Touching base with renewed energies for INTRA-Faith Dialogue moving forward

[Marites Guingona Africa]

Dear Friends, 

Greetings of peace and love! I hope this finds you well.

It has been a long time since our last activity. I apologize for my long silence. I have had to attend to health issues (mine and my father’s), my 22-month old grandchild’s pre-schooling in Singapore, renovations in my parents’ house, and transitions in our organization and at our workplace these past six months. 

I am now feeling much better health-wise, and my father is being well attended to by excellent caregivers day and night.  Thank you for your prayers!

On the work-front, I have some exciting news. But this is going to be a rather long email so I am not sure if you will have the time to read this through. In any case, here goes —

New Beginnings at The Peacemakers’ Circle

We recently marked our 11th year simply and quietly by reflecting on who we are, what we have individually and collectively gained from our journey together this past decade and, based on a reality-check of our capacities and limitations, how we see ourselves being able to continue to serve the cause of peace through the activities that we initiate and the projects that we offer. 

I share here some highlights of our turning-point experiences and the decisions we have made—

1) The Peacemakers’ Circle has served as the coordinating office of the United Religions Initiative (URI) in Southeast Asia-Pacific for ten 

        (10) years since it was established in 2001. URI is a global interfaith community in which my Hindu friend Shakuntala Vaswani and I have 

        taken turns serving (as its Regional Coordinator) all those years. Last December 2011, we decided that it was time to move on and give 

        others in the region a chance to take on the responsibility. We also decided that beginning in 2012 we will become independent of the 

        URI and no longer identify ourselves as its Cooperation Circle.

2) The Peacemakers’ Circle managed to survive for over a decade despite the lack of funds for our operations. We were able to remain 

        productive because of the small grants we received for our projects from The Asia Foundation, Catholic Relief Services (CRS), the U.S. 

        Embassy, and the Australian Embassy. The funds we received from them helped sustain our grassroots Muslim-Christian Dialogue work 

        for six years. We are currently on our fourth partnership project with the Australian Embassy. They have been funding our 10-month 

        action-reflection training programs since 2007. They are currently funding our ongoing Grassroots Muslim-Christian Youth Leadership 

        training program which is benefiting youth leaders from Tala (Caloocan City), Culiat (Quezon City), Quiapo (Manila) and Maharlika-

        Bicutan (Taguig). 

3) However, generating funds to cover our operational expenses continues to be a challenge for us. We have managed to get by all 

        these years with a little help from URI (as its coordinating office in SEAPac), with funds from our own pockets and from donations of 

        friends who believed in us. We are deeply grateful to them, especially to Rev. Fr. Andre De Bleeker, CICM (of Maryhill School of 

        Theology) who has been one of our most generous donors.  He manages to solicit substantial funds for us every year from his friends and 

        connections in Belgium. We thank you sincerely, Fr. Andre!

4) As we face the challenges of this new decade, we at The Peacemakers’ Circle once again affirmed to each other that despite the       

        difficulties of our work, our passion for realizing our shared vision and mission remains high. We have decided to carry on and continue to 

        move forward together in our endeavors, albeit in new ways. 

       We agreed that we shall continue to focus our efforts on addressing the following three areas of work: 

                 I. INNER WORK for Self-Awareness & Transformation

                II. DIALOGUE for Relationship-Building

               III. ACTION for Social Change

We are now also endeavoring to strive not only to help others but also to help ourselves. We have already been receiving support for our work in the area of ACTION for Social Change and have seen the benefits of our efforts in the grassroots communities we have been serving these past nine years. We hope to likewise energize our efforts in the areas of INNER WORK and DIALOGUE and to generate income for The Peacemakers’ Circle by offering the following workshops to the public for a fee—

a.  Inner Work for Self Awareness and Transformation weekend retreat workshops. Inner Work has been the spine that kept The 

     Peacemakers’ Circle standing since 2001. It was the reason for getting us—friends from the different religions and faith traditions--together 

     every week since 1998, three years before The Peacemakers’ Circle was established (in 2001). Our weekly meetings provided the fertile 

     soil on which the seed of the idea of The Peacemakers’ Circle came to be. We nurtured the seed by our friendship and togetherness, and 

     this has bloomed through the years and yielded good fruits. We would like to keep sowing the seeds of these fruits by offering weekend 

     retreat-workshops on Inner Work for Self Awareness and Transformation. We realize that there is a need for this. We received encouraging 

     responses to the invitation we sent out (for our upcoming June 1-3 session) from people of different faiths (even from as far away as 

     Mindanao) who wished to join the workshop. We will start humbly and small in this endeavor, and we are hopeful that in time this too will 

     grow and yield good fruits in the hearts of those who have participated in it. 

