Raimon Panikkar, ‘apostle of inter-faith dialogue,’ dies

“Overcoming tribal Christology,” Panikkar said, “is the task of third Christian millennium.”

Aug. 31, 2010

A couple of years ago I sat with Raimon Panikkar at the evening meal in his home in the mountain village of Tevertet, Catalunya (Spain), with my Bavarian friend Dr Christiane May-Ropers. In the midst of our meal Raimon received a telephone call. It came in from the Vatican. It was the Pope. As Christiane and I sat with him at table, Raimon and His Holiness discussed the then still-fresh wounds opened up by the Pope’s recent unintended though regrettably inflammatory speech regarding the Prophet Mohammed. It was extraordinary to sit at the meal table while this conversation was going on. It seemed the Holy Father sought Raimon’s assistance resolving this awkward situation in some positive way. His life was like that; offering others what he had in his vast storehouse of wisdom and experience, and of course, from his unequalled experience of interfaith dialogue.

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For many years I had known of Raimon through his written work of course, but it wasn’t until my mentor, the late Dom Bede Griffiths died that Raimon and I became friends and travelled together. I’m grateful, and always will be, for his guidance and encouragement over the years. His courage and depth of knowledge, his ability with languages, his wisdom and insight – all made him a marvellous influence, not just in my life, but in the lives of all he touched, whether personally, or through his books and lectures. I shall miss him.

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And now to this excellent obituary by Joseph Prabhu . . .

Professor Raimon Panikkar, one of the greatest scholars of the 20th century in the areas of comparative religion, theology, and inter-religious dialogue, died at his home in Tavertet, near Barcelona, Spain, Aug. 26. He was 91.

Panikkar taught and lived in the United States from 1966-1987 and was known to generations of students here and around the world through both his lectures and his many books. What they heard and read were the arresting reflections of a multi-dimensional person, who was simultaneously a philosopher, theologian, mystic, priest and poet.

Panikkar was born the son of an Indian Hindu father and a Spanish Catholic mother Nov. 3, 1918. He received a conventional Catholic education at a Jesuit high school in Barcelona before launching his university studies in the natural sciences, philosophy, and theology, first in Barcelona and then in Madrid. Shortly thereafter, the Spanish Civil War broke out, and Panikkar was able to take advantage of his status as the son of a father who was a British citizen to go to the University of Bonn in Germany to continue his studies. When World War II started in 1939, Panikkar returned to Spain and completed the first of his three doctorates, this one in philosophy, at the University of Madrid in 1946.

It was around 1940 that he met Escriva de Balaguer, the founder of Opus Dei, with whom he had a close relationship. It was at Escriva’s urging that he trained for the Catholic priesthood and was ordained in 1946. Panikkar continued to be associated with Opus Dei for about twenty years, breaking effectively with the organization only in the early 1960s. He was tight-lipped about this period of his life, saying only that he did not regret it. It is clear, however, when one compares the Panikkar of the 1940s and the early 1950s with the later Panikkar better known to the world as a pioneer of inter-religious dialogue, that he had moved a long way from his early roots.

In late 1954 when he was already 36, Panikkar visited India, the land of his father, for the first time. It proved to be a watershed, a decisive reorientation of his interests and of his theology.

He had entered a dramatically new world, religious and cultural, from the Catholic Europe of his youth. The transformation was aided by his meetings and close friendship with three monks, who like him were attempting to live and to incarnate the Christian life in Indian, predominantly Hindu and Buddhist forms: Jules Monchanin (1895-1957), Henri Le Saux, also know as Swami Abhishiktananda (1910-1973), and Bede Griffiths, the English Benedictine monk (1906-1993). All four of them, in different ways, discovered and cherished the riches and the deep spiritual wisdom of the Indic traditions, and attempted to live out and express their core Christian convictions in Hindu and Buddhist forms. To some extent this multiple belonging was made possible by their embrace of Advaita, the Indic idea of non-dualism, which sees the deep, often hidden, connections between traditions without in any way minimizing the differences between them.

One of Panikkar’s many striking sentences looking back on his life’s journey asserts: “I left Europe [for India] as a Christian, I discovered I was a Hindu and returned as a Buddhist without ever having ceased to be a Christian.” A wealth of meaning lies in that assertion. Christianity in its historical evolution began as a Jewish tradition and then spread to the Greco-Roman world, acquiring along the way Greek and Roman cultural expressions which have given it a certain form and character. Panikkar, having grown up and having been trained in a traditional Catholic and neo-Thomist environment, had a profound knowledge of, and respect for, that tradition. This knowledge prepared him for discussions with some of the great minds of 20th-century Catholicism: Jean Danielou, Yves Congar, Hans Urs von Balthazar, and others. He was also invited to take part in the Synod of Rome and the Second Vatical Council. But Panikkar did not confuse or conflate historical contingency with spiritual truth. In Hinduism and Buddhism Panikkar found other languages, in addition to Biblical Hebrew, Greek philosophy, and Latin Christianity, to express the core convictions (the kerygma) of the Christian tradition.

That was the main thesis of The Unknown Christ of Hinduism, which Panikkar originally presented as a doctoral thesis to the Lateran University in Rome in 1961, based as it was on a close textual comparison between Thomas Aquinas and Sankara’s interpretation of a canonical Hindu scripture, the Brahma-Sutras. Christ and his teaching are not, so Panikkar argues, the monopoly or exclusive property of Christianity seen as a historical religion. Rather, Christ is the universal symbol of divine-human unity, the human face of God. Christianity approaches Christ in a particular and unique way, informed by its own history and spiritual evolution. But Christ vastly transcends Christianity. Panikkar calls the name “Christ” the “Supername,” in line with St. Paul’s “name above every name” (Phil 2:9), because it is a name that can and must assume other names, like Rama or Krishna or Ishvara.

This theological insight was crucial for Panikkar because it provided the basis of the inter-religious dialogue that he and Abhishiktananda and Bede Griffiths were both advocating and practicing themselves. Far from diluting or in any way watering down core Christian beliefs and practices, such dialogue, in addition to fostering inter-religious understanding and harmony provided an indispensable medium for deepening the Christian faith. Such dialogue provides an insight and entry point into other, non-Christian names and manifestations of Christ. This was particularly important for Panikkar because together with other Asian theologians he saw how historical Christianity had attempted, especially during its colonial periods, to convert Christ into an imperial God, with a license to conquer and triumph over other Gods. This for Panikkar is the challenge of the post-colonial period inaugurated in the mid-to-late twentieth century and continuing into our present and the future. In his words, “To the third Christian millennium is reserved the task of overcoming a tribal Christology by a Christophany which allows Christians to see the work of Christ everywhere, without assuming that they have a better grasp or a monopoly of that Mystery, which has been revealed to them in a unique way.”

Needless-to-say, such striking ideas carefully and rigorously argued and dramatically expressed got the attention of religious thinkers and secular institutions around the world. Panikkar was invited to teach in Rome and then at Harvard (1966-1971) and the University of California, Santa Barbara (1971-1987). He was now, as Leonard Swidler, occupant of the Chair of Catholic Thought at Temple University, called him, “the apostle of inter-faith dialogue and inter-cultural understanding.”

Conversant in a dozen or so languages and fluent in at least six, he traveled tirelessly around the world, lecturing, writing, preaching, and conducting retreats. His famous Easter service in his Santa Barbara days would attract visitors from all corners of the globe. Well before dawn they would climb up the mountain near his home in Montecito, meditate quietly in the darkness once they reached the top, and then salute the sun as it arose over the horizon. Panikkar would bless the elements — air, earth, water and fire — and all the surrounding forms of life — plant, animal, and human — and then celebrate Mass and the Eucharist. It was a profound “cosmotheandric” celebration with the human, cosmic, and divine dimensions of life being affirmed, reverenced, and brought into a deep harmony. The celebration after the formal service at Panikkar’s home resembled in some respects the feast of Pentecost as described in the New Testament, where peoples of many tongues engaged in animated conversation.

At the center of these celebrations, retreats, and lectures stood Panikkar himself and his arresting personality. People who heard or encountered him could not help but be struck by this physically small man who packed a punch and who managed to combine the quiet dignity of a sage, the profundity of a scholar, the depth of a contemplative, and the warmth and charm of a friend in his sparkling personality.

