Wisdom From the World's Great
Spiritual Leaders.
Interviews by Virginie Luc, photographs by Stephan
Crasneanscki
Who is God? What is death? What is worth dying for?
How do you explain fanaticism and violence waged in
the name of God? Candid responses and profound comments
by the world’s great spiritual leaders are accompanied
by magnificent, never-before-published images of these
wise men and women, as well as ordinary people engaged
in religious practices around the world. Their voices
span geographical and theological distances yet come
together to create a spiritually satisfying and meaningful
worldview.
OF GOD AND
MEN
© by Virginie Luc
Why did we embark upon such a journey? What were we looking
for in the shadow of prayers and the light of the wise?
Approaching religious men and women seemed a religious
act in itself, linkingus to something greater than ourselves.
For 200 years, people have been announcing the end of
religion in the modern world. Religion has been accused
of being a form of intellectual, psychological and socioeconomic
alienation, an obstacle to individual and collective progress.
Science, critical reason and self-awareness were the keys
to a better world, a world in which mankind would at last
be free from the shackles of religious illusion. But in
its attempts to eradicate “religious myth”,
modern society has developed a new myth to replace the
old one: the myth of progress.
The promise of an ever more radiant future achieved by
dint of political, scientific, and technological progress
has been undermined by a series of catastrophes in the
20th century. Communism, materialism, and psychoanalysis
failed to deliver. Faith in progress and the hopes placed
in “civilization” evaporated, vaporised by
the Second World War and its millions fatalities; by Hiroshima,
the Gulag, and the Shoa, as well as by the genocides in
Rwanda, Tibet, and Sudan. Paradoxically, as these horrors
have swept the world, human beings have reinforced their
links and ties with the spiritual universe. At the beginning
of the 20th century, 50 pecent of the world’s population
claimed to belong to one of the four major religions – Catholicism,
Protestantism, Islam, and Hinduism. Today, at the start
of the 21st century, the figure is 64 percent. And some
experts predict that it will rise to 70 percent by 2025.
For good or ill, the world’s religions are in a
healthy state. Religion is alive for the Hindu Amma who
in her embrace delivers a universal maternal love, as
well as for the extremists who, in the name of Allah,
fly aircraft into skyscapers. But God should never be
confused with what men make of him. Since the dawn of
time, the history of religions has been inextricably linked
to war and bloodshed. Religion has been used as a pretext
of all types of fanaticism. It excites as much as it calms,
stirs up as much as it quells.
The man of God is no longer cut off from the world. He
may be the one who controls the blinding light and the
frightening shadow, everything that as to do with the
supra-world, but he is no longer the force that dulls
the masses’ minds. On the contrary, at a time when
religion is returning in strength, spiritual leaders possess
a formidable power not to be entrusted into just any hands.
Beyond history, beyond the multitude of events and power-wielding
men and women, beyond the inexorable succession of happenings
inscribed in the stones of time, there is the immutable.
Religion has nothing to do with the changeable fancies
of fashion. For an Indian, the Ganges is always the Ganges.
For an American farmer, Christ is always the man who,
one stormy day at Golgotha, was crucified. Today, the
men and women of God bear witness. Whether the unquestioned
spiritual guide of a million souls, like Pope Benedict
XVI, or a divine soul who has suffered human violence,
like the Dalai Lama, these people are the guardians of
a vast interior empire, where time is of no importance
and the values are different from those of the earthy
realm. In the interviews we conducted with these 12 great
spiritual leaders, it is in this empire through which
we have journeyed.
Amma (Mata Amritanandamayi), a Hindu spiritual leader
Pope Benedict XVI
The Dalai Lama (Tenzin Gyatso)
Ayatollah Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah
Michihisa Kitashirakawa (right),
High Priest of the Shinto
Grand Shrine of Ise
Dr. Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury
Interviews by Virginie Luc
Judaism
- Yona Metzger, Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel
Christianity
- Pope Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger), Bishop of Rome,
Catholic Church
- Alexei II, Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, Primate
of the Russian Orthodox Church
- Dr Rowan Douglas Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury,
Anglican Church
- Mark S. Hanson, Presiding Bishop of the Evangelical
Lutheran Church in America
- Dr Frank S. Page, President of the Southern Baptist
Convention
Islam
- Muhammad Sayyed Tantawi, Grand Sheikh of the Al-Azhar
mosque of Cairo, Sunni Religious Authority
- Sayyed Muhammad Hussein Fadlullah, Shia Religious
Authority
Buddhism
- Tenzin Gyatso, XIVth Dalai Lama
Hinduism
- Amma, Sri Mata Amritanandamayi Devi
Sikhism
- Joginder Singh Vedanti, Jathedar of the Akal Takht
Shintoism
- M. Michihisa KITASHIRAKAWA, Jingu Daiguji
of the Grand Shrine at Ise
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