Prof Francis Clooney - Lecture - 'Christianity, Hinduism & Islam at the Crossroads'

good afternoon and thank you all for coming taking this time out in the middle of the day so I'd like to begin by expressing my thanks to Amit Keskin and to all here at AIS I can see there's a lot of exciting programming and a lot of bold ideas that are being discussed in a way that's so important for today's world and I hope to be able to contribute to this as I in my Jesuit sarcastic way said a few minutes ago the title of my talk is probably more exciting than the talk itself so because I have a particular point to make not to solve the problems of the 21st century into religiously but to offer a certain angle on these issues and problems and then plenty of time to talk I think we agreed that I would stop speaking by 1:00 p.m. and that would give us plenty of time for questions and discussion and more or less will will sort of scroll through the text I didn't make it as a handout but rather the bullet points you can see will be more or less the points that I'm talking about if anyone would like the PDF that it's based on we could somehow arrange to send it to people who are here if you want so the the two starting points that I would like to put before us the first is a larger uncontroversial one the second one is really more to the point of what I'm trying to say to you today but the global problems facing all human beings are not religiously divided problems we are concerned about the violence in our cultures violence in our world environmental degradation of the terrible crises of refugees the loss of democracy the loss of respect for human rights around the world these trends that are so worrisome in different places we see these things all the time racism and other forms of bias and exclusion are oppressing and destroying our traditional cultures and our modern cultures as well and I think all of this concerns us as human beings and therefore we have to be concerned about these things my point would be we also have as I put here common religious challenges which to some extent may be problems and to some extent may be opportunities and these two are inter-religious but I would say this second set that I'll now run through are in a sense more intimate inside the religious traditions to which we belong the larger issues of ecology racism and so on whether one is religious or not matters these inner crises I think are things that we need to face and whether one nice which other okay it's on are necessary for us to face secularism and secularization and I think certainly I'm always obviously thinking in terms of the United States the Northeast Boston Cambridge Massachusetts and therefore not representative of the whole us nor can I speak for the Australian context but this problem of secularization and the the loss of religions public place the loss of religion as a player in public life the retreat of the religions from policy and politics and in some cases the concerted effort to exclude saying religions cause trouble religions are biased and therefore to move to a kind of a secular free environment which often turns out to be worse than the starting point and the exclusion of religion is again it's not a Christian problem or a Muslim problem or a Hindu problem but it's a problem for all of us to face secondly and perhaps more a virtue than a problem depending on how one takes it pluralism and the diversity that surrounds us it's almost impossible in today's world for any of us to live in a narrowly religious environment among people just like myself that I think increasingly certainly in our big cities such as here or Boston Massachusetts we're very very aware of the diversity around us and the very idea that there can be an entirely Christian culture or Christian community immune to presence of others or Muslim or Hindu or any of the traditions is increasingly implausible they're always the others are not simply going to be somewhere far away if you want to meet Hindus you have to go to India if you want to meet Muslims you have to go such-and-such you meet Christians in certain places know everybody is everywhere and I think this fact of life which you're here because you know this already becomes either a threat these people don't believe what we believe these people are of too different from us these people are a threat to us or it is simply the god-given opportunity of the 21st century this is the way the world is as a believing Christian I would say this is the way God wills the world to be for us and therefore how do we live in a pluralistic world not closing it out not trying to simplify it but rather seeing it as a religious opportunity for all of us there's also the problem of individualism and here certainly I'm thinking of the phenomenon of spiritual but not religious which is so common in the US but also particularly for younger people but not only younger people the increasing inability to want to commit to a religious community the kind of great sense that all of this is problematic all of this is weighted with baggage a terrible history burdened with beliefs and practices that are unpleasant whole traditions that have hierarchies that can be oppressive and leaders who can be scandalous etc etc I'll pick and choose I won't belong I won't become a member or remain a member my parents may have been members my grandparents members but I will pick and choose and find the truly spiritual and different traditions this is all the students I work with at Harvard all the time are in this category and I think in one way again it's a fact of life those of us who are older we have to face this fact that the declining membership in our communities of active participation is a fact of life but we don't have to see it nearly or merely as a raishin but rather how do we reinvent and reimagine ourselves religiously in a world in which the younger members in particular may have a different attitude of what belonging