PRAYERS AND SONGS FROM AFRICA

.

.

.

.

.

Our Lord and God Almighty,

we praise you,

for you created us all and made us

into many different tribes and nations,

that we may befriend one another

and that we may not despise each other.
. 

Open our hearts, we pray,

so that we may respond to the needs

of all our brothers and sisters.

.

.

Oh Lord Jesus, bless all our lands

with more lasting peace and fraternal understanding.

Above all, heavenly Father,

touch the hearts of our political leaders

and all those in power.
.

. 

We pray that they may exercise power gently,

that they may humbly seek a disinterested dialogue

that will bring about understanding,

leading us all to a place where all nations and all people

live together in peace and harmony.
. 

Where there is bitterness teach us forgiveness and reconciliation,

replace hatred with love and indifference with care.

We ask this through Christ our Lord.
. 

Amen.

.

.

.

.

Oh Lord Jesus Christ, who said to your apostles

“Peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you”
. 

Give us courage to challenge the perpetrators of violence

and to change their behaviour.
Help us devote our whole life,

thought and energy to the task of making peace.
. 

We pray for a new Africa,

where fear, violent thoughts or action shall no longer exist,

and where selfishness will not lead people to

commit injustice to others.
.

As for the peoples of every African tongue and race,

may your kingdom come;

your kingdom of justice, peace and love.

May peace prevail in Africa.

May peace prevail on earth.

.

Amen.

.

.

.

.

.

.

Lord, rightful advocate of peace.

God of power and mercy, please destroy war,

which results in a spiral of human suffering

and the destruction of your bountiful creation.

Eliminate violence from our midst and wipe away the tears.

Hear the cries of many African people

afflicted through the death of their loved ones.

Hear the sighs of those who live in constant fear,

Hear the cries of many African mothers

who suffer with hunger pains but still break their backs

to feed their families,

Hear the cries of those who have been displaced

and are facing hunger and scarcity.

Through Jesus Christ our Lord and Saviour we pray.

Amen

All three prayers composed by
 Aneth Lwakatare
(Tanzania)
.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

THE CRUSADES - A RELIGIOUS LICENSE TO KILL

.

.

The crusading religion of Western Christendom

had separated it from the other monotheistic traditions.

The First Crusade of 1096-99 had been the first cooperative act of the new West,
 a sign that Europe was beginning to recover from the long period of barbarism known as the Dark Ages.

.

.
The new Rome, backed by the Christian nations

of Northern Europe, was fighting its way back onto the

international scene.  But the Christianity of the Angles, the Saxons and the Franks was rudimentary.  They were aggressive and martial people and they wanted an aggressive religion.  During the eleventh century, the Benedictine monks of the Abbey of Cluny and its affiliated houses had tried to tether their martial spirit to the church and teach them true Christian values by means of such devotional practices as the pilgrimage.

.

.

.

The first Crusaders had seen their expedition to the Near East

as a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, but they still had a very primitive conception of God and of religion. 
.

. 

Soldier saints like St. George, St. Mercury, and St. Demetrius

figured more than God in their piety and, in practice, differed little from
 pagan deities.
.

.

Jesus was seen as the feudal lord of the Crusaders

rather than as the incarnate Logos: he had summoned

his knights to recover his patrimony - the Holy Land - from

the infidel.  As they began their journey, some of the Crusaders resolved to avenge his death by slaughtering the Jewish communities along the Rhine Valley.  This had not been part of Pope Urban II's original idea when he had summoned the Crusade, but it seemed simply perverse to many of the Crusaders to march 3,000 miles to fight the Muslims, about whom they knew next to nothing, when the people who had - or so they thought - actually killed Christ were alive and well on their very doorsteps.

.

.

During the long terrible march to Jerusalem, when the

Crusaders narrowly escaped extinction, they could only account for their survival by assuming that they must be God's Chosen People, who enjoyed his special protection.  He was leading them to the Holy Land as he had once led the ancient Israelites.  In practical terms, their God was still the primitive tribal deity of the early books of the Bible.
.

.

.

When they finally conquered Jerusalem in the summer

of 1099, they fell on the Jewish and Muslim inhabitants of the city with the zeal of Joshua and massacred them with a brutality that shocked even their contemporaries.

.

.

.

