The presence and witness of indigenous religious leaders from Australia (the so-called ‘Aboriginals’), New Zealand (the Moira), Pacific Island nations, Africa, Asia, the Artic, North and South America was one of the most distinctive dimensions of the fifth Parliament of the World’s Religions that occurred in the Melbourne, Australia Convention and Exhibition Centre, December3 – 9, 2009. With strong financial support from the Australian government, the regional government of Victoria and the city of Melbourne, every plenary session and program session of this Parliament began with recognition of the indigenous ancestors and elders who cared for the region of Victoria and Melbourne before the arrival of European colonizers in the 1700s:
On behalf of the Victorian Government may I begin by acknowledging the traditional custodians of the land on which we are gathered and pay my respects to their Elders past and present.[i]
All of the afternoon and evening plenary sessions of the Parliament were opened with traditional greetings by the senior Woman of the Wurundjeri People of Coranderrk, Australia, Aunty Joy Murphy-Wandin, Chairperson of the Australian Indigenous Consultative Assembly.
One of the high points of the Parliament was when she greeted Tenzin Gyatso, His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, in the final plenary session, with a gift of a plant and an animal pelt from her people’s sacred land. The Dalai Lama pretended to act as if the animal was still alive by carefully placing it on his lap when he was seated. When Aunty Joy explained to him that it was a pelt, he gave a big frown reminding the audience that Tibetan Buddhists avoid taking animal life.
Their brief conversation was overheard via two jumbo screen projection systems placed on either side of the stage before the Dalai Lama addressed the Parliament. About thirty journalists had snapped flash pictures of Aunty Joy and the Dalai Lama when he walked out on the Melbourne Convention Centre stage. This was the only session of the Parliament for which we had to pass through metal detectors and identity badge checks out of concern for the Dalai Lama’s safety in such a public space. In his address his well-known sense of humor came through as he acknowledged the Parliament’s accomplishments but said it was time to become more engaged with the life-threatening issues facing our planet: “The Parliament has become a little sleepy.” Wake up and take the Parliament’s work to new levels, he encouraged the audience of several thousands in attendance.
Many members of the McCormick community are already aware of Presbyterian and McCormick connections to the Parliament of the World’s Religions that first began to meet in Chicago at the Columbian Exhibition on 11 September 1893.[ii] And some will recall that McCormick’s former President David Ramage was one of the persons among others first approached by the Hyde Park Vivekananda Society about their hope to hold a centennial Parliament in 1993. President Ramage recruited among others a McCormick alumnus and Presbyterian minister, the Rev. Dirk Ficca, to organize the centennial Parliament connecting with the global diversity of Chicago’s religious communities and organizations. He also recruited the Rev. Dr. David Daniels in McCormick’s faculty to connect the 1993 Parliament with the diversity of Chicago’s African-American religious communities, including Pentecostal and Black Evangelical leaders and congregations, the Nation of Islam, and Ethiopian Hebrew congregations.
It is said that the 1993 planners prepared a Parliament for 2,000 persons at the Palmer House-Hilton Hotel and 8,000 showed up. I first learned about the 1993 Parliament from two of my advisees at Monmouth College who attended in order to meet the Dalai Lama and sign a petition on behalf of Tibet.[iii] The 1893 and 1993 Parliaments bore fruit in many ways including:
- The spread of the study of comparative religions in North American high schools and higher education;
- Western interest in the practice of yoga and forms of Hindu and Buddhist meditation;
- Local interfaith societies like the one in Hyde Park that began meeting before World War I and the Vivekananda Societies that spread new knowledge about Hindu wisdom to Christians et al.;
- Awareness among local interfaith societies that they were part of a larger global movement in many ways unprecedented in human history.
This collection of local and regional movements has fostered a variety of NGOs (Non-governmental organizations associated with the United Nations) dedicated to ending religiously motivated violence between communities, promoting world peace and cooperation, and, creating local and regional models for a new kind of global civilization, a convergence of civilizations rather than a clash (like the mutual learning that occurred in Spain in the Middle Ages between Muslims, Jews and Christians). The health and vitality of the global interfaith movement is attested to by what followed the 1993 Chicago Parliament: three more global Parliaments: Cape Town, South Africa in 1999; Barcelona, Spain in 2004; Melbourne, Australia in December 2009.
