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A fast pleasing to God

21/6/2015

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Part of this week's interfaith journey has been about fasting. For one thing Ramadan has begun and our scriptural reasoning discussions were on the subject of fasting.  The qotation from the Qur'an was prescrptive - fast for the prescribed days unless you are ill or on a journey and if it's only possible to fast with extreme difficulty then compensate by feeding a needy person. Ramadan is the month in which the Qur'an was revealed to the Prophet Mohammed so while fasting during the hours of daylight is important the focus is actually on the Word of God.  It's like a time of retreat.  

The Christian passage at first glance seemed so different. it wasn't really about fasting at all but about the temptations of Jesus when after having fasted for 40 days and 40 nights he was tempted to turn stones into bread to satisfy his hunger. There's no prescription to fast in the Christian scriptures though as a good Jew Jesus obviously did fast and even seemed to take it for granted that his followers would also fast.  What Jesus does is tell his disciples how to fast - to do so privately and hiddenly and not parade it before other people, which is always a danger for religious ritual of any kind. As Jesus says this brings its own rewards. 

For the Jews fasting is also prescriptive and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement would be regarded as the most solemn of fasts but the day is spent in the Synagogue and is a moment to ask for forgiveness for past sins and renewed commitment for the future.  Again not eating is important but only a backdrop to a day of intense prayer and reflection. What was interesting was that the scripture passage we reflected on and which is read at Yom Kippur was from Isaiah. It reminded us that it's possible to have a wicked fast, that the kind of fast that God desires is to unburden the oppressed, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, look after the homeless. As so often happens in religion ritual is important but only if the intention is right.

I often think at events such as the scriptural reasoning one that Christianity appears quite wishy washy compared to Islam and Judaism which are more prescriptive. To say it's a religion of the heart doesn't satisfy those people for whom law is an expression of God's will.  Lent compared to Ramadan or the Baha'i fast is so little but it too has its place.  The passage about the temptations in the desert that we looked at this week was not really about abstaining from food and drink but about power - using power for our own ends, either to make life comfortable for us or to have our message heard and draw people to our projects.  For Jesus this was not on - nothing was more important than listening to the Word of God, realising the giftedness of our lives, knowing that how we proceed should be with compassion and discernment, that living for the kingdom of God daily in small ways is better than grand gestures.

All of this has resonances in Pope Francis new encyclical in which he reminds us human beings of our relationship with the created world in which we live. He recognises the danger our world is in as a result of our greed and dominion over creation, our sense that it is there for our benefit and ease, our loss of the sacredness of all life. The encyclical had been leaked and the leaks seem to have brought about more criticism than the document did in its actual publication. A lot of the criticism came from mining companies and global warming deniers so it's not too hard to determine their motivation. Jed Bush, a presidential candidate and a catholic commented on it saying  “I think religion ought to be about making us better as people and less about things that end up getting in the political realm.”  I wonder what he meant by that. This came from a man who had lobbied for a change in abortion laws. Was this political?  Is religion is about personal morality as long as it doesn't interfere with my settled life?  And since morality and religious living are to do with values are they not intrinsically connected to politics?  Obviously this encyclical has annoyed some people because it calls for a fast from the whole of humanity, a discipline that will stop us using the earth's resources for our own ends, a discipline that will help us rediscover our connectedness to the earth and a realisation that in killing our earth we are in fact killing ourselves. Future generations will be glad of that.

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Reverencing the holy

13/6/2015

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There has been a lot in the news this week about some tourists who were arrested for posing naked on a holy mountain in Malaysia. They were accused of  disturbing the spirit of the ancestors and so causing an earthquake that killed 18 people shortly afterwards.  It seems this is a growing trend in tourism among the young and what draws attention to it is the posting of photographs on social media. Nothing is private anymore and there's a kind of boasting - see where I have been and what I have been up to. 

Kinabalu is the highest mountain in Malay and 15 million years old. it's regarded as sacred by the Kadazan Dusun tribe who live in the area. The Kadazan believe that the souls of their ancestors rest on the peak of Kinabalu awaiting emancipation before their final destiny at peace with the creator in the sky, Kinohiringan. It's a kind of purgatory and purification rituals are performed by priests and priestesses to help souls on their journey to the sky. It's also a kind of temple. Whether or not one believes in this creation myth it's a holy place to be respected and treated with reverence and respect.  Nearly all religions have holy places, mountains, wells, rivers which inspire a sense of awe, are what George McLeod called thin places where the curtain between the temporal and eternal is very thin. It's important to approach them with reverance if we are to  experience this awe and to treat them with respect is to realise that the ground on which we walk is holy. 