Not surprisingly, universities around the world, Catholic and non-Catholic, invited him to give lectures. To mention just a few among hundreds delivered, he was invited to give the William Noble Lecture at Harvard in 1973, the Thomas Merton Lecture at Columbia in 1982, and the Cardinal Bellarmine Lecture at the University of St. Louis in 1991. The most prestigious invitation, however, came from the University of Edinburgh, where Panikkar delivered the Gifford Lectures in 1989. These have recently been published by Orbis Books as The Rhythm of Being. Panikkar thus joined the select company of William James, Karl Barth, Albert Schweitzer, and Reinhold Niebuhr to mention just a few of the most famous Gifford lecturers. He was in fact the first Indian and the first Asian invited to give these lectures.

Some of Panikkar’s other well-known books are The Vedic Experience; The Intrareligious Dialogue; Myth, Faith, and Hermeneutics; The Silence of God; The Cosmotheandric Experience; and The Invisible Harmony. Jaca Books in Italy is bringing out his collected works (Omnia Opera) in some 30 volumes, and Continuum Books in England and the Untied States is planning an English edition. There is also a helpful Web site www.raimonpanikkar.org.

Ours is a new era in world history, where thanks to globalization and the increasing communication between cultures and religions it is vital that there be a well-developed Catholic theology of religions. Panikkar was one of the pioneering and paradigmatic theologians of this new era. He has left us a rich and many-sided legacy from the liturgical and pastoral to the theological and sapiential. It behooves us who follow him to notice, absorb, and extend that legacy.

[Joseph Prabhu is a professor of philosophy and comparative religion at California State University, Los Angeles.]

The Muslims in the Middle

By WILLIAM DALRYMPLE

Published in The New York Times: August 16, 2010

I first encountered William Dalrymple’s work in his book (1994, Flamingo), “City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi”. Though I’d been travelling to Delhi for many years, this was the first real dip into the culture and history of an amazing and ancient city. Dalrymple’s writing is wonderful: engaging, tactile, earthy and informed. In talking about modern Delhi, he leaves nothing out of its ancient roots, and, as a consequence, brings the whole urban portrait vividly alive. In subsequent visits to this seat of the old Moghul Empire, I have, among other things, been inclined to look more seriously at Sufism – that mystical, intellectual and open-minded dimension of Islam, which may, as Dalrymple opines, be a bridge across from the Christian ‘West’ to the world of Islam, such as can be found at the Nizzam ‘udin Mosque. Authors of William Dalrymple’s calibre come along rarely. His scholarship is underpinned by his lived experience of the subject. He really gets to know the population, and thus builds empathy with their circumstances and possibilities; he even found people whose grandparents were eye witness to the Mutiny of 1857. We should get to know more of what and whom he knows, and about which, because of his grasp of history, he writes with such insightful depth. Indeed, we ignore what Dalrymple and writers like him have to offer, to our disadvantage. In this mid-August article from The New York Times, he argues that the ‘West’ would benefit from more understanding of and dialogue with the peaceful wisdom-teachings and contemporary teachers of Sufism. Based on my own limited reading and small contact with only a few Sufis, I agree, but we don’t want to lose the opportunity. Time, I think, is not on our side.

New Delhi

PRESIDENT OBAMA’S [recent] eloquent endorsement … of a planned Islamic cultural center near the World Trade Center, followed by his apparent retreat the next day, was just one of many paradoxes at the heart of the increasingly impassioned controversy.

We have seen the Anti-Defamation League, an organization dedicated to ending “unjust and unfair discrimination,” seek to discriminate against American Muslims. We have seen Newt Gingrich depict the organization behind the center — the Cordoba Initiative, which is dedicated to “improving Muslim-West relations” and interfaith dialogue — as a “deliberately insulting” and triumphalist force attempting to built a monument to Muslim victory near the site of the twin towers.

Most laughably, we have seen politicians like Rick Lazio, a Republican candidate for New York governor, question whether Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the principal figure behind the project, might have links to “radical organizations.”

The problem with such claims goes far beyond the fate of a mosque in downtown Manhattan. They show a dangerously inadequate understanding of the many divisions, complexities and nuances within the Islamic world — a failure that hugely hampers Western efforts to fight violent Islamic extremism and to reconcile Americans with peaceful adherents of the world’s second-largest religion.

Most of us are perfectly capable of making distinctions within the Christian world. The fact that someone is a Boston Roman Catholic doesn’t mean he’s in league with Irish Republican Army bomb makers, just as not all Orthodox Christians have ties to Serbian war criminals or Southern Baptists to the murderers of abortion doctors.

Yet many of our leaders have a tendency to see the Islamic world as a single, terrifying monolith. Had the George W. Bush administration been more aware of the irreconcilable differences between the Salafist jihadists of Al Qaeda and the secular Baathists of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the United States might never have blundered into a disastrous war, and instead kept its focus on rebuilding post-Taliban Afghanistan while the hearts and minds of the Afghans were still open to persuasion.

Feisal Abdul Rauf of the Cordoba Initiative is one of America’s leading thinkers of Sufism, the mystical form of Islam, which in terms of goals and outlook couldn’t be farther from the violent Wahhabism of the jihadists. His videos and sermons preach love, the remembrance of God (or “zikr”) and reconciliation. His slightly New Agey rhetoric makes him sound, for better or worse, like a Muslim Deepak Chopra. But in the eyes of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, he is an infidel-loving, grave-worshiping apostate; they no doubt regard him as a legitimate target for assassination.

For such moderate, pluralistic Sufi imams are the front line against the most violent forms of Islam. In the most radical parts of the Muslim world, Sufi leaders risk their lives for their tolerant beliefs, every bit as bravely as American troops on the ground in Baghdad and Kabul do. Sufism is the most pluralistic incarnation of Islam — accessible to the learned and the ignorant, the faithful and nonbelievers — and is thus a uniquely valuable bridge between East and West.

The great Sufi saints like the 13th-century Persian poet Rumi held that all existence and all religions were one, all manifestations of the same divine reality. What was important was not the empty ritual of the mosque, church, synagogue or temple, but the striving to understand that divinity can best be reached through the gateway of the human heart: that we all can find paradise within us, if we know where to look. In some ways Sufism, with its emphasis on love rather than judgment, represents the New Testament of Islam.

While the West remains blind to the divisions and distinctions within Islam, the challenge posed by the Sufi vision of the faith is not lost on the extremists. This was shown most violently on July 2, when the Pakistani Taliban organized a double-suicide bombing of the Data Darbar, the largest Sufi shrine in Lahore, Pakistan’s second-largest city. The attack took place on a Thursday night, when the shrine was at its busiest; 42 people were killed and 175 were injured.

This was only the latest in a series of assaults against Pakistan’s Sufis. In May, Peeru’s Cafe in Lahore, a cultural center where I had recently performed with a troupe of Sufi musicians, was bombed in the middle of its annual festival. An important site in a tribal area of the northwest — the tomb of Haji Sahib of Turangzai, a Sufi persecuted under British colonial rule for his social work — has been forcibly turned into a Taliban headquarters. Two shrines near Peshawar, the mausoleum of Bahadar Baba and the shrine of Abu Saeed Baba, have been destroyed by rocket fire.

Symbolically, however, the most devastating Taliban attack occurred last spring at the shrine of the 17th-century poet-saint Rahman Baba, at the foot of the Khyber Pass in northwest Pakistan. For centuries, the complex has been a place for musicians and poets to gather, and Rahman Baba’s Sufi verses had long made him the national poet of the Pashtuns living on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. “I am a lover, and I deal in love,” wrote the saint. “Sow flowers,/ so your surroundings become a garden./ Don’t sow thorns; for they will prick your feet./ We are all one body./ Whoever tortures another, wounds himself.”

THEN, about a decade ago, a Saudi-financed religious school, or madrasa, was built at the end of the path leading to the shrine. Soon its students took it upon themselves to halt what they see as the un-Islamic practices of Rahman Baba’s admirers. When I last visited it in 2003, the shrine-keeper, Tila Mohammed, described how young students were coming regularly to complain that his shrine was a center of idolatry and immorality.

“My family have been singing here for generations,” he told me. “But now these madrasa students come and tell us that what we do is wrong. They tell women to stay at home. This used to be a place where people came to get peace of mind. Now when they come here they just encounter more problems.”

