Saint Mary of the Immaculate Conception Roman Catholic Church

Dear Good People of Saint Mary,

Last weekend I was in Salt Lake City for the Parliament of the World’s Religions. Let me tell you, it was interesting. I made some good friends, saw a lot of people whom I hadn’t seen in a while, some I saw last week… but it was very interesting. I am convinced in today’s world you can sew a crazy hat and show up, call it a religion and they will give you a seminar. But  generally speaking there were 80 countries and 50 religions represented, 9,500 in attendance. Our Catholic network, CADEIO (cadeio.org), for the first time sponsored a conference- long schedule of seminars and workshops, and provided an authentic Catholic presence where we hadn’t been represented much before. You may have seen in the news that there were “Catholics” there who confused people about our church, some ordained a woman, others tried to let people think that our Church has made changes that she hasn’t made. All the more reason to be there! No longer can we flee from the world because we think we will not be accepted or we will be misrepresented, or even belittled. We must give an authentic witness of who we are. So we did.

I was invited by the World Sikh Council to present the Catholic viewpoint with regard to two tenets of Sikhism that we share in common. The first was with regard to the Langar meal, a  custom began by the first Sikh Guru, Nanak, in the 1400s that has continued to be a hallmark of Sikh life even today. The Langar is an open kitchen, where anyone can come and  receive a home-cooked meal. Anyone. As a sign of the radical equality of Sikh society, all people sit on the floor in rows and members of the community serve them, wave after wave of people who come hungry. I was happy to explain the beautiful custom we now have in Fredericksburg, supported by the many volunteers of Saint Mary and all the downtown churches, of our Community Dinners. You see, you don’t have to be poor to be hungry, and you don’t have to be homeless to be lonely. Our compassion reaches out to all people, us, in the name of Jesus Christ who calls us to do this for the least of our brothers and sisters.

The other topic the Sikhs asked me to present was, as a panel member along with a native American and a Baha’i, the theology of the unity of humanity as created by God. I started with the reflection of Thomas Merton (you can find it in one of my homilies from a few weeks ago at the parish website), then traced the thoughts from Laudato sí (Pope Francis’ new encyclical on human responsibility and the environment), to a beautiful document of the International Theological Commission called “Communion and Stewardship,” to the theology of Henri de Lubac and theologians leading up to Vatican II, with the roots of their thoughts extending back to the first century Fathers of the Church.

I used as part of my presentation a beautiful account I learned this week about the unlikely meeting between Chiara Lubich, founder of the Focolare Movement of the Church, and  American Muslim Imam W. D. Muhammed of New York in Harlem, 1996. She said, “It seems that the Lord has placed him beside us, and the Lord has placed us beside him. Let’s go deep into our hearts where God is present and tell him we want to do this: We want good faith. We want to serve. We want to be brothers and sisters.”

He wrote, ” Once the oneness of God is impressed upon the heart, our nature transcends race, it transcends beliefs. It resides in the heart and makes us one, as God is one.”

When we approach our brothers and sisters in the human family of God our Father, if our encounter is honest and open to real encounter, it is something beyond a press photo or an annual meeting. I used in my presentation a new idea. In another Vatican document, “Dialogue and Proclamation,” dialogue is described in four ways: the dialogue of life, of (spiritual)experience, of theological exchange and of social action. When we approach one another on an interreligious level, that is, the level of completely different world religions, we begin  with the dialogue between God and his creation, when by his Word he created all things and declared them good. This “Dialogue of Creation” is a new idea and, as I suggested in my paper, must be the ideal upon which all other dialogues between peoples must be based.

God has created no one who is deaf to his Word.

We have been prepared from the beginning by God for the moment of meeting, sensitive hearts ready to meet.

God bless you.

Dear Good People of Saint Mary,

There have been several meetings referred to as a Parliament of the World’s Religions, the first being the World’s Parliament of Religions of 1893, which was an attempt to create a global dialogue of faiths. The event was celebrated by another conference on its centenary in 1993, again in Chicago. This led to a new series of conferences under the official title of the  Parliament of the World’s Religions which have taken place since every few years in Kyoto, Cape Town, Barcelona, Monterrey, Melbourne, and this year in Salt Lake City.

In 1893, the city of Chicago hosted the World Columbian Exposition, an early world’s fair. So many people were coming to Chicago from all over the world that many smaller  conferences, called Congresses and Parliaments, were scheduled to take advantage of this unprecedented gathering. A number of congresses were held in conjunction with the exposition, including those dealing with anthropology (one of the major themes of Exposition exhibits), labor, medicine, temperance, commerce and finance, literature, history, art, philosophy, and science. One of these was the World’s Parliament of Religions.

The 1893 Parliament, which ran from 11 to 27 September, marked the first organized gathering of representatives of Eastern and Western spiritual traditions. Today it is recognized as the occasion of the birth of formal interreligious dialogue worldwide.

I’m not with you this weekend because, as president of CADEIO (in my last year until April), I’m participating in the Catholic program that our Association has prepared for the 2015 Parliament. We have prepared seminars based on the newest developments in interreligious dialogue, especially the fresh approach that Pope Francis has encouraged based on  relationship. I will be working mostly as a speaker in a seminar and a panel with the Sikhs, a dialogue between Catholics and leaders of the Sikh religion which I attended for the first  five or six years that I came to Saint Mary.

It is a time that people of all religions are going to gather—about 10,000 people in all—to pray for peace, for harmony in our environment, for growth in understanding and  conversation and renewed efforts to help alleviate hunger, suffering and violence through collaboration in what Pope Francis has called the “Dialogue of Action.” It is good to talk about it, it is even better to do something about it! Our goal is to start working on these social reforms together.

I will be the homilist at the Cathedral of the Madeleine at the Saturday Vigil Mass this weekend, and I will remember all of you and our parish’s hopes and needs in all these areas.  My daily prayer for Saint Mary is that we will awaken to the presence of God who is so present to us though we don’t necessarily think of him, or remember his goodness toward us too often. We need to learn how to see him in our most difficult situations, in the most forgotten people, in serving those who need to know Jesus through us the most.

For those of you who have subscribed on the parish website for periodic announcements and reflections, I won’t be recording a homily this week, but will resume the weekend after.

This trip to Salt Lake City will be the final significant obligation I will have for CADEIO until after Easter! I’m so looking forward to things slowing down a little and just enjoying being a pastor. Also the several trips I have taken to Kansas have accomplished our family’s goal. We have prepared the farm for sale and now the remaining contents of the house will go in  in auction later in November. I will still try to go home when I can for a couple days at a time to visit Mom.

Sunday the 25th we will begin a three-class series on Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato sí. If you would like to participate, you can download a copy free of charge in pdf format—please let’s start reading it so that our discussions will be meaningful. We will discuss the document the first two Sundays and plan a parish response in action to the document on the third. By the way, the words Laudato sí are the beginning of the prayer that Saint Francis really wrote—the Canticle of Creation:

Be praised, my Lord, for all your creation and especially for our Brother Sun, who brings us the day and the light; he is strong and shines magnificently…

God bless you.