But would treating this holy place with disrespect actually cause an earthquake?  It's certainly true that we humans often disturb the processes of nature and we now know that has consequences for our planet.  But it's not likely that the earthquake was caused because the ancestors and gods were displeased and now need to be appeased. The story reminded me of the people of Pompey who thought the gods were displeased when Vesuvius began rumbling and that redoubled efforts to  please the gods would keep the people safe. Deep within religious traditions there is a primitive instinct that wants to control life in the face of a mystery we know is ultimately uncontrollable.  If we pray, if we carry out the correct rituals, if we do the right visualisation and have positive thoughts then we can be safe, healthy, happy, secure with everything going our way. It's easy for religion to become superstition and to enter into practices and rituals in the hope of overturning or influencing reality can seem very much like this.  It's not been unknown in religion to focus on the correct performance of ritual in the belief that it influences God and affects reality . Such a tendency can lead to those who perform the rituals being given a power and importance which can be inflexible and abusive. Bad things happen to good people and that's a reality. What religion is about is to help us cope with these not necessarily change them.  

This means that  prayer and religious practice are important, not in the sense of managing God but in helping individuals be open to the courage and strength, wisdom and insight  necessary to live out our day to day reality. For some religions this comes from God, from God dwelling within each one of us. For those religions that are less theistic, It comes from the spark of the divine, the spark of wisdom and courage in the heart of everyone but which can lie dormant until liberated through prayer and practice.  It's this kind of prayer that helps us realise that life is not for us but we are for life. Once we realise that we can live life fully, treating it as a gift but also treating it with revernce and respect.

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A Sense of Humour

8/6/2015

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A well known and popular politician in Britain unexpectedly died last week. In the many tributes that have been paid to him a few people mentioned a saying of his.  'politics is too important to be taken seriously'. They were stressing his sense of humour, his light touch but his strong commitment to what he believed in even if it meant going against the majority of his party.  He was what people call a conviction politician. 

I think we could also say that religion is too important to be taken seriously. I've often felt that religious people take religion too seriously and could do with a bit of a sense of humour. I actually said this at a recent interfaith panel I was on and am not quite sure how the audience, never mind the other pannelists, took to it. It seems a bit strange for someone who has committed her life to religion and who thinks that religion can make a significant contribution to the world to make such a comment. 

But what do I mean by that?  I mean that sometime it sounds as though religion is an end in itself, rather than a framework within which people find meaning, value and purpose. It's important and we need more of the values that are at the heart of all the major world religions - love, compassion, justice, peace, equality, generosity, magnaminity but it's not an end in itself.  It's the field in which the pearl of great price is hidden but focus too much on the field the pearl will never be found, just like the finger pointing to the moon - focus on the finger and you'll never see the moon.  

To take religion too seriously is to focus on the institution with its need for maintenance and order and the tendency to compare one with another - my truth is better than your truth, my way of life better than yours. Then we become over-defensive about our own and overly critical of others. It's this kind of approach that leads to the kind of proslytisation that forces one's own belief on others and is intolerant of others. It focuses more on the head than the heart, on thinking that faith can come from persuasion and argument than from recognition or relationship.  It focuses on dogma to the extent that it can lead to competition as to where truth lies and to accusations of heresy. It can focus on what religion says rather than what it means. 
 
To take oneself too seriously is not psychologically healthy and the ability to laugh at oneself can release tension and put things into perspective. So too with religions. Some religions are good at this, better than others.  Judaism immediately comes to mind and as a Catholic growing up in a sectarian society we had in-jokes that helped us sit lightly on this. I suppose the problem is when we laught at others or humiliate them through humour. For some people humour is a subtle way of getting at others, of undermining them and then it can become a weapon rather than a life-opening moment.  Perhaps the answer is in the intention.  To laugh healthily and poke fun at religion by bringing it down to earth and helping it recognise its idiosyncrasies can be no bad thing. There are certainly many comic characters and stories in religion but that's a story for another blog. 