Then, one morning in early March 2009, a group of Pakistani Taliban arrived at the shrine before dawn and placed dynamite packages around the squinches supporting the shrine’s dome. In the ensuing explosion, the mausoleum was destroyed, but at least nobody was killed. The Pakistani Taliban quickly took credit, blaming the shrine’s administrators for allowing women to pray and seek healing there.

The good news is that Sufis, though mild, are also resilient. While the Wahhabis have become dominant in northern Pakistan ever since we chose to finance their fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan, things are different in Sindh Province in southern Pakistan. Sufis are putting up a strong resistance on behalf of the pluralist, composite culture that emerged in the course of a thousand years of cohabitation between Hinduism and Islam.

Last year, when I visited a shrine of the saint Lal Shahbaz Qalandar in the town of Sehwan, I was astonished by the strength and the openness of the feelings against those puritan mullahs who criticize as heresy all homage to Sufi saints.

“I feel that it is my duty to protect both the Sufi saints, just as they have protected me,” one woman told me. “Today in our Pakistan there are so many of these mullahs and Wahhabis who say that to pay respect to the saints in their shrines is heresy. Those hypocrites! They sit there reading their law books and arguing about how long their beards should be, and fail to listen to the true message of the prophet.”

There are many like her; indeed, until recently Sufism was the dominant form of Islam in South Asia. And her point of view shows why the West would do well to view Sufis as natural allies against the extremists. A 2007 study by the RAND Corporation found that Sufis’ open, intellectual interpretation of Islam makes them ideal “partners in the effort to combat Islamist extremism.”

Sufism is an entirely indigenous, deeply rooted resistance movement against violent Islamic radicalism. Whether it can be harnessed to a political end is not clear. But the least we can do is to encourage the Sufis in our own societies. Men like Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf should be embraced as vital allies, and we should have only contempt for those who, through ignorance or political calculation, attempt to conflate them with the extremists.

William Dalrymple is the author, most recently, of “Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India.”

Pakistan floods worse than 2004 tsunami: UN

Tue Aug 10, 2010 (Source: Australian Broadcasting Commission)

The United Nations said the massive floods in Pakistan had affected 13.8 million people and eclipsed the scale of the devastating 2004 tsunami, as anger mounted among survivors.

Every day the floods in Pakistan rage down from the mountains and through the low-land valleys. Millions are homeless, starving and without water or medical help. The scene is one of unimaginable horror. One of the biggest dangers to refugees of all ages is that of cholera; it has always been this way in this part of the world, but during the current monsoon season cholera will certainly take away many.

In the midst of what I see on television and read in the news, my thoughts go back to my ancestors who lived, worked and died in the Cis-Sutlej States of the Punjab, which were then under British protection. My great, great, great grandfather John Conlan was a soldier of the 8th Light Irish Hussars. While on the regimental march from Multan to Ferozpur (Ferozepoor) he contracted cholera and died on 24 March 1818. He is buried along the road in an unmarked grave. He left behind his widow, Ann, and three boys: Thomas (my great, great grandfather), Richard and John jr. His legacy to them was two pounds, seven shillings and sixpence, plus some “prize money” due to him from the capture of the Mahratta Fortress of Hatrass.

Between 1818 and 1854 cholera killed more than 8,500 British soldiers. In those days soldiers said that it was the disease rather than enemy fire that killed their comrades. Not until the beginning of the twentieth century was cholera checked to some degree. The desperation of cholera victims and their families is still with us; made more visible by nightly television images from Pakistan. Unless the world takes immediate and more effective steps to help, many more than the current estimated 1,600 dead will face certain death.

(AFP) The Pakistani government and UN officials have appealed for more urgent relief efforts to cope with the worst floods in more than 80 years, with President Asif Ali Zardari due to return home after a heavily criticised European tour.

The entire north-western Swat valley, where Pakistan fought a major campaign to flush out Taliban insurgents last year, was cut off at the weekend as were parts of the country’s breadbasket in Punjab and Sindh.

“This disaster is worse than the tsunami, the 2005 Pakistan earthquake and the Haiti earthquake,” Maurizio Giuliano, a spokesman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), said.

He said the 13.8 million affected outstripped the more than 3 million hit by the 2005 earthquake, 5 million in the tsunami and the 3 million affected by the Haiti earthquake.

The United Nations estimates 1,600 people have died in Pakistan’s floods. About 220,000 were killed by the December 26, 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia.

Martin Mogwanja, the UN humanitarian coordinator in Pakistan, called on relief operations “to be massively scaled up”.

“Millions of people have suffered and still there is more rain and further losses are feared. I appeal to the world to help us,” prime minister Yousuf Raza Gilani told reporters.

Foreign donors including the United States have pledged tens of millions of dollars in aid but, on the ground, Islamic charities with suspected extremist links have been far more visible in the relief effort than the government.

Pakistan’s meteorological office forecast only scattered rain in the next 24 hours and said the intensity of monsoon showers was lessening.

But with floods sweeping south, thousands of people are fleeing into cities to seek safety as heavy rains continued to lash the province of Sindh and water levels rose further in the swollen Indus river.

Mr Zardari has spent August in France and Britain, courting massive criticism from the political opposition and intelligentsia for not returning at a time of national disaster. One protester threw a shoe at him in England.

The United Nations estimated that up to 500,000 people are homeless and 1.4 million acres of agricultural land destroyed in central Punjab province, but said damage was worst in the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

OCHA spokesman Mr Giuliano said that even donkeys were being used to access parts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa inaccessible by other means and warned that the risk of water-borne diseases persisted.

Authorities in the Punjab district of Muzaffargarh issued a red alert and ordered people to evacuate as water entered the city from breaches in canals.

“The situation is very serious. We are totally helpless. That’s why we asked people to move to a safer place,” local official Farasat Iqbal told AFP.

An overloaded army boat evacuating people in the Punjab town of Jampur capsized Sunday and 30 people are missing, said a local official.

At least 14 people, including three children, were killed as flash floods destroyed homes in the the northwestern Hangu district. In the lawless Khyber district on the Afghan border, 150 houses were destroyed in floods.

BANGLADESH: New water filter to combat arsenic poisoning

DHAKA, (IRIN) – An innovative, locally designed arsenic filter, known as the Sono filter, now offers hope for millions who lack access to safe drinking water in Bangladesh.

One year after returning from the Governor General Lord Auckland’s ‘Mission to Herat’ in Afghanistan, Thomas Conlan, in 1841, is promoted to Superintendent of the Abkari Establishment (abkari = excise duties) in Barisal near Dacca (now Dakha – capital of Bangladesh), then in East Bengal as part and parcel of the British empire. The whole of East Bengal generally was considered as underdeveloped and provincial, in stark contrast to the cosmopolitan power and money that radiated out of Calcutta and its environs. Yet Thomas and Ellen, married since 1836, found their five years in this modest town with its surrounding natural beauty left a deep, formative impress. Thomas jr. (b.28 Nov 1837) spent his pre-school years here. Ellen gave birth to their daughters Emily (1841-1844) and Rose (1842-1849).

Barisal was lush green, and, with a small population, absolutely pristine. Nature, everywhere having no clear-cut boundaries between town and village, invaded every field, every open space, every alley between the houses.

And there was water everywhere. Barisal is located at the southern end of Bangladesh, which is the area where the country’s three major rivers, the Brahmaputra-Jamuna, the Ganges-Padma and the Meghna combine to empty into the Bay of Bengal. This massive body of water drains through a system of interlinking smaller rivers, spill-channels, canals, and in those days, especially during the monsoons, there was water everywhere.

The most important geographical element of Bangladesh is its rivers, which is not matched elsewhere in the subcontinent. Not only do the rivers overflow during the rainy season, but virtually any depression (and this is especially true of Barisal and other coastal areas of Bengal) in the ground becomes a part of a vast watery landscape in which a great number of villages throughout the delta stand out as islands in the surrounding water.

Though only discovered as an issue in 1993, probably since time immemorial, there has been a problem with the water in this region. Over the years, thanks to my family history there, and, in 1993 coming to know of Bangladesh’s issues with arsenic poisoning, I have taken an interest in what is being done and may be done to help the poor people who cannot buy bottled water.