McCormick alumni/ae, students, faculty, and staff have been intimately involved with the Parliament process even before 1993. The Rev. Dirk Ficca (McCormick M.Div. alumnus 1981), Executive Director of the Chicago-based Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions (CPWR), has dedicated his ministry to interfaith action and dialogue.[iv] His staff includes Zabrina Santiago (McCormick M.Div. alumna 2008), Partner Cities Director. Honna Eichler, a senior in the M.Div. program at McCormick, worked on preparing the hundreds of program sessions for the recent Melbourne Parliament. McCormick M.Div. student Daniel Ross – Jones raised his own support from the United Church of Christ in Milwaukee and attended the Melbourne Parliament. Richard Pak, a M.Div. senior, worked in IT support for CPWR. Matt Black (McCormick M.Div. alumnus 2007) also worked on IT support for CPWR. Other recent McCormick alumni/ae volunteered their time and creativity in the Parliament offices to make Melbourne possible: Katie Lindahl (McCormick M.T.S. alumna 2009); et al. McCormick alumnus (M. Div. 1962) and former trustee, the Rev. David Bebb Jones, attended the Cape Town and Barcelona Parliaments. The Rev. Mamie Broadhurst, M.Div. alumnna 2005, worked for the CPWR staff before and during the Barcelona Parliament. The Rev. Dr. Robert Reynolds, D.Min. alumnus 1986, and Executive Presbyter for the Presbytery of Chicago, attended Barcelona. Susan Pudelek, who worked in McCormick’s Development Office (1992-2001) as Director of Development for Foundation Relations and Interim Vice President for Seminary Relations and Development, attended the 1993 Chicago Parliament, co-led a program session at the 1999 Cape Town Parliament, served as a CPWR Program Associate on staff before and during the 2004 Barcelona Parliament, was a Parliament Ambassador and attended the most recent Parliament, and continues as an Ambassador for the next Parliament (location to be determined).
Professors Sarah Tanzer and I took a Travel Seminar of students from McCormick, LSTC, and Chicago Theological to Barcelona.[v] President Heidi Hadsell of Hartford Theological Seminary and former Dean of the McCormick faculty participated in Barcelona and Melbourne. Other members of the wider McCormick community have also participated, including the Rev. Dr. Barbara Cathey of Edgewater Presbyterian Church, Chicago (ACTS D.Min. in Preaching, 2008) who attended the Barcelona Parliament and Laura E. Cathey, our daughter, who attended Barcelona and worked for CPWR in summer 2008 and 2009 beginning with a grant from the Lilly Foundation.
Janaan Hashim, J.D., a McCormick adjunct faculty member since 2006 who teaches in our Religious Pluralism course each fall, sponsored and participated in program sessions in Barcelona and presented or moderated in five sessions in Melbourne, including a ground-breaking program she organized on ‘Muslim Women Securing Their Own Individuality: Different Societies, Same Struggle’ with Islamic professional women from Saudi Arabia and Iran. She also organized a follow-up program session to ‘The Headscarf Debates,’ a very well attended session in Barcelona that focused on France, Turkey and the United States. The 2009 session was subtitled ‘Religious Dress and Secular Fundamentalism’ and included an Islamic scholar from Indonesia, the nation with the largest Muslim majority in the world. Janaan also moderated the session in the Parliament’s Islam 101 Series: ‘Muslim Women’s Contributions to a More Just and Sustainable World,’ that included scholars and leaders from Indonesia, Israel, and Saudi Arabia.
The presence of theological students and faculty in Barcelona (about thirty schools in North America and Europe were represented) bore fruit for Melbourne with a grant from the Luce Foundation. This made it possible for students, faculty and staff from fifteen theological schools in the U.S. to participate in the Melbourne Parliament including students and faculty representing the Association of Chicago Theological Schools (Catholic Theological Union and Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago), Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, CA (Pacific School of Religion), Boston Theological Consortium (Harvard and Yale), Union and Auburn Theological Seminaries (NY), Hartford Seminary, Andover – Newton Theological School, Hebrew College (Newton, MA), Sound Vision (Chicago), Luther Seminary (St. Paul, MN), Emory and Vanderbilt Divinity Schools, Perkins School of Theology (SMU), et al.
Students and faculty from the fifteen schools (a group of about one hundred persons) met each day of the Parliament for a 90-minute program session on ‘Educating Religious Leaders for a Multi-Religious World.’ Other Parliament participants joined us in these sessions, and asked why theological students and faculty attended the Parliament and what were our perspectives on interfaith education? As a result, our first meeting and some that followed packed out a very large meeting room. The enthusiasm with theological students and faculty at the graduate level gathered from so many fine schools was contagious. Our leaders included some of the top scholars in the field of interfaith dialogue and comparative theology: Paul Knitter (Union Seminary, NY), John Pawlikowski (CTU), President Heidi Hadsell (Hartford), John Thatamanil (Vanderbilt), Rabbi Or Rose (Hebrew College), Ruben Habito (Perkins – SMU), and Imam Abdul Malik Mujahid, the new Chair of the CPWR Board of Trustees and the founder of Sound Vision (Chicago).
