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Executive Director’s Letter, June ’05 |
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Written by Charles Gibbs
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Thursday, 02 June 2005 |
Dear Friends of the URI,
Greetings of love and peace.
Several years ago, when the United Religions Initiative was a small band of people from around the world struggling joyously to create a charter that would create an organization to change the world, a Buddhist monk named Heng Sure gave us some wise advice.
He looked at this small band of people of diverse faiths working with sacrificial dedication to create something that had never before existed and he said, “We’re very good at working hard. But we need to remember to stop and celebrate our victories. It doesn’t matter if they are big victories or little victories. We need to celebrate them. Celebrating gives us the joy, inspiration and strength to keep working, especially when the work is difficult and it’s easy to be discouraged.”
We live in a time when the work is difficult and it’s easy to be discouraged. So, I invite you to celebrate. I invite you to celebrate a meeting that marks a major milestone in URI’s evolution as a global organization.
On June 26, at the Lazarus Retreat Center and Dongguk University in Seoul, Korea, members of URI’s outgoing and incoming Global Councils, URI’s global staff, and special guests will gather to celebrate the Fifth Anniversary of the signing of URI’s Charter, which is also the 60th Anniversary of the signing of the United Nations’ Charter. We will gather to celebrate five years of enduring, daily interfaith cooperation, to end religiously motivated violence and to create cultures of peace, justice and healing for the Earth and all living beings.
We will gather to celebrate growth from 85 Cooperation Circles at the charter signing to over 280 CCs in 60 countries five years later. We will gather to celebrate the lives, including our own, that have been transformed as we have worked hard together to create an unprecedented community of global spiritual citizens. Like the global interfaith movement, this community is only in its infancy, but it is changing the world.
We will gather to celebrate the service of our outgoing Global Council, the URI’s first, inaugurated at the 2002 Global Assembly in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil where we gathered to share the sacred and serve the world. These leaders from 21 countries have served for three years helping URI become something that has never existed before in human history – a global interfaith community that is sowing the seeds of a crop humanity has never harvested, the fruits of interfaith cooperation for peace, justice and healing on a global grassroots scale. You can explore URI’s website (www.uri.org) to read story after story of the transformative work that is going on all over the world because people like you have committed themselves to interfaith cooperation for a better world. Read and celebrate.
We also gather in Seoul to celebrate our incoming Global Council, whose members will guide URI through its next three years of growth toward becoming a globally visible and effective force for peace, justice and healing. Growth toward 1,000 CCs and 1,000,000 million members.
As we gather to celebrate, we also gather to work hard envisioning, planning and committing to our future of service to the world. We will visit the Demilitarized Zone, which divides one Korea into two parts in an uneasy ceasefire to a war that began 55 years ago on June 25 and has never officially ended. At the DMZ and throughout our week in Seoul, we will stand in solidarity with our Korean brothers and sisters and pray for the day when this uneasy ceasefire yields one Korea at peace within its borders and a source of peace and understanding in the world.
That would be a miracle. Something great to celebrate.
We aren’t there yet. But we will be if we have the boldness and conviction to imagine a world of peace, justice and healing, and to work for it with our sisters and brothers of all faiths; if we remain committed to sharing the sacred and serving the world as global spiritual citizens.
And if we remember to celebrate our victories.
Whoever you are and wherever you are, I invite you to join in this celebration of what we have accomplished together and in this commitment to the accomplishments yet to come.
Love,
Charles Gibbs
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 15 February 2006 )
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