a regular life of prayer in the convent, going out during the day to schools but living quite apart from the rest of society in convents. That changed with the Second Vatican Council when sisters were asked to go back to the origins of their communities and renew their way of life so that it was more relevant to the modern age. We realised that much of our work in formal education was behind us and we extended our vision of education to include works such as interreligious dialogue, spiritual direction, psychotherapy and counselling, special needs education, parenting and leadership skills.  

Seeing this being carried out in the film was impressive. It was obvious that each of us belonged to a network of supportive and committed women. What we did, we did not do in isolation so that each of us then had a network of colleagues and friends with whom we engaged and worked – a vast web of relationships.  And we are only one small group of women here in Scotland. Thinking of our global community, of those contacts who then have their own networks, the web of goodness is vast. This world wide web of commitment and service is all around us but often invisible. But for those of us who have the eyes to see it is a sign of hope and encouragement that in the end “all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well”.  
0 Comments

A Holy Land?

24/5/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
Since my last blog two weeks ago a war has raged in Israel-Palestine. It’s not the only part of the world that’s at war but it is a conflict which affects interfaith relations here in Scotland in a way that no other conflict does. This is because for four of the world religions, Judaism, Christianity, Islam and the Baha’i Faith the land is regarded as holy and often referred to as ‘The Holy Land’. 

For Jews it is the land that God gave them and offered them a place of safety after the Holocaust and hundreds of years of antisemitism in Christian Europe. For Christianity it is the land where Jesus was born, lived, preached, died and rose again. For Islam it is the place where Mohammed undertook his night journey from Mecca to Jerusalem and then ascended through the seven heavens to encounter the various prophets and meet God face to face.  For Bahai’s it is the land where the three central figures of their faith, the Bab, Baha’u’llah, and Abdu’l-Baha are buried and where the Baha’i’s global spiritual and administrative centre is to be found.

For all four faiths it’s a place of pilgrimage and many believers have an investment in and concern for this part of the world that’s not always recognised. I’ve often heard Jews question why people seem to be more interested and critical of Israel than any other area of conflict, even suggesting such interest could in fact be antisemitic. I’ve also been in a situation at a Council of Christians and Jews where someone from the Jewish community was disturbed that we Christians might think of Israel as our Holy Land while Jews obviously think of it as theirs.

This is a challenge and often the elephant in the room during dialogues between followers of the four faiths who see themselves as descendants of Abraham, which in fact makes them brothers and sisters. However, while we all agree that Abraham is our father, and hold that the land is holy there is much not to agree on. For Muslims, the Al-Aqsa Mosque is the spot from which Mohammed travelled to the highest heaven during his night journey and received the revelation of the Qur’an. The Mosque is the third holiest site in Islam and the one to which the early Muslim community turned when praying until God directed them to pray in the direction of the Kaaba in Mecca instead. Towards the end of Ramadan this journey of the Prophet is celebrated as the Night of Power and devout Muslims will spend the whole night in prayer and recitation of the Qur’an.

The Mosque is built on the Temple Mount and, within the shrine of the Dome of the Rock beside the Al-Aqsa Mosque, lies the place where Abraham was sent to sacrifice his son Isaac and the site of the First and Second Jewish Temple including the Holy of Holies, the most sacred site in Judaism.  This was the innermost and most sacred area of the Temple, accessible only to the High Priest who once a year, on the Day of Atonement, was permitted to enter the sanctuary to offer sacrifice to atone for his own sins and those of the priesthood. Within the Holy of Holies was kept the Ark of the Covenant, a symbol of Israel’s special relationship with God. And for many orthodox Jews it is the place where the third and final Temple will be built when the Messiah comes. So sacred is this place that many Jews will not walk on the Mount itself in case they unintentionally enter the area where the Holy of Holies stood, since according to rabbinical law, there is still some aspect of the divine presence at the site. What is left to Jews is what remains of the Western wall of the Temple which for them is a place of pilgrimage and prayer.

So, here we have, in a land troubled by concerns about nationhood and land boundaries, a holy site which is claimed by both Judaism and Islam. It’s one of the most contested religious sites in the world and a focal point for the Israeli – Arab conflict as we have seen in this most recent war. It’s not the cause of the conflict, which is much more political than directly religious, but it does reflect a little bit the different loyalties, narratives, histories, allegiances that come in to play when reflecting on Israel-Palestine - loyalties, narratives, histories and allegiances that can affect relations here in Scotland. Most attempts to speak about the situation leads to polarisation, a desire of both Israelis and Palestinians to tell their story, believing very often that the ‘other’ side’s story is heard more than theirs. I’ve stopped listening to these stories unless balanced by the story of the ‘other’ side.

