Editor’s Note: The following address was offered during an Interfaith Peace Service at the Claremont Main Road Masjid in Cape Town, South Africa as part of the Friday congregational prayers on October 19, 2001.

Peace through Genuine Friendship
by Chris Chivers

Embracing otherness

Towards the end of the film Gandhi, when many of the cities of India are being torn apart by inter-religious violence and conflict — and the Mahatma is once again fasting to try and bring people to their senses — there is a moving scene. In it, a Muslim — whose child has been murdered by a Hindu in the violence — in great distress and anger confronts Gandhi with his grief. During the tense moments of dialogue, as the film records them, the man demands of the Mahatma what he must do in response to his personal anguish. As many of you will doubtless recall, Gandhi famously tells him that he must find a Hindu child who has been orphaned in the conflict and bring him up as his own child — but not as a Muslim, rather as a Hindu.

We meet together today during a time of great conflict, uncertainty, and suffering in our world. As we do so I begin very deliberately with that story from the life of Mahatma Gandhi for the simple reason that it encapsulates for us so much of the journey towards peace which we must walk.

We have come to proclaim our simple yet profound desire for peace. We have come to reassert in words, again once spoken by Gandhi, that "an eye for an eye, makes the whole world blind." We have come as those committed to the nonviolent way in our world, to conflict and warfare as an absolute last resort.

But we have also come bringing with us the reality of a deeply divided world. A world of great wealth and even greater poverty. A world of great creativity and ingenuity, but also a world of immense destructiveness and wickedness. A world of amazing potential but a world which has all too often failed to give basic human rights and opportunities to even the smallest fraction of its citizens.

We know that the faiths which we embrace, and which we experience so definitively as life-enhancing, have all too often been the cause of the many conflicts which have beset us. They are the very stumbling-blocks to peace itself.

Faith communities and conflict

And if we consider the reality of this world — if we restrict ourselves simply to the reality of our own city and Western Cape communities — we know that the faiths which we embrace, and which we experience so definitively as life-enhancing, have all too often been the cause of the many conflicts which have beset us. They are the very stumbling-blocks to peace itself.

As a Christian I have to face head-on the sorry legacy of divisiveness which has far too frequently marred two thousand years of my faith community’s witness around the globe. I speak of the part that Christians played in the enslavement of millions of Africans. The destruction — the total eradication of civilizations, of ways of life — which came through centuries of Christian colonization of this continent of Africa. The tens of thousands of Muslims who were killed by Christians in the Crusades. The millions of Jews who perished in the Shoah of the last century — a direct result of centuries of anti-Jewish attitudes, rhetoric and behavior on the part of Christians. The millions of our fellow South Africans who for so long suffered under the yoke of an apartheid policy idiotically devised by men and women who proclaimed that they were doing the Christian God’s work. It is indeed a tragic indictment on a faith whose originator proclaimed, "Blessed are the peacemakers," yet whose followers have all too often chosen to ignore his pathway of peace.

All of us have to face similar failures to live-up to the great truths of peace, love and comradeship which our traditions so deeply extol but which we so lamentably fail to make real.

Beyond the ghetto of our faith

This is why the story of Gandhi’s, with which I began, is such a challenge — and ought to be such an inspiration — to us. For when we look at the world we are a part of, when we think of the history we have created for our fellow human beings, we know that the kind of insularity which has for too long been a feature of our religious proclamations and lifestyles has so transparently failed to bring peace and stability across the globe. We need desperately — now, more than ever before — to reach beyond, to step out of our ghettoes of piety and exclusivity, and to respond to Gandhi’s challenge to embrace "otherness". We need to overcome fear and ignorance and to do so through that most elusive and risky of all human endeavors: through genuine friendship.

This afternoon’s service of peace is of course a step along that road. We meet as friends, as co-workers for a better, more peaceful world. I believe that with all my heart for there are so many people here this afternoon whom I have come to know, respect and to love. But I also know that our friendship needs considerably to be deepened if today is not to prove to be yet another false dawn in our long road to freedom and ultimate peace. And in this regard the challenge of Gandhi’s invitation to embrace otherness — to reach beyond our own comfort zones and to achieve real mutual understanding — should prompt us, I believe, to do three things.

Acquaintances become friends

Firstly, we need to recognize that lasting peace in our world will only be realized when we have taken ourselves beyond acquaintanceship and achieved genuine friendship.

It is wonderful that we meet in one another’s sacred spaces. It is indeed a blessing from God that we recognize such spaces as holy and our religious beliefs as divinely inspired. But beyond such communal gestures and encounters — important though they undoubtedly are — we actually need to walk a harder road to glory.

Will we move inter-faith, inter-religious understanding from an institutional level — where it is often focussed far too much around religious leaders — back where it belongs, where it’s most needed and where, ultimately, it will make its most lasting contribution, at the grassroots of our communities?

