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True Religion

30/9/2018

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 Recently I was invited to become part of a Buddhist – Christian dialogue group. Over the years I’ve had quite a lot to do with Buddhism. It’s a religion I love.  I got to know it through study but also through teaching. There’s nothing more helpful for understanding another faith than communicating its basic principles to others in a sympathetic way. It’s like standing in the shoes of another faith, trying to see life from its perspective and leading students to see it in all its beauty and richness. Like stained glass, religion can look quite different from the outside and the inside of a community.  And the heart of religion which is essentially experiential can only be understood from the inside though this is often difficult for a non-member to see. Good religious education’s aim is to do just this – to try to show the depth, meaning and purpose of the faith, not just its external beliefs and practices - those institutional aspects that obscure the pearl of great price that I believe is at the heart of all religions. To get to the heart of religion, however, it’s important to listen and to hear what the faith means to believers and how it contributes to their well-being. This understanding of religion as an experience is important for a true understanding of what it’s all about.
 
Many people never get beyond the externals of a faith. This is true both of believers and non-believers, insiders and outsiders. Some people are religious in a cultural sense and go regularly to their place of worship for the sake of community. They sometimes put themselves into the category of being ‘belongers’ but not ‘believers’ while others find the external institutional aspect of religion not at all helpful and call themselves ‘believers, not belongers’ – interested more in spirituality than religious doctrine, happy to accept the spiritual teaching but not willing to get involved in the institution or community. It’s part of the crazy world of religion as it exists today. 
 
There’s a Catholic theologian, Aloysius Pieris, who comes from Sri Lanka and has long experience in Christian – Buddhist dialogue. He speaks of all religions having both oppressive and liberating aspects. Unfortunately for many people their experience of religion has been oppressive and I often think that if this is so they are right to give up their religion. Religion must never injure our humanity or our well-being. Today there are many examples of abuse within religion as well as without and it’s scandalous. In my own day I am appalled at the times parents cut themselves off from their children because those children had married outside their faith – and most often this faith was not a different faith but simply a different denomination of their own faith. Obedience to religious authority was seen as more important than family unity. This is definitely the wrong kind of religion and to my mind quite heretical. This is an example of institutional religion being so self-important that it’s forgotten the spiritual ideal of love that’s supposed to be at its heart. Teilhard de Chardin once said that we are not human beings trying to be spiritual but spiritual beings trying to be human. How different would institutional religion look if promoting humanity was its guiding star.  
 
I do think that the institutional aspect of religion is important. It’s what gives structure to a faith; it gives a sense of intergenerational community; it helps people look outwards to the suffering of the world and have a concern for its betterment. Hopefully it helps people live an upright and moral life. It can make an important contribution to the health and well-being of society but it has to be seen in context. For me it’s like a framework, scaffolding that supports spiritual growth and practice. It’s like a field or box in which there is a pearl of great price but the externals can obscure this as much as they can reveal it. A spiritual practice of prayer and meditation are necessary if the true heart of religion is to be recognised, understood and appreciated for what it can contribute to our personal human journey. Once found this treasure can help us evaluate and  participate in our religion in a way that is liberating. It can help us sit lightly on some of the structures, recognising their importance but acknowledging that these are relative to its spiritual heart which should always take priority I think.

At the meeting of our Christian – Buddhist dialogue group we agreed we wouldn’t come as formal representatives of our faiths but as practitioners. It would be a meeting of minds and hearts, a sharing of what and how we as practitioners experience our faith. We felt we already knew something of the externals of each other’s faith, so we could concentrate on our practice and on issues that face each of us as members of our race and participants in our world. It was liberating to know that the dialogue would not focus on what our faiths said or taught so much as what we believed and understood at a personal level. This meeting was only a beginning but it offers hope for a truly spiritual sharing that will help us recognise, experience and articulate that pearl of great price in our own faith but also in the other

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A Time to Retreat

18/9/2018

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I’ve just spent a week on a beautiful Scottish island. I was on retreat – a week away from television, the internet, work, e-mails, diary. Nothing to do but reflect, pray, walk and rest. It sounds idyllic and many people would love to have such an opportunity – or would they?  When I tell friends I’m going on retreat I’m often asked, will I be alright? What will I do? Some even admit it would spook them to spend such a week on their own and it’s true that a retreat is not just about peace and harmony but about facing up to all the turmoil, tensions, conflicts, fears, hopes etc that go on in all of our minds but that we often run away from with distractions of all kinds.
 
