Nostra Aetate - In Our Time

83 rothers and sisters. We Sikhs have two greetings. The first is Waheguru Ji Ka Khalsa, Waheguru Ji Ki Fateh – the army of the pure belongs to God and the victory belongs to God. The second is Sat Siri Akahal – Truth is the Eternal Being. Both of these greetings actually confirm the existence of God. When we greet each other, we don’t say hello; we invoke God, confirming that He is Omnipresent. Our faith is based on this premise, that God is everywhere. And each one of us here has the same divine spark. Our founder and the first of ten successive Gurus, Guru Nanak, travelled widely. Between 1497 and 1521 he went on a remarkable inter-faith journey of dialogues spanning some 23 years, covering over 27,000 kilo- metres, almost exclusively on foot. That equates to an average of over three kilometres a day, every day for 23 years. Where did he go? Why did he go? What was he doing? In my humble opinion, it was his profound com- passion and pity for the human condition that drove him to meet as many people as he could in different locations. We humans are split personalities, we have infinite goodness and infinite wickedness, both at the same time. We have to control ourselves, we have to mobi- lise the goodness that is inherent in us. What does this goodness comprise? First and foremost it is compassion, forgiveness, truthfulness, transparency, accountability and contentment as opposed to yearning for more and more. It is also an abundance of humility and love. In aggregate, this constitutes a gold standard for every human being. There is also a wicked standard – we have lust, we are revengeful, we are greedy, we have unnec- essary attachment with things and we have ego. E-G-O – Edging God Out – the worst thing. When you edge God out, then you remain with a big ‘I’, and arrogance is the worst affliction of humans. The first Guru taught us to be humble. Never before in history had a prophet bowed down to a disciple and said: “You are the prophet.” This happened within the Sikh Dharam – the Sikh religion – ten times with the succession of each Guru, and this is a remarkable thing. Five days before Guru Nanak left the world, he put his forehead on the feet of his disciple and said: “Now I will sit down below here and you are the Guru.” The third guru did the same, as did the fourth, the fifth and the sixth, up until the tenth Guru who bowed down to the sacred text – Guru Granth Sahib Ji – the Sikh scrip- tures – the eternal, timeless Guru. So our message was complete by 1708. We were told not to wait for another Messiah, that the message was complete. The record shows that Guru Nanak went as far as Dhaka, as well as west to Mecca and Baghdad, north to Tibet and south to Sri Lanka. He travelled occasion- ally with his two faithful companions, Bhai (brother) Mardana who was a Muslim musician and Bhai Bala who was a Hindu. He had a Muslim on one side and a Hindu on the other because the population comprised a predominance of Hindus and Muslims. It is important to contextualise this as there was conflict where people were trying to convert each other. Throughout these journeys, neither knowing where he would spend the night nor where would he eat, Guru Nanak spread the message of the oneness of God. He stressed the need to live peacefully in the world inspired by a sense of loving duty not just to the Creator but to the entire creation. Whatever one’s faith, whatever one’s background, his teachings were expressed in lyrical verse urging us to live up to those qualities latent within us all that make us in the image of God, namely, love, compas- sion, forgiveness, truth, humility and selflessness. B BROADENING INTERRELIGIOUS DIALOGUE AND COLLABORAT ION FOR OUR T IME Bhai Sahib Mohinder Singh meeting H.E. Sheikh Nahayan Mabarak Al Nahayan, Minister of Culture, Youth, and Community Development, UAE and United Nations at the first World Inter-faith Harmony Day held in Dubai, February 2016