Thenceforth Christians in Europe regarded Jews and Muslims
as the enemies of God; for a long time they also felt a deep
antagonism toward the Greek Orthodox Christians of
Byzantium, who made them feel barbarous and inferior.
.
From A HISTORY OF GOD -
The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam
by Karen Armstrong
.

.

.

.
Pope Urban II  - The Motivator of The Crusades
.
Urban II's crusading movement took its first public shape at the Council of Piacenza, where, in March 1095, Urban II received an ambassador from the Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Komnenos (1081–1118) asking for help against Muslim Turks, who had taken over most of formerly Byzantine Anatolia. A great council met, attended by numerous Italian, Burgundian, and French bishops in such vast numbers it had to be held in the open air outside the city. At the Council of Clermont held in November of the same year, Urban II's sermon proved highly effective, as he summoned the attending nobility and the people to wrestle the Holy Land and the eastern churches generally from the Seljuk Turks.
.

.
There exists no exact transcription of Urban II's speech which was given at the Council of Clermont on November 27, 1095. The five extant versions of the speech were written down quite a bit later, and they differ widely from one another. All versions of the speech except that by Fulcher of Chartres were probably influenced by the chronicle account of the First Crusade called the Gesta Francorum (dated c. 1102), whose author also gives a version of the speech. Fulcher of Chartres was present at the Council, but his version of Urban's speech was written 1100-1106; Robert the Monk may have been present, but his version dates about 1106.
.
Fulcher of Chartres has Urban say:
"I, or rather the Lord, beseech you as Christ's heralds to publish this everywhere and to pers­e all people of whatever rank, foot-soldiers and knights, poor and rich, to carry aid promptly to those Christians and to destroy that vile race from the lands of our friends. I say this to those who are present, it meant also for those who are absent. Moreover, Christ commands it."
.

.
  The chronicler Robert the Monk has put into the mouth of Urban II:
."...this land which you inhabit, shut in on all sides by the seas and surrounded by the mountain peaks, is too narrow for your large population; nor does it abound in wealth; and it furnishes scarcely food enough for its cultivators. Hence it is that you murder one another, that you wage war, and that frequently you perish by mutual wounds. Let therefore hatred depart from among you, let your quarrels end, let wars cease, and let all dissensions and controversies slumber. Enter upon the road to the Holy Sepulchre; wrest that land from the wicked race, and subject it to yourselves.  God has conferred upon you above all nations great glory in arms. Accordingly undertake this journey for the remission of your sins, with the assurance of the imperishable glory of the Kingdom of Heaven."
.
Robert further claims:
When Pope Urban had said these things in his urbane discourse, he so influenced to one purpose the desires of all who were present, that they cried out 'It is the will of God! It is the will of God!'. When the venerable Roman pontiff heard that, [he] said: "Most beloved brethren, today is manifest in you what the Lord says in the Gospel, 'Where two or three are gathered together in my name there am I in the midst of them.' Unless the Lord God had been present in your spirits, all of you would not have uttered the same cry. For, although the cry issued from numerous mouths, yet the origin of the cry was one. Therefore I say to you that God, who implanted this in your breasts, has drawn it forth from you. Let this then be your war-cry in combats, because this word is given to you by God. When an armed attack is made upon the enemy, let this one cry be raised by all the soldiers of God: It is the will of God!
 It is the will of God!"
.

.
"All who die by the way, whether by land or by sea, or in battle against the pagans, shall have immediate remission of sins. This I grant them through the power of God with which I am invested. O what a disgrace if such a despised and base race, which worships demons, should conquer a people which has the faith of omnipotent God and is made glorious with the name of Christ! With what reproaches will the Lord overwhelm us if you do not aid those who, with us, profess the Christian religion! Let those who have been accustomed unjustly to wage private warfare against the faithful now go against the infidels and end with victory this war which should have been begun long ago. Let those who for a long time, have been robbers, now become knights. Let those who have been fighting against their brothers and relatives now fight in a proper way against the barbarians. Let those who have been serving as mercenaries for small pay now obtain the eternal reward. Let those who have been wearing themselves out in both body and soul now work for a double honor. Behold! on this side will be the sorrowful and poor, on that, the rich; on this side, the enemies of the Lord, on that, his friends. Let those who go not put off the journey, but rent their lands and collect money for their expenses; and as soon as winter is over and spring comes, let them eagerly set out on the way with God as their guide."
.
It is disputed whether the famous slogan "God wills it" or "It is the will of God" (deus vult in Latin, Dieu le veut in French) in fact was established as a rallying cry during the council. While Robert the Monk says so, it is also possible that the slogan was created as a catchy propaganda motto afterward.
.
Urban II's own letter to the Flemish confirms that he granted "remission of all their sins" to those undertaking a "military enterprise" to "liberate the eastern churches."
.
From Wikipedia 
.