There are retreats of different kinds. Some take place in community with some kind of teaching taking place each day. Others offer a daily meeting with a director to reflect on issues coming up in the hours of prayer. Within the Christian tradition retreats can last 8 days though the spiritual exercises of St Ignatius of Loyola are done over 30 days. In the Buddhist tradition some retreats can last 4 years and even more and some Buddhists do more than one.  These retreats are an immersion into Buddhist teaching with some periods of silence, regular pujas and meditations. The point is to observe the mind, its intricacies and dark places in an effort to move beyond illusion and face reality.
 
Within the Catholic Church there are two kinds of religious life – active religious and  contemplative. Active religious orders, like my own, were founded as a response to a social problem and members of these orders are committed to education, the care of the sick, the welfare of the poor, care of the environment. refugees etc. There’s hardly an issue of injustice or crisis in the world that doesn’t have a religious order committed to combatting it. These religious do pray and meditate but the focus of their lives is their service to others.  Contemplatives live in community though there are those who choose to live a solitary life as a hermit. The focus for all of them is a life of  prayer For some people this way of life is difficult to understand. I often find that religious life with its vows of chastity, obedience and poverty is questioned but accepted because of the good work that religious do. Contemplative life is more difficult to understand.
 
A life focussed on prayer and study, whether as a solitary or a member of a contemplative order, is a very countercultural way of life for a generation that lives in constant communication and finds it hard to be away from their smart phones. It’s also hard to see what relevance such a way of life has for today. For many it seems selfish, opting out of the normal problems of earning a living and running a household.  The reality is that contemplatives set aside these concerns to live at the heart of life and take its sufferings and problems to heart, feeling the pain of the world and praying for it. It’s a force for good in the world and when things are hard I often think we should remember the amount of prayer that is happening around us and draw upon its strength. Even for those religions that don’t have a monastic way of life, prayer is part of their daily life. Jews meet three times a day to pray, Muslims meet five times as do Catholic monastics and Buddhist monastics have their regular daily prayer and meditation. One of the focuses of this prayer is praying for others.
 
No matter what people might believe about God, prayer is a force and energy for good at a very human level. Scientists tell us that we all have an electro-magnetic field around us which generates enough energy to light up a light bulb.  Biologists speak of morphogenic fields – fields of energy which store our genetic and inherited memory. We are putting energy out into our environment and it’s up to us whether it’s good or bad, positive or negative.  There’s no need to be religious or to believe in God to recognise this human and scientific reality. Buddhists who don’t claim to believe in a personal God, send loving kindness into the world when they pray that all beings may be well, may be happy and free from suffering. People can give and receive good energy from another through kything. We are emitting energy through our thoughts and intentions all the time. And to recognise that this energy is out there and can be directed at  me can help me draw on the strength of others when times are hard.
 
There’s a lot of bad energy about.  The daily news shows us what greed, power, domination, abuse and violence can do. We see its results in the way we treat one another and seem to find it impossible to live in respect and harmony with one another. It’s easy to be aware of this negative energy and wonder what the world is coming to or how we as a species are so capable of inflicting cruelty on those who appear, but are not in fact, different from us. How do we treat one another so badly? How we contaminate and abuse this planet on which we all depend for survival?
 
