The Chapel with No Crucifix

The Mossman Daily paper reports that the chapel at the Royal North Shore Hospital has had its crucifix, Bibles and all other Christian symbols removed to avoid offending people of other faiths. Apparently, this is not as a result of any pressure from any religious groups, just the decision of state government bureaucrats.

Read the article here...

I'm not sure that this is the best way for people of different faiths to interact with each other in Australia. What does hiding or denying the symbols of various spiritual beliefs and cultures in publicly shared spaces say to people about the place of spirituality in our individual and collective lives? It suggests to me that spirituality is a private thing that doesn't belong in the public realm. I think that this view reflects a popular, but erroneous dualistic view of spirituality that leads to a harmful slicing up of people's private and public lives that is not natural. My very real concern is that this kind of thinking is taking hold as the leading way of dealing with public expressions of diverse spiritual and religious views and that the outcome for us will be a culture that is spiritually fearful, intolerant and even more spiritually deficient than it is now.

I'd like to suggest that there is another way that might lead to a more spiritually engaging cultural landscape for our communities. What if (crazy as this sounds), we encouraged people of different faiths to respectfully engage with each other, talk about their similarities and differences, and to seek to benefit from each other's teachings and experiences? What if we encouraged people to take an interest in the various public expressions of diverse religious beliefs and to befriend people who don't believe, look or act in the same way we do (whichever "we" you happen to be)...

I've been reading some books by Vinoth Ramachandra lately (you'll see some in my bookshelf on the right hand side of this blog), and he suggests that the best foundation for spiritual interaction in our modern world of different faiths and ideas is to allow and promote respectful and robust engagement between people of different faiths. To the extent, that genuine "conversion" to the other's views should be possible as we allow the perspectives of others to critique our own, and vice versa. This alternative "public offense" stance that we are seeing a bit of will lead to spiritual intolerance and blandness that will be to our society's detriment.

I know a lot of bad things that happen are attributed to religion, but that is a niave point of view, that fails to take into consideration the cultural and historical factors that influence a society's spiritual and religious expressions at any given time. Like ours at this time. How do we define the decision to remove the Christian symbols from the chapel? Is it a political, legal, cultural, historical or spiritual decision that has been made? How we answer that question will say a lot about how we view spirituality and its role in private and public places, and whether societal expressions of spirituality can be separated from their cultural and historical influences.

Shalom...