Perhaps what we need is for those of us who call this land holy to reflect with one another on what that means, to feel together the pain of division, to recognise together the right of all to justice and statehood and above all pray together for a peace which shows that it is not ownership or even history that makes a place holy but a recognition of a common humanity under God that recognises all others as our sisters and  and brothers.
0 Comments

St. Mungo's Museum of Religious life and Art

9/5/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
 The St Mungo Museum of Religious Life and Art is a very special place. It’s named after Glasgow's patron saint who brought the Christian faith to Scotland in the 6th century and designed in the style of the medieval Bishops’ Castle on which site it’s built. When it was opened in 1993 it was one of only two museums of religions in Europe though there were Christian monasteries and churches that had been converted into or housed displays of religion.

​What made St Mungo’s different was that it included all religions and none and in the 1990s this wasn’t very popular especially with the Christian Churches, many of whom had a theology of believing they had an exclusive insight into truth and salvation and weren’t at all sure about displaying artefacts from ‘non-christian’ faiths.  What challenged many of them was that the Gallery of Religious Life showed that all faiths celebrated, ritualised, and customised significant moments in life - birth, initiation, commitment, marriage, death. The displays honoured the integrity of each faith but showed their similarities.  I delighted to see statues of the Virgin Mary with her son Jesus next to the Goddess Isis with her son Horus in exactly the same pose, or the infant Jesus next to the infant Krishna. This did annoy some people, but part of interfaith work is to realise that all want to celebrate significant rites of passage and that there are universal symbols and commonalities in the way they do this.  It should also be said of course that it attracted a lot of praise and recognition for being ground-breaking and innovative and for significant artefacts like the statue of Siva Nataraja and the first authentic zen garden in Britain.

When the museum was being set up the curators worked hard to involve stakeholders and be inclusive of all faiths. Through the Glasgow Sharing of Faiths, faith communities were kept informed of developments, were consulted about the displays, and even contributed to them.  Because of this the various faith communities felt they had an investment in the museum. In a very special way, it felt like home to them, and was used to celebrate festivals and events like the exhibition on the Declaration Towards a Global Ethic which was brought to Glasgow by Hans Kung who had presented it and had it accepted at the Parliament of World Religions in 1993, the same year the museum opened. But above all the museum became a centre for interfaith activity.

The mission statement of St Mungo’s says that it is designed to ‘explore the importance of religion in people’s everyday lives across the world and across time, aiming to promote mutual understanding and respect between people of different faiths and none’. As an interfaith practitioner I’ve had a lot to do with the museum and been greatly supported in my work by the curator, manager and staff.  For about fifteen years we hosted an annual Meet Your Neighbour event which happened over a weekend but took an interfaith committee many months to plan. Different religious communities set up a display of their faith in the function room and were available to meet and talk to visitors. The weekend was punctuated by musical or cultural events, like the Jewish Choral Society, Hindu dancers, bellringers, tabla and sitar players. We had workshops on storytelling, sari wearing. Mehndi, calligraphy.  We involved schools and on occasions when we decided on a concert on the Sunday afternoon, we had people standing by the zen garden with the doors and windows open so that they could hear the concert as there were no seats left in the function room.

Sometimes the dialogues were of a more serious nature and in the run up to the reconvening of the Scottish Parliament in 1999 it was where members of faith communities gathered to consider what the New Scotland would be like for people of faith.It was in the light of these discussions that the Scottish Interfaith Consultative Group was formed and this then led to the setting up of the Scottish Interfaith Council which today is known as Interfaith Scotland.  The Council was started with very little – myself as the founding director, the gift of a computer from my community and the use of an office in St Mungo’s. This consolidated the relationship between the Museum and SIFC and we continued to work well together. For us St Mungo’s became the home to our dialogues with First Ministers, religious leaders, interfaith practitioners from England, Ireland, and Wales. It’s where we grew and developed. We eventually had to move out when we got funding to appoint staff and even then we were given an office by Glasgow Life, the body that runs Glasgow Museums. And continued to work together especially in projects such as the setting up of the Forum of Faiths by Glasgow City Council.

