We have spiritual, moral and social potentials for building peace, William Vendley

"Your Excellency Nazarbayev, President of the Republic of Kazakhstan;

Your Excellency Tokayev, Chairman of the Secretariat of the Congress;

Your Excellencies Heads and Former Heads of States;

Eminent and Esteemed Religious Leaders;

Brothers and Sisters all:

 Good morning. Our hosts invited me to reflect on the role of religious leaders in building peace.

 Let me begin with a short story. After that, I would like to reflect on a few principles. Finally, I would like to suggest two concrete steps forward.

 When I was in West Africa working with religious leaders, I found myself in a bare field in Liberia as the brutal war there was winding down. I experienced there that religious communities have great spiritual strengths, moral heritages and social capacities related to peace.

 It was just a bare field, no facilities at all, yet there were about a thousand displaced people encamped at the end of the civil war. The UN relief trucks, God Bless them, were still weeks of.

 We religious people often witness that believers have hidden strengths, spiritualities, a living link with the Mysterious transcendent ground of their lives. Often, it is a dark night of affliction, gross injustices of withering losses that - like and x-ray - discloses the hidden strengths of spiritualities.

 In fact, people do bear the unbearable. People do find hope where there appears to be no grounds for hopes. People do sacrifice themselves out of love for others. And people do forgive the unforgivable. These spiritual strengths are cultivated by religious traditions.

 These same spiritualities blossom in the bright noon sun. They show themselves in individual acts of kindness, caring, honesty, and a commitment to build social system of transparency, participation and justice through which we can joyfully live together. Spiritualities are a great strength for building peace.

Second, religious communities moral sensibilities are another set of strengths for building peace. Who else has prosecuted day-in and day-out for millennia what it means to be a human person in community before the mysterious Origins of existence. These religious moral heritages are not simply catalogues of "dos" and "don'ts", although these are important. They are great living moral discourses, shapers of character and conscience, and cultivators of virtue. Without them, we would be lost in amnesia. We would limit ourselves to one dimensional efforts that could never deliver the real peace, which is linked to our dignity as people open to transcendent Mystery.

 Added to our spiritualities and our moral heritages, we are, collectively, the heirs to the hundreds of thousands of temples, synagogues, mosques and churches that dot the corners of the earth. These local congregations are linked in districts, and organized on national and often regional and global levels. There is a tissue of connection they unites each congregation within its tradition. Every local congregation in the vast webs of religious network is potentially a local center for advancing peace. 

 In short, we have spiritual, moral and social potentials for building peace.

 To harvest this potential, we need to look at our situation with honesty.

 We must be the first to acknowledge that our religions traditions have at times been abused by extremists. We must reject this abuse.

 Second, we are committed to working together on common problems. We need to put those problems squarely before us.

 We know too well the blood of war, how it kills, maims and destroys the lives of the innocent. We know too well the crushing weight of poverty, how it stunts, humiliates and plunders. We know too well the children lost or held back by preventable diseases and denied educations. These and the abuses to our environment are genuine threats to peace. They are our common problems. They call us to cooperative action.

 Third, we see - each from the angle of our own faith tradition - the soul deadening and often brutal impacts of denying the human spirit its fundamental openness to and freedom before that Transcendent Mystery that grounds our existence.

 Pope Benedict's speech to the United Nations on April 18, 2008, recalled the profound upheavals that humanity experienced coinciding with the formation of the UN. The Pope noted that when the meaning of transcendence is abandoned, freedom and human dignity are grossly violated.

 Similar sentiments on the same topic abound in many religious traditions. Recently, Muslims have written to Christians on the "Love of God and the Love of the Neighbor", noting that they are inseparably linked. The Buddhist tradition, for example, emphasizes that going beyond oneself in self-emptying compassion for the well-being of the other is the key to one's own salvation.

 So it is that - despite our real religious and theological differences - our moral sensibilities converge around a shared conviction:

 We know that our human family is faced with new, urgent and decisive threats to peace. We know that action that combines justice with forgiveness must be taken. But, we also know that it would be a mistake to take a merely expedient stance, a short-term position that undermines that inviolable dignity and freedom of the every human person.

 So it is that our multi-religious "means and methods" of action must express our common commitment to honor and protect the inviolable human dignity of each person, as we advance the common good to build the peace.

 Finally, religious leader can, I believe, take two decisive steps forward:

 First, we can unite to build the simple and honest mechanism that can serve principled multi-religious cooperation for peace on every level: local, national, regional and global. This is what Religions for Peace has been laboring to do for forty years. Much more must now be done. We must also partner with governments and other stakeholders. And here, we offer a special thanks to the government of Kazakhstan. 

 Second, we can recognize that our common conviction on personal morality expressed as "do to others as you wish done to you" needs to be translated into social paradigm.

 We need to begin to forge a notion of "shared security". Today, my security depends on yours. Yes, we can and do respect the need for state security. Yeas, we are grateful for the expanded notion of human security. But, these are not enough. No walls can be built high enough to protect ourselves from the needs of others. The security has to be our concern. We are no safer than the most vulnerable among us. In purely practical terms, we've always known this: each religion has its own variation of the Golden rule: treat the other as yourself.

 Thus today, addressing the practical realities related to our vulnerability following the great religious moral imperatives to care for the other coincide.

 In short, religious communities have priceless capacities essential to building peace. Principled cooperation among them can respect their real difference, even as it helps to unleash their powers to build the peace for which our hearts hunger.

 Thank you. "