Washington National Cathedral’s Bourdon Bell will toll ten times on Sept. 11, at 8:46, 9:03, 9:37 and 10:03 a.m., in remembrance of the lives lost when four planes crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field.

As the sound of the funeral bell fades, author Karen Armstrong will lead a forum on compassion; part of a series of events at the cathedral commemorating the 10^th anniversary of 9/11.

Armstrong launched the Charter for Compassion in 2009; a manifesto composed by leading thinkers and activists from faith traditions around the world that urges people and religions to embrace compassion as a core value. At its heart is the Golden Rule: Treat others as you would wish to be treated.

During a November 2010 clergy conference, Armstrong introduced the charter to a group of priests from the Diocese of Washington and spoke about the nature of God, the importance of community and the need for genuine dialogue.

“I’d been long frustrated that religion, which should have been making a major contribution to a just and compassionate world, was also seen as part of the problem,” she said, describing the charter as a summons to action. “It seems to me an urgent task: unless we treat all nations, all peoples, as we would wish to be treated, we are not going to have a viable world.”

Community is crucial to every religious tradition, she said, noting that as on the road to Emmaus, God is discovered in interaction with the stranger, the “other.”

“We’ve got to widen our identity of community,” she said. “We are the global village. The purpose of community is to get to know one another and I think this is the religious challenge.

“We are linked together more closely than ever before. Suffering is no longer confined to a distant part of the globe. If we turn our backs on it, that world will come to us in a terrible form, as it did on Sept. 11. It’s not enough to be singing hymns in our own church… we must look out for each other.”

The “otherness that is God” must be embraced in the manner of Abraham, who rushed out to bring strangers into his own encampment, she said. “Love your enemies, said Jesus. Look behind the headlines, and develop a concern for all the people who’ve been born into a troubled spot in the world. They are our brothers and sisters and it’s a religious duty. We must struggle to increase our understanding.”

In essence, she said, religion is a call to action rather than the acceptance of a set of philosophical propositions.

“Our job is to create a global society, where people of all persuasions can live together in peace and harmony. We’ve got to make room for people, for the stranger, like Abraham did.”

Recognizing the mystery at the heart of our own religion and that of others is critical: “We really need to get back to a sense of what we don’t know. In religion, nobody can have the last word, and that is crucial. Without that sense of mystery, we are losing the plot.”

Likewise it is important to set the ego aside and engage in genuine dialogue.

“Don’t come into it thinking you have the answers,” she said. “There’s no point in going into dialogue unless you’re prepared to be changed by it. You are changed by each other.”

It is vital to keep a sense of humility, being mindful always of our own limitations. (“We can’t explain ourselves: How can we explain God?”)

“Much of our thinking about God is really quite primitive,” Armstrong said. “We hear about God and Santa as children. Over the years our feelings about Santa mature and change, but often our feelings about God get stuck at a very immature level.”

“We only know about the existence of beings. We don’t know anything about being itself,” she said. “Any human definition of the divine is likely to be so limited that it could be blasphemous.”

All religious symbols point beyond, “into the silence, which is illuminous.” The study of scripture is “ongoing and it always will be, recognizing always that there’s no last word and that God is inexhaustible.”

At its best, the practice of religion “leads us to a place of silence, transcendence and wonder,” she said, quoting Sufi mystic and philosopher Ibn Arabi, who said it was quite common for a Sufi in ecstasy to say, ‘I’m no longer a Muslim, Jew, Christian.’

“Once you’ve glimpsed the divine, all those man-made constructs fall away. A religious task for our time is to overcome that ignorance, and to approach other faiths with – not tolerance, I hate that word – but real appreciation for those insights.”

Resources:

www.charterforcompassion.org

Armstrong’s new book, “Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life” was published in January. a “how to” book of just 50,000 words.)