I think it’s obvious that St Mungo’s Museum is very close to my heart and I hope it’s obvious that it has fulfilled its mission well and contributed positively to the social fabric of Glasgow.  So, I am appalled and dismayed that there is some likelihood that it might not open after the pandemic.  The suggestion that the Council is looking to transfer the museum to a third party is worrying. St Mungo’s is unique, it has made a significant contribution to overcome racism, sectarianism and religious prejudice. It has worked with faith communities, school children and others to promote mutual understanding, respect and cooperation. It has involved stakeholders in a way no other museum has and to shut it would be a disgrace as far as I am concerned. It’s something that must be contested. 
0 Comments

How to Speak of God?

25/4/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
One way of understanding religion is that it’s a language that tries to understand and respond to questions which are of themselves unanswerable – what is the meaning of life, where do we come from, where are we going, why is there something rather than nothing, why do we suffer? Each religion responds in its own way through story, scripture, religious teachings and practices which, from my perspective, are not to be taken literally but, like the finger that points to the moon, take us to a dimension of truth that is beyond expression. This intuition is expressed in the language and thought processes of the time in which it was formed. Often, at least in the case of Catholicism, it has been developed in dialogue with the prevailing culture of the time and because of that it can become outdated. My sense is that this is what has happened with the word God.
 
The Abrahamic faiths – Judaism, Christianity, Islam and the Bahai faith believe that the universe was created out of nothing by the direct action of God. Human beings, although part of this creation, are the summit of it with unique abilities and responsibilities to care for the created world. Faced with the awesomeness of nature, its unpredictability, its otherness, the dependence on it for life and nourishment it’s no wonder that the answer to the question of where nature came from or how it all began was found in a supreme being who brought it into existence and sustained it in life.  This Being or God was not constrained by the limitations of the created world but lived outside time and space in an eternal heaven or paradise but chose to reveal something of Godself in the natural world, by speaking to people through the Torah in the case of Judaism, the Qur’an in Islam, the person of Jesus in Christianity and Baha’u’llah in the Bahai faith.  This was a personal God who wanted a relationship with his creation, especially human beings. It was an image, a hypothesis that gave life and meaning to many over the centuries but it grew out of a stage of history when people believed in a three-fold universe – heaven above, hell below and the earth in the middle. It was a good answer to the mystery of the world at a time when we did not know how the world began.
 
But we now know how the world began even if the supposed gravitational singularity that started it off is still a mystery. We know about the Big Bang, we know we live in a complex and immense universe that is still expanding, we know there is a direct link between the energy that formed itself into matter and the evolutionary process that brought us human beings from star dust to consciousness. How are we religious people to speak of God in the light of this new universe story? My experience is that sermons still talk of God as a Being separate from the universe in the sense that God loves us, is even besotted with us, God calls us to particular jobs and a way of life, God will answer our prayers, God will reward us in an after life such as heaven.  Attending Church services it would seem that we are still living in the three dimensional world that gave birth to the Book of Genesis.
​
Theology of course over the years has recognised that while God is transcendent, God is also immanent in nature, in history and in the human person who according to the Abrahamic tradition is made in the image and likeness of God. While positive things can be said about God they are inadequate and are in danger of anthropomorphising God – so for example God is not so much loving as love itself, God is not so much wise as Wisdom itself, God is not a Being but Being itself. There is what is called the kataphatic tradition that talks in positive terms about God and the apophatic tradition that recognises the impossibility of knowing God and the only response is silence. This is a bit like the God with attributes and God without attributes found in the Hindu tradition. But, for those people who are not interested in theology and mainly go to Church for their spiritual sustenance, the way God is talked about or prayed to does not reflect what they know of the world in which we live. I’m sure that for many young people and perhaps older people too their rejection of Christianity and God is as much because of cosmology as it is because of theology.
 
