This is the season, the darkest time of the year, when Christians reassess and reaffirm their highest aspirations – and the lowly beginnings of their religion.
But another recurring theme in our multicultural, agnostic, spiritual-not-religious society is that a single religion can no longer rightfully dominate the public domain, in spite of Christianity’s lingering grip on many public institutions. This is especially true in Vancouver, which harbours a surprising share of organized spiritual energy drawing on traditions from around the world, including enterprises like YYoga (the biggest yoga chain in North America); the Dalai Lama Center for Peace and Education; authors like Eckard Tolle (The Power of Now, A New Earth), and spiritually-infused retailers like Lululemon.
Vancouver is one of the few cities in the world where the Dalai Lama – who has honorary degrees from both UBC and SFU – has lent his name to promote his message of compassion, kindness and mutual understanding. Celebrity healer and thinker Deepak Chopra is about to license his name to a new enterprise launching in Vancouver. (He’ll be here in February for a four-day Journey into Healing, tapping into Ayurvedic mind-body-spirit integrated wellness.)
While we are already very much alive on the spiritual front, the SFU-hosted 12-day visit to Vancouver in March by renowned religious writer Karen Armstrong could take our city to a new level of year-round compassion, not just a holiday breakout of kindness. Armstrong, a former Roman Catholic nun who has written 12 books on comparative religion, especially Christianity, Judaism and Islam, won the 2008 TED Prize for her call for a Charter of Compassion. It was based on her awareness of the centrality of compassion in all the major faiths of the world.
“Every single one of them has evolved their own version of what’s been called the Golden Rule,” she says in one of her TED talks. “Sometimes it comes in a positive version – ‘Always treat all others as you’d like to be treated yourself.’ And equally important is the negative version – ‘Don’t do to others what you would not like them to do to you.’”
Armstrong marries a welcome tough-mindedness with her lofty goal, reminiscent of Martin Luther King’s statement that “Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic.” She is frustrated with the tendency of organized religion to “argue about abstruse doctrines.”
“I sometimes see when I’m speaking to a congregation of religious people a sort of mutinous expression crossing their faces because people often want to be right instead. And that of course defeats the object of the exercise.”
She points to the paradox of a world that seems more dangerously polarized than ever, even though we are more closely bound together than ever before through globalized economies, easy travel and instant communications. “Our perceptions have not caught up with this reality.” To change that, she’ll be launching the Greater Vancouver Compassion Network while she’s here, part of the International Campaign for Compassionate Cities, a group that includes New Delhi, London, Ontario and Seattle, where her international campaign began in April 2010. Canada, apparently, is working to become the first Compassionate Country (has Stephen Harper found out?).
“Compassion does not mean pity,” explains Armstrong. “It requires us to ‘feel with’ the other, to put ourselves in other people’s shoes; to refuse to place ourselves in a separate, privileged category; to take responsibility for other people’s pain – even the pain of our ‘enemies’ – and do all we can to assuage it; to look into our own hearts, discover what causes us grief and then refuse, under any circumstances to inflict that pain on anybody else.
“The bottom line is this: if we want a peaceful world, we have to be more compassionate.”
Have a great holiday and a healthy, compassionate new year. •
