Swinburne Chaplaincy

Swinburne University of Technology

Swinburne University of Technology

Swinburne Multi Faith Facility
rd
3 Anniversary Celebration 7th May 2014

Listen to the Sounds of Silence an inter faith imperative.

Swinburne Chaplaincy supporting the Swinburne Multi Faith Facility
In 2011 Swinburne University of Technology provided a generous space for the practice and
exploring of matters of faith, spirituality, religion, meditation, quiet reflection and communal
dialogue. It is a space for activities for people of all faiths or none: encouraging the search for
meaning, respectful dialogue and supporting spiritual life, faith and healthy religion.
The Swinburne Chaplaincy program approaches our complex multi faith community in a society
that is secular, pluralist and diverse with the rhetorical question:
Can we encourage respectful dialogue between people of different faiths and belief
frameworks . . ?
. . . while maintaining the integrity of ones own tradition?
. . . and affirming the distinctiveness of different traditions?
The anniversary celebration is an occasion to address the issue of respectful dialogue. The MFF was
opened in 2011 by Melbourne Archbishop Rev Dr Philip Freier. Dr Deborah Weismann (Jerusalem
based Chairperson of the International Council of Christians and Jews) spoke at the 1st anniversary.
The guest speaker for the 2nd anniversary event was Professor Abdullah Saeed (The Sultan of Oman
Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Melbourne University and a Fellow of the Australian
Academy of Humanities).
The speaker for the 3rd anniversary was Rev Dr Denham Grierson (FACE). Denham is a Minister of
the Uniting Church in Australia. He is an internationally recognised educator and Emeritus Professor
at the United Faculty of Theology (Associated with the Melbourne University of Divinity. He is the
author of a number of books including Uluru Journey (An exploration into narrative theology) JBCE
1996
Denham approached this 3rd anniversary event with these questions in mind:
Is there one God or many? Can such a dispute be resolved?
Grappling with the challenges of focusing on faith in a university context in a pluralist society,
Denham approached the event from a perspective that sought to engage the academic community
rather than bring a particular faith perspective.

"In my travels I have found many who are seeking answers.

I have come to believe that no one who has come earnestly seeking
and with a genuine hunger has gone home with an empty heart"
A quote from Uluru Journey. D Grierson JBCE 1996

Swinburne Chaplaincy http://www.swinburne.edu.au/chaplaincy/ Enquiries: ndaddow@swin.edu.au Phone: 039214 8489

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LISTEN TO THE SOUNDS OF SILENCE

A MULTI FAITH IMPERATIVE
Denham Grierson
Swinburne University Multi Faith Facility 3rd Anniversary 7th May 2014

THE TRIUMPH OF RELATIVISM

In 2010 a book was published with the intriguing title, God is not One. The author, Stephen Prothero,
chairs the Department of Religion at Boston University in the USA. Having taught for many years in the
field of Religious Studies Professor Prothero reached the following conclusion. 'For more than a
generation we have followed scholars and sages down the rabbit hole into a fantasy world in which all
gods are one'. (p3) Such a view, of all gods being one,he regards as dangerous, disrespectful and untrue. It
is a form of ignorance to his mind to declare at base that all religions are one.
In this he dismisses the DalaiLama and Mahatma Gandhi, as well as such scholars as Karen Armstrong,
author of The History of God, and Huston Smith who wrote the best seller World's Religions, A Guide
to our Wisdom Traditions. To illustrate his claim Prothero points out that each of the religions address
different realities. For Buddhism the problem is suffering,the solution or goalis nirvana. For Christianity
the problem is sin, the solution is salvation. Islam, he claims, sees self-sufficiency as the problem, the
conceit we can do without God, and the solution is submission to God in order to gain 'a soulof peace'. So
he goes on across eight religions illustrating the substantive differences between their views of God, the
tragedy of the human condition, its incompleteness, and the resolution each Faith offers to the human
enigma.
Professor Prothero illustrates his view with a sports analogy. Which of the following, he asks, baseball,
basketball, tennis or golf is best at scoring runs.The answer of course is baseball because runs is a
foreign term to basketball, tennis and golf alike. Different sports have different goals. Basketball players
shoot baskets, tennis players win points, and golfers sink putts. So if you ask which sport is best at scoring
runs you have privileged baseball from the start. He goes on to say 'To criticise a basketball team for
failing to score runs is not to besmirch them. It is simply to misunderstand the game of basketball'. (p22)
The inescapable conclusion is that no one religion has a claim to ascendancy. All are relative options
which may or may not be useful in helping you shape a meaningful life. No one religion has a superior
claim. You may choose, without remainder, the religion of your choice.In short, all religious world views
are relative and discrete.
There is another unavoidable layer to this point of view. It is captured in the sub title to Prothero's book.
'The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World and Why their Differences Matter. The claim here
is that religions are rivals and one assumes therefore are in competition with each other. Prothero goes on
to argue that both tolerance and respect are empty virtues because in the end they seek to paper over the
sharp differences of religious world views, making the world more dangerous, and obscuring reality in
the process. A glance around our world today provides ample evidence of the claim that rival religions are
in conflict. Look at the Sudan, Myanmar, the Middle East or even to select urban environments in
Western cities. The conflict is between religions and within religions, testimony to the claim of
competitive rivalry.