So what do we do with the word god? We can’t ditch it because it’s ingrained in religions , ie apart from Buddhism which doesn’t accept a creator God but a force for life at the heart of the universe. The way of talking about God that I like best in the Christian scriptures is that of Paul where he says that God is the One, the Reality in which we live, move and have our very being. This seems to me to fit the new universe story and expresses well what Teilhard de Chardin calls ‘the organic centre of the evolving universe’.  But can we use such an expression as part of our Church services and liturgy? It would take a momentous shift in consciousness and practice. We know that language forms our ways of looking and understanding the world in which we live and to continue with the traditional language is to form people in a mindset that reflects a world that we know does not exist.
0 Comments

A Wild and Precious Life

11/4/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
Mary Oliver has a poem, The Summer Day which ends with the question: Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? This notion of a wild and precious life has been on my mind this week in the light of two deaths, the Jewish remembrance of Yom Hashoah and a television programme on a Benedictine Monastery in Leicestershire.
 
One of the deaths has been that of Prince Philip, the husband of Queen Elizabeth whose death now brings his life into focus. Being such a public figure Prince Philip was fair game for the media and he was associated with blunt embarrassing remarks that were not exactly politically correct. Now his achievements are being recognised and even his bluntness is being interpreted as a desire to be friendly and put people at their ease, often backfiring on him. He gave up a promising military career and made a life for himself in a situation where he always had to play second fiddle to the Queen whose role was clearly detailed and defined.  Now the media is acknowledging the difficulties he overcame, his decades of public service and commitment to issues such as the environment and the welfare of young people through the Duke of Edinburgh Award which has now been awarded to over three million young people. It was a life well lived.
 
Another controversial figure – at least as far as the Catholic Church is concerned – who died on 6th April is Fr Hans Kung. Fr Kung is one of the last theologians who attended the Second Vatican Council as an expert advisor to the Bishops. His work on infallibility brought him in to conflict with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the designation Catholic theologian was taken from him in 1979 which meant losing his job in the catholic theological faculty of Tubingen. What happened then was that he moved to the Protestant faculty of the same university where he continued his work, desiring more than anything the reform of a church he loved. He was also involved in interfaith issues and is responsible for the maxim, “no peace in the world without peace among the world religions, no peace among the religions without dialogue between the religions and no dialogue between the religions without investigation of the foundation of the religions”. Later he added “no dialogue among the religions without global ethical standards” when he wrote the document on a “Declaration Towards a Global Ethic” which was presented and adopted by the 1993 Parliament of World Religions in Chicago.  Kung’s commitment to Global Ethics then became a lifetime’s work and the need for such an ethic was echoed last year at the Edinburgh Book Festival by the late Lord Jonathan Sacks in conversation with Amin Maalouf. Another life well lived.
 
Yom HaShoah, which also happened this week, is the moment when the Jewish community remembers those murdered by the Nazis. Unlike Holocaust Memorial Day, which is a political and national event, Yom HaShoah is a community affair. It is very moving to see displayed page after page the names of those family members related to the local community who died in concentration camps. For the Jewish community the Shoah is a family affair and a present reality. The two speakers this year were remarkable.  

Noemie Lopian grew up in Germany but knew nothing of the Holocaust from her family and unbelievingly asked her mother if such a thing could possibly be true when she was told about it in school. It was only when she was in her mid-thirties that she read her father’s memoirs and understood for the first time the suffering her father endured when as a teenager he was sent to a series of concentration camps and took part in a number of death marches. His parent and two younger sisters were murdered in Auschwitz. Noemie realised this was a story that needed to be told, translated her father’s memoirs “The Long Night” into English and committed herself to telling his story at events such as Yom HaShoah.  This she does with the second speaker, Derek Niemann and what is remarkable about their work is that he is the grandson of a Nazi perpetrator. Derek was brought up in Scotland and only found out about his grandfather when he and his wife decided to visit Germany and trace some family history. Looking up the address of the family home on the internet he discovered that his grandfather was SS Hauptsturmführer Karl Niemann, a former SS Officer and concentration camp overseer who had been tried and found guilty at Nuremberg for  crimes against humanity and use of slave labour. Derek too has written a book, “A Nazi in the Family”, and is determined that his family’s secret should be brought into the light. Speaking as he does with Noemie is really powerful and they are determined to use their precious life to work together to educate people about the atrocities of the Nazis with the hope that such a thing should never happen again.
 
