Vancouver Courier Report on August 22nd Meeting
Vancouver Courier August 25, 2004
Believers Move Toward Peace
PAT JOHNSON
The Mount Pleasant Community Centre at 16th and Ontario is where east meets west in the city. On Sunday, it seemed, much of the world was jammed into one of its small, unattractive rooms. For a few months, a small group of local Muslims and Jews have been meeting to explore each other's traditions. The beauty of this tiny effort in this remote corner of the world has caught the attention and imagination of other people of faith, so much so that the bilateral phenomenon burgeoned last Sunday into a veritable spiritual summit. Christians, Sikhs, Hindus and others joined the Jews and Muslims already in progress.
The agenda: Nothing really, except a few words of unity
followed by home baking and, to use a yiddishism, shmoozing. A small step
for people of faith, perhaps. A giant leap for humankind.
A flutist from Syria together with a guitarist from Israel began the afternoon,
and Rabbi David Mivasair sang a Psalm in Hebrew, joined by the Jewish
voices in the room.
"Maybe that's all we need-some singing and some dancing," said the rabbi, who has worked with local Imam Fode Drome to get the group together. Global understanding may or may not come from summits of world leaders, but it can hardly help but come from meetings like this one, Mivasair said: "Friend to friend, person to person, over coffee, over hummus."
In his presentation, the imam urged the audience to look
inward, as well as outward.
"It may not be possible to bring peace to others until you have peace
in yourself," Drome said. "What I don't have, I can't give ...
Unless you change yourself, you can't change others."
Janina Diodati, superintendent of independent Catholic schools
in the Vancouver archdiocese, summed up the potential of people of different
faiths becoming friends and sharing food.
"If we can do it in this room, if we can do it in our city, then
what of our province, our country, our world?" she asked.
Hardial Singh Garcha, president of the Guru Nanak Spiritual Society, urged participants to emphasize commonalities, not differences.
"If we talk religion, we may find some differences. But if we talk spirituality and values, we have more similarities," said the Sikh leader. Forgiveness, compassion and love are values that transcend religion, he said. Greed, attachment, anger, lust, ego: these are temptations humans struggle with regardless of creed.
Garcha told a story of two men coming upon a beach covered in fish out of water. The first man begins saving the fish by throwing them one by one back into the water. Do you think you can save all of them? asks the second man. I don't know if I can save all of them, replies the first man, winding up to hurl another fish back into the water, but this one in my hand I can save.
The story seemed apt to the meeting, which represented small steps toward the huge objective of mutual understanding.
But Vancouver last weekend also happened to be the locale for a separate, equally monumental gathering. Canadians of Indian and Pakistani descent, Hindus and Muslims, spent four hours together Saturday in seminars and celebrations marking the anniversary of independence of the two notoriously conflicted nations. These two events, happening coincidentally, should make one wonder: is there something in the air here?
Rabbi Mivasair, quoting the ancient sage Rabbi Tarfon, urged the acceptance of obligations and limitations. "It's not your obligation to complete the task," he said. "But neither are you free from the obligation to engage with it."
Vancouverites don't have to finish this journey toward understanding,
perhaps, but we have an obligation to begin it. If, as an old saying has
it, the journey of many miles begins with a single step, Vancouver last
weekend seemed to be on its way to somewhere unknown yet far away and
great.