My Journey into Interreligious Dialogue
By Ewert Cousins with Janet Cousins

Professor Ewert Cousins of Fordham University, a longtime member of the MID advisory board, has kindly composed these reflections on the way he first became involved in interreligious dialogue. The present article focuses on his early contacts with the Lakota Indians, his subsequent work at an ecumenical institute in Jerusalem, and his involvement with a remarkable conference at the United Nations in 1975. We plan to publish a sequel to this article in the next issue of our bulletin.

Part II

Conference at the United Nations: October 24, 1975
My journey into interreligious dialogue took a dramatic turn in 1975. In early January I received a telephone call from my friend Jean Houston inviting me to join a committee of the Temple of Understanding that was organizing a conference of world religious leaders to be held in October 1975 at the United Nations. Founded in 1960 by Juliet Hollister, the Temple of Understanding had emerged as a major force for creating understanding and communication among the world’s religions. It had assembled an impressive international committee which included, for example, the Dalai Lama. The Temple had organized four major conferences, one of which took place in Calcutta in 1968. It was at this conference that Thomas Merton made his now famous statement: “My dear Brothers and Sisters, we are already one, but we imagine we are not. What we have to recover is our original unity: What we have to be is what we already are.”

Merton’s statement provided the theme of the UN Conference in 1975: “One Is the Human Spirit.” Since the United Nations is built on a secular model, it lacks a structure for bringing religious and spiritual resources into the workings of the UN. It was to fill this gap that the Temple of Understanding proposed such a conference. And it was in this context that I joined the planning committee of the Temple of Understanding in 1975.

This began one of the most remarkable years of my life. For ten months, while I continued to teach my classes at Fordham and Columbia, I was caught up in the world of international diplomacy—a world that shifted every day according to the dynamics of the world community. The Temple’s project became part of this world.

Our planning committee of some five members met in January of 1975 at the United Nations headquarters in Manhattan for a meeting with C. V. Narasimhan, then Office Director for Secretary General Kurt Waldheim. The committee agreed to make a proposal that the United Nations host a meeting of world religious leaders at the United Nations. This proposal was directed to the Secretary General, who was already in Vienna en route to a formal visit with the Pope. Within a short time the project was launched. With the aid of Monsignor di Filippo, of the Vatican Observer’s office to the UN, I drafted a short letter to Kurt Waldheim, informing him of this initiative and suggesting to him that he bring it to the attention of the Pope. Shortly after that the Austrian attaché came to the office, picked up the letter and placed it in his official mail pouch to be delivered in Vienna the next morning. And so the project was launched.

After a week, word trickled down from the Secretary General’s office that Kurt Waldheim had not passed our initiative to the Pope, but to Monsignor Benelli, who was in charge of internal Church affairs. The Monsignor responded to the Secretary General that this was a laudatory project but he was afraid that it would show more the disunity of religions than their unity. As a result the initiative did not move forward.

In this period, I was assigned to report to André Lewin, the spokesman of the Secretary General and attaché for special projects. Once a week I would go to his office at the UN and bring him up to date on the progress of our committee and receive his advice for further development. Of particular concern was the choice of speakers for the final day of the program at the United Nations: one speaker each for Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

An idea emerged that I should be sent on a mission to take up the idea again and gather support for this initiative with the Christian leadership of Europe and specifically the Vatican. At that time I was officially a consultant to the Vatican Council for interreligious matters and had access to the Vatican. André Lewin, the spokesman to the Secretary General, discussed the matter with Kurt Waldheim, who said he would support the project if we could get the endorsement and official support of the project from the Christian world leaders. So I was sent on an official mission to the Vatican, the World Council of Churches, and the Archbishop of Canterbury. At a meeting of high Vatican officials, Cardinal Pignedoli gave his wholehearted approval of the initiative. At the World Council of Churches in Geneva, I was cordially received by the General Secretary, who said that he could not speak at the UN as a representative of Protestantism since according to the statutes, the World Council was not a representative body. I met the Archbishop of Canterbury at a public event in London, but did not have time to propose the project. Fortunately, the strong support of the Vatican was sufficient to place the plan once again in operation.

Not long after I returned from Europe, I was called to a meeting of those UN officials connected with General Assembly Affairs. The question was where and how could our proposed meeting take place? If a vote of the General Assembly were to take place, the Soviet Union and China would veto it. However, the meeting could be held in the large conference room number four, but not as an official UN event. Eventually, this was also rejected. The event took place in the Dag Hammarskjold Auditorium, which seated three hundred. As the summer and fall approached, some obstacles to the project emerged, but they passed and the project moved into its realization in October as a “Spiritual Summit Conference” and as a landmark event. This was the fifth spiritual summit organized by the Temple of Understanding; others had taken place in Calcutta, Geneva, Princeton Theological Seminary, and Cornell University. This week long interfaith festival marked the 30th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations. For the first time the world’s religious leaders would meet at the United Nations. The actual program had two parts: five days at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine with hundreds of participants and thousands in the audience, and a final day with representative delegates at the United Nations.

