BY REVEREND JEFFREY UTTER

LOS ANGELES - Two hundred fifty persons from many religious faiths and from many parts of Southern California came together on Sunday, April 19, to know one another better and to affirm the importance of interreligious understanding and cooperation for the future of humanity.  The event was hosted by Soka Gakkai International, the largest lay Buddhist organization in the world, at their headquarters in Santa Monica.   The theme was “Making a World of Difference: Hearing One Another, Healing the Earth.” 

This is also the theme of the Fifth Parliament of the World’s Religions, to be held in Melbourne, Australia at the beginning of December.  Ten thousand people from all the great and small religions of the earth are expected to attend.  The Parliament tradition has received a huge impetus from the Ramakrishna Order and the Vedanta Society, whose founder, Swami Vivekenanda, made a huge impact on Westerners at the first Parliament in Chicago in 1893.

The event began with a stirring candlelight ceremony in which representatives from Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Judaism, Islam, Christianity, and other traditions offered prayers and lit a central candle representing interfaith unity.  The haunting sound of the “didgeridoo” evoking the Australian aboriginal “dreamtime” was followed by violin and piano in the Western style and by the stirring drums of the Japanese Shumei tradition.  A lively keynote address by Yoland Trevino, global chair of the United Religions Initiative, highlighted the deep wisdom of the earth’s indigenous spiritualities for the period of worldwide ecological crisis which we are now entering. 

Forty workshops offered a wide array of reflective and interactive experiences on theology, spiritual practice, and ecological sustainability.  A separate program with workshops for young people ended with some of them addressing the larger plenary gathering on their vision for our interreligious future.  Participants in the event said they  left heartened and more strongly committed to “hearing each other” and “healing the earth.”