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THE TRIUMPH OF RELATIVITY? ABSOLUTELY NOT

So what do we make of these claims and the triumph of relativity they contain, putting aside for the
moment the somewhat simplistic description of the essential characteristics of each religion Prothero
provides. How might we respond to this point of view? For a response seems necessary, not because
Prothero's plea for the recognition of difference is an outlandish claim. We recognise the truth of his
assertion that religions offer contrasting and sometimes incompatible world views. But in the end
Prothero's claim is only half a story, a vision sharply focused by one eye but not two.
Let us begin by exploring a little the function of language. There are of course hundreds of languages but
most, in one form or another, acknowledge that reality is best understood by postulating polarities. You
will be familiar with them. The absolute and the relative, the one and the many (which preoccupied the
Greeks and particularly Plato in his discussion of the Forms), the immanent and the transcendent, the
universal and the particular, the finite and the infinite, the mortal and the immortal, time and eternity,
dynamic and form- there are many other examples, which if not strictly polarities but forms of perception,
offer an alternative to the other competing dimension of reality yoked to it.
The philosopher and theologian PaulTillich held the view that language itself was an absolute that
manifested itself in countless forms, relevant to different cultures and varying circumstances. Tongans
have over twenty words to describe a coconut and its products. English less than ten, but they are both
languages. Prothero seems not to recognise this structure of reality in the way he presents his case. Take his
illustration of different sports. They are different games with different rules and different ends. But they are
all games and they all are about winning or losing. They are not about comparing knitting socks, felling
trees or flying aircraft.The illustration itself only works in his terms because what is foreground,
difference, is not linked with what is background, similarity. Or that it is the absolute of language that
makes it possible to communicate in the first place about multiple options.
For example, if one was to take the polar opposites of the Absolute and the Relative, each of the particular
forms of religious conviction share in common an attempt to respond to that which is beyond or eternal or
divine, that which is not relative but absolute. It can be argued that science does not escape this dilemma
either. As the German philosopher Emmanuel Kant argued long since, we can explore what he called the
phenomenalworld, the proper realm of science, but we cannot reach beyond time and space to the
noumenal, which is the presupposition of all that we seek to know. You cannot look at the eye by which
you see. It is the eye which makes seeing possible. In another context the Oxbridge Don C.S.Lewis argued
that God is the presupposition of any discussion about God.
We do not know what givens such as time or form or complexity or totalism are in themselves. We can
describe such dimensions of experience but we cannot get behind them to explain them because we
ourselves are bound by time and space. We are creatures, not Creators. There is no absolute vantage point
for us by which we can know why things are the way they are. It follows that all interpretations are
misinterpretations to some degree because they cannot by definition be absolute. We cannot have a total
understanding of what addresses us. We are too fallible and inadequate to do more than point to the
mystery of things that are the embracing universals of our daily experience.
So let us push this objection to Prothero a little further. What happens when all faiths are declared relative
and adversarial is that the temptation arises to declare a particular religion Absolute and all other options
untrue, false or illusory.A judgment is levelled at those who do not share the mother faith perspective, and
then it is an easy step to justifying why these others should be discarded, resisted, and in extreme cases,
eliminated.Conversion is offered as the escape from damnation. So there is a traffic in which people move
from one view to another, all the time professing a move from falsehood to truth. That the traffic is
indiscriminate across religions illustrates that any one religion has grounds for strengthening its conviction
that it is the true option and all else is by definition at best unacceptable and at worse damnable.

