Campaign for Love & Forgiveness Web contributor, Mary Ann Brussat, of spiritualityandpractice.com attended the Gathering the Spiritual Voices of America in Aspen, Colorado last week. Below, she provides the first in a series of reports from this event.

More than 100 spiritual leaders met at the Aspen Institute in Colorado for a think tank-like meeting organized by the Global Peace Initiative of Women (GPIW) and partially funded by The Fetzer Institute. The GPIW, in announcing the event, says that during the past several years, the nation has become both politically and religiously polarized. This initiative is an effort to end these divisions by tapping the values shared by all religious traditions and by focusing on the vision of unity.

Gathering the Spiritual Voices of America has the intention “to deepen our knowing of Oneness and our compassion as a nation.” Energized by the US elections and what some are calling the possibility of a “transformational presidency,” participants acknowledged that the world is in deep crisis on many fronts, and there needs to be a spiritual response. Or, as one participant put it, “If Barack Obama calls us and asks for help, what will we say?”

So how do 100 Christians, Buddhists, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, indigenous leaders, and civic leaders figure out a path of love and compassion for a nation? By asking questions, the same kinds of questions many of us find ourselves asking when we question our life path or when we embark on a new relationship: “What am I doing here?” Sister Joan Chittister laid out some questions that could yield an answer. “Who are you really?” “How did you get to be that person?” “What did it take?” And since this is a multifaith gathering in a pluralistic society, “How did your sense of purpose affect your relationships to other religions?”

Figuring out the right questions to consider was deemed so important that the whole first day of the gathering was devoted to crafting them in small groups. One participant found herself wondering what would happen in all our encounters “at home, school, and work—if we prioritized figuring out the best questions to ask.” And second, what would happen, if as Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi reminded us, we moved ahead with the understanding that “this conversation may be monitored for quality purposes.”

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 at 10:53 am and is filed under Things to Think About. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.