Katherine Marshall, a Berkley Center Senior Fellow and Director of the World Faiths Development Dialogue, attended the Monterrey Religious Encounter, September 21-24, 2007.
The Interreligious Encounter hit its full stride Sunday, with speakers and participants well into routines of speeches, panels, and the like. Overall there were three full days of events, with the closing plenary on Monday evening. The International Interreligious Encounter then concludes, and in Monterrey, the Cultural Forum shifts its focus from religion to other dimensions of culture, over its 80 day life. For the Parliament of the World Religions, the focus will shift to the major global event on its calendar, the meeting in Melbourne Australia in December 2009.
The Interreligious Encounter, to my mind, had three overlapping dimensions. It offered, first and perhaps foremost, the opportunity, largely in this instance to the people of Mexico, to learn about and, in a real sense, to encounter the diversity of living religion today. The major (that is, the largest) world faiths, from all continents, had representatives at the Encounter, in a “safe†atmosphere where they could present both their beliefs and their perspectives on major world problems of the day. This was a place for learning and feeling, not for debate. Lingering images for me included the delight of the Mexican participants, but also of the international participants, in encountering different traditions and religions in the flesh: crowds of people trying to hear the first Buddhist ordained nun from Thailand and the presentation on Paganism, groups of nuns posing for picture after picture with the Sikh contingent, and a line of people wanting their photographs taken with the group representing Yoruba traditions.
The Encounter also was part of a continuing process of building networks, reinforcing contacts across widely different worlds focused on religion. The international participants included veterans who knew each other well – many going back to the watershed Chicago 1993 Parliament of Religions meeting, but there were new faces also. The network, I can attest, is rich and wonderfully diverse, with people of good will who share a vision of a diverse and peaceful world, and who, from their direct contact with religious friction, also harbor fears about what lies ahead if interfaith harmony is not achieved. The discussions among participants were fascinating – how contemporary religions should approach just war, with examples from India, Colombia, the Middle East, and Africa, reflections on the fascinating film that premiered in Monterrey – Rumi Returning, a joyful celebration of the great 13th Century Sufi poet and sage, brilliant reflections by Harvard Confucian scholar Tu Weiming about the changing dynamic of religion both in China and within the broader world of Chinese cultures, issues for reproductive health from abortion to genetic engineering, options ahead for a Sikh project for education in Kericho, Kenya, the Baha’i influence in Botswana, and much discussion about what religious leaders and communities could do about violence within families, to highlight a fraction of the conversations I personally was part of.
Skeptics of interfaith meetings often focus on a phenomenon that was evident at Monterrey: those who come to such events rarely represent the branches of religions that are in conflict. Such meetings do not solve problems directly. There are knotty problems around representation: who, after all, can truly “represent†most faith traditions? And the vision of harmony among traditions that is the essence of most interfaith events obscures real difficulties, tensions, and religious conflicts. The meeting in Monterrey was not about dialogue, it did not have a structured agenda, and it did not set out to change opinions. It was careful to live up to its theme: “respect in every respectâ€. It was aggressively inclusive. Nonetheless, the reality of differences was often obvious, in part in the many communication barriers and very obvious differences in style and approach. The fact that there are conflicts around religion was not hard to discern, just for a start, in a meeting where the large majority of participants were Catholics, issues for women were high on the agenda, and a long series of sessions focused on family, reproductive issues, and HIV/AIDS. Meetings like this, though, serve an important purpose in breaking the many barriers of ignorance, in helping to build the web of networks, and in marking the paths ahead for engagement, intense dialogue, and action.
