Dave Andrews

Depending on our understanding, our religions can be either a source of escalating conflict, or a resource for overcoming conflict If we construct our religion as a closed set of beliefs and behaviours, we will identify ourselves against others and it will often lead to violence. Jonathan Sacks, in his latest book Not In God’s Name says ‘Once a religion becomes an identity, and an (exclusive) community, conflict will ensue’. But if we construct our religion as an open set of love for God and love for neighbour, we will identify with others and it’ll lead to reconciliation. To be a resource for overcoming conflict, we need to understand that the heart of all true religion is open-hearted compassionate spirituality.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu says, ‘God’s dream is that all of us will realize we are family – we are made for togetherness. In God’s family, there are no outsiders. Black and white, rich and poor, gay and straight, Jew and Arab, Muslim and Christian, Hindu and Buddhist – all belong’. Now, more than ever, we need to remember that ‘God’s love is too great to be confined to any one side of a conflict or to any one religion.’[i] Maulana Wahiduddin Khan says ‘God has the same compassionate relationship with every (one) as a father has with all his children. Therefore it is alien to the divine scheme of creation that this earthly plane should be marred by hatred and violence. It is God’s most cherished desire that love should be returned for hatred and violence should be met with peace. According to the Qur’an, paradise is God’s neighbourhood and in this neighbourhood only those who have compassion, (whose) actions are of benefit to others, find acceptance’.[ii]

The psychologist, Dan Goleman, says empathy is the heart of compassion.[iii] ‘Empathy’ is the capacity for us to ‘feel how others feel’. It is, he says, in ‘empathising’ with potential victims – people in danger or distress – and ‘feeling how they might feel’, that we can be motivated to refrain from harming them, and, hopefully, even perhaps consider helping them.[iv]

The philosopher, John Macmurray, says that while most of us might be willing to give intellectual assent in our ‘heads’ to the priority for us to rediscover our capacity for empathy,it simply will not happen, unless all of us give some emotional affirmation to that intellectual assent in our ‘hearts’ and make it happen![v]

The issue is not so much a conflict between our ‘heads’ and our ‘hearts’, but a conflict that we have in our ‘hearts’.[vi] In our ‘hearts’ we know that we cannot live without love. And that love involves an enhanced ‘sensibility’ – an enhanced appreciation of, and affection for, one another’s lives. But, in our ‘hearts’, we also know that if we develop an enhanced ‘sensibility’ towards the beautiful, yet painful reality of one another’s lives, it will inevitably entail great agony as well as great joy. So we vacillate. Wanting to become more loving, and wanting to become anything but more loving. Both at the same time.

But, the only way we can live, is to live in the real world. And the only way we can live in the real world, is to love the real world. And the only way we can love the real world, is to overcome our fear of the suffering that love in the real world involves. We must not allow our fear of the suffering to so take over our lives that we put all our efforts into building up our defences against the world, and so alienate our selves from the very reality to which we need to relate. We need to find a faith that can help us overcome our fear of the suffering, so that we can embrace the world as it is, love it, warts and all, and live our lives, with friend and foe alike, to the full.[vii]

Miroslav Volf, a Croatian, whose family, along with hundreds of thousands of others in the former Yugoslavia were driven out of their homes in the name by ‘ethnic cleansing’, says ‘a refusal to embrace the other, in her otherness, and a desire to purge her from ones’ world by ostracism or oppression, deportation or liquidation, is…an exclusion of God;[viii] for our God is, as Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Maulana Wahiduddin Khan say, ‘a God who loves strangers!’[ix]

Volf says some say that ‘too much blood has been shed for us to live together.’ But, the ‘only way to peace is through embrace.’[x] He says an embrace always involves ‘a double movement of aperture and closure. I open my arms to create space in myself for the other. The open arms are a sign of discontent at being myself only, and of a desire to include the other. They are an invitation to the other to come in and feel at home with me, to belong to me. In an embrace I close my arms around the other – not tightly, so as to crush her, or assimilate her forcefully into myself; but gently, so as to tell her that I do not want to be without her in her otherness. An embrace’ Volf says ‘is a sacrament of a (universal) personality. It mediates the interiority of the other in me and my complex identity that includes the other, a unity’ in diversity. [xi]

[i]       Desmond Tutu Desmond Tutu’s Recipe For Peace www.beliefnet.com 2004

[ii]      Maulana Wahiduddin Khan The Prophet of Peace Penguin New Delhi 2009 p16

[iii]    ibid 328,329

[iv]    Goleman, D. Emotional Intelligence, (New York: Bantam Books, 1995) 119

[v]     Macmurray, J. Freedom In The Modern World, (London: Faber&Faber, 1958) 28-29

[vi]    Ibid., 55

[vii]   Ibid., 58-59

[viii]  Ibid., 32

[ix]    Ibid., 30

[x]     Ibid., 39

[xi]    Ibid., 39