Distinguished Religious Leaders, Your Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen:

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1 Multi-religious Cooperation for Peace Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina Dr. William Vendley, Secretary General 24 July 2015 Distinguished Religious Leaders, Your Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen: Good morning. Being back with you in Bosnia-Herzegovina fills me with joy. During and after the war, I had the occasion to work with the religious communities here. It was a hard time. But hard times are paradoxical they can also be the occasion for unusually deep friendships based on trust. With you we learned life lessons that have helped us around the world. On behalf of so many of us, I am happy to thank you for these gifts today. I also want to thank the Inter-religious Council of Bosnia-Herzegovina (IRC-BiH-RfP) for hosting the RfP International symposium on advancing multi-religious action projects. This morning, I would like to reflect with you on three points: 1. What our religions teach about overcoming conflict and healing; 2. How Religions for Peace has benefited from your experience in BiH; and 3. Going forward. I. What our religious traditions teach about overcoming conflict and healing Actions speak louder than words: Mr. Jacob Finci, we recall your leadership of the Jewish group La Beneveolencija that distributed food and medicine to the members of all religious communities. You and your group made a profound contribution. On a small personal note, RfP had the joy of arranging for matzo and wine to be loaded on to a relief plane so your community could celebrate Passover. Your Eminence Cardinal Pulic, I recall you driving to Belgrade to visit Patriarch Pavle in May His Holiness the Patriarch had let you know that he would welcome seeing you. As the Patriarch was elderly, you graciously went to visit him in Belgrade. Your Grace Bishop Grigorije, your Patriarch Pavle courageously agreed to the formation of the Council and he appointed your predecessor, Metropolitan Nikolai, to represent the Serbian Orthodox community, which is now represented by you.

2 Reis Kavazovic, we were able to meet yesterday for which I am so grateful. I recall working with your predecessor, Dr. Mustafa Ceric, during the time of building the IRC-BiH. More than once I have heard Dr. Ceric refer teasingly to me around the world as a bitter friend. He meant simply that those who brought up the relevance of core religious truths on compassion in moments of extreme hardship can seem like a bitter lemon. He knows, of course, that those core religious teachings are actually wonderfully sweet. So, by the Grace of God the Mercy of Allah each community found the strength to reach out to the other communities to start the building of Peace and reconciliation. And you accomplished much together: Shortly after the war, you issued an historic joint declaration asking everyone in BiH to unite on the basis of shared moral commitments to rebuild the country; then you went together on the radio and TV to call your communities to work together; you traveled to sites of pain and destruction; you conducted a national art contest, My Bosnia-Herzegovina, for the country s young students asking them to compose essays, poems and paintings about the country they loved; you advanced beginning in 1999 a reform of the legal code in relationship to freedom of religion and your efforts issued in a new law in 2004 that defines the legal status of religious communities; more recently in the spring of 2012 you established 12 committees across the country in local communities. None of this was easy, but you found the strength in your faith to do these things. So, let me pivot from these achievements to ponder the sources of your strength. Let me quote a few scriptures. I do so aware that I am not a religious leader and that it is up to each community to interpret its own sacred scriptures. Mr. Finci, in the Hebrew bible we read the following in Genesis: The Lord asked Cain, where is Abel. And Cain replies: How should I know, am I my brother s keeper? The irony in Cain s answer is painful. For, he has just killed his brother Abel out of jealousy. But notice the ancient Jewish text is a two edge sword. It does not suggest that the line between good and evil runs through communities. Rather, it runs through each human heart. Yes, tensions among communities can exaggerate this primordial vulnerability of the human heart, but this vulnerability lies on a deeper and more original level than racial, national, class or religious group identities. Thus, the text calls each to examine him or herself. Each of us fails in subtle or gross ways, and if each fails then by definition each of our religious communities collectively also invariably fails to some degree. This not to suggest that our communities scriptures or doctrines are wrong. Not at all, for it is those same scriptures and doctrines that illuminate our failures. So, Mr. Finci, with such a teaching with such a two-edged sword we can appreciate how the Jewish community drew strength from its profound heritage.

3 For the Islamic community, we note your remarkable Surah Fussilat Surah 41 Verse 34 which reads: Good and evil deeds are not equal. Repel evil with what is better and your enemy will become as close as an old and valued friend. Again, we notice the high irony: one is to repel evil with good. This surah urges Muslims to engage in what I like to call a high form of moral mathematics. Perhaps the basic moral math is the injunction not to hurt anyone: Live and let live. Perhaps a middle moral math is to treat others the way you want to be treated. But this sura is an example of higher moral mathematics in that it calls the listener to repel evil with what is better. Like Jews and Muslims, Christians, too, are to follow their own formulation of a higher moral mathematics. Chapter 5 of Matthew s Gospel states in part: You have heard that it was said, you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say to you love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. And these texts are not offered as mere take it or leave it suggestions. They are commands to persons and communities who would follow them. So through these texts, we get glimpses into how your respective heritages remain your irreplaceable sources of strength for building peace. We note, too, that this high moral mathematics does not require an advanced academic degree, for it is taught and celebrated in the home, the neighborhood, the mosque and the church. If my time here helped me to become more aware of the power of high moral math for peacebuilding, I learned here another companion lesson as well. Let me state this second lesson with yet another one of my odd terms of speech. Here in BiH, I learned that it is helpful to have a high IQ to understand high moral math. Let me be clear: by IQ, I don t mean intelligence quotient, I mean irony quotient. It takes a high irony quotient to understand our respective faiths. Only a high irony quotient allows us to understand ourselves and the ways we all engage in self-deception. Only a high irony quotient can see the good hidden in the bad, and just as importantly the presence of evil in what is otherwise so good. It takes a high irony quotient to understand that there are persons in my own community that fail its higher moral math, and at the same time, that there are people in the other communities that in fact are practicing a form of their own higher moral math. Concretely, this is exactly why we understand our scriptures as two edged swords : they would judge us and our communities ever as much as those beyond them. A high irony quotient helps us to discern both goodness wherever it lays and also our flights from the Light be those evasions in our own hearts or in our communities collective hearts. Here in BiH, I received a kind of master class on this need for a high irony quotient related to peacbuilding. I was standing in a destroyed religious site with the religious leader of that site. It could have been anywhere in BiH, and it could have been any one of the four religious communities sites. The religious leader, whose name I shall not mention, said to me simple