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What is a Martyr?

2/6/2015

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Last week the Catholic Church formally and officially recognised Archbishop Oscar Romero as a martyr for the faith and gave him the title Blessed.  The next step is canonisation as a saint.  Many christians had been hoping for this offical recognition for many years and had found Romero's dedication to the poor of El Salvador an inspirtation in their own work for justice.  But it was a long time in coming - over  twenty years in fact.  

There was a lot of debate  as to why it had taken  the Catholic Church so long to do this, especially as he had been recognised by the Anglican Communiion. Some people blamed the previous two Popes, sugggesting that they ( without any evidence) considered his death to be political rather than religious. Certainly he was murdered by the death squads for speaking out  against the Salvadorean Government on behalf of the poor and marginalised in his country. But Popes did support him.  Benedict XVI told reporters in 2007 that the archbishop was “certainly a great witness of the faith” who “merits beatification" and Pope Francis saw him as a man of God.  It was this present Pope who cleared the way for his beatification by declaring him a martyr. Normally the formal recognition of sainthood requires a miracle as proof of heroic virtue but the courage of someone who dies for what he belives, for witnessing to his faith, bypasses this requirement. Once Romero was acknowledged as a martyr the journey to canonisation was open. 

Martyrdom is a feature of many religions and the willingness to die for one's faith recognised as  the height of fidelity and commitment.  The Sikh Khalsa is founded on this willingness. According to Sikh tradition Guru Gobind Singh ordered Sikhs to attend a fair, during which he  appeared from a tent carrying a drawn sword and demanding the head of one of his loyal followers. He repeated the command until one of his followers volunteered. He was taken behind a screen, there was the sound of the swish of a sword, Gobind Singh then reappeared, his sword dripping blood, and demanded a second victim. He too was escorted behind the screen, and again the sound of the sword could be heard. In this manner five loyal Sikhs agreed to offer their lives. When Guru Gobind Singh had apparently dispatched the fifth, the screen was removed, and all five were seen to be very much alive. The five were then initiated into the khalsa through the amrit ceremonty, the same one perforomed for all Sikhs who wish to be baptised. This ceremony, initiated as it was following this demand for self - sacrifice shows the foundational attitude that Sikhs are meant to have.  " No greater love ...........

The Baha'is too have their martyrs. Their founder Baha'ullah was exiled, imprisoned and taken before a firing  squad for for refusing to compromise his beliefs, an event which will be remembered next week on 9th June.  Buddhism has the idea of the Bodhisattva as one willing to lay down his or her life for the enlightenment of all sentient beings. To lay down one's life for one's friend is the highest ideal for Christians in their following of Jesus. And many people have done this but so too many people have  lived their lives for their family and friends,   And sometimes this has led to conflict and even to death - history is full of such examples. People like the sister in my own community, Dorothy Stang, who was shot down at gun point for defending the land rights of the poor in Latin America, just as Archbishop Romers died because of his solidarity with the poor and the marginalised. 


But what about the suicide bombers that we hear so much about today?  Are they martyrs? Certainly they are willing to lay down their lives for their beliefs in the attempt to impose these beliefs on others or eliminate those who are different from them. This has been described as an active martyrdom, compared to the more passive kind of martyrdom in a religion  like Christianity. For the prophet dying in  a battle to defend Islam was seen as martyrdom and the Qur'an tells us 
"That you believe in Allah and His Messenger, and that you strive hard and fight in the cause of Allah with your wealth and your lives, that will be better for you, if you but know! (If you do so) He will forgive you your sins, and admit you into Gardens under which rivers flow, and pleasant dwelling in Gardens of Eternity, that is indeed the great success
( Surah 61:11-12 ). 

For some today dying fighting those they see as the enemy of Islam is following this injunction but others would debate it and see it as terrorism and inimical to true Islam which is the way of peace and has its own conditions for a just war. But how does one convince these suicide martyrs that others are not the enemy but fellow human beings, made in the image and likeness of God, brothers and sisters with the same hopes and joys, sorrows and struggles  as they have? There's no easy answer but an answer needs to be found for the sake of our future.  We all have a part to play in finding it. 

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    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.

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