b.  Dialogue for Working Relationships. This is a training workshop program designed for business corporations and organizations that are 

     interested in improving relationships among people in their workforce. I am currently drafting the program and learning how to translate my 

     words in corporate language (with the help of my husband and two children who are successful in their respective corporate careers!). I 

     received feedback from some friends (who own businesses) that they are interested in our workshops for their employees. With God’s 

     grace, we will be able to reach out also to the corporate world and develop among their people “co-sensing capacities” and inspire respect 

     among them for differences in their shared space through the ways of true dialogue and heart listening

A challenging INTRA-FAITH DIALOGUE experience

Sometime in late March, I received a call from the office of Msgr. Gerardo O. Santos, ED.D (Chairman of the CEAP Religious Education Commission) inviting me to be one of the resource speakers for the 4th Benedict XVI Summer Festival of Catechesis and Christian Formation (National Religious Education Conference) which was to be held on April 24, 25 & 26, 2012 at Siena College in Quezon City. I was told that the reason for the short notice was that Fr. Bert Alejo, S.J. who had earlier agreed to speak on the topic: “Spirit of Communion: Ecumenism & Inter-Religious Dialogue,” could not make it and he recommended that I take his place. I thank PB for the opportunity. It turned out to be an enriching experience for me! 

The event was attended by around 1,000 catechists and Catholic formators from around the country. I learned that the topic assigned to me was only one of the 36 topics which were to be offered to the participants in concurrent sessions every afternoon for the three-day duration of the event. I was told that I should expect around 40 participants to sign up for my session, and that those would be the same participants who would be attending all the two-hour sessions of the three days.

I prepared for 40 participants, but only 12 came. I learned that many of them had initially chosen other topics to attend but were refused entry because the classes of their choice were already too big. Only about three or four of the participants chose to attend my class out of personal interest. That was not surprising to me. Lack of interest in interfaith dialogue among fellow Catholics has been a reality I have had to contend with these past ten years.

Unfazed, I started the class anyway. After the opening prayers and the introduction, I began by asking: Who are Catholics here? They seemed to be startled by the question and they looked around at each other with uncertainty as though I had asked a trick question. I waited until hands were slowly raised. Then I asked them again: What does the word “catholic” mean? What makes Catholics different from other Christians? Again, the startled looks around the circle. I heard one voice saying that the word “catholic” means “universal.” I drew a circle on the board and said, If this is the Catholic Church with all of us Christians engaged in one charism/ministry work or another in it and facing the different challenges in our midst, what is or who are outside the circle? And in this light, what makes us universal? I could see the confused expressions on the faces around the circle again, and the responses were tentative. It was as though I had just asked them another trick question.  

I then invited them to relax and engage in a self-reflection exercise. I asked them to ponder on the questions written on the Religious Distance Survey form (which I distributed to each one of them around the circle), and to check their answers on the box provided. We talked about their answers when they were done, and they seemed not to be surprised by the fact that they held biases and prejudices against practitioners of other faiths. 

Next, I invited them to reflect on the images (which I was to show them onscreen) of violence and war involving people of different religions, and on the succeeding passages about peace from the holy books of the different faith traditions. Responses around the circle to the images onscreen revealed negative attitudes toward peoples who do not share the Catholic faith. When I showed the 20-minute film documentary “In the Light of the Crescent Moon” (which The Peacemakers’ Circle produced in 2006), many were struck by Sirikit, the Muslim woman crying for her husband and children and bemoaning the injustices that her family experienced in predominantly Christian Metro Manila. I then spoke about fear, anger, and violence, and about love—Christ’s love—that calls for us to brave our fears so that we can love each other freely and fully as human beings the way Christ loves us….

Each workshop session that followed gave rise to many rich exchanges of thoughts and feelings about dialogue with people of “other faiths.” At the end of the third and last day, they milled around my laptop with their flash drives to copy my materials. Some asked if I could conduct the same workshop for their colleagues in their parish. One took courage to ask me if what I was saying was approved by the Church. I realized then how important the presence of a priest was to these workshops to assure the participants that they were not being led astray by me!

In the end, I synthesized the workshop and highlighted the three things I hoped they had gained from it --

1)       A clearer understanding of what it means to be Catholic in this pluralistic and technological advanced world today, and a sense of 

         appreciation for responding to the challenge to build relationships of mutual respect, understanding and cooperation with people of 

         diverse cultures and beliefs everywhere.

2)  A sense of what true dialogue means in the context of our Catholic faith—that it is about embodying Christ love the way Christ --“the 

         Word of God”--embodied God’s love for us.

3)  An interest in proclaiming Christ’s love in our ways of being and relating with people, no matter what their faith traditions may be.

         Proclamation is love in action, and conversion of the heart is its fearless outcome. 

The Call to INTRA-FAITH DIALOGUE in Metro Manila

 My experience at the workshop in Siena College affirmed my belief that the need to promote INTRA-FAITH DIALOGUE FOR INTERFAITH UNDERSTANDING among Catholics is necessary and urgent. A recent meeting of the Manila Muslim-Christian Peacemakers’ Association (MMCPA) which I attended in Quiapo last Wednesday also affirmed the same urgency of need to promote this among Muslims. 