Occurring naturally in ground water in trace amounts, arsenic can have serious health implications for those who ingest it over extended periods.

“We are enthusiastically watching this new filter,” said Mohammad Ibrahim, executive engineer for ground water at the government’s Department of Public Health Engineering (DPHE) in the capital, Dhaka.

Arsenic can be found to varying degrees in ground water in 63 of the country’s 64 districts, Ibrahim said, estimating that some 16 percent of the country’s population – 23 million Bangladeshis – currently lacked access to safe drinking water.

Safe drinking water – a long-standing problem

From about 1960-1975, due to contaminated water supplies, diarrhoea was the most dreaded disease in Bangladesh, claiming the lives of over 100,000 children under five annually.

To address this, nearly 7.5 million tube-wells were installed throughout the country in the 1970s and 1980s by the DPHE and a string of non-governmental organisations (NGOs). By 1990 over 95 percent of the population lived within 100 yards of a tube-well – up from a meagre 2 percent in 1970, according to the DPHE.

Today there are some 10 million tube wells in Bangladesh but many have become a source of anxiety: Surveys conducted in the 1990s revealed that around 70 million people (out of Bangladesh’s population of over 150 million) were at risk of arsenic poisoning from drinking water from these tube wells.

Arsenic-contaminated ground water

The DPHE first detected arsenic-contaminated ground water in 1993 in several southern districts of Bangladesh.

The latest government estimates suggest there is arsenic contamination in at least 155 sub-districts in 46 out of the country’s 64 districts.

The World Health Organization’s (WHO) acceptable level of arsenic in drinking water is 0.05 mg/L for Bangladesh, while the standard for Europe and North America is 0.01 mg/L.

A 1998 British Geological Survey study of tube-wells in 61 districts in Bangladesh, revealed that 46 percent contained arsenic above 0.010 mg/L (milligrams per litre) and 27 percent above 0.050 mg/L.

It was estimated at the time that the number of people exposed to arsenic concentrations above 0.05 mg/L was 28-35 million and the number of those exposed to over 0.01 mg/L was 46-57 million.

Toxic effects

“Arsenic is a poison. The lethal dose for humans is 125 milligrammes. It is four times as poisonous as mercury,” said Abdal Ahmed, an associate professor at Dhaka’s Mymensingh Medical College.

Drinking arsenic-rich water over a long period can lead to arsenicosis, resulting in various health conditions, including skin problems (such as changes in skin colour and hard patches on the palms and soles of the feet), skin cancer, cancers of the bladder, kidney and lung; and diseases of the blood vessels in the legs and feet.

Symptoms of chronic arsenic poisoning can take 5-15 years to reveal themselves depending upon the amount of arsenic ingested.

According to a recent field study conducted jointly by the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC), the world’s largest NGO, and the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Diseases and Research, Bangladesh, 25-77 million people in Bangladesh are today ingesting dangerously high levels of arsenic in their drinking water.

Current options for providing safe drinking-water in Bangladesh, include: obtaining low-arsenic groundwater by accessing safe shallow groundwater or deeper aquifers (deeper than 200 metres); rain water harvesting; pond-sand-filtration; household chemical treatment; and piped water from safe or treated sources.

However, only the Sono filter provides a truly sustainable solution to the problem.

The Sono filter

Invented [and developed by a Bangladeshi scientist and his brother] in 2006, the Sono arsenic filter is a simple device that uses a “composite iron matrix” that can be manufactured locally from cast iron turnings, along with readily available river sand, wood charcoal, wet brick chips and two buckets.

The top bucket is filled with locally available coarse river sand and a composite iron matrix. The sand filters coarse particles and controls the flow of the water, while the iron removes inorganic arsenic. The water then flows into a second bucket where it again filters through coarse river sand, then through wood charcoal to remove other contaminants, and finally through fine river sand and wet brick chips to remove fine particles and stabilise water flow.

The filter’s humble housing in a stack of two buckets belies its power to change lives: It can remove 98 percent of the arsenic in water, as well as other organic, bacterial and mineral impurities.

Tested by the US National Academy of Engineering in 2006, the Sono filter meets WHO and Bangladesh standards.

Patients drinking the filtered water for two years show reduced levels of arsenical melanosis (skin pigment changes), with significant improvement in their health, said Abul Hussam, the Bangladeshi developer of the filter, and an associate professor at George Mason University.

No new cases of arsenicosis were detected in Bangladesh where people were using the filters, even in the worst contamination areas, Hussam said.

Each filter costs US$35 and produces 20-30 litres of clean water per hour for one to two families.

To date, some 32,500 filters have been distributed – two-thirds for free, with plans now under way to deliver more than 10,000 to UNICEF and other NGOs.

“These filters can last for at least five years with simple maintenance and producing no toxic waste. We estimate that about a billion litres of water has been consumed from these filters and continues to be used daily,” Hussam said.

According to the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), arsenic contamination of the water remains widespread in Bangladesh, with long-term exposure resulting in serious health problems.

There are an estimated 40,000 cases of severe arsenic poisoning in Bangladesh today, with public health experts warning that there will be more than 2.5 million cases in the next 50 years if the problem is not addressed properly.

Drinking arsenic-free water is the only way to prevent the disease, UNICEF says.

From IRIN – humanitarian news and analysis

a project of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs

As seen on SBS news television 2 August 2010 (Australia): www.sbsb.news.com.au

This is no Nato game but Pakistan’s proxy war with its brother in the south

The Taliban’s refusal to talk underlines the west’s irrelevance in Afghanistan: only the regional players can deliver lasting peace

William Dalrymple

The Guardian Newspaper, Thursday 1 July 2010

On a hot morning in May 1836 Thomas and Ellen Conlan were married in Delhi, the old capital of the dying Moghul Empire. In the following year Ellen gave birth to Thomas jr. while the Shah of Persia, the Russians and the British were all jostling for influence in the Afghanistan, and so, ‘The Great Game’ (as Kipling named the intrigue) was under way.

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In April 1838 John McNeill, the British agent in Herat, Afghanistan wrote to the Governor General in British India demanding that he despatch an expeditionary force to the Persian Gulf, as a means of compelling the Shah of Persia to listen to British representations concerning Russian expansionism in the region. Subsequently the British forces occupy the island of Kharak, north west of Bushire. They receive dispatches from Lord Palmerston that Persia’s Shah Mohammed’s attack on Herat in Afghanistan is seen as a hostile act. As a consequence in April 1838 Colonel Stoddard is sent to Herat with a message for the Shah, who is now alarmed by how seriously his move against Herat is viewed by the British. John McNeill proceeds to the Persian camp and draws up a draft agreement with the Persians, which the Russian succeed in having the Persian Shah not ratify and the siege continues.

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On the 1st November 1838 Governor General Lord Auckland send as expedition in full march, commonly called the ‘Mission to Herat’ (thus ensued the First Anglo-Afghan War 1839-1842). One of the Mission’s interpreters was the Government Collector at Haupper (contemporary Hapur 65 km east of Delhi), Thomas Conlan, for he had facility with no less than five languages of the region. He remained with the adventure till August 1840 whereupon he returned to Haupper in India; to Ellen and his small son Thomas Jr. (later to become Vice Chancellor of the University of Allahabad and Barrister at the High Court in Allahabad). Such were the circumstances surrounding the family of my great, great grandfather and grandmother. As a consequence the tales and history of ‘The Great Game‘ has been of interest to me for much of my life.

The following essay, which appeared in The Guardian, by William Dalrymple is a wonderful, though salutary example of what knowledge of history and respect for the local tribal aspirations in this region could mean in terms of the Western world’s intentions of bringing peace and stability to an increasingly volatile and unpredictable region.

Last month I had a private dinner in Kabul with Amrullah Saleh, who at that time was President Hamid Karzai’s security chief. Saleh is a tough, burly and intimidating Tajik with a piercing, unblinking stare, who rose to prominence as a mujahideen protege of Ahmed Shah Massood, the legendary Lion of the Panjshir.

Under Massood, Saleh was one of the leaders of the anti-Taliban forces in Afghanistan before 9/11, and he brought these credentials to his job after the US conquest, hunting down and interrogating any Taliban he could find, with little regard for notions of human rights. The Taliban and their backers in Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI, regarded him as their fiercest enemy – something he was enormously proud of – and at dinner he spoke at length of his frustration with the ineffectiveness of Karzai’s government in taking the fight to the Taliban, and the degree to which the ISI was still managing to aid their pocket insurgents in Waziristan and Baluchistan.