But there is good energy out there, not just in the form of social justice projects and good just enterprise, but also in the form of prayer and intentional good energy being sent out into the world and the universe. This kind of energy is hidden and not always understood.  But it should not be forgotten. Even if we cannot personally get involved in great projects that aim to change the world we can intentionally live our lives well. We can try to live not from the head which analyses, judges, compares, criticises, sets us apart from one another but from the heart or the heart mind as some people talk of it. From this stance we can look with sympathy and love at our world and quite deliberately send out healing energy. Every morning as we face another day we can have the intention to live it well, to spread an energy of kindness and compassion wherever the day takes us. For some this is a religious practice but at heart it is a human practice that can give hope to us and to our world. 

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In the Name of the Other

3/9/2018

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Last week we (the Bishops’ Committee for Interreligious Dialogue) organised a colloquium on the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas.  Levinas was born in Lithuania of a Jewish family and only escaped extermination in Auschwitz because he had become a French citizen. He spent the war in a prisoner of war camp while his family perished in the Holocaust.  Reflecting on this suffering was the basis of his philosophy.  Influenced as he was by Heidegger and Husserl,  his philosophy is difficult and the language complicated. Like theologians philosophers have their own vocabulary, yet underneath it are concepts that are meaningful and relevant. We were lucky in our colloquium as we had two experts on Levinas – Dr Steve Innes who introduced us to the difficult concepts and language and Dr Margie Tolstoy who brought us back to the essentials and the heart of Levinas’ work.

If I understand it correctly the ‘other’ is at the heart of Levinas’ philosophy.  For Levinas a person is more than any description or idea that we might have of them. Nothing can fully describe the other. To reduce a person to my idea of them is to deny them real autonomy and is in fact a violent act because it encourages me to claim what the other is about even before they have spoken.  We have to allow the other to be other, to be different and it is this recognition of otherness that not only allows us to relate to them but to experience God through them. This experience of otherness is for Levinas the basis of ethics. Personal relationships are an exploration of the other whom we can never totally know. The other is a mystery whose mystery and difference is always to be respected.


It reminded me of Thomas Merton‘s saying “A person is a person in so far as each has a secret and is a solitude of their own that cannot be communicated to anyone else……..a love that breaks into the spiritual privacy of another does not love them: it seeks to destroy what is best in them and what is most intimately theirs.”  And the corollary of this is to care for and take responsibility for the wellbeing of the other.

It’s very obvious that this is exactly what the Nazis didn’t do – they judged and reduced the Jewish community to something less than human, they refused to allow the Jews and others to be themselves and to respect their difference.  With his experience of Nazi persecution and the horrors of the Holocaust it’s understandable that Levinas should put the other at the heart of his philosophy. And the Nazis were not the only ones to dehumanise others.  One of the characteristics of genocides is to use the kind of language that equates a group with animals, vermin, insects or disease. And the human race has seen more than its fair share of genocides.  We never learn.  Even in a milder form any kind of hate speech and racism, whether it be anti-Jewish or anti- Islamic, is dehumanising and violent.

Levinas’ focus is on the other and his recognition of the sacredness of the other is profound and important but there is also a sense in which we are the same. The idea of other can be distorted and exaggerated to divide people into ‘ them’ and ‘us ‘which set us apart from one another.  We are different but we do all share the same human nature; we belong to the same human race; we are interconnected and interrelated. The Golden Rule tells us to love our neighbour as ourselves and Buddhism reminds us that this is true because our neighbour is ourselves.  To harm another is to harm ourselves. Differences, while they are to be respected and honoured, are also superficial.
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The point of the Levinas colloquium, organised as it was by our Committee for Interreligious Dialogue, was to help us reflect on the impact Levinas could have on interreligious dialogue. It’s obvious I think.  To recognise the differences in faiths, to allow them to be themselves, to recognise that they are different and that perhaps it’s impossible to truly enter into their psyche, to recognise that in their differences they have a wisdom and message for all of us. But members of other faiths are human beings seeking a meaningful way of life for themselves and the world. While it’s important to recognise their otherness it’s also true that we can learn to understand them, dialogue with them and break down any barriers that  set us apart.  We can try to learn their language and understand the world from their perspective. To enter into the world of another is to tread on sacred ground and to dialogue with them is a sacred act. Levinas reminds us of this 

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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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