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E Pluribus Unum Project
Inaugural Keynote Address 1997
The Buddhist tradition has a teaching about "mindfulness" which has always impressed me. It is, in my view, the essence of a spiritual life that is at the root of all religions. I want to ask you to be intentionally mindful for just a moment about how you have come to be here today. Consider how many people and experiences have given you direction in life. Consider the challenges and obstacles that you have had to overcome. Consider your good fortune at having heard about this conference and at having been selected. I want you to know that you are not here because you are smart, though many of you are.
I want you to know that you are here not because you are talented, though many of you are. You are here because we thought that you had the potential to be wise. And only wise people have the ability to know that it takes sacrifice of self-interest to advance the common good. That is what it will take to build a better society.
I need to talk to you about three things in order to define key terms that we will be using during this conference. It will help set forth what we have planned for you during this inaugural E Pluribus Unum Conference. Those three things are religion, social justice and the common good, and finally, the meaning of E Pluribus Unum.
RELIGION
In the history of human civilization, religion is the most common way that people have divided themselves. Through particular beliefs, customs, values and rituals, religion has provided humanity with a symbolic way to give life meaning. Unfortunately, for much of human history, the stronger one's allegiance to one's religion, the more likely one was to reject and ridicule other religions.
There is a very big difference between righteousness and self-righteousness. Righteousness is when we act towards others in a spirit of justice and compassion. Self-righteousness is when we come to be convinced that the religion, lifestyle or philosophy of living that we have come to embrace is superior to alternate paths.When we cross the line between righteousness and self-righteousness, we find ourselves in the territory that leads to prejudice, hatred and death.
In a similar way, there is good religion and bad religion. Bad religion is triumphant. It confuses ends and means. It places doctrines over people.It accepts injustice as a divinely-ordained condition, beyond the ability of humanity to affect. It breeds self-righteousness.Good religion recognizes that there are many equally valid paths to God. It puts a premium on acts of kindness and compassion for others. It is based on the belief that every person is made in the image of God.
Good religion promotes the belief that a human being's duty here on earth is to repair a broken world. In the Jewish tradition, we call this concept tikkun olam.
We need to recognize that every religion represented in this room today has elements of good religion and bad. Ironically, when our loyalty to our own religion blinds us to the truth and wisdom of another's tradition, we go down the road that has given religion a bad name. This is why it is so easy to hate religion. This is why so many dismiss it. This is why so many have overlooked the possibilities that religion offers to create an alternative reality to the world we currently find ourselves in.
My hope is that this conference will help you learn the difference between good religion and bad and thereby, make religion a more effective tool for the betterment of our world.
SOCIAL JUSTICE AND THE COMMON GOOD
The Bible gives us a paradigm of how religion can and has functioned in the world. We start out with an idyllic past in the first books of Genesis. God, representing the perfect unity of creation, fashions a perfect place on earth called Eden. Adam is the first human being conscious of a transcendent power beyond self. From Adam, all humanity descends, and thus, the brotherhood of humanity.
Soon, humanity is "out of Eden" and reality sets in. We see a world of murder, fratricidal jealousy, slavery and liberation, territorial conquest and displaced populations, alienation, promises made and promises broken, disobedience, and punishment. This is not just the Biblical story; it is our story. It is the world that we live in. It is the wilderness.
Starting with the idyllic past and then taking us through the wilderness of reality, the Bible leads us to understand its messianic vision of the future. Part of the spiritual vision of the Bible is its vision of a messianic future. We find it in many places in Scripture but nowhere is it better articulated than in the book of Micah ch. 4 (also paralleled in Isaiah ch.2) "It shall come to pass in the end of days that the mountain of God's house shall be established on the top of the mountains. And all nations shall come to it and we will walk in God's path. They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more."
Life is a journey through a wilderness filled with much pain and suffering, injustice and inequality. Religion has the power to move us toward the messianic future.
Consider the great moral giants just of this century: Mahatma Ghandi developed his philosophy of non-violence out of his Hindu roots. He used it to overturn British colonial control of India and later tried to quell the violence in his native land between Moslems and Hindus.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. admired the teachings of Ghandi greatly and applied the same principles to advance the cause of civil rights in America. His call for social justice pricked the conscience of an entire nation.
Dietrich Boenhoeffer was a Protestant minister in Germany during the Nazi regime. He deplored the silence of the church in the face of Hitler's tyranny. Arrested for plotting to assassinate Hitler, he was executed two months before the end of the war, but not before he authored Prisoner for God, his call for an ethically based Christianity.