It is a measure of how little the west still understands the conflict in Afghanistan that news of Saleh’s sacking last month merited so much less attention than last week’s sacking of General Stanley McChrystal. McChrystal’s departure reflects no important alteration in strategy, but the sacking of Saleh gave notice of a major and ominous change of direction by Karzai. As Bruce Riedel, Obama’s Afpak adviser, said when the news broke: “Karzai’s decision to sack Saleh and [Hanif] Atmar [the head of the interior ministry] has worried me more than any other development, because it means that Karzai is already planning for a post-American Afghanistan.”

Since then the nature of Karzai’s plans have become clearer: it has emerged that the head of the ISI, Lieutenant General Ahmad Shuja Pasha, has secretly been visiting Karzai; on Monday General Kayani, the head of the Pakistani army, will arrive in Kabul, presumably to confirm whatever deal has been agreed. It seems the Pakistanis are encouraging an accommodation between Karzai and the ISI-sponsored jihadi network of Sirajuddin Haqqani, which would give over much of the Pashtun south to Haqqani but preserve Karzai in power in Kabul. The US has been party to none of this, and administration officials are apparently surprised and alarmed.

The problem remains that we continue to view the situation in Afghanistan through western eyes, as a battle between the US and Nato against al-Qaida and the Taliban – an impression William Hague’s speech yesterday underlined. But this has long ceased to be the main issue, and British troops are now caught up in a complex local and regional conflict that has completely changed the nature of the war.

Internally, the war is viewed primarily as a Pashtun rebellion against a Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara-dominated regime, which has only a fig leaf of Pashtun window-dressing in the person of Karzai. For although Karzai is a Pashtun, under his watch Nato installed the Northern Alliance in Kabul and drove out of power Afghanistan’s Pashtun majority.

In this way we unwittingly took sides in the Afghan civil war that began in the 1970s – siding with the north against the south, the town against the country, secularism against Islam, and the Tajiks against the Pashtuns. We installed a government and trained up an army that in many ways discriminated against the Pashtun majority, and whose top-down constitution allowed for little federalism or regional representation. No matter how much western liberals may dislike the Taliban, they are in many ways the authentic voice of rural Pashtun conservatism, whose wishes are ignored by the government in Kabul and who are largely excluded from power.

Externally the war has now turned, like Kashmir, into an Indo-Pak proxy war in which Nato is really a bit player. Under Karzai, India has established increasing political and economic influence in Afghanistan, opened four regional consulates and provided reconstruction assistance amounting to about $662m. The Pakistani military establishment, already terrified of India turning into a new economic superpower, has always believed it would be suicide to accept an Indian presence in what they regard as their strategic Afghan backyard, and is completely paranoid about the still small Indian presence, rather as the British used to feel about Russians in Afghanistan in the days of the Great Game.

According to Indian diplomatic sources there are still less than 3,600 Indians in Afghanistan, almost all of them businessmen and contract workers; there are only 10 Indian diplomatic officers as opposed to nearly 150 in the UK embassy. Yet The horror of being squeezed in an Indian nutcracker has led the ISI to risk its internal security and coherence – as well as Pakistan’s relationship with its main strategic ally, the US – in order to keep the Taliban in play and its leadership under watch and ISI patronage in Quetta. Indeed the degree to which the ISI has been controlling the Afghan Taliban has only just emerged. A report by Matt Waldman of the Carr Centre for Human Rights at Harvard, based on interviews with 10 former Taliban commanders, documented how the ISI “orchestrates, sustains and strongly influences” the Taliban, and that the ISI are even “represented as participants or observers on the Taliban supreme leadership council, the Quetta Shura”.

Karzai’s new deal with the Pakistanis, and his obvious intention to try to reach some accommodation with the Haqqani wing of the Taliban through Pakistan’s mediation, therefore represents a major strategic victory for the Pakistani military and a serious diplomatic defeat for India – though it remains to be seen if the ISI really can deliver the Taliban, who today were proclaiming their unwillingness to negotiate with Karzai. It also remains to be seen whether the Pakistani military can defend their own country from the jihadi Frankenstein’s monster they have created.

This dangerous new situation does offer some opportunities. Until now India, relishing its ever-growing international status, has understandably and angrily resisted any linkage between an Afghan settlement and Indo-Pak peace, which would involve finding a final agreement on Kashmir. Yet the linkage is already there, and there are many clear benefits for India if it is prepared to accept ground realities and negotiate.

The stage is now open for a deal whereby India could agree to minimise its presence in Afghanistan – which it could accept as Pakistan’s sphere of influence – in return for Pakistan withdrawing its longstanding sponsorship of the Kashmir jihad, which it could accept as India’s domain. To satisfy Nato, an undertaking by Pakistan to drive al-Qaida from the region would also need to be included.

Such a deal would certainly be difficult to sell domestically. There would be strong resistance by the many hawks in both India and Pakistan. Yet such an understanding would be the best and possibly only hope for a regional peace that might allow Afghans, Kashmiris, Pakistanis and Indians some chance of a stable future and to concentrate on the regional issues that really matter – feeding and educating the largest undernourished population in the world.

The truth is that a Nato diplomatic offensive aimed at selling this solution is likely to have a far more positive effect than any amount of counterproductive military surges and drone strikes. For in calming the dangerous paranoia of the Pakistan military lies the only realistic chance of regional peace – and the war is likely to continue until the ISI can be persuaded that its own jihadis are a far bigger threat to Pakistan than that posed by India, its South Asian big brother over its border.

1. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

Five leadership secrets of the Trappist monk

In the 07/20/2010 issue of the “Washington Post.”

Over the last thirty years I have had the good fortune to have visited and stayed in various monastic communities in Australia, the USA, the UK, Thailand, Nepal, India and Tibet. My monastic friends have come from such communities as: New Norcia’s Benedictine Monastery in Western Australia, St Benedict’s Monastery at Arcadia near Sydney, The Trappist (Cistercian) communities at Snowmass, Colorado and at Gethsemane Abbey in Kentucky, Camaldolese hermitages in Arezzo, Italy, at Big Sur, California and at the late Bede Griffiths’ ashram at Shantivanam, near Trichy in South India. I am an honorary member of ancient Dhe-Tsang Buddhist monastery in the remote Gyalrong Region of Eastern Tibet, and have completed a month-long meditation retreat at Kopan Buddhist monastery in the mountains around Kathmandu, Nepal. As a young man I sat in vipassana meditation at Suan Mokkh Forest Monastery at Surat Thani in Thailand, and at Bodhinyana Forest Monastery in the hills around Perth. I often have stayed with the yogi-monks at the Divine Life ashram in Rishikesh on the River Ganges. During the years I gave lectures on the Western Contemplative tradition in Dharamsala, in the Himalayas I was guest of the Tibetan communities at the Nechung and Namgyal Monasteries, and at Geden Choeling Nunnery.

I have learned a number of lessons from the monks and nuns who live this way – according to the Rules as set by their various founders. Though living a far less ‘active’ life than me, I can say that the values and practices that inspire, underpin and motivate their lives have informed much of what I do and how I do it – and above all how I imagine the type of leadership I offer – to myself and others. Stephen Martin, who wrote the following article in the Washington Post, succinctly enumerates and describes five ‘secrets’ that point to their success as members of communities that have thrived, somewhere in the world, continuously for many centuries.

Stephen Martin, who explores leadership as a speechwriter and as a business columnist for the Raleigh (N.C.) News & Observer, has written for America, Commonweal and U.S. News & World Report.

Trappist monks live apart from the world. But their rich and ancient traditions also offer vital lessons on leadership for those of us living in it. The Roman Catholic order, founded in Citeaux, France, has practiced prayer nonstop for nearly a thousand years. Responsible for supporting themselves, they have been entrepreneurs for just as long.

