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Silent Music

26/10/2016

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I have just spent some time on a silent retreat. This is something that members of religious orders do every year though now it’s customary for lay people to do it as well.  Not every religious tradition has this custom though they all have times when they ‘opt out’ of everyday life to take time to reflect. 

Ramadan and Hajj would be such a time for Muslims. The daily fast of the month of Ramadan with its extra opportunities for prayer, listening to sermons, reading the Qur’an puts ordinary everyday life into perspective. For Jews this happens at this time of the year when they celebrate the High Holy Days but it also happens every week at Shabbat. Shabbat is an opportunity to put aside daily work and take time for reading and prayer. It’s a day of rest, a moment which remembers the day of creation when God rested from his work, rejoiced in it I presume as it tells us in the Book of Genesis that it was all very good. I don’t read this literally but I think it does reflect a deep religious intuition that rest, time out is important and that work, activity is not the be all and end all. It’s good to take time out to reflect on our life, to re - assess our priorities, to see the  giftedness of our lives, to accept our failings and limitations, to be inspired by the ideals of our religious tradition and our desire to live according to our best self.

All of this is true of the retreat I was on. It took place over 10 days. There were over 30 people on it and each person was allocated a spiritual director with whom they met each day to reflect on issues that had come up during the previous day – either at prayer, through the reading of scripture or just in personal reflection. It’s intensely personal and there are good and bad moments during it. It’s not easy to look reality in the face sometimes – the diminishments of age and organised religion itself was something that came up for me (not that I’m that old you understand!), the number of ways in which the ego wants its own way but so too was the sense of call which has been present in my life since I was a child.

While the Christian scriptures were a companion on this retreat I was also aware of their resonance with other faith traditions. The sense of call and the underlying reality behind external appearances – what Gerard Manley Hopkins calls the ‘dearest freshness deep down things’ is to be found in many faiths. I was particularly reminded of Hinduism and a wonderful poem by Kabir  “I hear the melody of his flute and I cannot contain myself…..” which refers to the story of the young women of Vrindaban who, on hearing the music from Krishna’s flute, leave their homes, their obligations and duties to follow him and spend the night in dance with him.

This is quite a radical message – that each of us is called to follow our inner spirit, to respond to what life throws up for us and to become all that we can be.  It’s not about following religious rituals or practices though these are good if they help us listen to that melody at the heart of life – what John of the Cross calls silent music. It’s a melody that some people hear within religion but others, it seems, are increasingly hearing elsewhere -   through relationships and family life, through a love of nature, through an understanding of the universe and its interconnectedness. It’s a music which is all around us and also deep within us but can only be heard in silence. Not everyone hears it. While it might be present in ordinary life we need to break through our business, our egoistic concerns, our anxious attempts to be successful and important, our sense that everything depends on us.

We cannot hear this silent music or see the ‘dearest freshness deep down things’ without taking time to stop, to get in touch with our heart’s desire, to listen to what is best for our own well- being and that of  those we live with – which nowadays we recognise to be the universe itself. It need not of course be an eight day retreat but it can be a moment, a day, an hour or whatever when we just stop and get in touch with what is going on within us. But we need some help to do this. For one thing stopping brings us face to face with the complexities of our personalities and the busyness of our often uncontrollable minds. It’s not pleasant but it’s a sign we are getting beneath the surface of our lives. We need some help in stilling these inner disturbances and find the inner peace which is behind them all.

​Today meditation classes are plentiful and moments to stop, reflect and pray are found on the internet so help is available. More and more people seem to be making use of these opportunities and in some situations meditation is even being taught to children. The transcendental meditation movement believe that the quality of life in a city is improved and the crime rate reduced if a large number of people begin to meditate. I’m not sure if this can be proved and I think it’s probably about the good energies that come from meditation, something I do believe. But would the world not be a better place if politicians, those in authority, indeed all of us could stop and get in touch with our inner wisdom so that what we then do is in the best interests of the well-being of our world and its inhabitants? That's something to meditate on.  