How many of us, for instance, have actually embraced otherness in our own homes: how many have invited those of faiths different to the one we practice to sit and eat with us, to share our family lives? Thereby we create for ourselves more measured, intimate opportunities for conversation, for discussion and mutual understanding than such public occasions as this one allow. Will we, I wonder, risk such engagement and breakdown the invisible, but tangible, barriers which we so often erect to protect us from the vulnerability of real friendship, even as we are attempting at a safer level to be friends? Will we move inter-faith, inter-religious understanding from an institutional level — where it is often focussed far too much around religious leaders — back where it belongs, where it’s most needed and where, ultimately, it will make its most lasting contribution, at the grassroots of our communities? For those who meet in one another’s homes, who look one another in the face, and who share one another’s food are much less likely to look at one another down the barrel of a gun. They are less likely to resort to conflict and violence as a means of resolving the differences of opinion, which of course exist between us, or to resort to the kind of negative slogan-swapping and name-calling which so often clogs up our communal discourse.

Not doing apart what we can do together

Secondly, we need, I believe, to strongly resolve not to do apart what we can do together.

In our struggle for liberation, justice and peace we worked together ceaselessly and creatively to bring down walls of oppression and wickedness. But in the new struggles to eradicate poverty and homelessness, violence and abuse and to combat HIV/AIDS too often we have retreated into our own familiar circles of influence. It is almost as if, in terms of good works, we were competing with one another rather than pooling our considerable resources for the common good.

We already have an Inter-Religious Commission on Crime and Violence which has made strategic interventions in our community. How can we enhance this peace-building structure in a similarly inter-religious way to combat the many other problems which beset us and thus to put building blocks towards peace in our city, province and nation more firmly into place?

Not uniformity but a recognition of human dignity and integrity

Thirdly, we need at all costs to avoid the mistaken belief that the goal of our encounters and interactions is uniformity. For the disease of syncretism — the belief that we are all really talking the same language and singing from the same song-sheet — is far too pervasive a disease amongst many who engage in interfaith work and cooperation. It does not bring peace. Ultimately it will probably cause a greater degree of frustration and conflict. Certainly it makes for bland, toothless friendship.

We don’t believe the same things and we mustn’t pretend that we do if our friendship is to be characterized by integrity and truth. This much the Holy Qu’ran makes absolutely clear.

We don’t believe the same things and we mustn’t pretend that we do if our friendship is to be characterized by integrity and truth. This much the Holy Qu’ran makes absolutely clear. For whilst God could have created all of us as a unity we were not created in this way. But, as the Holy Qu’ran also goes on to reveal, there is a divine purpose to our having been created as a diversity of communities. For in so creating us God wills to test us by and through such diversity (Surah Hud, chapter 11, verse 118). For the Holy Qu’ran again recognizes — as does the Bible — that ultimate peace only in fact comes through a testing of hearts which involves a recognition and acceptance of diversity: of the unique, divinely-ordered and created nature of each and every person’s humanity.

In our political, social and religious discourse it is this recognition — the thoroughly African reality of "ubuntu" — that we most need to rediscover. For whatever views we hold, it is only when we truly believe that each person’s humanity is to be reverenced, respected and cherished that the absolute condition and pre-requisite for peace will have been achieved. It is only when we can look each other in the eye and see each other as fundamentally holy that true peace will be possible.

Mutual encouragement

In this regard — and returning to the story with which I began — we need to take one final leaf from the Mahatma’s book.

For whilst at times such as these we feel utterly helpless in the face of the evils and sufferings of both terrorism and war, we know that any form of retreat within ourselves and the illusory security of our communities is not the answer.

He was once asked by a Christian inquirer if he saw his task as a Hindu to be to convert Christians to Hinduism. "No," he said, "I see my task is to make them better Christians." From my own experience, I know that poor, weak, fallible Christian that I am, I have been made an immeasurably better Christian than I might otherwise have been through my friendships with people of other faiths. This has not least been through the many meals which my family has shared with Imam Rashied’s and with other members of this Mosque congregation. And it is through this sense of mutual support, friendship and encouragement — which we must deepen and cherish still further in the simple ways I have suggested — that the prayers we offer for peace will indeed be realized. For whilst at times such as these we feel utterly helpless in the face of the evils and sufferings of both terrorism and war, we know that any form of retreat within ourselves and the illusory security of our communities is not the answer. It is nothing else but a road to deep division and polarization from which we shall only harvest a future of mutual suspicion, bitterness and hatred.

The reality is that we have barely begun to get to know one another, our stories and our traditions. The pressing need for peace requires of us nothing less than that we begin to do so. For in the end it is only through the patient, honest and exacting way in which we strive to deepen our bonds of friendship that we will realize the peace which is the goal of all our striving.

Let us pray:
O God! Thou art Peace,
And Peace emanates from thee.
Allow us, O Lord, to live and be sustained in peace. Amen

Chris Chivers is an Anglican priest who has worked as a curate in North London and as Canon Precentor of St George's Cathedral, Cape Town. A regular contributor to various South African newspapers and the author of a number of publications — including the critically praised The Hard Road to Glory (2001) and Rumours of God amidst the ruins (2001) — he was recently appointed a Minor Canon of Westminster Abbey, London. Chris is married with two sons, and may be reached by email at Chris.Chivers@westminster-abbey.org