I was asked by CPWR to be a respondent to a paper by Prof. John N. Sheveland (Gonzaga University, Spokane, WA) on ‘Cultivations of Solidarity,’ a textual analysis of passages from the Bhagavad-Gita, the Dhammapada (sayings of the Buddha), and Paul’s letters to the Galatians and 1 Corinthians. My fellow respondents were Prabaha Duneja (Hindu-American translator and author of Bhagavad Gita: The Gospel of Timeless Wisdom) and Chinghui Ying (JianYing FaShi), a Buddhist monk from Taiwan and Ph.D. candidate at Rice University (Houston, TX). In John Sheveland’s paper, he began from a very informative social psychological study of the genesis of hatred in the human psyche, and then looked at Hindu, Buddhist, and Christian Scriptures that can cultivate a sense of wider solidarity in the human family and deep connection with the cosmos.[vi] Sheveland is a practitioner of comparative theology, a field that began in the nineteenth century, but that has been renewed in recent years by Francis X. Clooney, S.J. (Harvard Divinity School), the philosopher Peter Ochs (University of Virginia) et al. Comparative theologians build around their own Scriptures or normative texts a rich margin of Scriptures and symbols from other religious traditions that inform new senses of our sacred texts. In this case, Sheveland was looking for whether Hindu, Buddhist and Pauline texts could inform a wider sense that all persons, all beings indwell a cosmic body deeply rooted in Brahman (Ultimate Reality), in the Buddhist cosmos, and, for Christians, the body of Christ in the world. I.e., for Christians is the body of Christ not only the Church but also includes the bodies of Hindus, Buddhists, and secularists? And therefore the loving care and attention we give to our fellow believers, is likewise owed to our co-religionists in the other spiritual traditions and our secular neighbors? This may seem elementary to some but in a world divided by terror and the wars on terrorism, cultivating a ‘wider sense of we’ (Diana Eck’s phrase) becomes an interfaith imperative for our times. We had very good attendance and discussion at our session on Sheveland’s paper on the first full day of the Parliament and hope to publish it together with our responses soon.
On Friday evening during the Parliaments in both Barcelona and Melbourne there was a “Communities Night: ‘A Night of Hospitality.’” This is a time when Parliament participants travel off-site to visit in houses of worship of their own tradition, or someone else’s. In Barcelona Presbyterians from Chicago spent the evening with Protestant community leaders from the region of Catalan, representing about 250,000 Protestants. For Melbourne I checked off that I would be glad to visit in someone else’s sacred community, assuming I would end up in a synagogue, mosque, or Sikh Gurdwara. The Chicago Parliament staff elected me to spend the evening with the neo-Pagan community of Melbourne and with other neo-Pagans from around the world who were attending the Parliament.
This was a unique opportunity to be present with and observe a relatively new religious movement in its first and second generation of practice. In the past I have had at least one advisee at Monmouth College who self-identified as a member of Wicca, but my knowledge about neo-Pagans was limited to brief readings in Christian Century and newspaper accounts. Three of us who were Christians, a Unitarian Universalist, and an Ethical Humanist couple were in the group that traveled by tram with a group of Melbourne neo-Pagans to a Uniting Church congregation in an artsy Melbourne neighborhood that had a building dedicated to spiritual wellness where the Melbourne ‘Reclaiming Movement’ meets weekly. ‘Reclaiming’ is a movement that began in California in the 1970s to recover ancient pagan rituals and forms of devotion to various goddesses, deities, and sacred forces in nature. It spread ‘down under’ as Americans moved into new positions and careers in Australia’s expanding economy. It also spread via the Internet and novels and stories by contemporary writers that are set in the ancient pagan world.
