|
Global Scorching, Swedish Church,
Interfaith
Manifesto
For a week
beginning on Thanksgiving Day, Phyllis (i.e., Rabbi Phyllis Berman, my
life-partner) and I were in Sweden, taking part in the Interfaith Summit on the
Climate Crisis called by the Church of Sweden and then meeting with progressive
Christian and Muslim grass-roots activists.
We have posted on our Website the live video of my farewell
talk for the thousand people who filled the Cathedral of Uppsala - my talk on
"Words of hope" that we can carry into the world.
It intertwines a
vision of empowering ourselves and drawing on the Spirit, at
-
http://www.shalomctr.org/node/1469
We met mainly in the Cathedral under the sponsorship of the
Archbishop of Uppsala, head of the Church of Sweden. Our goal was to shape,
sign, and build support for a Manifesto that the Archbishop has now taken to the
Prime Minister of Sweden (which will chair the European Union during 2009) and
to the world-wide governmental climate-crisis meeting in Poznan, Poland, and -
after January 20- -- will take to the new American Administration.
For a
copy of the Manifesto, see -- http://www.shalomctr.org/node/1467
Our participation --- about fifty religious leaders from
all around the world and a thousand Swedes who packed the cathedral and filled
the smaller workshops that the fifty of us led -- was a way of building both
religious commitment and a new political constituency for vigorous action to
prevent climate disaster.
And the Manifesto we wrote and signed
delivered a strong message about the obligation of rich nations to meet the
needs of the poorest third of the human race. They have done the least to scorch
our world, but are both more much exposed to climate-induced floods and drought
and hurricanes, and far less able to draw on accumulated wealth to deal with
their effects.
For me, the most important plenary speech was not by a
religious leader but by a scientist who spoke with the clearest of facts and the
most powerful of spiritual passion. That was Dr. James Hansen of NASA, who
almost thirty years ago became the first scientist to lay before the US Congress
and the public the facts of global warming.
Again and again, Hansen said
that setting goals for diminishing Carbon Dioxide, goals for reducing the use of
fossil fuels, did not matter: The point was to change what we do. That has not
happened, he said.
And then he described some acts of civil disobedience
on behalf of "adam" (the human race) and "adamah" (the earth): Activists in
Virginia gathering where a new coal plant was scheduled to be built, blocking
the passage of the trucks to build it, calling its emissions of mercury and CO2
a murderous poison spewed into our lives.
It takes, I muttered to
myself, a scientist to echo Shifra and Puah, the midwives of the Torah story
who invented civil disobedience by disobeying Pharaoh's order to kill the
children of the Israelites. Where, I asked myself, is the religious commitment
to nonviolent action? (Including, on this issue, my own.)
Several
moments of the Summit stick in my brain like powerful paintings:
The
opening: Into a full Cathedral came a procession of Lutheran clergy all dressed
in black, surrounding one woman in a bright red dress - the Crown Princess of
Sweden, who opened the Summit. Her brilliant red in the midst of that blackness
was like a watchfire at deepest midnight. It seemed to symbolize the Summit
itself -a watchfire at the darkest moment of human history.
Another: One
of the multireligious services in the Cathedral - a shofar blown, Buddhist
bells, passages chanted from Quran and Gospels and Gautama's writings.
And then a large green globe, made of living moss, was carried into the
cathedral. Watching awestruck by this miniature of our planet, and feeling a
second level sense of awe, moved by my own emotion. I found myself wondering ---
What if ALL our communities - where now for some the central sacred
symbol is the Torah Scroll, or the Cross, or the Quran, or the Wheel of Life,
or the peace pipe ------ What if we ALL affirmed this living ball, this planet,
as a sacred symbol for every one of our communities and traditions?
Some
humor, too: A moment of private conversation: A teacher from India, looking at
the printed program, seeing Starhawk, re-creator of the Wiccan community in our
generation, listed as a "pagan." "This word," he whispered to me, "this
'pagan,' it is now all right to say?" I laughed and said it depended whom you
asked. For me, admiring Starhawk, yes, OK. (After all, long ago she was a
Jewish girl who went to Camp Ramah and who says she might have become a rabbi if
that had been possible when she was young.)
