The Week of Prayer for World Peace (WPWP) is an annual time in the UK for faith communities and peace organizations to come together to pray for peace.

This year it was the turn of the UK Baha’i community to host the main national WPWP event at the London Inter Faith Centre. The programme includes readings from the sacred scriptures or other writings of the various faiths and a prayer of thanks for the faith traditions and five affirmations for all participants to repeat. For example, this is the second affirmation, on human worth:

We affirm our common faith in the dignity and unique worth of the human person, irrespective of colour, class or creed.

And this year there was music from the Northamptonshire Baha’i Choir.

My job was to welcome everyone on behalf of the Baha’i community and to say a few well-chosen(?) words about faith and peace. I also found myself presenting the Wilson/Hinkes Interfaith Award for Peace to representatives of the Friends of the Bereaved Families Forum: Israeli-Palestinian Bereaved Families for Peace.

The London Inter Faith Centre provides an excellent collection of spaces for this and other events. The main meeting hall doubles as a parish church, but has minimal Christian symbolism, so can be used for the inter-faith meetings for which it was built. Followers of many different faiths sat together, reciting the affirmations and listening to the readings and music. A couple of the choir members had brought their young children, who were beautifully behaved. Through the east window we could see that the afternoon rain had given way for the time being to sunshine that served only to make the storm clouds look even blacker.

The affirmations, the readings and the music, and the accounts by a Jew and a Palestinian of how they had overcome the pain of their respective bereavements in the conflict, called forth a deep and reflective stillness, that was broken when everyone stood up to give a sign of peace (a handshake or some sign from within their traditions) to others in the hall.

The choir closed the ceremony by singing “God is the all-sufficing. In Him let the trusting trust.”

After a cup of tea, some cake and chats with various people - including my friend Rustam Bhedwar, a Zoroastrian Ervad (or priest), to whom I mentioned Baha’u'llah’s Tablet to Manikchi Sahib, relatively recently translated into Englished and published with some other of Baha’u'llah’s writings addressed to Zoroastrians in a slim volume entitled Tabernacle of Unity. Manikchi Hataria was a prominent 19th century Zoroastrian, who loved what Baha’u'llah taught and who had a Baha’i as his personal assistant. All my Zoroastrian friends in London know about Manikchi Hataria. Mr Bhedwar asked if I would send him a copy of the Tablet, and I promised to do so.

Technorati Tags: Week of Prayer for World Peace, Baha’i, London Inter Faith Centre, Jew, Palestinian, Zoroastrian

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

It’s been some days since I’ve had time to write here. I thought I would write something on Friday (a Baha’i Holy Day - the Anniversary of the Birthday of the Bab), but I was tied up most of the day and then exhausted at the end of it.

Then I thought I would write yesterday (Saturday), but I had to travel to Woodstock (near Oxford) for the inaugural meeting of the new UK Baha’i Religious Education Agency, aka BREA. I’m not a member of BREA, but I represented the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of the UK at the launch of the agency. It was an excellent meeting and I think the new agency will do well in supporting Baha’i RE teachers and SACRE members.

What’s that? Oh do I have to explain everything? Religious Education (aka RE) is compulsory in state primary and secondary schools in the UK. Each local education authority in England and Wales must appoint a Standing Advisory Committee on Religious Education (SACRE) to oversee the teaching of RE and the legally required collective act of worship in schools under its [tsupervision. Another locally appointed body, the Agreed Syllabus Conference (ASC), draws up the local RE syllabus for its area. Baha'is sit on an increasing number of SACREs and ASCs and there is Baha'i material in more and more of these syllabuses (syllabi?) The role of BREA is to support Baha'is who work in RE or are members of SACRE and to ensure that material about the Baha'i Faith in RE syllabuses is accurate and useful for teachers.

I kept thinking I must write about a couple of last week's activities. I attended a meeting of the Attorney General’s Equality and Diversity Advisory Group in the House of Lords on Tuesday afternoon. Inevitably part of the discussion was about the relationship between the government and the Muslim community. A comment the Attorney addressed to me at the end of the meeting indicated that the UK government will continue to pay special attention to the Muslim community for the foreseeable future.

On Thursday the All Party Parliamentary Friends of the Baha’is hosted the second of the UK Baha’i community’s seminars on freedom of religion or belief in the House of Commons. The theme was challenges to freedom of religion or belief and we had three excellent speakers: Baroness Cox of Queensbury, Frank Field, and Andrew Copson. Baroness Cox is a remarkable woman with an extraordinary commitment to the rights of persecuted Christians in various parts of the world, and a doughty fighter for human rights. Frank Field worked for many years for the United Nations Assoction in Geneva and in London and has a profound interest in and knowledge of freedom of religion. Andrew Copson, who is the Education and Parliamentary Officer for the British Humanist Association, gave an excellent account of why freedom of conscience, thought and religion applies just as much to those who have a non-religious philosophy or, indeed, who do not particularly care about religion at all.

I hope to write more about this seminar, but I’m prone to promise to write things and then find myself running out of time. So I may not get round to it!

This afternoon I attended the Week of Prayer for World Peace event at the London Interfaith Centre. More of this in a subsequent post.

Tomorrow I welcome the High Commissioner of Singapore to the UK National Baha’i Centre, and later in the week I fly to the US for a weekend of meetings.

Monday 23 October, 2006
This Daily Telegraph article and this leader comment critically on government efforts to combat Islamic extremism in the UK by funding a website and sending out free CDs to Muslims. Now I see more clearly the point of what the Attorney General said to me at the end of the meeting last Tuesday afternoon about the government’s paying special attention to the Muslim community (see above in this post).

Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Bab, Religious Education, RE, SACRE, Attorney General, Muslim, freedom of religion or belief, House of Commons, human rights