The program at the UN had been planned meticulously for more than nine months. The choice of speakers was a matter of paramount concern. After getting adjusted to the ways of the UN, I continued to meet weekly with André Lewin, the spokesman for Secretary General Kurt Waldheim. What he and I discussed was our choice of speakers and their appropriateness for the UN. He was very open to possibilities, but at the same time sensitive to political implications. The choice was not particularly difficult. What was difficult was exploring whether it would be possible to have speakers for Chinese religion: Taoism and Confucianism. The times were particularly problematic. Maoist China was not inclined to look positively on speakers reflecting the classical traditions of China. We tried looking outside mainline China, but this did not prove likely. Eventually, we regretfully gave up.
On the day the conference began, when hundreds of people were milling around St. John the Divine Cathedral, someone came to me and said, “There’s a group of about thirty Indians here who want to talk to you.” So I met with them in the parish building. When they identified themselves, I realized that we had the top American Indian leadership in the United States, both spiritually and politically. I was thrilled with this but perplexed with how to provide food and lodging and integrate them into the dynamism of the conference. Over the next day I heard reports that some of the Indians were unhappy at how things were developing for them. Just at that moment I saw the Iroquois entering the cathedral with their leaders Mad Bear and Beman Logan. At the same time, Toshio Myake, the head of the international committee of the Temple of Understanding, was arriving. I suggested that we go into the crypt of the cathedral. There we had a “pow-wow” for over two hours. Tensions were resolved and the two Iroquois leaders brought peace among the Native Americans, who made a distinctive contribution to the entire program.

The program opened on Sunday evening with a grand spectacle: a procession of groups of participants, each dressed in their traditional attire: Native Americans arrayed in eagle feathers, Buddhists in saffron robes, and Shinto in their white gowns proceeded down the aisle and around the cathedral. In the opening keynote address in the cathedral, Margaret Mead, the well known anthropologist, asserted that “at the heart of each religion we find the same overriding concern for our common humanity.” All of humankind, she cautioned, faces a common threat to our existence in pollution and advanced weapons. But this common threat brings “new hope,” she claimed, because we now share the same concerns. Dr. Mead’s concerns would be later shared by the Native Americans at the conference.

The days and evenings were filled with music, chanting, drama, liturgies, and formal discussion. A typical day began with a fire ceremony by the Native Americans in the center of the nave of the cathedral. This was followed by a panel discussion as exemplified by the following: a panel on the “unity of the human community” which was moderated by Xenon Rossides, permanent ambassador of Cyprus to the United Nations. Among the panelists were Princess Poon Diskul, president of the World Fellowship of Buddhists, Muhammed Zafrulla Khan, a Muslim and former president of the United Nations General Assembly; Master Chitrabhanu, a Jain spiritual leader; Dom Leclerq, the leading scholar of Christian monasticism, and Robert Muller, then an official of the United Nations Office for Inter-Agency Affairs and later an Under Secretary General. As the New York Times reported this panel: “Observing that there had been ‘drastic changes in human and international relations in a world grown utterly interdependent’ in the last 30 years, Mr. Rossides said the conference was helping to bring ‘the human spirit into the labors of the United Nations.’ ” Master Chitrabhanu spoke on Jainism’s emphasis on reverence for life, but he stressed: ‘We don’t want to make one religion in the world. You cannot expect a garden of only one flower.’ ” He has a beautiful capacity to respect and express our religious diversity while recognizing our unity.

At noon each day there was a liturgical event such as a Buddhist or Christian ritual. One of the most elegant was the Shinto ritual performed by almost one hundred who were flown in from Japan especially for this event. Dressed as they were in their white robes, they performed their ritual with consummate grace. In the afternoon groups of ten met in the small chapels surrounding the main altar. At the end of their discussions, group leaders gathered the results for a joint statement to be read at our final session at the United Nations.

In the evening after dinner there were artistic and musical events: on one evening a live symphony orchestra played a composition that was commissioned for the occasion. Another evening we were inspired by a tableau entitled “A Mass On the World,” conceived by Pir Vilayat Khan and enacted by a large group of his followers from the Sufi Order of the West. On Thursday evening the participants were treated to a banquet in the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria, during which we were entertained by the music of Ravi Shankar. The next day we gathered for the final session in the Dag Hammarskjold auditorium on the premises of the United Nations.

The final meeting at the United Nations featured eminent spiritual leaders, each representing a major religious tradition. Among them were the Buddhist Lord Abbott Kosho Ohtani, the Muslim scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr, and for Christianity, Mother Teresa, who later would be recognized by a Nobel Peace Prize for her work with the poor and dying on the crowded streets of Calcutta. In a speech which moved her audience to tears, Mother Teresa spoke of the love and dignity given by the Missionaries of Charity to those whom others had deemed too hopeless to care for. She urged the representative group of Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, Christians and Moslems to remember the poor as “brothers and sisters in the same family, created by the same loving God.” In one of her stories of the poor she recalled a man who had lived in the gutter and had been brought to the home for the dying. “he said he’d lived like an animal, but would die like an angel with love and care."

The summit ended with a joint statement which called for a “ ‘new spirituality’ free of insularity, a plea for religious freedom and a proposal that the United Nations create an agency to bring spiritual resources to bear on world problems.” The joint statement affirmed the following:

Bulletin 73 • Index