This weekend sees the end of the week in which we kept Holocaust Memorial Day and the beginning of the UN Week of Interfaith Harmony with its celebration of Human Fraternity Day which remembers the signing of the document on Human Fraternity by Pope Francis and Ahmad Al-Tayyeb, the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar University on 4th Feb. 1999.
 
There were Holocaust Memorial events all over Europe and I was privileged to be at the Scottish and UK events as well as the civic service at the Reform Synagogue in Glasgow. As always central to these events are the stories of survivors, some who experienced the horror of the extermination camps and others who escaped them because they were part of the Kindertransport.
 
The stories tell of the heroism of parents who were determined to save their children. Some did this, by going with the SS when they knocked the door, closing it carefully behind them leaving a child who felt abandoned and did not fully understand what was happening. Hannah Lewis remembers her mother doing just that and seeing her mother’s blood on the snow when she witnessed her murder while looking for her and not understanding why her mother did not meet her eyes. Others did what they could to ensure a future for their children, like the mother of Lily Ebert who asked her to exchange shoes when they were in the trucks headed for Auschwitz. Only afterwards did Lily realise that her mother had given her shoes in which some gold and jewellery was hidden in the heels of the shoes. To this day Lily’s most precious possession is a pendant that was hidden in those shoes. At the Scottish event Henry Wuga told of how his parents put him on the Kindertransport to Britain. He was one of 10,000 children whose parents made the supreme sacrifice of sending their children to safety because they sensed the horrors that were to come. Many of them did well but as children they did not fully understand what was happening and Henry remembers the tears of both children and parents as they separated.
 
The pain of these stories has stayed with me long after the event itself. Another moving story was that of a survivor of the Rwandan genocide. Holocaust Memorial Day also remembers the genocides of Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur though we cannot forget the terrible plight of the Uighurs in China, the Rohingya in Myanmar as well as the suffering of so many of the Afghani people today. At the UK HMD Memorial Service Antoinette Mutabazi from Rwanda told how she was third in line to be executed when news came that the bank had been breached and her executioners left to see what they could get for themselves – saved in a way by other people’s greed.
 
These stories set well the scene for Interfaith Harmony Week and Human Fraternity Day. They show us how far we are from that ideal and how important it is that we work to overcome division, prejudice, hatred and ideologies that set ourselves, our group, our religion, our culture, our way of life as definitive for everyone. Someone who to my mind was an ikon of peace and fraternity and a shining example for all of us is Thich Nhat Hanh who sadly died on 22nd January this year.
 
Thich Nhat Hanh’s death was peaceful. He was 95 years of age, though during the last few years he had suffered the effects of a massive stroke which left him speechless. He died in Vietnam, in the monastery he had entered when he was 16 years old. For much of his life he was exiled by the Vietnamese Government for opposing the Vietnam War and travelling in the west, especially America, to speak of peace and encourage the US to withdraw from the war. Martin Luther King was so impressed by this gentle monk that he suggested him for the Nobel Peace Prize, and I believe the reason he didn’t get it was because MLK broke the rules by revealing the nomination.
 
I was privileged to make two retreats with Thich Nhat Hanh and to visit his monastery in the Dordogne region of France which was composed of several hamlets and called Plum Village. I shall never forget these retreats. Thich Nhat Hanh was an ikon of mindfulness and peace so that to see him walk into a room, sit quietly in the lotus position and teach with gentleness and kindness was a lesson in itself. I think he was a genius in that his teachings on Buddhism touched his listeners’ humanity and made perfect sense. This was religion at its best and I do wish I was able to do that for Christianity. Thay, as his disciples called him, had a great respect for Christianity, writing two books about their relationship, Living Buddha, Living Christ and Jesus and the Buddha as Brothers. He felt that Buddhism would allow Christianity to discover the spirituality behind many of its teachings. And it has done that as far as mindfulness and meditation are concerned.
 
Thich Nhat Hanh will continue to be an inspiration through his writings and teaching. He wrote "Birth and death are only a door through which we go in and out…. So do not be afraid of death". His death was peaceful. The death of those remembered at HMD was violent but through these deaths and the story of survivors there is a message of resilience and hope and the memory of them all will live on as an inspiration to all of us and a motivation to promote human fraternity. 

