Witnesses of Mercy for Peace and Reconciliation

77 WITNESSING MERCY FOR PEACE AND RECONCILIAT ION It has been a journey in which we have tenaciously attempted to identify the role that religious leaders can play in initiating a process of self-transformation, com- munity transformation and social transformation, to bring back and establish the real meaning of mercy, compassion and empathy. Instead of restricting ourselves to being critics of the system, we explored how we could take the responsi- bility of capitalising on all noble teachings in the four religions to bring love, compassion, mercy and empathy to the world. It has been an exploration to develop the inner power of individuals for them to become empa- thetic, merciful and compassionate. How did we do that? We brought the religious leaders of four religious traditions together as intra-faith and interfaith groups to transform individuals, communities and situations to bring about social justice, equity and equality. This has been a Herculean task. We were doing it within a context of a country which has gone through three decades of civil war. It has been a hard journey uphill to convince people that religion and religious lead- ers could play a critical role in reconciling and healing individuals, communities and the society at large. Our interfaith groups adopted a religious approach to initiate discourse on reconciliation. The four wings of reconciliation were identified as compassion (in the Sri Lankan context, compassion is the word with which people could easily understand in preference to the word mercy), forgiveness, truth and justice. Collectively, these interfaith groups conducted more than 1,000 awareness-raising intra-faith and interfaith dialogues using a specially designed poster. The core content of the poster captures the essence of change, we were aspiring to. It clearly demonstrated the spheres of change: the spiritual and the political as represented by compassion, forgiveness, truth and jus- tice respectively. However, these core areas do not exist exclusively. They are inextricably interwoven with each other with the thread of ultimate humanness. When there is a compassionate or merciful heart, there will be empathy and forgiveness. When there is empathy and forgiveness, then we will have the strength to seek truth and justice. Even though we have set up systems and structures to address the needs of truth and justice, it is hard to make it a reality if the society is not ready to internalise and embrace it. The embracing and internalisation will occur only when we succeed in touching that place in the heart of the people and society in which compassion/mercy is truly inculcated. In a country where people killed each other, spurred by differences relating to ethnicities, reli- gions, languages and other differences, how can we move forward if we are not ready to forgive and empathise? How do we inculcate these values in people through a discourse on religion? How do we create synergy through a discourse on compassion, forgiveness, truth and justice? There was a need for creating this safe Dishani Jayaweera holding a conflict transformation training session for a clergy group Picture © Jayanth Dhramawardana