During that meeting in Quiapo last Wednesday, I was informed that the MMCPA had increased from around 40 members (a year ago) to 188 today! This included around 46 jeepney drivers who proudly showed their plastic membership identification cards to me! While I expressed appreciation for this growth in their membership, I encouraged them to divide themselves into smaller committees to help them address the different challenges they faced in their community. I realized then that we at The Peacemakers’ Circle had to double our efforts in Quiapo to ensure that all Muslims and Christians knew what Muslim-Christian Dialogue and Relationship-Building really meant, and what it demanded of them. 

If it is to be effective, promoting INTRA-FAITH DIALOGUE FOR INTERFAITH UNDERSTANDING in grassroots communities has to take into consideration the motives behind the willingness of the people to dialogue. The question I’ve often heard asked is: Anong mapapala ko dyan? (What is in it for me?) In the course of my engagement with them, I learned that some of the things that attract the people (in the poverty-stricken and conflict-ridden grassroots communities) to the idea of engaging in Muslim-Christian Dialogue are:

                       o The need for protection against police arrest 

                                 -their membership cards are visibly dangled like talismans around their necks, or on their jeepney dashboards

                       o The need to belong to an organization that will help empower them to address their need for poverty alleviation; the need 

                                to have their needs heard and addressed. Kailangan na po namin ng puhunan sa negosyo dahil magpapasukan na! (We 

                                need capital money for our small business because school is about to begin again!), whispered one woman to my ear. 

                       o The need for self-improvement and recognition 

In this light, I realized that the greatest challenge to promoting interfaith dialogue in grassroots communities is the challenge of bringing about attitude change. This calls for facilitating values formation modules and activities based on the teachings and ideals of their respective faith traditions. Muslims have identified the need to strengthen their iman (faith). This holds true for Christians too. It was distressing to note in one of my workshops that many in the grassroots who called themselves Catholics did not know if Jesus Christ is "fully human" or "fully Divine" or both! 

The Peacemakers’ Circles' response

1. With the help of friends and support of partners and donors, we will continue to visit Quiapo and the other grassroots communities (Tala, 

        Culiat and Maharlika-Bicutan) to give practical Intra-Faith Dialogue workshops to the members of their Muslim-Christian Peacemakers’ 

        community organizations in small groups every month.

2. With the help of Fr. Carlos Reyes and the Episcopal Commission on Interreligious Dialogue of the CBCP (ECID-CBCP), we shall be

        reaching out to Catholic lay and religious formation groups to offer workshops on Intra-Faith Dialogue for Interfaith Understanding. Imam 

        Col Ebra Moxsir (President of the Imam Council of the Philippines) expressed interest in reviving the National Imams-Priests Dialogue 

        Forum (NIPDF) which was formed in 2007. However, Fr. Caloy felt that it would be embarrassing to carry on with only very few priests 

        interested in engaging in dialogue with the hundreds of imam counterparts. So...it would be better to focus on training the laity instead, 

        he said.  

3. We are about to promote ENGAGING ACTION FOR INTERFAITH PEACEBUILDING: A Campaign for Unity in Diversity through 

        Dialogue. We will be sending out letters to heads of colleges and universities requesting for 1-2 hours of their time for us to make a 

        presentation to their students and teachers on the challenge and invitation to interfaith dialogue.  We will also be showing In the Light of 

        the Crescent Moon, the 20-minute video that The Peacemakers’ Circle produced to tell its story. Its message continues to be relevant 

        today. We will also be reaching out to seminaries, dioceses, etc., to request for the same space and time in their communities for us to 

       make our presentation.  

There is a lot more to share with you and a lot to hear from you too, I’m sure. I hope we can come together to the TAYO-TAYO MUNA Dialogue Circle again sometime during the last week of June to explore possible ways we can help each other move INTRA-Faith Dialogue activities and initiatives forward. Please let me know which days (weekday or weekend) would work best for you.

Thank you so much for your patience and kind attention! I very much appreciate your friendship and support, and I look forward to hearing from you again!

Yours in peace,

Marites

--

MARITES GUINGONA-AFRICA

Founder & Executive Director

THE PEACEMAKERS’ CIRCLE FOUNDATION, INC.

Rm. 105 PhilDHRRA Partnership Center

59 C. Salvador St., Varsity Hills, 1108

Quezon City, Metro Manila

Philippines

Cell phone no.: +63 917-538-9358

Tel. no.: (63) (2) 925-2815; (63) (2) 788-6402

Fax no:  (63) (2) 426-6737 local 102

E-mail: thepeacemak...@gmail.com

            shek...@gmail.com        

Webpage: www.thepeacemakerscircle.org                 

[maria lourdes noel]

Dear Maritess,
Thank you very much for your thorough explanation of what PEACEMAKERSCIRCLE ACIVITIES.  I'll gladly help you.  Please call me any time.  Its my pleasure to help you.

Gratefully,
Sister Arnold Maria Noel