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I would add here that science can fall into this category in the hands of its most dedicated protagonists. A
theory of everything is somewhat immodest given what we seek to name.Atheism, and in particular, the
new atheism with its harsh and dismissive attitude to those who believe, is not free either from claiming an
absolute status for its position, above all others. What is relative becomes absolute and the necessary
tension of the polarity, Absolute-Relative is obscured and lost.
THE FINGER POINTING AT THE MOON IS NOT THE MOON
Buddhism has a wonderful way of unveiling this process. The finger pointing at the moon, they say, is not
the moon. Any relative perspective, which is inescapably the case as soon as we try to codify what we
believe in a particular language, can do no more than point to that which is absolute. Our doctrine is
relative.Our rituals are relative. Sacred texts are relative since they were written in time and space by
human beings. Revelations become wrapped in language, culture and religious practice and they become
relative because they have to take form in what we can shape and understand, and are domesticated thereby
to our understanding of what they mean.
Take scripture or sacred text.They are meant to be the lens through which we are led to the holy or the
divine or the Wholly Other, that realm that lies beyond the capacity of language to illumine. But when the
text is declared to be absolute then the vesselis made of equal value to the message. The finger becomes
the moon. In the so called religions of the Book, Judaism, Christianity and Islam this process of turning the
relative into the Absolute is described as idolatry. An image of God, whether material, intellectual, or
devotionalthat is worshipped, instead of that to which it points, is an idol.
The Orthodox world understands this well. For when they write an Icon,they are very aware that its
purpose is to point beyond itself to that which deserves honour, respect and worship. One does not look at
an icon but through it. A finger pointing to the moon. The Protestant principle matches the Buddhist
insight. 'Nothing relative should be made absolute.' Sikhism also holds that no image of God is acceptable
or possible.
In the Hindu sacred text the Upanishads there is an amusing passage concerning Svetaketu, a first class
student much taken with his own knowledge and learning. His father is not impressed. 'Have you ever
considered,' he asks his son, ' how to hear what cannot be heard...perceive what cannot be perceived...
know what cannot be known'.
Lao Tzu, the Taoist sage,puts it most directly.
The Tao (way) that can be told is not the eternalTao
The name that can be named is not the eternal name
There is in this an understanding that God is not object but always Subject. It follows that all our attempts
to imagine God or the sublime or the void, or the eternal are but ways of our devising, and they fall back to
earth as an arrow fired into the sky, a means of holding up for a time that ineffable dimension of our
experience, pointing beyond itself, as a finger pointing to the moon. But only a finger, not the moon itself.
I think fondly of Mark Twain from time to time.Someone said to him once, such and such was the will of
God, to which Twain replied, 'Who found that out?
NAMING THE UNNAMEABLE
So far we have used the symbol, the Absolute, without definition, as much a logical or philosophical
category as a theologicalone. Let us now be precise and name the Absolute as a religious category.
Different religions give a particular name to that Absolute which represents the unitive ground that binds
all relativities together. One mysticalJewish community has seven hundred and twenty names for God
and yet in another Jewish tradition the name of God should not be said except in its proper time by an
anointed representative once a year. Buddhism has no god while others have multiple names or no names

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for the One or the Ineffable, 'that of which nothing greater can be thought'. Hinduism has multiple names
for multiple gods for Hindus honour diversity as others honour unity. Some prefer to talk of Wisdom.
Others, the Mystery. Christianity speaks of the One God in God's three ways of being God to us.Sikhism
believes God is all in all, both immanent and transcendent. Islam offers its allegiance to Allah.
But in all of this, no matter what words we use they are all forms of language and before the Inexpressible,
they all fall silent for want of durable currency that carries us beyond the limit horizon of time and space.
As the unknown Medieval author of The Cloud of Unknowing reminds us, 'He (sic) may well be loved, but
not thought. By love he can be caught and held, but by thinking never'. (p68) So it is to this point of
silence that I would like to bring you for contemplation of that for which only indirect images can give us
insight. Like that of Foucault's pendulum that stays unmoving as the world spins around it. The still point
in the turning world, an ancient image from the East, made manifest in a moment, an image that points
beyond itself in the present that we share together.
We have arrived at a place that Huston Smith addresses in this way. 'Whether religion is for us, a good
word or bad; whether ... we side with a single religious tradition or to some degree open our arms to them
all, how do we comport ourselves in a pluralistic world that is riven by ideologies, sacred and profane?
We listen.' (p248) Aboriginal nations have always required, as part of their spirituality, the capacity to be
silent and listen, a precondition to being a learner of the worldview they celebrate.
We have arrived at that imperative that I have described as a necessity in a multi faith community. 'Listen
to the sounds of silence'. (It has been said that God's first language is silence, but don't ask me who found
that out.) Oddly it is this Multi Faith Centre that symbolises this quest of which we speak. It testifies to
the Absolute in the midst of multiple knowledge domains in this University that, each in their own way,
claim pre-eminence. It is a cone of silence, a space empty of descriptive finality. It is a sacred place in an
environment that is secular, a secular place proud of being so, tolerating the religious, but regarding it as a
consumer choice, no different from following a football team, or preferring rock music to classicalor jazz.
In such a case there is a blindness to that Absolute to which all relative claims are inescapably yoked in
polar tension.
LISTENING TO THE SOUNDS OF SILENCE
Let us for a moment engage in an imaginary exercise. Into this sacred space, the Multi-Faith Centre, each
faith gathers regularly to worship in its own particular way. Each world view held up makes a distinctive
claim upon the worshipper.So many groups gather, reaching out to that 'nothing which is not nothing' -the
Ultimate, the Holy,the Ineffable, God, the Divine,- there are many names. Let us imagine that we could put
all of these groups in this one place at the one time, each with its rituals, music, prayers, incantations and
declarations. Each group operating at the same time. It is possible to imagine a moment when all of the
speaking, the cacophony of sound, would fall silent,perhaps because of the absurdity,but also because of
the mutual recognition that for all our differences, we all stand in the one place as fellow human beings.
Here we all are, of the one species, seeking to offer worship and obedience before the Beyond, name it as
you will, and all of us brought to the same point where we fall silent, guided by the wisdom of our
aboriginal brothers and sisters. What can we say or do in this Presence, this Presence that is before, behind,
within, without, nearer than thought, closer than breathing, beyond all that can be named?
What is the sound of this silence? What does it tell us? One thing it does is judge all our human pretensions,
all of our claim to exclusive knowledge, all of our presumptions to know what God thinks or wants. Again it
was the medievalauthor of The Cloud of Unknowing who wrote, 'We cannot know God we can only love
God.' For God in his view was never merely or ever finally an object of thought. Rational thought cannot
conquer that which is unknowable.God is the question at the heart of our existence, and the sustainer of it,
accessible only by the way of love.
That is not to say that what our Wisdom tradition teaches us is of no value. If we did not have a finger
pointing at the moon we might never know the moon at all. But when we turn to that which the finger
indicates, in the end we fall silent. Words cannot carry us beyond an evident threshold of being. We come to

