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May -16th Saturday Afternoon
12:30-2:45 PM
Crestone Interfaith Gathering 2009
Wellcome – Bill Ellzey
Welcome everyone to Shumei International Institute’s 7th anniversary celebration. I’d like to extend a special welcome to Shumei’s president, Ms. Hiroko Koyama, who is here from Japan. And to her gifted translator and traveling companion, Alice Cunningham. To Alan Imai, SII’s sensai (teacher) who spreads Shumei’s principles to the far corners of the world, with his current emphasis on natural agriculture. To visiting sensais. To our guests who came from beyond U.S. borders. To the scheduled speakers, musicians, and representatives from Crestone’s varied spiritual centers. To all the behind-the-scenes personnel who started planning this anniversary back in December. And of course to Crestone’s residents, our neighbors and friends and those who come just for the healthy, free lunch tomorrow.
I want to begin by calling your attention to SII’s mission statement that is found on the inside back cover of your program. It’s about knowing that you are a world citizen and, as one, you are able to act for the common good.
Now, I want to share a few seminal moments in my life that allowed me to understand the deep meaning of being a world citizen as told in a moving story of Mokichi Okada, Shumei’s founder, when he declared that he was a citizen of the world.
When I was about 10 years old, following my father out of church one Sunday, I said to him, “Pop, I’m not sure I believe in God.” Dad, who was a minister, stopped, turned around, stuck out his hand and said, “Congratulations son, I’m glad to see you thinking for yourself.”
Message received: It’s OK to question.
When I was 15, our family went to Europe to visit mom’s home country, Austria. First stop was London where I found myself in Hyde Park, famous for its soap box orators. I heard a man railing against the United States for its insanity of making air to ground missiles, ground to air missiles, air to air missiles and ground to ground missiles.
Wow, I thought. This is the first time I have ever heard someone speaking against my country.
Message received: There is a bigger world out here. There are other opinions—and they have validity.
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On my 20th birthday, in 1965, I was standing on an elevated lawn in Selma, Alabama looking over a street packed with 2,000 black and white protesters who had arrived in “Freedom Busses.” There was a barricade in the street, and on the opposite side state troopers stood shoulder to shoulder, a dozen rows deep, with helmets on and billy clubs. Everyone was waiting for Martin Luther King to return from the court house with a parade permit so we could march. While I stood there I noticed a fellow, about my age, on the other side of the barricade, and it dawned on me that he was raised within a belief system of prejudice and I was raised in one without it. And a strong feeling came over me that prejudice was something that would have to die out, evolve away with the passing of generations, an excruciatingly long time.
Thankfully, to a large degree, I was wrong. Soon blacks began to appear in TV commercials and sit-coms. White people almost subliminally began to get used to seeing blacks behaving pretty much as they do, being pretty much the same as them.
Of course there’s still a ways to go but things are so, so much better than during the civil rights movement of the ‘60s.
So where am I going with this? This is a welcoming speech. Welcoming implies acceptance. And acceptance is the first step to global thinking, to making tangible the idea of being a citizen of the world.
Maybe we get stuck in the belief that our race or nationality is the highest demarcation that defines us, that we are American, Japanese, Chinese, German, Italian, etc. With not too big a leap or too much difficulty it’s possible to see oneself as a Citizen of the World first, and where you were born, second—like, I’m an American from Colorado. The next notch up would be, “I’m a citizen of the world from the United States.” It just takes a little practice. You have to try it on. Feel the fit.
Speaking of garments, what comes next today will be presentations from the amazing tapestry of spiritual centers present here in Crestone. Try thinking of them as powerful threads individually that, taken together, comprise a major fabric of Crestone. They represent beliefs that stem from all over the world—some from the world’s great religions…and some from new spiritual paths.
And from such fabric we can make garments. [Threads, fabrics, garments]. They don’t always fit at first, but often they “wear in.” And with use they become a favorite old, comfy thing that we could wear all the time.
I can’t leave this idea of being a world citizen without noting the remarkable event in world history of last November when this country accepted—and elected—a half black, half white person as president, who spent a good amount of his childhood living in Indonesia, playing with children who weren’t American, who has first hand experience of the world being bigger than his nationality. What’s more, he has brought into his cabinet, his closest advisors, a number of people who themselves were either born overseas or spent much of their formative years in countries and environments that I only learned about at a later age.
Because of this refreshingly enlarged global familiarity in the White House, people throughout the world have great hope that we are in for a sea change in consciousness on our planet.
Now let’s see and hear what makes up this fabric of Crestone.
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