 Some years ago, “The Shack” was a popular book in Christian circles. It’s a novel, written by William P Young and published in 2007. It became a bestseller and stayed on the bestselling list for years. It’s the story of a father who returns to a broken, tumbled down shack in a forest where four years previously police had found evidence that his young daughter Missy may have been murdered after having been abducted during a camping trip at the time when Mack, the father, had left her to go save his son who was in danger of being drowned after the canoe he was in capsized. This was a tragedy that brought on what Mack calls “The Great Sadness”. His return to the scene of his daughter’s possible murder is in response to a note in his mailbox from “Papa” asking Mack to meet him that weekend at the shack. Puzzled as to who Papa is but suspecting it is God (his wife always refers to and talks to God as Papa) he goes.  The shack is as he remembers it, broken down and abandoned but the blood-stained clothing of his daughter is still there, and he vents his grief in anger and tears. Just as he is about to leave, the shack and its surroundings are transformed, and he is welcomed into a warm, cosy home situated in and idyllic environment where he meets God – not just as Papa but as Trinity. So, he meets God the Father in the form of and African American Woman, Jesus a middle eastern carpenter and the Holy Spirit, a young Asian woman. Mack’s interaction with each of these persons brings about peace and acceptance.

My memory of reading the book over 10 years ago was that I didn’t like it and was rather dismissive of it, thinking it was a bit of nonsense.  Most people I knew liked it, because of its account of God, especially God being a black woman, but I thought and still think that its portrayal of the Trinity gave a wrong idea of God. It’s not that I don’t believe in the Trinity but the portrayal of the Trinity as separate individuals and one of them being Jesus does not resonate with me, nor fit with my theology. For me the Trinity is an analogy that says if God is about anything God is about relationships and if God is that Reality in which we live, move, and have our very being then reality itself is relational. But how does an author, an artist, express this reality apart from depicting relations between people?

What has brought this book back into my consciousness is that I was flicking through Netflix and discovered it had been turned into a film which I watched and enjoyed. It may be that I was able to take the story less literally than I did when I read it and was able to sit more lightly on the theological issue of God and the Trinity. What I was left with was the psychology behind it and the power of religion to bring about healing – not in the sense of simply asking for it but in the encouragement of facing up to issues of heart break and tragedy that can lead to transformation. The film, and the book, is a reflection on the problem of evil, of unjust and senseless suffering, a problem that leads many people to reject any belief in God for how can a good God allow such things?  I’m not sure that the film will answer that question satisfactorily for unbelievers but looking beyond the images and metaphors there is I think a lot of wisdom.

In the first instance Mack experiences an unconditional love which does not judge him but supports and encourages him in his heart break. Do we not all need this and is it not a blessing when we have it? It is this acceptance that helps him face up to his grief. He does this in the film by Jesus inviting him to take a rowing boat out into the middle of a lake. Jesus is standing by the shore, and I found myself thinking, ‘oh no, he’s going to walk on water’. And of course, he does. The boat begins to let in water, horrible slimy oily-like black liquid and Mack is in danger of sinking until he steps out of the boat and with Jesus walks to the shore. This is a depiction of the gospel story when Jesus walks on the water to save his disciples from a storm. Did it really happen? Who knows but looking beyond the literal story the wisdom is that we must face the storms of life and religion can be a support in this as can family and friends?  Another scene is when Mack meets wisdom who teaches him not to judge quickly without understanding something of a person’s circumstance and conditioning, whether that be his own father or the man who abducted his daughter.
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The film doesn’t have the same ending as the book though both allow Mack to bury his daughter and so move on, realising that while this all happened when he was unconscious from a road accident that happened on his way to the shack, it had brought about a personal and inner transformation. So, a book, a film, not to be taken literally – maybe a bit like religion itself. It’s not so much what it says but what it means that’s important and if we were to look beyond the literal I think we would find a great deal of wisdom, not just in The Shack but in religion itself.