Yesterday was kind of a hard day to be the token American. I felt like I should have a ready answer to everyone’s question, “we thought Hillary Clinton was going to be elected, what happened?” but I don’t have one in English, let alone in German. And also, in a way, nothing out of the ordinary happened. Our system worked as intended. People voted. Donald Trump won. I pray that he has reserves of grit and heart and character and self-control and humility that haven’t been evident during the campaign, because these are things that are required of the President of the United States in a way that they aren’t necessarily required of the CEO of a company (though should be, imho). The job isn’t just about power and fame, it’s about politics and diplomacy. Is he up to it? The world is holding its breath.
Last week after my post I had a near-breakdown about doing this. What am I up to here? What could I possibly contribute that hasn’t already been said more eloquently elsewhere? But oddly enough, the election has reassured me. I have a strong sense that we need to talk about faith, not to evangelize but to really grapple with the questions, what do we want our world to look like? and what role do religion and church play in that? I don’t see those conversations happening, or at least I’m not a part of them, but I want to be. And now isn’t the time to hide in the corner and pretend everything is fine and let others do the work. It’s time to step up and talk about what we think is important. I think this is important. And with that I am hereby giving up on stressing out about this particular question, thank you for listening.
The class topic yesterday was world religions – what do they say about the meaning of life and how to live? It was an understandably superficial look given that we had only two hours to cover “the world,” and actually more than that, I got the distinct sense that we were looking at the whole question through Christian-colored glasses. There was the incongruity, for example, that Judaism (followers: 17 million) was one of the world religions we looked at, but whatever-it-is-they-do-in-China (population identified in Wikipedia as following “Chinese religion”: over 1 billion) was left out entirely because “Confucianism is more of a philosophy than a religion” (?). And ditto “folk religions” which maybe also don’t lend themselves to broad-stroke generalizations even though they are prevalent all over the world (remind me to tell you the story of Zurich’s patron saints sometime). And is it even possible to untangle religion from culture and society and tradition and philosophy? I’m sure academics have worked this all out, but we didn’t get that far last night.
There was a fascinating side note, though, about the Parliament of the World’s Religions, which took place in Chicago in 1893 as part of the Chicago World’s Fair. The Parliament included speeches by a monk, Swami Vivekananda, who effectively introduced both Hinduism/Buddhism and the concept of interreligious dialog to the western imagination. And I quote:
“Hail Columbia, motherland of liberty! It has been given to thee, who never dipped her hand in her neighbor’s blood, who never found out that the shortest way of becoming rich was by robbing one’s neighbors, it has been given to thee to march at the vanguard of civilization with the flag of harmony.” (http://www.esamskriti.com/…/Address-Parliament-of-Religions…)
I think it’s safe to say that those “nevers” aren’t true at this point, if they ever were. And I think that our days at the vanguard are numbered. But we can still choose to march with the flag of harmony, and I hope we do.
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