means so if I put before somebody even one of my own family one of my nephew's let's say are you Catholic or not will get a very embarrassed you know can come a looted answer but there may be other ways if you ask it differently how are you spiritual how are you religious there may be ways of opening this up for people but again this is not a Christian issue or a Jewish issue or a Buddhist issue it pertains to all of us and then finally I added in in thinking about this in the last few days the loss of old ways of learning or to put it the other way new media deep changes in how we do or don't learn I mentioned at the start that I finished a book tentatively called slow learning and Fast Times about the great traditions of learning to which we all belong Muslim and Christian and Jewish and Buddhist and Hindu and so on that in many cases we have far more access to far more of tradition than ever before in human history I can read the commentaries I can read the texts in translation I can have them translated automatically in some cases but increasingly we don't have the time to read we're looking at our phones and the way we learn is becoming a smaller space images matter more video matters more and so more and more opportunity to learn and less learning and I think in some ways this again impacts all of us if we have these crises before us from the environment to human rights to violence and if we have these deep changes within our traditions how are we transmitting our traditions to the future how are we drawing on the fact of our traditions and so the question I have at the bottom of the page how then do we learn and teach and write or make known our traditions is really at the heart of what I want to say now to turn to another element and this is the other side of it which maybe gives the distinctive edge to I'm talking about because I think many of you could have just said all that I said I mean this is not secret knowledge of any sort but rather my own personal journey has given me a slant on this that we need a certain kind of inter religiously literate people who had truly learned it in their own tradition and truly learning other traditions as well even just one is quite enough in order to have this deeper knowledge of people who are learning across traditional boundaries as kind of a push back against the way the world is going and this is really where I want to go and I will go too deep into this for the interest of time and finishing by 1:00 p.m. but basically as I mentioned I'm a Catholic priest I'm a Jesuit but for you know 85 90 percent or more of my Jesuit life I've been studying Hinduism first as a young Jesuit went to Katmandu Nepal in 1973 all the boys I taught were Hindu and Buddhist and I found as a New Yorker not prepared for this that this was what the most wonderful experience like going there in this you know the end of the missionary era st. Xavier's school and Kathmandu we were bringing the faith and were bringing true humanity to the people of Asia and I found that suddenly my students who were teenagers not learned bearers of tradition but they were opening my eyes to spirituality to religious truth two ways of practice to devotion to love of God in Hindu and Buddhist traditions of Nepal and suddenly I realized that this clicked for me it made sense and that it didn't have to be a dichotomy either I belong to my tradition and my job in life is to convert you to my tradition or I think I'll just join your tradition or forget the whole thing I think I'll just become a secular humanist rather this tension between the two training to be a Catholic priest in the Roman Catholic Church and increasingly more deeply studying Hinduism seemed to be a really good chemistry for me that has worked well and when I look at the problems of the 21st century and look at the problems of the world around us in many ways I'm really speaking of the fact that there is this narrow alternative that is in the face of the problems around us learning across religious boundaries can be an incredibly powerful way of understanding and this is really what I want to put before you on the third page I won't go into too much detail but after I spent my years in Kathmandu I came back I did theological study in Cambridge Massachusetts and then was ordained a priest in 1978 and then persuaded my religious superiors to let me do a PhD in Hindu Studies so I went to the University of Chicago the South Asia Department because I felt that if I did this only secondhand or only in a fairly superficial sense I would have a great love for benevolence toward Hinduism but I wouldn't really get inside it and I grew up traditional enough Catholic reading my Latin and Greek that I got inside being Catholic so the PhD at University of Chicago offered me the opportunity to go deeper into the Hindu traditions to learn the Sanskrit learn some Tamil and go back many many times to India and this kind of dedication and commitment to learning for me has been a wonderful opportunity much of it for me is books if you've come to visit me in Boston you'll see my you know crammed shelves the typical professor kind of thing with all my books around me but I think I've tried to live it as well and to have the connections many trips to India whenever I'm in India I always try to visit temples as often as possible even here in Melbourne I visited temples when I can many Hindu friends over many years back forty five years or more at this point but also different kinds of learning from texts so learning from ritual texts learning how people worship and how they learning from commentaries so great scriptures like the Upanishads or the bhagavad-gita or Tamil classic poetry with layer upon layer of commentary which I think would be recognizable in Buddhist tradition and Islamic tradition Christian tradition the tradition of learning on a text you read the text but it's surrounded by the wisdom of the later generations and I love plunging into that