FAYETTEVILLE — With joy I will join a sold out Bud Walton Arena a month from tomorrow to welcome His Holiness the Dalai Lama to Northwest Arkansas.
Tenzin Gyatso in his religious service as the 14th Dalai Lama has been an articulate Tibetan spiritual leader whose focus on the virtue of compassion has inspired people of many religious and secular traditions.
The Dalai Lama is a generous participant in the ecumenical movement.
He shares great friendship and common ground with religious leaders from many faiths. He is a symbol of our common religious commitments to compassion and nonviolence. He is also a proponent of contemplative prayer practices that people of varied faiths find important to their spiritual lives. He helps us discover and celebrate many things that religious people hold in common in a pluralistic world.
Philosopher William James wrote in his masterpiece “The Varieties of Religious Experience” that there are four characteristics that create common ground among the world’s religions. The religions of the world are most similar in the experiences they report, the path they teach, the practices they commend, and the behavior they produce, which might be called the fruit of compassion.
Every religion affirms a sense of the sacred - ultimate reality, the More, the mysterious. All religions find their ground in glimpses of the sacred, especially through unitive experiences that bring enlightenment.
Every religion affirms a way or a path. It is a path of transformation, usually articulated as a path of dying to an old identity, an old way of being, and being born into a new identity, a new way of being.
Every religion offers practices, practical means for following the path on a sacred journey of living.
Worship, rituals, prayers and other practices help us be open to the sacred along the journey.
Every enduring religion affirms compassion as the primary ethical virtue of life.
When I hear the Dalai Lama, I expect to hear a wisdom address focusing on the practice of compassion, particularly through nonviolence.
We embrace similar values in our Christian tradition. We focus on Jesus’ commandment to love, and we tell stories of his compassion and his rejection of violence.
We also extol the social expression of love as justice.
When religious leaders articulate visions of compassion and nonviolence, we speak a common language. There is much to share andaffirm across religious boundaries.
All religions are not the same. Each religion is born in a distinctive cultural-linguistic world, with peculiar stories, rituals, history, practices and ethos. When we put our common experience of the sacred into words, doctrines and beliefs, we create the most distinctive, and also the most conflictive aspects of our traditions.
I know that there will be some in our community who will decry the visit of the Dalai Lama, believing that he can only be false and lost because he is not a Christian. Some will even go so far as to imagine that their God would condemn a loving, compassionate person like the Dalai Lama to eternal hell and punishment simply because he is not a Christian. That’s a monstrous notion of a genocidal tribal god. Why would anyone believe in a god who is less moral, than they are?
Trinitarian Christians recognize any expression of truth, goodness or beauty to be the work of the Holy Spirit. That is why we can embrace the Dalai Lama as a spiritual person who expresses the truth of our shared eternal values like compassion.
That is why we can embrace scientific truths like evolution and not feel threatened. If anything is true, good or beautiful, it is a manifestation of God who is perfect truth, goodness and beauty.
For a day, it will be a joy to sit at the feet of one of the great religious sages of our lifetime. I expect to hear the Dalai Lama speak of many of the same values that I treasure as a Christian, but I hope to hear of them in the fresh, less familiar language and metaphors of Buddhism. In the language and metaphor of my own tradition, I expect to see Christ manifested in him, as I see Christ in so many other people of good Spirit.
Congrats Coach
P.S. I’d like to congratulate my parishioner Gary Blair for coaching his Texas A&M Aggies to the womens basketball championship.
Gary’s home remains here, and his wife Nan helps run our church bookstore. He’s a good man and a great coach. I wish our athletic department had encouraged him to stay when the Aggies called.
LOWELL GRISHAM IS AN EPISCOPAL PRIEST WHO LIVES IN FAYETTEVILLE.
Opinion, Pages 15 on 04/10/2011