The Very Reverend James Parks Morton

Once each year Shinji Shumeikai of America is honored to have the Very Reverend James Parks Morton as a guest speaker at the Pasadena National Center's monthly Jyorei Celebration. Reverend Morton is President of The Interfaith Center of New York and Dean Emeritus of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. The following is the text of his address on April 14, 2002.

    Today, April 14, 2002, we are living in a hugely uncertain moment. This uncertainty is true for us whether we sleep in New York --like me --or in Los Angeles --like you --or in Jerusalem or Belfast or Ramallah, where most of our brothers and sisters find it hard to get any sleep at all.             
     This morning as we think about art and religions and peace, let us keep these sleep-deprived friends in our hearts. Honestly, we are all in the same boat. I was on the subway on my way to work at 8:45 in the morning, the time the first plane struck the World Trade Center on September 11, and at 9:15 I was in my office when the second plane crashed into the second tower. That day I also heard the frightening talk about a possible attack on the Los Angeles airport. There is no hiding place anywhere today, for any of us. We are in a different world from a year ago --and part of the difference is the fact that we know we are all entirely vulnerable. For most Americans this is a new situation.
    Yesterday and today we are experiencing powerful art: Alex Kerr's calligraphy --the Taiko drums --beautiful flowers --our music concert this afternoon with shakuhachi flute and koto strings. I hope we can appreciate in a fresh way how the arts can make an important difference in our lives in the midst of the uncertainty around us that won't go away. 
    What is it about art that grabs us and focuses our attention? There are many, many ways that all the arts use to catch us. Here are three basic ways: first the use of pattern; second, by texture or feeling or mood. Third, by beauty.             
    Take the visual arts of painting, sculpture, calligraphy: they all use unusual patterns and arrangements of shapes and lines and colors, of light and dark, of massing of material. Dance grabs us by unusual patterns of physical movement and rhythm and configuration of our bodies. And music arrests us with intriguing new patterns and combinations of sounds and rhythms.             