kind of commentary learning I am by training of philosopher and more so a theologian so faith seeking understanding facing up to the issues of deep learning using my intellect as honestly as I can and trying to be honest and asking difficult questions but always from a faith starting point risking it perhaps in saying I may come up with answers that are not convenient to what I believed already but nonetheless from faith through thinking to faith and trying finding over and over again in the Hindu traditions as one could find in other traditions great examples of this kind of faith intellect combination that people live with theology but also mysticism and practice texts that want you to do something that don't just read this but do it worship it sing it belong to it or texts that say as far as we can go this is where words lead and then there's a silence or there's kind of a breakdown of words but you need words to get that far so Hindu mystical texts as well and particularly in some of the work I've done on it mentioned the book I did his hiding places darkness on Hindu in Catholic mystical poetry how poetry does things that prose does not do and the ability to work with a prose text gets you so far but to read poetry and poetry that kind of struggles with form and beauty and music and then says things that cannot be said simply in prose is extremely important as well so what I would say from this and I'll do this fairly briefly because this is um you know and leave it for questions is I found surprisingly that Hindu and Catholic go very well together a lot of people in the world may not think this in fact most people in the world don't even think about this but nonetheless people oddly saying well how can Catholics and Hindus have much in common when you believe in one God they believe in many gods you believe in one life they believe in many lives they have goddesses you don't have goddesses Jesus died on the cross Krishna did not die a violent death etc etc but and I won't go through all of this but you can read it while I'm talking the this the resonance and the harmony of traditions where two traditions kind of work well together and I think growing up an Irish Catholic in New York with the piety A's and devotions of the pre Vatican to church going into a Hindu temple again and again is like going to church and if one grows up in a different tradition I'll say a certain Protestant Christian tradition or maybe Muslim tradition you wouldn't necessarily you wouldn't have the same experience going into a Hindu temple but the smells the bells the flowers the images the chanting people doing a variety of things and often I found at home in Hindu temples in a way that I thought was rather remarkable and and finding that this was very sustaining to be able to recognize in the other religious tradition something of my own aside from theology aside from evangelization aside from the great questions of life we somehow have a kindred spirit and I'd say at the top here various inter religious learnings have various chemistry's so everything I say then put it into different context because if you let's say our Christian and engaging in study of Islam that will be different it won't be like Hindu Catholic or if you're Muslim studying Judaism it won't be the same thing or if any of us who are of the West studying the Chinese classics would be a different chemistry and I think that's important to know that I can't say to you this is what I learned from Hindu Catholic therefore when you as a Christian study the Koran this is what you should think it doesn't work that way but rather out of your own religious background your own religious sentiments where does that lead you when for some reason intentional or by chance you engage another religious other how does that actually work out for you so to keep going I mentioned already the the differences that don't go away I mean I think we have to be intellectual and not get to the point of saying oh forget the doctrines forget the dogmas we all believe the same thing which in the short run is better than killing each other or you know abusing the other but in the long run can be mind deadening and intellect destroying where we end up saying well anything goes or everything's okay that's okay maybe today but tomorrow and the day after and for our children and their children could be the loss of the intellectual side of a tradition I don't think it means because we disagree on this point one life or many lives therefore we have nothing in common rather my point is okay that is a difference we're not going to resolve in this lifetime but we have a thousand other ways to learn from one another I think Jesus died on the cross for all human beings you may not let's keep that in mind you may think that Muhammad the Prophet was the last of the prophets and I may not see it exactly that way keep it in mind but that doesn't mean we don't have a lot in common that we can talk about so one does this kind of learning into religiously and my point I'm getting toward the end because it's ten to one is to say that you go on your personal journey of learning and you engage in the study of the other for some people you know if you get to be a professor than you do it in a professorial academic way but some kind of life journey in which learning from the religious other then you bring it home with you and again I think it's perfectly legitimate to say that somebody might change religions I've studied this so long suddenly I realize that I am a Buddhist or I am i have become Jewish or this or that that's possible and we Christians who are always concerned about preaching the gospel and bringing people to Christ can hardly say that conversion is a bad idea in other contexts know if conversion is possible then it's possible period but for most of us and certainly for me this idea of returning home coming back and bringing it back and changing the way I am Catholic I think from me has been an