As times and market conditions have changed, Trappists have kept up by reinventing their businesses continually. Since the founding of Mepkin Abbey near Charleston, S.C., in 1949, for example, the monks there have sold cinnamon buns, ventured into logging, run a large egg farm and, most recently, started selling native plants. How have Trappists thrived through the centuries? Here are five of their secrets:

1.Get (really) disciplined. As in waking up at 3 a.m. every day for the rest of your life. That’s when Trappists rise for Vigils, their first community prayer of the day. They will gather for worship five more times before turning in at 8 p.m. In between, they work, study and pray some more. Their schedule almost never varies. Their meals rarely change. They talk as little as possible. Everything about their lives is ordered toward their mission of praising God.

On the surface, this routine seems like a soul-killing exercise in boredom. But tremendous focus paves their path to salvation. “The monk has a feel for the stark and the spare,” writes Michael Downey in his book, Trappist. “Fasting, abstinence, and keeping vigil are disciplines embraced so as to stay alert, awake for the coming of God.”

2.Throw away the key . At Holy Cross Abbey in Berryville, Va., where I recently made a weekend retreat, the doors to the guest rooms lock only from the inside. When you go out, there’s no way to secure your laptop or Blackberry or car keys. It’s a rather discomfiting reminder of what makes the Trappist world go round: trust, in God and your brothers. Spiritual growth doesn’t happen when we’re holding back or playing defense. It takes openness.

“Anytime you get put together with 15 or 20 people you don’t know, you’ll find things about them that are objectionable, and they’ll find them about you,” said Daniel DeVoe, the guest master at Holy Cross Abbey who is seriously thinking of becoming a Trappist himself. The trick is learning to appreciate the strengths of others, to give them the benefit of the doubt, to acknowledge your own shortcomings and work to fix them. It’s all about building trust, the ancient glue that, against all odds, holds together monastic organizations to this day.

3.Know your customer. During a retreat several years ago at Mepkin Abbey, I found myself alone in the gift shop with Brother Stephen, an elderly, startlingly fit, lifelong monk. He rang up a few items, swiped my credit card and asked how I was doing. I asked customers the same thing all the time when I clerked at a grocery store in high school. Unlike me, however, he actually cared about the answer.

I confessed, frankly, to being tired with a busy job, grad school, a young son and another child on the way. There wasn’t a lot of time for prayer, which was what I probably needed most. He nodded and remarked that perhaps helping raise my family was a form of prayer in itself. We talked for another 10 minutes. More insights, tailored just for me, followed — and I shouldn’t have been surprised.

As Michael Downey explains, the work of monks “is not to be understood primarily as a product for consumers in a marketplace. …The fruits of the monk’s labor are sold as a means of livelihood, but they are sold to persons, real people with deep needs, not bottom-line consumers.”

4.Shut up. A monk’s life is a study in humility. It’s about setting aside personal plans and ambitions for the good of the community, saying goodbye to worldly pleasures and doing highly repetitive work with few tangible rewards. It’s a daily exercise in probing your flaws and coming to terms with your own insignificance. This adds up to a perpetual assault on pride, and it starts with quieting down and listening to what your brothers have to say.

“We’re all so impressed by what we know,” said DeVoe, the Holy Cross guest master. But rather than overestimating our own abilities, he said, real knowledge comes from paying attention to those around us. Monks have a longstanding tradition of turning to spiritual directors for guidance in the contemplative life. The feedback they get gives them a better sense of their strengths and weaknesses and serves as a spark for change. “You learn things about yourself that you wouldn’t know otherwise,” DeVoe said.

5.Live in the margins. In his book Leaders Make the Future, futurist Bob Johansen notes that “true innovations are likely to come from the margins that are stretched, rather than from the mainstream.”

Trappists make their home in the margins. They labor in obscurity, their chosen path makes little sense to most people, and they’re criticized, sometimes even by fellow Christians, for closeting themselves away when they could be out in the world helping people with urgent problems. They have Web sites and use e-mail judiciously, but they take care not to swamp themselves with information and distraction. They remain, in other words, as counter-cultural as ever, and therein is their strength.

Over the centuries, as Downey writes, monasteries around the world (and not just Trappist ones) have served as “renowned centers of peace and refuge, the focal points of culture and education.” That’s surely because they have stood beside the mainstream and observed it carefully but never immersed themselves in it. Their perspective is always a bit out of step with the times and refreshingly original as a result.

“The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men,” Thomas Merton, America’s most renowned Trappist monk, wrote in his landmark autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain.

More than 60 years since its publication, and centuries since their founding, Trappists still go their own way, focused and unhurried, free of the need for the world’s approval. By training, they’re too modest to say their experience with leadership can teach us anything, but we’d be wise to learn all we can from them anyway.

If you wish to have more information about Meath Conlan’s spiritual tours to India and beyond, please view my TOURS page here, or email Meath at: meath@diversejourneys.com

FRIENDSHIP IN AN AGE OF ECONOMICS

By: Todd May, in The New York Times

Todd May is Professor of philosophy at Clemson University. He is the author 10 books, including “The Philosophy of Foucault” and “Death,” and is at work on a book about friendship in the contemporary period.

My old friend Dom Bede Griffiths in the 1970s communicated with two of his closest friends, Martyn Skinner and Hugh Waterman, how lonely he had become. He clung to their friendship, as they were probably the only people who had a real insight into his heart. He said that “apart from you two I have very few friends left now – so many have died and others have ceased to write. Your letters are so full of feeling and make me feel one with you more perhaps than ever before.” in Shirley du Boulay’s (1998) book, “Beyond the Darkness: A Biography of Bede Griffiths,” Rider, UK. p. 151

This little insight into the character of my old friend forms the backdrop to this article in the New York Times, by Todd May. It was because I enjoyed such a refined quality of friendship with Bede over many years that May’s article drew me in contemplation of friendship generally, something which for most of us, if we are graced with it in its true form, remains a mystery; something that we value and are grateful for in whatever measure it is given to us, yet we can hardly fathom as to why we have been so privileged by it. Now for Todd May’s essay:

When I was 17 years old, I had the honor of being the youngest person in the history of New York Hospital to undergo surgery for a herniated disc. This was at a time in which operations like this kept people in the hospital for over a week. The day after my surgery, I awoke to find a friend of mine sitting in a chair across from my bed. I don’t remember much about his visit. I am sure I was too sedated to say much. But I will not forget that he visited me on that day, and sat there for I know not how long, while my humanity was in the care of a morphine drip.We benefit from our close friendships, but they are not a matter of calculable gain and loss. While we draw pleasure from them, they are not a matter solely of consuming pleasure.

The official discourses of our relations with one another do not have much to say about the afternoon my friend spent with me. Our age, what we might call the age of economics, is in thrall to two types of relationships which reflect the lives we are encouraged to lead. There are consumer relationships, those that we participate in for the pleasure they bring us. And there are entrepreneurial relationships, those that we invest in hoping they will bring us some return. In a time in which the discourse of economics seeks to hold us in its grip, this should come as no surprise.

The encouragement toward relationships of consumption is nowhere more prominently on display than in reality television. Jon and Kate, the cast of “Real World,” the Kardashians, and their kin across the spectrum conduct their lives for our entertainment. It is available to us in turn to respond in a minor key by displaying our own relationships on YouTube. Or, barring that, we can collect friends like shoes or baseball cards on Facebook.

Entrepreneurial relationships have, in some sense, always been with us. Using people for one’s ends is not a novel practice. It has gained momentum, however, as the reduction of governmental support has diminished social solidarity and the rise of finance capitalism has stressed investment over production. The economic fruits of the latter have lately been with us, but the interpersonal ones, while more persistent, remain veiled. Where nothing is produced except personal gain, relationships come loose from their social moorings.

Aristotle thought that there were three types of friendship: those of pleasure, those of usefulness, and true friendship. In friendships of pleasure, “it is not for their character that men love ready-witted people, but because they find them pleasant.” In the latter, “those who love each other for their utility do not love each other for themselves but in virtue of some good which they get from each other.” For him, the first is characteristic of the young, who are focused on momentary enjoyment, while the second is often the province of the old, who need assistance to cope with their frailty. What the rise of recent public rhetoric and practice has accomplished is to cast the first two in economic terms while forgetting about the third.

In our lives, however, few of us have entirely forgotten about the third ­ true friendship. We may not define it as Aristotle did ­ friendship among the already virtuous ­ but we live it in our own way nonetheless. Our close friendships stand as a challenge to the tenor of our times.