My last reflection of a wild and precious life came from a television programme about the Cistercian Abbey of Mount St Bernard in Leicestershire. Here was a community of monks who lived a very unadventurous life committed totally to praying for the world and honouring God away from the glare of publicity. Their genuineness, simplicity, dedication and love visibly showed a life well lived even if not understood by most. More on this another time but what more could we ask for in living our own wild and precious life? 
0 Comments

Reading Scripture Together

30/3/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
I recently took part in a dialogue with a small group of Baha’is. I was in fact the only Christian and more than a dialogue it was an account of the teachings of Baha’u’llah, the founder of the Baha’i faith but referring to some Christian scriptures. I learned a lot in the process about myself and about interreligious dialogue. 

Dialogue can be challenging especially when you see your faith from another perspective. Sometimes it challenges your very identity. This is especially true when it comes to supercessionism which is also called replacement theology, that is when one religion believes that it has a revelation that replaces or develops that of a previous one which can suggest a superiority.  Christianity did it to Judaism. Christians believed that Jesus was the Messiah promised in the Hebrew scriptures; the Jews didn’t recognise him, so those who did and followed Jesus fell heirs to the promises given by God to the People of Israel. Christians had in fact replaced Jews as God’s Chosen People.  Islam then did it to Judaism and Christianity when Muslims, while respecting the prophets of Judaism, including Jesus, claimed that Mohammed was the final prophet and the Qur’an the true expression of the Word of God. And the Baha’i faith reflects this attitude in believing that Baha’a’ullah is a further revelation from God which is appropriate for the modern age.

While in no way explicitly rejecting previous revelations it did feel a bit like supercessionism as I listened to an interpretation of the Christian scriptures which Baha’u’llah reinterpreted to show how he understood them or fulfilled them. This being accepted by Baha’is as the correct understanding of the scriptures. It raised for me questions about how to accept the integrity of another faith when one faith develops from another or is influenced by another. How do we accept the integrity of a faith’s understanding of scripture when it is shared or used by another faith but understood differently?

I had an experience of this a few months ago when I was involved in a project to interpret a scripture story depicted on a medieval tapestry which was to be put on display in the newly refurbished Burrell Museum in Glasgow. The story chosen was that of the story in Genesis 22 of Abraham being asked to sacrifice his son but being saved from doing so by an angel. The Christians and Jews shared the same text but interpreted it in different ways and even had different names for it. For Jews the story is called the Binding of Isaac or the Akedah and shows the total submission to God’s will of Abraham, the exemplar of faith. It’s because of Abraham’s obedience and willingness to kill his son that God tells him, “Because you have done this…I will bestow my blessing upon you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars of heaven and the sands on the seashore” (Genesis 22:16–17). Isaac was saved and a ram sacrificed in his place and in memory of this a ram’s horn is blown each year at the festival of Rosh Hashanah to remind God of the Akedah and his promise to bestow blessings on God’s People and safeguard their future.

Christians on the other hand refer to the story as the sacrifice of Isaac and see in it a prefiguration of the death of Jesus on the Cross. They approach the same story from a different viewpoint, from their own theological understanding of seeing Christ at the centre of revelation. For one person in our group this was a bit disconcerting – another faith interpreting her faith, not only differently but in a way that could suggest the Christian understanding was the correct one. It was very obvious that we are standing in different places with different mind sets even when we read the same scriptures.  

This was the case with my interaction with my Baha’i friends which was enjoyable and friendly but used passages from the Gospels and understood them in a way that was alien to me. It was obvious that our whole approach to the Gospels was quite different. For me the scripture was saying something about Jesus and the reality of God’s relationship with humanity, while for the Bahai’s the same scripture was used to show that the Christian understanding was inadequate and replaced by a further revelation.  Do I have the right to say that this was wrong?  Not really because I don’t own my scriptures. The scriptures of the world religions contain a wisdom that is universal and available to all and as such are not the property of any one faith.  For the Baha’is or Baha’u’llah to interpret the Christian scriptures as proof of the validity of his own faith is an act of faith in itself and it’s this that has to be acknowledged by saying Baha’is believe that this ……… means……….. Christians too have to acknowledge that their understanding of these same texts is based on their faith, perhaps even foundational to it.     
​
What all this says to me is that we need to be sensitive when using scripture within the context of dialogue. We need to listen and acknowledge different understandings, be sensitive to supercessionist texts and what impact they can have on our dialogue partners. We also need to face up to the challenges that a replacement theology poses as we acknowledge our respect for the integrity of other faiths – a respect which is foundational to interreligious dialogue.
0 Comments