important point it's not really on the screen here but to say so I've been a Catholic priest for over 40 years a Jesuit for over 50 years and studying Hinduism for 46 years of that time now I think I'm a better Catholic because of this now you could say well would you what kind of a Catholic or priest or Jesuit would you be if you'd never studied Hinduism I don't know how would I know that but nonetheless it's not a damage it's not a danger where oh you've done this and I know some people have a very conservative nature would say if you do that the devil will get you if you do that you'll lose your faith I think it will guess what it's not true and I think somebody can you anybody can lose their faith in any circumstance it's always possible but nonetheless this inter-religious learning is a kind of depth that you gain that makes you still a member of the community to which you belong by birth by family by commitment but you have this kind of aura around you you have this other way of doing it so I say Madison to parish every weekend and I never almost never talk about Hinduism in the in the sermon but I think because I've studied that Hindu classics the Bhagavad Gita the Upanishads and so on like that it changes the way I read the gospel and so people coming out of church usually complementarity we'll say we've never heard anyone explain that reading that way before and I think in some ways it's just I have a different angle on things but but this is a commitment that one has to make and I'm going to come back to the final point about how does this work in our urgently desperate world but as I say a deep study is not simply a matter of piling up books it's not simply book learning it's a vocation it's a kind of religious activity and it has to be cultivated as a way of life and not to be rushed you can't say well I read the bhagavad-gita a few weeks ago and it didn't change anything so now I'll try the Chinese classics or I looked at the Quran and I didn't understand it so I stopped or I opened the Bible to the Book of Leviticus and didn't get it so I'm not gonna read the Bible anymore well no it takes time you have to do this over a time and not everybody can do what I've done I've been blessed with the opportunity for so long to study Hinduism but in some ways to focus in our world of too fast learning and say I need to be able to sustain this learning slowly over time and give it the excitement of the first moment the light comes on and I begin to understand it and then the boredom sets in it becomes tedious and all kinds of unanswered questions and then you break through and you come to another level of understanding and another level of understanding and I think this kind of lifelong process which is a kind of vocation is really really important and fairly rare clearing a space making norms for learning reading education practice worship in my tradition learning from the other as I said I can do well and I love going to Hindu temples because I'm a Roman Catholic not despite the fact and and what are the analogies for you and finding deeper ways to make inter-religious learning work and this leads me to this is my second to last point I think that this learning is desperately needed in today's world and that in a world where things are speeding up and go faster and faster and we can say look the world is literally burning up the temperatures are rising and there are you know millions of people living on the edge of desperation and the tides are rising and the coastlines are being flooded and so on and so on and so on put those books down and go out and do something and I think we all need to do something but I think there has to be some way in which some of us at least step back and say but we're intellectual spiritual beings and we have to be able to not only do but to understand to empathize to sympathize to make connections across boundaries because if I only at best that most understand my tradition and I only have benevolence toward you but I don't understand anything about your tradition that's not enough and so many dialogues are wonderful but they're only a starting point I come as the Catholic and I tell you what Catholic is and you come as the Muslim and you tell me what Islam is and so on and so on and then I go back into my little Catholic world and you back into your little world where is the mutual penetration in the mutual learning and I think we need people who are able to go back and forth between these worlds this is so important I mentioned their number 23 elite lessons this is a privilege most people have you know real jobs and don't get paid to read books or write books so and not everybody can say just you know just take the next year off take a sabbatical and and and read the text for the next year but in some way to say we all have to make spaces in our lives to read poetry to meditate to study a text and say for the next five years I'm gonna work and read the Holy Quran or I'm gonna read the Gospels or whatever making spaces like that those of us who are older to do it and show younger people this is possible this is worthwhile this is not a waste of time that even when we care about all these urgent issues we have to be able to stop and learn as well I'll skip a little bit here just mention this one briefly and then I will go the conclusion in a conversations I had in Sydney who is rah and affinity on Saturday I gave an example which I don't have time to develop now but my whole life's work has been studying Hinduism as a Catholic what happens when I begin to study Islam and I picked surah 19 of the Quran Maryam which is this beautiful you know very unforgettable surah talking about prophecy and the Prophet Zechariah marry Abraham Moses and other figures from the tradition with this whole kind of angle that's familiar to the Christian if you've read Luke's Gospel but different and getting into that and realizing that there's a kind of meditation on the Word of God and being