Dalai Lama Closes Parliament with a Call to Action

The Dalai Lama, who has a kind of rock star status at this event, closed the 2009 Parliament of the World's Religions on December 9 in Melbourne. The aging spiritual leader was playful and self-deprecating at first, then became extraordinarily serious in his remarks. He called on the leaders of the world's diverse faiths to act together to address the pressing problems of war and climate change. He said we must not just gather together but also act together; otherwise people will say we just went home and went to sleep.

The spiritual leader urged the participants to develop a common ethic of compassion and mutual respect. Peace of mind cannot be purchased in a store; it must be developed within. We need to pursue a sense of peace within our own traditions, then move out into the world to spread that peace. Meeting together to share our experiences is a crucial part of this process. No one group can do this work alone.

The Dalai Lama made a particular point of saying that our shared community of compassion must include people who are not religious. He noted that China is not a religious country but must be drawn into the shared community of compassion. His call to compassion resonated powerfully with the Charter for Compassion proposal of Karen Armstrong and the Global Ethic work of Hans Küng.

The words of the Dalai Lama strongly reinforced the core message of the Parliament, which was that while our beliefs and traditions are delightfully different, our problems are shared in common, and the core teachings of our traditions are strikingly similar. We need to work with that core of shared values to bring a compassionate response to the pressing problems that threaten our ability to survive on this planet. This may sound like a simple message, but it is a striking turnaround from the all-too-common antagonism of the world's religions.

Amid much inspiring pageantry, the 2009 Parliament came to an end. All of the participants I talked to said that they had been profoundly moved and were ready to go home and find ways to make a difference.

The Future of the Interreligious Movement

A 27-year-old Buddhist monk, when asked how he was feeling at the Parliament of the World's Religions, replied "overwhelmed and overinspired." There is so much going on here, and one has to make such difficult choices about what to do, that it's actually stressful.

As the week progresses, it seems like there are two major ways of looking at interfaith dialogue. One is to want to be as inclusive as possible and therefore not to enter into disputes about sensitive social or political issues. The emphasis, as Executive Director Dirk Ficca says, is on relationships, not issues.

The other major point of view is that the human community has urgent needs and that action is needed right now, action that will inevitably ruffle some feathers and make some people unwilling to participate. Rabbi Michael Lerner and Sister Joan Chittister of the Network of Spiritual Progressives are prophets with this sense of urgency.

Exactly the same issue of how to approach interfaith dialogue is present in Unitarian Universalist congregations and other religious communities. And in some ways, both views are right.

The Street Theology of Anger

Here is a photo of Imam Abdul Malik Mujahid, the incoming Chair of the Council for the Parliament. He gave a fascinating talk on why young Muslims are drawn into what he calls a "street theology of anger." Particularly in Afghanistan, these young people have never known any reality other than war.

Dr. Mujahid asked us what we would do if someone injured us or our property. Most of us would call the police. He then asked what we would do if we had no phone with which to call, or if the police were actually good friends of our attackers. And what if there were no elections to get rid of the corrupt police chief? What would you do? Such is the reality of the people of Afghanistan.

(In the photo above, some of you may recognize Lynnda White, who is asking Dr. Mujahid to come and speak in Peoria. He said yes!)

Paul Carus Award

Last night the Parliament presented the Paul Carus Award. Paul Carus, of LaSalle, Illinois, was one of the founders of the 1893 Parliament and tried for the next thirty years to organize a second Parliament. After his death, his family endowed a yearly $100,000 award for a person or group that is doing outstanding interfaith work.

This year the award went to an organization called IFAPA, or Interfaith Action for Peace in Africa. They are a coalition of eight major religious groups in Africa who have joined together to try to prevent wars on that continent. The gentleman at right is a member of IFAPA. We had the pleasure to meet him and converse briefly with him in French, our only common language.

Charter for Compassion

There is also a major movement here to support the Charter for Compassion, a global ethics statement developed by Karen Armstrong. For more on the Charter for Compassion, see my earlier blog post on that subject.

All good wishes to my readers! Please comment if you wish.

The Charter for Compassion

This past week, Karen Armstrong, along with Desmond Tutu and other leaders, announced a campaign called the Charter for Compassion. The Charter for Compassion calls on the world community to adopt a global ethic of compassion based on what we often call the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

This moral guideline exists in virtually all of the world's religious traditions, which in itself is a rather remarkable fact. One question we might explore is how that came to be. There must be some deep resonance with our human nature and aspirations that is expressed in this simple maxim that does not belong to any one tradition, but to them all.

As Hans Küng and other religious leaders have passionately argued for years, the world urgently needs some kind of shared ethical framework. We are growing ever more interconnected, ever more part of the same village with everyone else on the planet. How are we going to live together on an ecologically and politically endangered planet without some common guideline for behavior? Karen Armstrong believes that compassion, as expressed in diverse ways that echo our Golden Rule, is the ethical guideline that can unite all of humanity.

The key to compassion is to set aside the selfishness and greed of our ego-centered tendencies and truly take seriously the needs of another. This dethroning of the ego has long been described as one of the ingredients of genuine spiritual experience. In compassion, we move beyond caring only about ourselves, and in so doing, discover a far wider world of meaning and satisfaction. We also find that our compassion is powerful and can change the world.

As we enter the festival season of the year, a season that takes compassion seriously, at least for a while, I invite you to explore the Charter for Compassion. You can find it at www.charterforcompassion.org. As the world searches for some way to find common ground, this ancient approach may point the way out of our confusion toward hope.