.

.

THE HIGHEST FORM OF PRAYER

.

.

.

"Ye have heard that it hath been said,

Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy.

But I say unto you, Love your enemies,

bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you,

and pray for them which despitefully use you,

and persecute you;

that ye may be the children of your Father who is in heaven:

for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good,

and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust."
Matthew 5:43-45

.

 .

.

.

"Many people pray to God because they want God

to fulfill some of their needs.  If they want to have a

picnic, they ask God for a clear, sunny day.  At the same

time, farmers might pray for rain.  If the weather is clear,

the picnickers will say, "God is on our side; he answered

our prayers."  But if it rains, the farmers will say that

God heard their prayers.  This is the way we usually pray.

.

.

.

When you pray only for your own picnic and not for

the farmers who need the rain, you are doing the opposite

of what Jesus taught.  Jesus said,

"Love your enemies, bless them that curse you..."

When you look deeply into your anger, you will see

that the person you call your enemy is also suffering.

As soon as you see that, the capacity of accepting and

having compassion for him is there.

Jesus called this "loving your enemy."

.

.

.

.

.

When you are able to love your enemy,

he or she is no longer your enemy.  The idea

of "enemy" vanishes and is replaced by the notion of

someone who is suffering and needs your compassion.

.

.

Doing this is sometimes easier than you might have

imagined, but you need to practice.  If you read the Bible

but don't practice, it will not help much.

In Buddhism, practicing the teaching of the Buddha

is the highest form of prayer.  The Buddha said,

"If someone is standing on one shore and wants

to go to the other shore, he has to either use a boat

or swim across.  He cannot just pray, 'Oh, other shore,

please come over here for me to step across!' "

.

.

To a Buddhist, praying without practicing

is not real prayer."

.

From Living Buddha, Living Christ

Thich Nhat Hanh

.

.

JESUS AND THE BUDDHA

.

. .
Edited from the preface to Jesus and Buddha -
The Parallel Sayings by Marcus Borg
*

 I have sometimes said that if the Buddha
and Jesus were to meet, neither would try to convert the other - not because they would regard such an effort as hopeless, but because they would recognize one another.
.

 Jesus and the Buddha were teachers of wisdom.
Wisdom is not just about moral behavior, but about the "center," the place from which moral perception and moral behavior flow.
Jesus and the Buddha were teachers of a world-subverting wisdom that undermined and challenged conventional ways of seeing and being in their time and in every time. Their subversive wisdom was also an alternative wisdom: they taught a way or path of transformation.
.

 They both were teachers of the way less traveled.
What Jesus and the Buddha said about "the way"
is remarkably similar.

*
 Published in 1997, Jesus and Buddha -
The Parallel Sayings is an excellent text for comparisons between the teachings of these two religious paths. The similarities are amazing.

 .

.
Do to others as you would have them do to you.
*
Luke 6:31
.

 Consider others as yourself.
*
Dhammpada 10:1

 .

.

Do not store up for yourselves treasures
on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal.
*
Matthew 6:19-20

 .

Let the wise man do righteousness:
A treasure that others can not share, where no thief can steal; a treasure which does not pass away.
*
Khuddakapatha 8:9

 . .

The kingdom of heaven is like treasure
hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.
*
Matthew 13:44

 .

 If by giving up limited pleasures
one sees far-reaching happiness, the wise one leaves aside limited pleasures, looking to far-reaching happiness.
*
Dhammmapada 21:1

.

.

Truly I tell you, if you have faith the size

of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain,

"Move from here to there," and it will move,

and nothing will be impossible for you.

*

Matthew 17:20

.

A monk who is skilled in concentration can

cut the Himalayas in two.

*

Anguttara Nikaya 6:24

.

.

.