Conversely, our times challenge those friendships. This is why we must reflect on friendship; so that it doesn’t slip away from us under the pressure of a dominant economic discourse. We are all, and always, creatures of our time. In the case of friendship, we must push back against that time if we are to sustain what, for many of us, are among the most important elements of our lives. It is those elements that allow us to sit by the bedside of a friend: not because we know it is worth it, but because the question of worth does not even arise.Friendships follow a rhythm that is distinct from that of either consumer or entrepreneurial relationships. This is at once their deepest and most fragile characteristic.

There is much that might be said about friendships. They allow us to see ourselves from the perspective of another. They open up new interests or deepen current ones. They offer us support during difficult periods in our lives. The aspect of friendship that I would like to focus on is its non-economic character. Although we benefit from our close friendships, these friendships are not a matter of calculable gain and loss. While we draw pleasure from them, they are not a matter solely of consuming pleasure. And while the time we spend with our friends and the favors we do for them are often reciprocated in an informal way, we do not spend that time or offer those favors in view of the reciprocation that might ensue.

Friendships follow a rhythm that is distinct from that of either consumer or entrepreneurial relationships. This is at once their deepest and most fragile characteristic. Consumer pleasures are transient. They engulf us for a short period and then they fade, like a drug. That is why they often need to be renewed periodically. Entrepreneurship, when successful, leads to the victory of personal gain. We cultivate a colleague in the field or a contact outside of it in the hope that it will advance our career or enhance our status. When it does, we feel a sense of personal success. In both cases, there is the enjoyment of what comes to us through the medium of other human beings.

Friendships worthy of the name are different. Their rhythm lies not in what they bring to us, but rather in what we immerse ourselves in. To be a friend is to step into the stream of another’s life. It is, while not neglecting my own life, to take pleasure in another’s pleasure, and to share their pain as partly my own. The borders of my life, while not entirely erased, become less clear than they might be. Rather than the rhythm of pleasure followed by emptiness, or that of investment and then profit, friendships follow a rhythm that is at once subtler and more persistent. This rhythm is subtler because it often (although not always) lacks the mark of a consumed pleasure or a successful investment. But even so, it remains there, part of the ground of our lives that lies both within us and without.

To be this ground, friendships have a relation to time that is foreign to an economic orientation. Consumer relationships are focused on the momentary present. It is what brings immediate pleasure that matters. Entrepreneurial relationships have more to do with the future. How I act toward others is determined by what they might do for me down the road. Friendships, although lived in the present and assumed to continue into the future, also have a deeper tie to the past than either of these. Past time is sedimented in a friendship. It accretes over the hours and days friends spend together, forming the foundation upon which the character of a relationship is built. This sedimentation need not be a happy one. Shared experience, not just common amusement or advancement, is the ground of friendship.

Of course, to have friendships like this, one must be prepared to take up the past as a ground for friendship. This ground does not come to us, ready-made. We must make it our own. And this, perhaps, is the contemporary lesson we can draw from Aristotle’s view that true friendship requires virtuous partners, that “perfect friendship is the friendship of men who are good.” If we are to have friends, then we must be willing to approach some among our relationships as offering an invitation to build something outside the scope of our own desires. We must be willing to forgo pleasure or usefulness for something that emerges not within but between one of us and another.

We might say of friendships that they are a matter not of diversion or of return but of meaning. They render us vulnerable, and in doing so they add dimensions of significance to our lives that can only arise from being, in each case, friends with this or that particular individual, a party to this or that particular life.

It is precisely this non-economic character that is threatened in a society in which each of us is thrown upon his or her resources and offered only the bywords of ownership, shopping, competition, and growth. It is threatened when we are encouraged to look upon those around us as the stuff of our current enjoyment or our future advantage. It is threatened when we are led to believe that friendships without a recognizable gain are, in the economic sense, irrational. Friendships are not without why, perhaps, but they are certainly without that particular why.

In turn, however, it is friendship that allows us to see that there is more than what the prevalent neoliberal discourse places before us as our possibilities. In a world often ruled by the dollar and what it can buy, friendship, like love, opens other vistas. The critic John Berger once said of one of his friendships, “We were not somewhere between success and failure; we were elsewhere.” To be able to sit by the bed of another, watching him sleep, waiting for nothing else, is to understand where else we might be.

THE WAITING CITY – MOVIE REVIEW

BY ANTHONYMORRIS ON JUL 09 2010.

SOURCE: http://www.thevine.com.au/entertainment/movie-reviews/the-waiting-city-_-movie-review20100709.aspx

I saw this new movie reviewed on SBS television tonight, and, as it has to do with Kolkatta (Calcutta) in India, I know there are many visitors who would like to have the information. I’ve chosen this review by Anthony Morris. I was in Kolkatta with the late Mother Teresa and her sisters in the 1980’s, so many of the views of this sprawling city of over 20 million come back to me very palpably. Diverse Journeys has a special “Following The Buddha” spiritual tour during February 2011 in North India – and it starts in Kolkatta.

It’s easy to create a movie couple that shouldn’t be together: just check out any Hollywood action blockbuster. The trick is to create a couple that audiences can believe would be together even though it’s obvious they don’t fit. In that department – and just about every other – The Waiting City turns out to be a resounding success.

It’s obvious from the moment they arrive in Calcutta to collect their adopted child that Ben (Joel Edgerton) and Fiona (Radha Mitchell) aren’t on the same page. Ben is a mellow musician-turned-producer type who knows the terrain; Fiona is an uptight lawyer who spends most of her time on the phone and laptop trying to conduct a case back in Australia.

No-one actually comes out and says this child is a last-ditch attempt to keep their relationship alive, but when the adoption agency starts throwing up delays – leaving the pair of them with not much to do but spend time with each other – it doesn’t take long to figure out that they have more than a few issues ticking away.

Soon Fiona’s laptop goes out the window, Ben starts getting friendly with a backpacker (Isabel Lucas) he knows from his musician days, and why is what should be a simple and straightforward adoption procedure taking so long anyway?

One of the big benefits of setting what is basically a two-person drama in India is that there’s an awful lot to look at in the background, and this film takes full advantage of its many stunning locations. Fortunately Ben and Fiona do have perfectly good reasons for wanting to have a look around (especially when they decide to visit the orphanage where their child came from) so things never quite slip over into travel documentary territory. More importantly, the constant tension between the celebrations of spirituality going on around them (the film is set during the Durga Puja, when Calcutta celebrates the Hindu goddess Durga) and Fiona’s religion-free approach to life becomes increasingly important as the story progresses.

Both Mitchell and Edgerton shine in very different roles, giving what could have easily been clichéd characters (seriously, they’re playing a hard-nosed professional woman and her slacker husband) real emotional depth. Whatever their character flaws, there’s always a solid sense of connection between them, and it makes the slow unravelling of their relationship (just at the moment when a third person is going to be relying on them) all the more painful to watch.

The final twenty minutes drag a little – mostly because after we reach what’s been built up as the story’s climax there’s another development in store – but the many, many powerful moments beforehand more than make up for it. 2010 is shaping up to be yet another bumper year for Australian film, and The Waiting City should be a big part of that.

The Waiting City opens in cinemas nationally in Australia on Thursday, July 15.

“Sometimes an experience can break suddenly into our lives and upset their normal pattern and we have to begin to adjust ourselves to a new kind of existence …”

Bede Griffiths, The Golden String, p. 11

“People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that’s what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that is holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life.

A true soul mate is probably the most important person you’ll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then leave.

A soul mates purpose is to shake you up, tear apart your ego a little bit, show you your obstacles and addictions, break your heart open so new light can get in, make you so desperate and out of control that you have to transform your life, then introduce you to your spiritual master…”

— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia)

Barrow Island and The Mary Anne Passage, Indian Ocean off the coast of Western Australia. Showing the proposed Gorgon Gas Project

In 1967 as a late teen, I worked at sea off the coasts of Western Australia in the Indian Ocean for Western Geophysics – an American geophysical company. It is near where the contemporary proposal for the Gorgon Gas Field project is to be developed. My first encounter with the ocean was during a storm in the Mary Anne Passage between Barrow Island and the coast at the settlement of Onslow: transferring from one ship to another as the waves heaved below and around us. In the course of time fear was only overcome when, through continual adjustment, trial and error, perseverance, and learning-by-observation from older, more experienced seamen, my fear was overcome and I gained the necessary self-confidence to stay at this new kind of existence for the full year of my contract.

