Last week representatives of the religions of the world met together in Salt Lake City. To me this event seemed significant and exciting, especially because it was only the sixth like it in the history of the world and was happening at a time when conflict in the Middle East seemed to be fueled by religion. Nevertheless, it was ignored by all my normal news sources. It happened, though, that my daughter, Jan Fuller, senior chaplain at Elon University, who is building there a model multi-faith program, took a delegation to the conference. I asked her to share her impressions and permit me to pass them to readers of this blog. Below is her article, which will also appear next week in the Burlington, N.C., Times-News.
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Twenty Elon students, faculty, and staff attended the 6th Parliament of World Religions in Salt Lake City, October 15-19. The Parliament was founded in 1893 in Chicago, and has been considered the beginning of the global interfaith movement. Each meeting takes a thematic perspective in search of the ways religious leaders and communities could better the world by acting together.
In 1993, at its second meeting, the Parliament considered a possible ethical common ground. It met again in 1999 in Cape Town, to witness the transformation of a new South Africa, and the role of religion and spirituality in its creation. In 2004, they worked on pathways to peace in the face of fear and violence. In 2009, in Melbourne, the theme was a sustainable, healthy world, and the rights of indigenous peoples. This year’s conference included issues like women’s dignity, emerging leaders, poverty, war, violence and hate speech, and climate change.
Elon’s representatives went to this national conference of 10,000 participants to learn, engage in dialogue, and to present twice about our multi-faith initiatives and mindfulness for college students. There were 73 countries represented, 30 major religions with at least 548 sub-traditions and denominations present.
We had lunch with the Sikh community, heard prayers from multiple perspectives, and enjoyed some of the over 1000 workshop sessions offered by 1800 presenters around this year’s themes.
At one session, a Rabbi asked us to look around at 10,000 of us sitting together at peace in the same massive room. “We are a microcosm of the whole world here.” It was not a perfect gathering. There were not enough women speakers, but some were amazing. We didn’t all speak the same language. Some of the prayers sounded like lectures. Some spoke too long. There was plenty of schmaltz and genius. It was a microcosm.
Of course, the world is not at peace. But five days at the Parliament gave us a glimpse into what could be: people coming together from all walks of life, all perspectives on religion, secularity, spiritual eclectics, to learn from each other, to understand what we share, to articulate and honor what we do not share, to be and express our authentic selves without compromise, and to see that we can cooperate to improve human lives around the world.
The Parliament does not assume or ask that we all believe the same, although it asserts that almost all religions have some form of injunction like the Golden Rule from the mouth of Jesus: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you (Luke 6:13, Matthew 7:12.)
The point of the Parliament is to find common ground for our work to heal humanity and the earth. Together we have resources, strength, and resolve that we do not have individually. When we meet at meetings like the Parliament, we hope to live deeper and more authentically the faith that we own, while building bridges of relationship, cooperation, and the basis for actions to heal the world and the humans who need to thrive in it.
This, after all, is the goal of our work across religions. We are building relationships of trust, bridges to peace, networks of action for the sake of larger issues that transcend our individual communities’ commitments. We are imagining what we could accomplish together. We could feed the hungry of the world, house the refugees and homeless, challenge consumerism, make pathways for peace, to name a few. Whether you honor other religions or not, this is a goal, a hope, a trajectory, that benefits all of us with hope. Think of what we could accomplish if we learned to walk out of our comfort zones into partnership with others who are similar and different. It’s a dream worth pursuing more than every five years.