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our limit before the Ground of all Being. We stand before that which is ultimately incomprehensible and
infinitely compassionate.The love we offer is an answering love to that love that has first come to us.
Therefore this place is more than a place. It is a meeting ground in which we allow the silence to fill us
and we learn more than we could ever have imagined. By being still. By falling silent. By listening. By
opening ourselves to that which comes to renew and transform, into which all that we do and are is taken
up. The sounds of silence speak of both relationship and oneness, which at once defies explanation but is
as complete as language can describe it. Strange that in a University, at its heart, at the centre of its life, the
last word is not knowledge but love.
THE TURN TO THE HUMAN
There is however one final word to be said. It is best conveyed in a Jewish story that goes something like
this. A man went into the desert and found his way to the gate of Mystery. 'I have spoken your word to
others but they do not listen' he said.
'So I Have come into the desert to speak with you directly'. 'There is no place for you here', a voice replied
from within. 'Go back. I have sunk my hearing in the deafness of mortals'.
As one whose home faith is Christian I am compelled by the turn to the human to seek there the
reconciliation that I believe all confessions have at their heart. My tradition calls it incarnation,but each of
us have our own words for it. For the love we confess is not complete if it does not reach out to others,
strangers and enemies alike, whatever their faith or belief. And this we learn when we go beyond words to
the moment of listening stillness. We learn it, not in the noise of solemn assemblies but in the moment
before God, when we listen with an open heart to the sounds of silence.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Armstrong Karen
Prothero Stephen
Smith Huston
Anonymous

A History of God
Mandarin Paperbacks London 1994
God Is Not One Black Inc, Schwartz Media Pty Ltd Melbourne 2010
Worlds Religions Harper Collins Paperback N e w York 1995
The Cloud of Unknowing Penguin Books London 1978

The Swinburne Chaplaincy team:

Sarah Lamb, Rabbi Moishe Weiss, Rev Jessica Cheung, Imam Rashid Mohammed and Rev Newton Daddow.
We are available to students and staff on all campuses. We have a sense of participating as colleagues to
contribute to a rich community life that affirms the value of learning: inviting deeper understanding and
contribution to a more humane world.
We recognise the beauty and challenge of our cultural diversity at Swinburne. With students and staff from our
Asia-Pacific region as well as Africa, the Middle East, Europe and other parts of the world - this is a privileged
congregation of the world.
As a multi-faith community, where any learning environment might include a Hindu, an agnostic, Buddhist,
Muslim, Christian, Sikh or Jew, we affirm the value of respectful dialogue and reflection. We are uniquely
placed to share in the quest for peace and truth and to shape a community marked by a commitment to
tolerance, justice and compassion.
The truth is a snare: you cannot have it, without being caught.
You cannot have the truth in such a way that you catch it,
but only in such a way that it catches you. Sren Kierkegaard

Swinburne Chaplaincy http://www.swinburne.edu.au/chaplaincy/ Enquiries: ndaddow@swin.edu.au Phone: 039214 8489