A Historic Encounter

13/3/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
www.washingtoninstitute.org/experts/yousif-kalianWhen Pope Francis met Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb, the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar University in Cairo in 2016 he declared that the meeting itself was the message. This was a hailed as a historic encounter which both sides hoped would lead to greater understanding and dialogue between the two faiths. That hope materialised into a friendship between the two men which resulted in the signing in 2019 of a statement on ‘Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together’ – a document that has been promoted throughout the world and quoted in Pope Francis’ latest encyclical ‘Fratelli Tutti’.  So too the meeting between Pope Francis and Ayatollah al-Sistani, the most important, revered and followed Ayatollah in the Shi'a world, in the city of Najaf this past week is historic. The meeting was a private one but a message in itself and likely to lead to more cooperation and dialogue. Yousif Kalian, a program specialist at the U.S. Institute of Peace based in Erbil, underlined this by stating   "Ayatollah Sistani doesn't meet with just anybody. It is well known and well documented that he only meets with people as a way to send a signal and a sign."

The meeting took place during Pope Francis’ historic visit to Iraq, the first ever for a Pope. It happened in spite of concerns for the Pope’s safety and warnings about crowds ignoring covid restrictions and the possibility of a spike in the virus. The Pope was committed to honouring his promise of a visit and the people of Iraq showed their delight by the warm welcome they gave him. The Christian community in Iraq includes a range of rites and traditions which include Syriac, Assyrian, Chaldean, Armenian and Melkite and is one of the oldest in the world, dating back to the first century and mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles. Now it is facing extinction after hundreds of thousands have fled the violence and destruction of the so-called Islamic State. Francis travelled to Iraq as a pilgrim of peace to show solidarity with a community whose spirit has been broken, an expression used by Yousif Kalian "What the pope's visit is doing is bringing back some of that hope again," said Kalian, "the visit is really going to be giving a huge vote of confidence from the pope to the people that they can handle and sustain themselves, despite the challenges."
 
 The Pope, 84 years of and suffering from sciatica, had a gruelling three days, visiting war torn Mosul on the Nineveh plains and praying for peace, calling for hope to triumph over hate declaring “fraternity is more durable that fratricide”; celebrating the first papal mass in the Chaldean rite in St Joseph’s Cathedral Baghdad – significant because Chaldean is a dialect of Aramaic, the language of Jesus; attending an interfaith meeting in Ur thought to be the birthplace of Abraham, the father of Jews, Christians and Muslims. There Pope Francis told the gathering, which included Muslims and Christians but unfortunately no Jews whose numbers are in single figures, “From this place, where faith was born, from the land of our father Abraham, let us affirm that God is merciful and that the greatest blasphemy is to profane his name by hating our brothers and sisters. Hostility, extremism and violence are not born of a religious heart: they are betrayals of religion. Peace does not demand winners or losers, but rather brothers and sisters who, for all the misunderstandings and hurts of the past, are journeying from conflict to unity.”

The meeting with Ayatollah al-Sistani was an image of such unity. The meeting was private and took place in Ayatollah Sistani’s home.  The Vatican, however, said Pope Francis thanked al-Sistani for having “raised his voice in defence of the weakest and most persecuted” during some of the most violent times in Iraq’s recent history. And al-Sistani’s office released a statement that said religious authorities have a role in protecting Iraq’s Christians and that the Shia leader “affirmed his concern that Christian citizens should live like all Iraqis in peace and security, and with their full constitutional rights”.  
​
Marsin Alshamary, a research fellow at the Brookings Institution, told Al Jazeera that it was “a very significant” meeting. “The Iraqi public is tired of conflict and it is an opportune moment to have this visit,” she said. “But it is important to recognise that this visit is nothing more than symbolic and that is more than enough. Having the pope visit Iraq for the first time in history is such an honour and it is such a great thing to be happening. And Iraqis are so happy to be hosting him.”  “Nothing more than symbolic” sounds quite dismissive but if in this historic meeting there is a message it surely is one of unity and openness which offers the possibility of further dialogues, growing friendship and working together for the common good. There will be developments I’m sure and at some time in the future we will see what good seeds have been sown by this historic visit. 
0 Comments
<<Previous

    Author

    I am  a Catholic nun, involved in interfaith relations for many decades.  For me this has been an exciting and sacred journey which I would like to share with others.

    Picture

    Archives

    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013

    RSS Feed

    Categories
    Religious Performances
    ​​

    All

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.