I could go on and cite the way that Elie Wiesel used his personal experience as a Holocaust survivor and his understanding of Jewish tradition to become an international crusader for human rights. Or how the Dali Lama continues to offer a model of spiritual resistance out of his Buddhist tradition to the Chinese occupation of Tibet. Or how Archbishop Desmond Tutu challenged the policy of apartheid in South Africa from pulpits in that country and around the world.
These are examples of people whose lives bear witness to the incredible power of faith to stand up to evil and oppression and to rally people of conscience to a given cause. There are thousands of other such religious role models for social justice and you will meet some of them during these next three weeks.
What has given these individuals the strength to be "drum majors for justice" (MLK) in a world filled with poverty, oppression and selfishness? Good religion gives people just such strength. A person of faith believes that good can triumph over evil despite the injustice that they see in the world and lives his/her life in a way to make that belief true.
In order to acquire such moral courage and strength you must learn to simultaneously be committed to and rooted in the particularities of your own faith and also, reach across the boundaries of your faith to understand and to empathize with those whose beliefs are totally different from you.
Social justice is to religion what love is to family. One is the institution; the other is a quality of being that makes the institution worthwhile. Just as a family without love is dysfunctional, so is a religion that does not teach and manifest a deep commitment to social justice, dysfunctional. It is a religion that has lost its way.
E PLURIBUS UNUM: What are we doing here?
The sense of tribe is deeply embedded in the human soul. Religion is only one example (e.g. professions, geography, race, club, nationality). And tribalism is gradually overtaking our nation and our world. Millions have been slaughtered just in the past few years due to ancient tribal animosities in Africa, in the Balkans, in the former Soviet Union, in Cambodia and in other places around the globe.
Nor is America immune. Our body politic easily falls prey to the competition between American tribes (e.g. corporate interests, professional groups, ethnic groups, etc.). Each is determined to advance its own, group self-interest regardless of the consequences to other groups or to society at large. The victim is "the common good".
This is precisely where E Pluribus Unum- "Out of the many, one" comes into play. This latin phrase, which appears on your dollar bills, was coined as the motto of our nation with reference to the necessity of creating one centralized country out of the colonies of the Revolutionary era. Since that time, the phrase has come to mean more.
We are, in every sense of the word, a pluribus. Our differences in religious backgrounds just happens to be the most obvious way that this conference has grouped you. But we wear multiple identities: families, ethnic groups, states, soon colleges and universities. We root for different ballclubs, we speak the same language with different accents, jargons and sometimes, even meanings. (ex. "bad").
We are therefore a grand experiment. Our hope is that we can use the very religious traditions that, in fact, divide us from each other, to unite us. We hope to do that, not by minimizing the importance of our respective faith traditions, but rather by exploring those core values of our respective faith traditions that might bring us closer to working in partnership towards creating "the common good". The key to creating a democratic, pluralistic society that demonstrates concern for the outsider, the oppressed, the hungry and the weak is not to make us all the same. We are strengthened when we celebrate our differences and, simultaneously, recognize that we are all enriched when we recognize our common humanity.
If we can, out of our diversity, create an intentional, spiritual community for three weeks, modeling tolerance and respect in speech, religious practice, and beliefs, we will gain a glimpse of the possibilities of a truly civil society.
We have created a program with four strands: academic, community service, spiritual arts and worship and community life. Some of this program is already prepared; much of it you will co-create with each other. It has been designed to bring to the fore the special gifts that each of you have to contribute to the common good. It is your ability to realize those gifts and exercise them in society that will determine how well we can move our society closer to the messianic ideal of the Bible.
CONCLUSION
I have had the good fortune to spend a good deal of time in Jerusalem. I've always been intrigued by its name. In Hebrew Jerusalem means "city of peace (shalom)". How odd for a city that has been the focal point for religious wars for several thousand years! Even today this city is divided into religious sections and is at the center of controversy between competing national aspirations.But consider this. The Hebrew word "shalom" also means "wholeness". Perhaps the message is that only when work through our differences and learn to live together can we achieve true wholeness and true peace. Perhaps that is the significance of the end of the quote from the prophet Isaiah that I quoted earlier, part of the Bible's messianic ideal for humankind: "For out of Zion shall come forth truth, and the word of God from Jerusalem".
We here are a microcosm of the diversity of society. We will have to work hard to experience shalom/wholeness/oneness. If we can achieve a glimpse of E Pluribus Unum, however fleetingly during these 3 weeks together, each of the 80+ of us will be a candle, able to light a way in the wilderness, to a better tomorrow.
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