Event: Sheffield’s Inter Faith walk

A Sheffield Interfaith Walk takes place on Sunday 13th April at 2.30 p.m. until 5 p.m.

This is intended as a celebration of faith & unity and is organised by the Islamic Society of Britain and Yorkshire and Humber Faiths Forum. The route will run through the Burngreave area of the City.

ALL ARE WELCOME.

Start: St Catherines of Alexandria, Melrose Rd, S3 9DN

End: Firth Park Methodist Church, 8 Stubbin Lane, S5 6QL

Please do come along and say hello!

The Golden Rule

Karen Armstrong: 2008 TED Prize wish: Charter for Compassion

I have posted a few quotes below from this lovely talk on belief and compassion. But the talk is worth watching for her telling on the Iliad story of the encounter between Priam and Achilles.

Armstrong on Belief

I found some astonishing things in the course of my study that had never occurred to me. Frankly, in the days that when I thought I’d had it with religion, I just found the whole thing absolutely incredible. These doctrines seemed unproven, abstract, and, to my astonishment, when I began seriously studying other traditions, I began to realize that belief, which we make such a fuss about today, is only a very recent religious enthusiasm. It surfaced only in the West, in about the 17th century. The word “belief” itself originally meant to love, to prize, to hold dear. In the 17th century it narrowed its focus, for reasons that I’m exploring in a book I’m writing at the moment, to include — to mean an intellectual ascent to a set of propositions — a credo. I believe did not mean “I accept certain creedal articles of faith.” It meant, “I commit myself. I engage myself.” Indeed, some of the world traditions think very little of religious orthodoxy. In the Qur’an, religious opinion — religious orthodoxy — is dismissed as zanna — self-indulgent guesswork about matters that nobody can be certain of one way or the other but which makes people quarrelsome and stupidly sectarian.

Armstrong on Compassion

So, if religion is not about believing things, what is it about? What I’ve found is that, across the board, religion is about behaving differently. Instead of deciding whether or not you believe in God, first you do something, you behave in a committed way, and then you begin to understand the truths of religion. And religious doctrines are meant to be summons to action: you only understand them when you put them into practice.

Now, pride of place in this practice is given to compassion. And it is an arresting fact that right across the board, in every single one of the major world faiths, compassion — the ability to feel with the other, and the way we’ve been thinking about this evening — is not only the test of any true religiosity, it is also what will bring us into the presence of what Jews, Christians and Muslims call “God” or the “Divine.” It is compassion, says the Buddha, which brings you to Nirvana. Why? Because in compassion, when we feel with the other, we dethrone ourselves from the center of our world and we put another person there. And once we get rid of ego, then we’re ready to see the Divine. And, in particular, every single one of the major traditions has highlighted — has said — has put at the core of their tradition — what’s become known as the Golden Rule. First propounded by Confucius five centuries before Christ, “Do not do unto others what you would not like them to do to you.” That, he said, was the central thread that ran through all his teaching and that his disciples should put into practice all day and every day. And it was the Golden Rule would bring them to the transcendent value that he called rén, human-heartedness, which was a transcendent experience in itself.

And this is absolutely crucial to the monotheisms, too. There’s a famous story about the great rabbi Hillel, the contemporary of Jesus. A pagan came to him and offered to convert to Judaism if the rabbi could recite the whole of Jewish teaching while he stood on one leg. Hillel stood on one leg and said, “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor — that is the Torah. The rest is commentary. Go and study it.”

And “Go and study it” is what he meant. He said, in your exegesis, you must make it clear that every single verse of the Torah is a commentary, a gloss upon the Golden Rule. The great Rabbi Meir said that any interpretation of scripture which led to hatred and disdain or contempt of other people — any people whatsoever — was illegitimate. Saint Augustine made exactly the same point. “Scripture,” he says, “teaches nothing but charity, and we must not leave an interpretation of scripture until we have found a compassionate interpretation of it.” And this struggle to find compassion in some of these rather rebarbative texts is a good dress rehearsal for doing the same in ordinary life.

Saturday event

We had a day of Pureland Practice at 118 today. We were joined by Marie, Mark and Paul and the day included a shared lunch and a discussion around nembutsu practice. It was a relaxed time and we are hoping that we will be able to to offer further weekend events in the coming months. Do let us know if you would be interested in attending!

Meanwhile, our regular monday evening services continue. See the diary page.

light & love

Amida Buddhism is a religion of light and love. It is life affirming without being complacent about basic human nature; respectful of universal spirituality but not dependent upon ideas of divine creation or divine judgement. It honours and appreciates the bitter-sweetness of the spiritual struggles of ordinary folk who are attempting to be truly human. It allows for a life of full time devotion without setting up an over-privileged priestly class. It is an engaged spirituality, centred on the prospect of the Pure Land paradise. It is suitable for all people, having a basic practice that is accessible to anybody. It is a path of sudden awakening centred uncompromisingly upon faith. It derives from the very earliest Buddhism and from a direct encounter with the Buddha of all time. It is grounded in the doctrines common to all Buddhist schools, yet offers a unique perspective on them, and, furthermore, does not require the mastery of those doctrines as a condition of awakening. It emphatically asserts that the practice that matters is the utterance of nembutsu in simple faith and that alone. Understanding of the doctrinal framework and support may be satisfying, but it is ancillary to the main spiritual project, which is eminently simple. It does not stand in opposition to other faiths, but reveals the generic nature of faith itself as the wellspring of eternal life. It holds that no religion can be ultimate since even revelation must pass through the medium of human nature. We are foolish beings of blind passion, living, knowingly or unknowingly, in the presence of infinite light, that reflects in us as faith. That gift of faith we either squander or gather in. We express it through ceaseless nembutsu expressing a contrite heart and a mind that is sincere, deep and unconditional. Such is Pureland.

Who loves dies well - Dharmavidya

Remember

 Ray writes -

Through January we have been meeting regularly on monday evenings for a meal and practice together.  Tonight though, instead of a service, we chose to attend the candlelit memorial ceremony held at the Winter Garden as part of Holocaust Memorial Day.

I was conscious of just how busy we all are. Sundari with a deadline for the completion of her book manuscript;  Bhaktika not present because he was working late; Stuart about to begin a night shift at the hospital; Sally just starting a new job; Sue also in the early days of her new career as a housing officer; and me, with a head full of planning for people’s alcohol detoxifications! The line of our liturgy that reads “Wishing to practise a religious life in truly simple faith” has become almost a koan for us as we explore what it means to live a buddhist life very much amidst life in the world.

The memorial was moving. There were some readings given by students from the King Edward VII Secondary School, including Benjamin Zephaniah’s powerful poem - We Refugees

Khun Saing spoke of his experiences fleeing from Burma and the home he has found in the UK.

But it was the words of Dr Otto Jakubovic that will stay with me. He started by saying he had been asked to speak for five or six minutes about his experiences as a child in the concentration camps during WWII. An impossible task and he spoke for much longer. He spoke with great dignity and the image that remains is that of a 14 year old boy, arriving at a death camp after an unimaginable train journey in a cramped carriage, walking in a line that seemed to be being segregated into two streams. Puffing out his chest, saying he was 18 and a gardener rather than a just a school boy, he was thus  spared the wavering of a thumb that meant he avoided being immediately sent to  to the gas chambers and instead was led to the camp.  ”You had to have luck to survive” he said.

The event ended with the lighting of candles and affirmations about what people could do right now to address discrimination in our own city and how we can all be a part of being a welcoming, inclusive community.