    Pattern in all the arts is a powerful phenomenon to catch us and hold our attention even in the midst of pain or just throbbing uncertainty that won't go away.             
     A second and subtler way that the arts use to grab us is the association of feeling or texture in the work of art with powerful moods that lie deep in our minds and bodies --happenings that our busy brain doesn't remember but that the work of art dredges out of our hidden depths to stop us in our tracks, patterns and textures that strike us in ways we can't resist.             
     But the third phenomenon central to all the arts is the subtlest, most difficult to define, but really the most important of all: that is beauty. Beauty certainly employs pattern and mood but somehow is above them all. Beauty is ineffable and impossible to pin down --but like love, beauty totally dominates all our faculties, and won't let go.             
     Also, like love, I don't know where beauty comes from, but I know it when I see it because it mesmerizes me. Beauty can be present in a man-made work of art or equally powerful in nature --both in a painting or a symphony or a ballet --or in a single flower or a horse or a mist-covered mountain.             
     How then does art relate to where we started this morning --to uncertainty and pain and loss? Very simply and very directly and very importantly.             
     An encounter with a work of art simply transforms us for a period of time that takes us out of our unavoidable human condition of fear and uncertainty. Art doesn't stop violence or sickness or war. But art takes us for a trip to a new place, a totally different time and perspective. Art doesn't change the bad situation but art can change us, turn us around, give us a new space of freedom where we can breathe ––a space that won't last forever but can so deeply refresh us that we are able to re-enter the battle of uncertainty knowing that pain and terrible things are not the only reality.             
     God's great creation contains both what we can call good and bad, both beauty and loss, both suffering and joy, and so perhaps the first trick to living is to recognize, not deny, the presence and power of both light and darkness in life. The second trick to living is to learn to negotiate our path between the forces of light and darkness so we don't stumble; and the third trick teaches if we fall down (which we probably will do many times) just get up and start over and keep on going. So art plays this crucial role of recharging us to keep walking on life's uncertain path.             
     Now for religion: art and religion have gone together from the beginning of time. They are inseparable. [One of] Meishusama's teachers, and also an important inspiration in my own life, was Onisaburo Deguchi, the co-founder of Oomoto in Japan. It was he who wrote the famous words "Art is the mother of religion." Works of art and beauty and nature are the powerful awakeners and stimulators that satisfy our deepest emotions. But religion has a different function from art and beauty: religion is the overall binder-together and connector of all the myriad different pieces of our life...sometimes contradictory pieces and sometimes good or sometimes bad pieces. Our English word "religion" comes from the Latin verb religare, which simply means to join together, to connect. So religion over the centuries has been seen as the great unifier of life at its manifold levels from the most private to the cosmic.             
     Religion has functioned as the unifier of our family life with the often profound differences of ages and generations, of male and female, often almost contradictory values and styles. Religion literally helps us keep our lives together. And particularly in the earlier periods of history --say up to 100 years ago --religion has also served as the major unifier of cities and nations and regions of the world --so we speak of the Christian West, the Muslim Middle East, Hindu India, Islamic Pakistan and Afghanistan, Buddhist Tibet and Thailand, Buddhist and Shinto Japan.             
     But today in the new millennium, the old definition of religion as unifier of specific cities, nations and geographical regions no longer works. We're all mixed up --not just America as a nation with huge numbers of every religion under the sun --but increasingly the same holds true for every big city all over the world. And indeed the opposite of religion as the unifier seems at the root of the conflicts that are on the verge of destroying our world --9-11 showcased one religion out to destroy another: Bin Laden's version of Islam destroying what it sees as the false religion of apostate America. And today's current disaster of Israel and Palestine, two peoples and three religions and one land only prove that our old understanding of the true function of religion needs radical overhaul.             
    The root of the problem is our confusing of the word "faith" with the word "religion." Faith is one particular way of believing in God that by definition is different from another way of believing. Shinto is different from Buddhism. Islam is different from HinduismÑand so on. But religion, on the other hand, by definition is about joining together and connecting differences into an all-including community. Please dream with me a moment: can't we use the ancient meaning of religion as the binder together of differences and join it to our new understanding of interfaith practice which specifically respects the uniqueness and preciousness of each different faith, but at the same time encourages the different faiths to learn about each other and actually experience and taste each other's worship and life together.             
     Instead of looking upon members of faiths that are different from my own as enemies to be eliminated or candidates for conversion to my faith, why can't we see different believers as our brothers and sisters who have different but very beautiful spiritual traditions and rituals that I want to experience and enjoy --as members of the same human family with many different fascinating gifts that we can all share to enrich and deepen each others' lives.             
     What a different world we would have if interfaith experience became everyone's common understanding of what religion was all about --religion as the binder together of the world's many different faith traditions. We retain our own specific and unique faith identity just like we retain our mother tongue or our special national foods and cuisine: my Hindu identity just isn't sacrificed if I really learn and experience Buddhism, or my French identity sacrificed if I learn to speak Spanish, or my Japanese identity sacrificed if I fall in love with Italian spaghetti Bolognese.              
     I can really love Shinto spirituality and Sufi Muslim spirituality and Jewish spirituality alongside my Christian spirituality and not become schizophrenic --just like I can learn to speak German and Russian and Chinese and still honor my English mother tongue. Truly serious international interfaith practice may be the way that religion in its many diverse forms can connect the world's many diverse peoples and save us from destroying ourselves and each other.             
     And once again, it is the arts with their intense riveting directness that are the keys to open a deep emotional appreciation of each different faith tradition that can enrich all our lives. The art of Russian chanting, Taiko drumming, Buddhist sculpture, Jewish story-telling, Hindu dance, immediately penetrates to my heart. In short, the beauty in the arts and in nature are the immediate means at hand for the huge task of restoring religion to its rightful place as the great unifier of the manifold differences in our belief systems. As Onisaburo Deguchi said almost 100 years ago: "Art is the mother of religion."             
     Finally, how can art and religion together help us restore peace to our deeply shattered and uncertain world? To begin with, what does the word peace really mean? Does peace basically mean the cessation of war? The stopping of terrorism and armed conflict between nations? Banning the bomb and chemical warfare? That seems to be a very narrow and negative understanding of peace --although the elimination of war in its many forms is obviously critical for all life to continue in our totally interconnected world.             
     But for a deeper understanding of peace we need a more inclusive and more spiritual meaning than our English word "peace" usually conveys. And here let us go to an older language than English and discover the ancient Biblical Hebrew word SHALOM and its Arabic derivative word SALAAM. What does the Biblical word for peace really mean? Basically Shalom means the presence on earth of God's peace (not just the human cessation of war or terrorism). And God's peace means God's justice and God's mercy for all God's people (not just some people like me) --but all people, folks very different from me in language and skin color and customs and even in faith. God's justice means my treating everybody else like I want them to treat me. God's peace --God's SHALOM means no downtrodden people, no poor people, anywhere on God's earth. God's peace means harmony --ultimately God's love, real divine --and human love and compassion between all people. And all people are very different.             
     Ultimately peace --shalom, salaam --is a religious word, an all-inclusive word --the opposite of exclusion and separation. Peace and religion both mean God's realm on earth --and religion is God's word for getting it all together --and getting us all together. So peace must necessarily mean interfaith work and interfaith understanding and interfaith appreciation --because interfaith itself means getting it all together.             
     And finally, to bring us back to where we started --it is art, beauty in human art works and in nature --that wakes us up, rivets us, comforts us, demands our attention. Most important of all, it is the arts that offer us a glimpse --a revelation of God's peace that is beyond any definition or dogma. God's peace that is harmony and love at the heart of all reality, the peace that passes all understanding.             
     So that is why we need our lives to be full of the arts, full of beauty. Art is not an extra, an add-on for some lucky people. Art and beauty are an absolute necessity for peace for all the world.

Edited for Shumei website.

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