4 but with forceful conviction: William, always give extra attention and support to the religious leader in the community of majority. What!, I thought, support the leader in the majority? What about the suffering minorities? What about you standing here in your shelled and burnt out religious site? This religious leader went on: It is the religious leader in the majority community who is especially vulnerable to the distortions caused by the hurricane winds of nationalism. It is that leader who may need special help in his (or her) efforts to resist some in his own community who have in my funny phrase not really understood their own community s high moral math. The relevance of this exceptional wisdom is amplified when we realize that we are all minorities somewhere and all majorities somewhere else. There is a kind of blindness and acuity of vision in each position. Those in each position majority or minority need to learn to help the other to round out his or her perspective. This sharing of perspectives is essential for all to have a sufficiently high irony quotient to see like a two-edged sword how the demands of high moral math are like walking up a mountain on which each is susceptible to failure and each is always invited to climb a little further up, a little further on... II. How RfP has benefited from your experience and built upon it Rather than speaking about the great growth of RfP around the world, now present in over 90 countries and collectively engaged in some 800 projects a year, I believe more important to share how the early lessons in high moral math and the need for a high irony quotient have continued to yield exceptionally rich fruit. For example, in Syria we were invited by a particular donor to undertake a big project of helping to document human rights abuses. Well, we think that protecting human rights is terribly important! However, based on our leanings here in BiH, we felt that documenting the ways Sunni families and mosques offered protection to Alewite families, and the ways Christian families and Churches protected Sunnis and the ways Alewite families protected Christians was more important. These acts illustrated the higher moral math and the high irony quotient necessary to both help people with their physical needs and importantly at the same time undercut the misuses of religion that fan the flames of sectarian violence. So, we intentionally devised our grassroots projects run out of local mosques and churches to provide shelter and needed services to members of all different communities. We have learned to provide humanitarian assistance whenever possible in ways that build up solidarity across our religious lines; that approach, we believe, truly honors the highest teaching of our respective faiths. And the beauty of this approach is that it can engage our religious leaders across national borders. For example, the Buddhist Supreme Patriarch of Cambodian, Venerable Tep Vong, traveled to Jaffna, the largely Hindu city, in the midst of the Sri Lankan war against the Tamil Tigers. Venerable Tep Vong traveled to Jaffna to give moral credibility to those Sri Lankan Buddhist leaders struggling to build peace. There were of course extremists within the

5 Buddhist community that alleged that these courageous Sri Lankan monks were deserting their community by dialoguing with the enemy Hindus. The Supreme Patriarch of Cambodia came to stand side-by-side with his Sri Lankan Buddhist colleagues to say by his gentle presence: Yes! Yes! Yes!: Buddhism has a high moral math of having universal compassion on all and Buddhism cultivates the high irony quotient to understand that it is authentically Buddhist to decry lapses in one s self and one s own community and to celebrate goodness in the other and the other s community. We witnessed the power of these kinds of religious acts often small and unsung here in BiH and we have tried to nourish these kinds of acts in our work around the world. III. Going Forward: Building Trust My concluding point deals with the importance of trust. The social scientist Francis Fukuyama published a remarkable book in 1995 titled Trust. In that book, he works out in dramatic terms the relationship of trust to effective social flourishing. High trust societies Low trust societies High trust societies Low trust societies High trust societies Low trust societies get by on small governments require large governments get by with small police forces/ small numbers of prison cells require large police forces/ large numbers of prison cells foster the flourishing of innovation in the business sector weaken the incentives for business innovation. Now trust is a virtue, and a virtue is a habit. Importantly, a virtue is a special kind of habit that orients us to values. Like all habits, cultivating virtues takes practice. The more we practice, the easier it is to follow a virtue. Virtues pre-dispose us by the force of habit to the good. Virtues make it easier to decide upon and then perform good deeds; in a word to choose good values. Religions are the great schools of virtues. Today, our religious communities need to become the engines of advancing social virtues like trust. For, trust is even more basic than the social contract of citizenship. Alas, in too many lands trust among diverse peoples has eroded. People feel compelled to retreat from their broad multi-dimensional civic identities and flee into their religious subidentities out of fear and for protection. But, this cannot be our resting position. Our religious traditions need to be the schools of virtues that build social trust for all of us. Without social trust, even well-intended, well-designed and well-led governmental programs cannot deliver a good political order. For, healthy social and policital orders depend on trust.

6 In short, your working together in common projects can both achieve the good of the particular project and importantly also build trust. In turn, building trust among the religious communities can be the irreplaceable catalyst in building social trust. Every act of multi-religious trust-building requires honesty, courage and generosity of heart. But you have the deep resources for these irreplaceable virtures: your respective holy scriptures tell you about the unique power of a higher moral mathematics that cuts like a two edged sword and can disclose the great goodness in the other. God bless you and thank you for your kind attention.