Australia is in certain ways a more secularized society than the U.S. Certain European populations were relocated to Australia and Tasmania beginning in the late 1700s as a form of punishment (e.g., Irish and British ‘criminals’). They did not arrive seeking religious liberty like the Plymouth Pilgrims in Massachusetts. With close political, scientific, and intellectual connections to the British Isles, Australian society secularized in the twentieth century in many ways along the pattern of western European societies. But in recent years there has been an upsurge of new religious movements in both Australia and New Zealand, including a new Pentecostal network of congregations in and beyond Sydney, Hillsong Church.[vii]
Some of these new movements involve peoples of European descent and some Christianized or secularized indigenous persons connecting with local indigenous religions and/or with the religions of pre-Christian ancestors in Europe. The appeal of this return to ‘the archaic’ in Australian religion is that secularized persons disillusioned with institutional religion (e.g., the Roman Catholic Church, the Anglican Church, the historic Protestant churches) find earth-related, eco-friendly, more fully inclusive of women, anti-establishment symbols and practices. These new rituals offer ways to re-enchant modern life that is sometimes lacking in larger senses of purpose and wholeness beyond consumerist materialism and competitive ideologies. The persons engaged in reclaiming indigenous wisdom and pagan rituals are not for the most part religious studies scholars concerned about historical authenticity. They are office workers, managers, mechanics, nurses, real estate agents, teachers, lab workers, artists, actors and actresses, musicians, and culture-producers. Their approach to ancient and indigenous religions is eclectic, synthetic, anti-dogmatic, and pragmatic. Their participation does not preclude them from using modern medical science or embracing evolutionary science and the ‘Big Bang’ cosmos. The approach is not systematic (concerned with logical consistency across all domains) but more like bricolage, making do with old fragments at hand to construct something new, useful and attractive.
The neo-pagan ritual in Melbourne consisted of three hours of hospitality, dance, songs (there was both a sola pagan singer/songwriter with guitar and a ‘pagan choir’ accompanied with harp), bardic story telling, and ritual attention to the forces of nature welcomed from all directions on the horizon. The dances were performed in circles and spirals, and some led to ecstatic expressions among some of the participants. Pagan priestesses and priests wore homemade ritual vestments. Leadership of the ritual was passed from priestess to priestess to priest. Drums and other hand held rhythm instruments accompanied the dance rituals. Some persons at the gathering were countercultural and artistically creative in their clothing, hairstyles, tattoos and body piercings. They were for the most part teenagers, twenty- and thirty year olds. The gathering was LGBTQI (Lesbian, Gay,Bisexual,Transgender, Queer/Questioning, Intersex) open and affirming. Most participants appeared to be Euro-Australians with a few Asian-Australians (there were no indigenous Australians present), and there were many references to ancient European goddesses and sacred forces. There was lots of food and beverage on hand, but one leader noted that in their weekend gatherings the hospitality included alcoholic beverages (which they left out that night in respect for visitors from the Parliament). They were very glad that three of the Parliament visitors were Christians, and said to some of us off-to-the-side that most of the mis-information about their movement was spread by Christians who opposed their rituals as ‘idolatry.’ There were no plants, animals or human beings sacrificed in the ritual. The accent was on the earth and goddesses as sacred, life – giving, and healing. When one of the priestesses would make a mistake in the ritual sentences or point in the wrong direction to the forces of the wilderness or the sea, there was laughter all around communicating a note of informality amid the structure of the ceremony. But most of all, the neo-pagans enjoyed dancing and being together and in one ritual whispered intimate expressions of love and acceptance in each other’s ears.
From the perspective of an outside guest from the Parliament who had the chance to interview informally several neo-pagans during the breaks in the ritual dance, I was struck with the hospitality and vitality in ‘Melbourne Reclaiming.’ I met young people and adults who have grown up in an advanced technological society where religious attendance is much more rare than in the U.S., and who were committed to the re-enchanting their daily lives and relationships through what they believed to be ancient religious rituals. There is something about the vast majority of our human species that is more deeply religious or spiritual than we are naturally ‘secular’ in some of the modern senses of that term.[viii] Perhaps for some of our contemporaries, a way to recover a sense of divinity is not through more formal, well-bounded historic religious institutions but through new religions, new spiritualities that they have a creative hand in reconstructing for themselves. The neo-pagan movement appears to have fused fragments of both the ancient archaic communal and cosmic wholeness with a modern democratic individualism (each participant valued defining for herself what it meant to be neo-pagan rather than identifying with a specific sacred text or institutional authority figure). It is easy for Christians to be judgmental about a movement calling itself ‘neo-pagan’ while overlooking the fact that we may have some things more in common with them than we do with some secular materialists and neo-atheists. Both Christian eco-feminists and neo-pagans seek to recover a sense of the natural world as also sacred in a time of ecological crisis. And we sometimes forget that most of our ancestors over two millennia ago were pre-Christian ‘pagans.’ If God was not forgetful of our ancestors, both ‘pagans’ and Jews, we can ask today, what is God doing in the world in and through new religious and spiritual movements?[ix]
So may wonder, how were Christian churches and denominations represented at the Parliament? Along with very good participation by Roman Catholics and Anglicans who are the religious majority in Australia and New Zealand, including Bishops and other church officials, the Uniting Church in Australia, the third largest Christian denomination, had a strong presence, and sponsored a program session on ‘Neighbourhoods of Difference: The Uniting Church and Interfaith Relations.’[x] I attended this session and was impressed with the multi-cultural leadership in the Uniting Church’s national staff, and their commitment to grow interfaith relations – neighborhood by neighborhood – through congregational ministries. The Uniting Church is a union denomination dating to 1977 of all the Methodists, and most of the Presbyterians and Congregationalists in Australia. They claim 300,000 members in 2,800 congregations organized into 51 Presbyteries and seven Synods. 1.3 million Australians clam an association with one of their congregations. In a DVD prepared for participants at the Parliament, their national staff and church officials narrated how the Australian people’s national commitment to be the best multicultural society in the world is supported by the interfaith working groups and dialogues sponsored by the Uniting Church. In the late twentieth century and this decade, Australia has added seven million new citizens to its population through a liberal immigration policy and refugee resettlement. The Uniting Church is a partner with federal and local governments and public and private schools in encouraging mutual recognition and respect for all citizens and new residents regardless of how long they have worked or studied in the country and their religious backgrounds. The coming together of the Uniting Church’s ministry in transforming and resourcing multi-cultural congregations and fostering excellent interfaith relations on the ground between different communities could become a creative model for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and other denominations in this country.