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Interfaith Events

9/10/2016

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​This week we had a very successful event for Catholic schools in Scotland.  125 pupils and 31 teachers attended an interfaith conference in the Alona Hotel in Strathclyde Park.  The focus of the day was to introduce the young people to the importance of interfaith relations and the Catholic Church’s approach to interreligious dialogue as well as preparing them for Scottish Interfaith week in November.  There was an opportunity to dialogue with one another, question their elders in faith from the Catholic, Jewish, Muslim and Interfaith communities, take part in a workshop on religion and the media which is the theme of this year’s Scottish Interfaith Week. I’d been told that social media would be important and had even joined twitter to prepare. It certainly was. I now know about hashtags and # interfaithincatholicschools on @inter_relig_sco got so many hits during the day with photographs taken behind our selfie frames.  I’m definitely an oldie when it comes to these things but I was so inspired by the energy, joy, politeness, interest of the young people. It gave me hope for the future.

The young people in our Catholic Schools live in a different world from the one I lived in. For one thing many of these schools are multifaith so it wasn’t all Catholic young people who were there. The pupils learn about the different major world faiths in their religious education classes, they are taught to question and reflect and consider where they stand on issues of faith and  morals. I don’t think I even knew about any other faith as I was growing up and I’m now very grateful for my involvement in interfaith which has taken me into another world. Many of these young people already live in that world. That’s not to say they understand or are involved in interreligious dialogue but they readily took to the idea of coming up with a plan for an interfaith event in their schools during Interfaith Week.  I’ll not know how many of them will carry out those plans but I’m sure some will and be good ambassadors for interfaith. I just hope they might be inspired to get involved in interfaith as they move on to university and later life – then I can be sure the future of interreligious dialogue will be secure.

The conference ended with a special commissioning service.  I suspect this is a Christian if not a Catholic tradition.  People are formally sent out with a particular message or service to do in the community with the authority of the community. It comes from the idea of Christianity being a missionary religion – originally this would be to go out and preach the gospel. This time the students publicly made a pledge about what they would do in their schools during interfaith week and then committed themselves to  “work together for the common good, uniting to build a better society grounded in values and ideals we share……..to help bring about a better world now and for generations to come, in a spirit of friendship and cooperation with others”

This commitment was taken from one that was pledged at the Millennium in the House of Lords by representatives from all the faith communities in Britain.  At that moment there was a sense of moving into a new age with hope for a better world. The world hasn’t improved but hopefully many of the people who pledged themselves at the Millennium are still working for good relations between faiths and witnessing to the world that this is possible. In a sense they are prophets or forerunners of a new way to relate and we do know there are plenty of examples of this throughout the world but it doesn’t often make the news.
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This notion of making statements or commitments seems to be around at the moment. Statements were made and signed at the recent meeting in Assisi, a meeting between the World Council of Churches and the Muslim community in Geneva. It’s good to have these because they can challenge participants and signatories to live up to the statements they’ve made. But sometime I wonder if there can be a rash of statements and wonder whether they’re always useful. I was at an event recently when one such statement was read out. It was long, the participants had no view of it, weren’t told who wrote it and didn’t have a copy of it. I doubt if anyone will remember what it said. It didn’t really add to the event though I suppose it could be published as coming from the conference on websites etc but it was of no real consequence. At least we weren’t asked to sign it. There was another conference. It too had its statement or declaration – written by the organiser of the conference. Again it didn’t say much more than we all must live in peace and harmony. Certain significant figures were invited to sign it without any participation in the conference. This then gave it an authority which I doubted it merited. In fact I was even reported in the press as having signed it on behalf of the Scottish Bishops and I wasn’t even there! It’s not that I’m against common statements and certainly not statements of intent but I do think we need to be a bit discerning about the ones that make a real contribution to good harmonious relations and beware of those which are looking for an authoritative approval and support that they don’t really merit. Politics can be as much part of interfaith as it can of any other area of society.

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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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