Together with learning from the ship’s Master and other experienced sea-men, I also learned to observe the state of the weather, wind and cloud formations. I took note of any waves breaking ahead over shifting sand bars or hidden outcrops of coral and oyster reef. I ‘listened to’ the rhythms of the sea. I became an ardent student of human nature: watching the ways in which my fellow shipmates related in a small space for weeks on end. Because of the cramped conditions, I became alert to how people can make room for and work together in spite of difficulties. There was also a sense, which I felt among others on board of living in the present. The ocean, with its fickle ways and constant change encouraged each crewman to enjoy the fine weather when it was sunny and calm, and work through the storms when they crashed over and around us. In other words, co-operate with each other in this moment now. Out there on the often unpredictable Indian Ocean I learned about the necessity of living simply, of not having unreal expectations of life, especially if my demands had the potential to diminish my neighbours’ right to the basic requirements of life at sea: modest comfort, space and privacy, and well-earned rest.

It impressed me that the ship’s captain Frank Foster, had, for many years, kept a small picture in the wheel-house showing Jesus standing behind a sailor at the helm in storm-tossed seas. Upon my inquiry, he shared with me his daily prayer: “Stay with me Lord! My ship is small and the ocean is vast!” This simple example of a daily spiritual practice showed me how the idea of the holy permeated some members of seafaring society.  The example of this one man was like the lifting of a veil, exposing a larger whole, a broader connectedness. It was, for me, like a breakthrough, challenging old patterns of thought and shifting my thought and life, as Bede Griffiths would say, ” to a new kind of existence”. This one man, Master of our ship the Heremia Star, and a former boxing champion of Western Australia, was a Soul mate. Like other Soul mates, rather than being there for the long term, Frank Foster came into my life just to reveal another layer of myself to me, and then leave. His task, albeit unknown to him, was simply to ‘break open my heart’ and shed some enlightenment in those depths that might otherwise have remained in darkness; the significance of which I might have been ignorant.

Thereafter my year at sea made more sense. Reflecting on these experiences I perceived spirituality as a normal part of everyday life, a stance that never really left me and that was a preparation for the meeting, a decade or so later, I was to have with the sage Bede Griffiths, who lived across the ocean in South India.

This new kind of existence initiated a deeper vision of life for me: the patterns I observed included connectedness to a larger whole; the feeling of self-transcendence; of finding a sense of spiritual meaning in daily activities; discovery of the ultimate aloneness / solitude of myself and each person; a growing respect for the cosmic order of things, and how most things seem to holistically ‘hang and work together’. It seemed to me that in this vision of life there is nothing which is not holy, and that all work is a ‘mystery’, not merely a practical concern but a means of  initiation into the mysterious laws of nature and of co-operation in her creative activity.

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I have a number of spiritual tours that included visiting Bede Griffiths’ Saccidananda Ashram at Shantivanam in South India – in December 2010, and then in January and February 2011. If you would like to know more about these, please visit my Tours page in this website, or email me, Dr Meath Conlan: meath@diversejourneys.com

I am also available to present retreats and workshops / seminars on Bede Griffiths and his contemplative vision. Please send for a form if you wish to discuss with me about this possibility for your organisation or region.

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“There is nothing, which is not holy. The simplest action of eating and drinking, of washing and cleaning, of walking and sitting … have a sacramental character; they signify something beyond themselves and are intimately related to religious rites. So also every form of work … is part of a sacramental mystery, by which we enter into communion with the rhythm of nature and take part in that ritual by which human life is continually renewed.”

Bede Griffiths, The Golden String p. 152

Bede Griffiths appreciated what he owed his spiritual forebears, mentors, and guides. In the course of his spiritual direction of others, or during his homilies, he referred especially to the great and wise spiritual teachers of the early church when speaking with others about the riches of his faith.

HH The Dalai Lama, Bede Griffiths & Meath Conlan. Perth, 1992

On the last day of The Dalai Lama’s 1992 spiritual journey to Perth, Western Australia, I received a phone call from his private secretary Tenzin Geshe Tethong inviting Bede and myself to a private audience before His Holiness left for other capitals. What was meant to be a short courtesy visit lasted ninety minutes.

Warmly welcomed, Bede and I sat in  the three-seater lounge and His Holiness in a single arm-chair nearby. The atmosphere was extremely friendly and relaxed. Almost immediately the conversation turned to the mystery of God. His Holiness was genuinely interested in how Christians conceptualised and spoke of the God and God’s nature.

In the course of the morning Bede shared how Christianity inherited the typically Hebrew understanding of God as a Being of utter transcendence, a holy mystery that no one could approach, a Being of absolute moral perfection and justice and yet of infinite mercy. By the time of the New Testament God is spoken of as in intimate relation to humankind, but generally speaking it is not until the Greek Fathers that there is a development of the divine nature. His Holiness was fascinated with Bede quoted Saint Clement of Alexandria: “The deity is without form and nameless. Though we ascribe names, they are not to be taken in their strict meaning; when we call him one, good, mind, existence, Father, God, Creator, Lord … we use these [names] of honour in order that our thoughts may have something on which to rest.”

But His Holiness’ interest piqued when Bede talked of the sixth century monk who wrote under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite. For the first time we find the whole problem of the nature of God and human understanding of this mystery systematically worked out. He held that God can only be known in ecstasy, when the mind passes beyond itself, transcending speech and thought … indeed his doctrine included the notion that God is as much above all being as it is above all thought. It is “above everything that exists.” Bede developed the thought of passing beyond every thought and existing thing so as to reach the supreme Godhead, yet all energy, all life, all consciousness, reason and will comes from this source and are therefore in some way contained in it. To attain knowledge of the supreme Godhead we must pass beyond all images and concepts into a kind of ‘unknowing,’ where we leave behind human notions of god-like things, as well as human means of expressing the divine nature.

While His Holiness had thought that Christians insisted on their words as permanent and definitive explanations of the mysteries, he was encouraged during this morning’s conversation, by the discovery that as Bede said, “in the abyss of the Godhead, that divine darkness, there is a mystery of personal communion in which all that we can conceive of as wisdom and knowledge, love and bliss, is contained, yet which infinitely transcends our conception … [for] the Godhead remains unfathomable, transcending human thought.” He quoted from the works of Dionysius: “I counsel you … leave your senses and the activity of the intellect … that your understanding being laid to rest, you strive toward a union with him whom neither being nor understanding can contain. For by the unceasing and absolute renunciation of yourself and all things … you shall be released from all, and so be led upwards to the Ray of that divine darkness, which exceeds all existence.”

There were other aspects of Christianity shared that morning, but Bede constantly returned to the doctrine of Dionysius and the Fathers of the Church.

At this stage His Holiness sprang up from his arm-chair and joined us on the lounge. He held Bede’s hand and while looking him in the eye, said: “You know Father, I never knew Christians could think like this.” We remained sitting clumped together for the rest of the morning. I found the Dalai Lama’s interest in everything Bede said to be sincere and engaged. Towards the end of our visit Bede remarked: “Your Holiness, as sad and painful as the history of the Tibetan Diaspora has been, it may very well be the means whereby Christians will take up meditation and recover their own contemplative riches.” His Holiness was fascinated, and agreed, while also restating his belief that for him there will never be one world religion for everyone, that there is goodness and truth to be found in all spiritualities of the world.

When we finally departed His Holiness’ presence we were both elated. I thanked Bede for his teaching and for providing the Dalai Lama with the opportunity for clarifying what perhaps was his somewhat incomplete understanding of Christianity. I believe he had given of himself at least as whole-heartedly as in any of his larger lectures before thousands. I recall one of the nicest touches at the end of this wonderful experience when Bede took me by the elbow as we walked from the audience. He remarked with, I felt, an unusual level of emotion: “You know, I really do think he likes me.”

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I have a number of spiritual tours that included visiting Saccidananda Ashram at Shantivanam in December 2010, and then in January and February 2011. If you would like to know more about these, please visit my Tours page in this website, or email me, Dr Meath Conlan: meath@diversejourneys.com

I am also available to present retreats and workshops / seminars on Bede Griffiths and his contemplative vision. Please send for a form if you wish to discuss with me about this possibility for your organisation or region.

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