Later I told the Archbishop I
was happy Starhawk had been invited. He glanced at me quizzically, said: "There
was a --ummmm ---- discussion. We decided she has done so much work to focus
attention on healing the earth that she couldn't be left out." And Starhawk
herself, smiling as she toasted the Church of Sweden, "To the first Archbishop
ever to consult a witch - in public."
And there were other ironies as
well: At the end, four of us, including me, were asked to say "words of hope,"
for all of us to carry into the world -- each of us for no more than five
minutes.
Our words were supposed to be stirring, passionate - not
academic. I think I carried out my assignment, crystallizing into five minutes
and a tone of hopeful passion my teaching about how to face the Pharaohs of our
planetary Plague as Moses did, with the words of hope that are the Names of God
he was given at the Burning Bush.
(Again, the live video of that
talk, intertwining a vision of empowering
ourselves and drawing on the Spirit, is on our Website at
-
http://www.shalomctr.org/node/1469 )
The video gives the
feel and color way beyond what I could describe in words.
I won't say
whether the other three fulfilled their mission, but I saw an amusing picture:
The Archbishop himself, carrying the six-foot Shepherd's Crook that is the
symbol of the bishop's pastoral task to gather the flock, came sidling toward
the pulpit.
As one speaker droned on and on and the Archbishop crept
nearer and nearer, I suddenly saw the Crook as what in Harlem's Apollo Theater
on Amateur Night was The Hook that literally dragged untalented performers off
the stage. "Give 'm the hook, the Hook," the audience would chant.
He
never used the Crook to yank the speaker off, but the undone act stayed vivid in
my brain.
One contribution we brought the interfaith assembly was a
Shabbat service built on chant, led by Phyllis Berman in such a way as to open
the Shabbat experience and Jewish prayer to these myriad religious
representatives. Thirty-six people came - four or five of them Jews, all of
them enthralled by the power of this path of prayer.
As Phyllis pointed
out, this is an interfaith experience very different from that of the "prayer
salad" in which many different forms are poured into a single bowl. Instead, it
invited everyone into the spiritual depths of one tradition. That is the way we
have learned to pray in The Tent of Abraham, Hagar, and Sarah: deep into Islam,
deep into Judaism, deep into Christianity - deep enough to experience the ONE
Who is at the heart of each.
After the Summit, Phyllis and I met with
Muslims and Christians who were pursuing a spiritually rooted politics in the
Swedish public square. And to our unexpected delight, we met the leaders of a
Muslim-sponsored school for migrants to Sweden -- with whom Phyllis, founder
and director of a renowned 30-year-old school for adult immigrants and refugees
to the United States, was able to have a long conversation at the highest
professional level - a level we might call Vocation, not even just
Profession.
More on that in a separate letter to you. For now, I invite
your thoughts in general - and especially on the question whether we should be
planning religious acts of nonviolent civil disobedience like the ones Dr.
Hansen spoke about - acts to challenge the scorching of our planet, acts to
confront the Pharaohs of our modern Plagues.
Blessings of shalom, salaam,
peace -
Arthur
P.S. -- Hanukkah begins on Sunday evening. The
traditional Hanukkah song of Ma'oz Tzur has not just one but a number of verses,
celebrating God's redemption of the Jewish people from a series
of
oppressions -- Egypt, Babylonia, Haman, Rome, as well as
Antiochus.
It ends with a verse looking forward to the ultimate
Messianic redemption of -- we might well say in our generation -- all peoples
and all life. There follows a new version of this verse in English that I have
written to fit the traditional Jewish melody. (It uses two phrases by Rabbi
Zalman Schachter-Shalomi from a quite different version of that verse.)
We
encourage you to sing it at the lighting of the candles or in any context
that calls to you.
Shalom, salaam, peace --
Arthur
Holy aid extend to us
and bring our planet's healing near.
When Your foes oppress the earth, give
all life compassion's ear.
In oil-addiction dour, at our darkest
hour,
Bless the sun and everyone, Make Messiah flower.
Bless the sun and
everyone, Make Messiah flower!
To donate to the Shalom Center, click on our logo!
|
