All in Good Faith

Author(s): Jean Potter, Marcus Braybrooke
Publisher: World Congress of Faiths

Page 33

3.
THE ISSUES
Marcus Braybrooke
The pioneers of interfaith services had a desire to encourage a sense of the unity of religions. In recent years, many of those who have taken initiatives have clearly acknowledged the distinctiveness of the historic faiths.
'Universalist in conception'.
Will Hayes saw his services as 'to some extent a confession of faith. They are universalist in conception'. In his Preface to Every Nation Kneeling, he referred to a passage from one of Whitman's private notebooks, which summed up the idea behind the services. There are (those) that specialize a book, or some one divine life, as the only revelation. I, too, doubtless own it, whatever it is to be a revelation, a part, but I see all else, all nature, and each and all that to it appertains, the processes of time, all men, the universe, all likes and dislikes and developments - a hundred, a thousand other Saviours and Mediators and Bibles - they too (are) just as much revelations as any. The grand and vital theory of religion ..... must admit all, and not a part merely' (1).
Sir Francis Younghusband, whilst recognizing the differences between religions, stressed the underlying unity. 'We need never lose our faith', he wrote, 'that all the time there may be an underlying and overarching harmony which may reconcile them all, if only we could reach it' (2). Here is the mystic's sense that the reality of the Divine transcends the particular and limited understandings of any one historical faith. It was a view voiced by Bishop George Appleton at a WCF service when he said, 'We stand in worship before the mystery of the final reality to whom or to which we give differing names, so great and deep and eternal that we can never fully understand or grasp the mystery of His Being' (3). This position is held by many Unitarians and Universalists and by modern Hindus such as Ram Mohun Roy and other members of the Brahmo Samaj, by Gandhians and by Vedantists. Swami Tripurananda of the Ramakrishna Vedanta Society, for example, recently quoted at a WCF conference, words of Swami Vivekananda. Vivekananda said he had learned from his master Sri Ramakrishna that 'the religions of the world are not contradictory or antagonistic. They are but various phases of one eternal religion. There never existed many religions, there is only one' (4).
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