a prophet and being able to speak in God's name can be wonderful and then at certain point the hook comes in and said Jesus says while I'm not God I'm not the son of God God has no son it's an abomination to think God has children well then you know then you close the book and walk away from it no you keep reading and saying as I said earlier okay let's mark that point we don't agree on that and we probably never will agree on that but nonetheless it doesn't mean so nineteen of the Quran is a closed book to me I can learn how to think about the Word of God how to think about prophets how to see Jesus and his mother Mary differently than I would only see them by reading the Gospels and so opening it up from different angles I won't go into the example unless you raise further questions but part of the point is simply to say even if you you do one thing well as well as you can like Christian Hindu that gives you like the ability to learn the ability to read so we can you know learn from native traditions learn from religions of Africa learn from Taoism even though you're not expert you haven't done the languages and so on you you have the the attitude and disposition for to religious learning so if you meet somebody if you meet a Jane or if you meet a Zoroastrian a Parsi you can begin to engage in some kind of learning even though you know you only know what wikipedia says about that religion it's possible to learn so to finish where we started and then this will stop in about two or three minutes I think back to the points of secularism pluralism individualism and changing media that I think we have to be able to create the possibility despite all our other concerns for this kind of inter-religious wisdom the commitment to learn the commitment to study that doesn't give away the values of our tradition merely to get along in our culture so as I put it and this all of this is open to revision obviously resistance to secularism and secularization refusing to accept the secular flattening of knowledge if the common discourse becomes all the religions are either problematic or a private matter and our society to be civil has to be a secular society with religion silenced and omitted that's simply not true and I think we need people to push back and say no society would be better if there were committed Christians who spoke as Christians and Hindus who spoke as Hindus and Muslims as Muslims not again in an abrasive domineering way but rather in a way that insists that the values of our traditions are desperately needed by society so secularism in its militant form is simply wrong and I think anybody who has religious concerns has to be able to say that in some constructive way likewise pluralism we have to be able to show for ourselves and for our children and I don't have children but our children and your grandchildren that it's possible to benefit from pluralism and not simply water down your beliefs that we can learn that relativism is not the answer but that I'm a much better person because my neighbor is of that faith a much better person because on certain days I go to pray with them in their place of worship and if we can show that of you know whatever generation we are in the room then for the next generation coming along and realizing it's not either staunch dig in mine alone is true or some kind of relativism where everything what difference does it make just be what you are some kind of better deeper opportunity that God has given us that pluralism is what God wants in the 21st century how do we show that in our lives the individualism thing I have a lot of points here that I won't go through again I can send you this PDF if you want it but the idea that we have to be able to show that belonging to a tradition still matters and having a community still matters that while there may be a level at which for self-protection we can back away from the you know the baggage of our traditions the scandals of our traditions the oppression of our traditions the answer is not to say from now on I'll simply be a free agent where I pick and choose as I want but that's some kind of imperfect belonging in an imperfect world is the way to go and that while I have you know I can any good Catholic can give you the list of all the things wrong with the Catholic Church nonetheless you can say at the end of the day I'm still gonna be a Catholic and I would think of any of the traditions in the room here's what's wrong wrong wrong wrong but here's why I stay and to be able to communicate that to younger people it doesn't mean I stay because I think it's perfect or I'll go to hell if I don't stay but rather there are good reasons we're better off if we have communities of worship and communities of belief and how to communicate that and the last point the new media deep changes in how we do or don't learn I'd like to think a lot of what I was saying about sustained learning deep into the traditions keeping at it over time is saying we have alternative cultures we need to cultivate an alternative culture where what you find on your phone or what you find on the you know the TV or on your computer is not enough and the quicker and quicker knowledge the more beautiful catchy images and so on is not enough and that while we can't go back and live in the 13th century or the 6th century or whatever nonetheless there is wisdom of these ancient traditions about how to be a learner DeWyze person that we need and I think we have to say ways of you know using new media just like the printing press was used when that was invented use it in some ways that enhances rather than makes us you know the lose hold of the traditions to which we belong so I've gone a little bit over what I wanted to do but I think I said a lot so we can talk about that thank you

Channel: Australian Intercultural Society

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Length: 33min 16sec (1996 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 13 2019