The Parliament of Religions is a rich context for theological students, educators, and religious leaders to explore the variety of ways that people are recovering a sense of soul; a feeling for divinity in what is still our quite secular age. We can celebrate the fact that Chicago and McCormick Seminary have been part of the Parliament process for many years past, present, and hopefully, future.
NOTES
[i] For more information on protocols and policies regarding indigenous peoples in the Australian state of Victoria (Melbourne region), go to www.aboriginalaffairs.vic.gov.au (accessed 22 January, 2010).
[ii] Richard Hughes Seager, ed., The Dawn of Religious Pluralism: Voices from the World’s Parliament of Religions, 1893 (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1993). John H. Barrows, ed., The World’s Parliament of Religions, 2 vols. (Chicago: Parliament Publishing Co., 1893). The Rev. Dr. Barrows was minister of the First Presbyterian Church of Chicago located in Hyde Park – Woodlawn. His papers and letters are now catalogued in the Newberry Library, Chicago.
[iii] Robert D. Black, producer; Jackie Rivet-River, writer/director, Peace Like a River: The Parliament of the World’s Religions, 1893-1993 (Chicago: Chicago Sunday Evening Club, 1993), VHS format. Wayne Teasdale and George F. Cairns, eds, The Community of Religions: Voices and Images of the Parliament of the World’s Religions (New York: Continuum, 1996).
[iv] CPWR hosts two websites: http://www.parliamentofreligions.org/ and their new social networking site for interfaith activists: http://www.peacenext.org. You will find information and photos from the Melbourne Parliament on both sites.
[v] Robert A. Cathey, “La Gran Encisera: Barcelona and Education for Interfaith Ministry in the Shadow of Terror.” Chap. 12 in David V. Esterline and Ogbu U. Kalu, eds. Shaping Beloved Community: Multicultural Theological Education (Louisville, KY and London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006).
[vi] Robert Sternberg, “A Duplex Theory of Hate: Development and Application to Terrorism, Massacres, and Genocide,” Review of General Psychology 7 (2003).
[vii] For a very good summary of day-to-day secular and religious life in Australia today, see Hugh Mackay, “Yearning for Magic Simplicities” and “The Inward Journey,” Chaps. 12 and 13 in Advance Australia…Where? (Sydney, Australia: Hachette Australia, 2007, 2008). Hugh Mackay is the George Gallup of Australian social research by public opinion polls. For the most up-to-date commentary on secularization and religion in Australia, see Tom Frame, Losing My Religion: Unbelief in Australia (Sydney: University of New South Wales, 2010). Hillsong Church now has multicultural congregations, schools, and communities in and around Sydney, London, Kiev, Cape Town, Stockholm, and Paris. See their website: http://hillsong.com (accessed 22 January 2010).
[viii] On the variety of ways of being secular and spiritual in the twenty-first century, see Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
[ix] See, e.g., the award winning study by Catherine L. Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2007). Albanese contests the thesis that American religion is primarily defined by the evangelical spirit of the first and second Great Awakenings by cataloging the history of the variety of transcendentalist, spiritualist, syncretistic, ‘New Thought, ‘New Age’ movements that continue to develop new forms of community and organizations.
[x] See the Uniting Church in Australia website: ‘Relations with Other Faiths,’ www.assembly.uca.org.au/rof/ (accessed 25 January 2010). For the history and statistics of this vital ecumenical denomination, see the website: http://www.uca.org.au/ (accessed 25 January 2010).