Dave Andrews

Meaningful interfaith engagement is a personal issue – it begins with us!

Leo Tolstoy, the noted author of War and Peace, once lamented, ‘Everybody thinks of changing humanity, and nobody thinks of changing himself’. Unfortunately, for Leo Tolstoy’s family, for much of the time, that included Leo Tolstoy ‘himself’.[i]

Fortunately for us, however, Leo Tolstoy’s most famous disciple heeded his exhortation rather than his example. So when he started his movement to change society, Mahatma Gandhi started it by changing himself. This apparently unremarkable process of change in one man’s life, was to have such a remarkable impact of international significance, that Albert Einstein was later reported to have said, ‘Generations to come, it may be, will scarce believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth.’[ii]

Leo Tolstoy and Mahatma Gandhi represent the choice we have: either we can complain about the way things are, or we can change the way things are, starting with ourselves.

Those of us who feel tempted to think that we have no choice, need to think again in the light of Viktor Frankl’s findings. ‘Frankl was a determinist raised in the tradition of Freudian psychology which postulates that whatever happens to you as a child basically governs your whole life. The limits of your life are set, and, basically, you can’t do much about it.’

‘Frankl was also a Jew. He was imprisoned in the death camps of Nazi Germany where he experienced things that were so repugnant to our sense of decency that we shudder to even repeat them. His parents, his brother, and his wife died in the camps or were sent to the gas ovens. Except for his sister, his entire family perished. Frankl himself suffered torture and innumerable indignities, never knowing from one moment to the next if his path, would lead to the ov-ens, or if he would be among the “saved” who would shovel out the ashes of those so fated.’

‘One day, naked and alone in a small room, he began to become aware of what he later called “the last of the human freedoms” – the freedom his Nazi captors could not take away. They could control his entire environment, they could do what they wanted to his body, but Victor Frankl himself was a self‑aware being who could look as an observer at his very involvement. His basic identity was intact. He could decide within himself how all of this was going to affect him. Between what happened to him, or the stimulus, and his response to it, was his freedom, or power, to choose his response.’

‘Through a series of such disciplines – mental, emotional, and moral, principally by using memory and imagination – he exercised his small, embryonic freedom until it grew larger and larger, until he had more freedom than his Nazi captors. They had more liberty, more options to choose from in their environment; but he had more freedom, more internal power to exercise his options. He became an inspiration to those around him. He helped others find meaning in their suffering and dignity in their prison existence. Even some of the guards.

‘In the midst of the most degrading circumstances imaginable, Frankl used the human endowment of self‑awareness to discover a fundamental principle about (humanity): between stimulus and response, (we) have the freedom to choose.’ 

We all have the ability to choose, but if we want to bring about change then we need to choose to be ‘proactive’, rather than ‘reactive’. ‘Reactive people are often affected by their phys-ical environment. If the weather is good, they feel good. If it isn’t, it affects their performance.

Proactive people can carry their own weather with them. Whether it rains or shines makes no difference to them. They are value driven; and if their value is to produce good quality work, it isn’t a function of whether the weather is conducive to it or not’.[iii]

‘Reactive people are also affected by their social environment, by the “social weather”. When people treat them well, they feel well; when people don’t, they (don’t function well). Re-active people build their lives around the behaviour of “others”, empowering “others” to control them by reacting to their actions. Proactive people feel the affects of their social environment, take the “social weather” into account, and decide how they are going to deal with the conditions. Whether people treat them well or not, they do the best they can (to relate well to “others”). Proactive people build their lives around their own behaviour, developing their power over themselves, so as to exercise increasing control over their responses’ to “others”.

It is only as people become less reactive, and more proactive, that they can actually become more responsible. Stephen Covey says, ‘Look at the word responsibility – “response‑ability”‑ the ability to choose your response. Highly proactive people recognize that responsibility. They do not blame “others” for their behaviour. Their behaviour towards “others” is a product of their own conscious choice, based on values, rather than a product of their conditions, based on (un-thought-through) feelings.’

People of one faith may have suffered because of the actions of people of an “other” faith. And people of one faith may have inflicted suffering on people of an “other” faith as a reaction. But we do not need to react. This may be hard to accept if we have justified our reaction for years and years in terms of the action of “others”. But we can choose to be proactive in future, rather than be as reactive as we may have been in the past. We can choose to break the cycle of action and reaction and respond creatively to “others”, even traditional rivals and ideological enemies.

Meaningful interfaith engagement provides all of us with an opportunity to develop an awareness of ourselves as persons – with an innate capacity to choose our response to the world around us and to change the world around us by choosing to be proactive rather than reactive.

[i]   Mead,F.(ed.) Encyclopedia Of Religious Quotations (London: Peter Davis, 1965).400

[ii]   Mehta,V. Mahatma Gandhi And His Apostles (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977) 46

[iii]   Covey,S. The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989) 69-70