Celebrate New Year at World Peace Day Interfaith Prayer Service

News

Celebrate New Year at World Peace Day Interfaith Prayer Service

Naperville Sun
December 30th, 2011

Credit: WikiMedia

By Wendy Foster

The seventh annual World Peace Day (January 2) Interfaith Prayer Service will focus on compassion for those of other religions this year. More than two dozen houses of worship and faith organizations have joined forces to sponsor the event at North Central College.

The theme of the event is One Community, One World, One Call: Freedom, Compassion, Justice and Equality.

“The idea is to foster increased understanding among all of the faith communities that make up our own community — to increase respect and tolerance,” said Bernarr Newman, a coordinator of the interfaith prayer service.

Tom Cordaro, justice/outreach minister of St. Margaret Mary Parish, who is the facilitator of this year’s event, said the service began with a group of activists from several faiths through Pax Christi Illinois program.

“Pope John Paul II had gathered world leaders together to pray for peace,” Cordaro said. “Because Jan. 2 is World Day for Peace, we decided to duplicate the prayer for peace in our community. It’s grown, both in number and in diversity of religious groups.”

Cordaro said the message is simple: Religion should bring people together, not “stoke fear and mistrust and hatred.”

“We all felt the need to reclaim the religious principle that we’re all members of one family, and however you understand God, he has called us to love one another and treat one another with dignity and respect,” he said.

He said the New Year’s Day service is an “opportunity for the religious community to come together, and by witness and by word, show that religious differences are no hindrance of building a world of peace.”

He said understanding is the key.

“World religions, all of them when properly understood, can be a real asset and a real enabler of tolerance and justice and compassion and equality and peace,” he said.

The focus of this year’s service will be the Charter of Compassion, which is “a way of reasserting the belief that all religions call people to be more compassionate toward one another,” Cordaro said. “Attendees will be invited to commit themselves to lead a more compassionate life according to the principles of the Charter of Compassion.”

During the service, six five-minute reflections will be presented by representatives of six different world religions, including Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, Baha’i, Christianity and Hinduism. There also will be prayers from a variety of faith traditions.

“We have asked the reflectors to address some aspect of the theme of the event; to provide different perspectives on that theme as it relates to their own religious tradition,” Newman said.

At this year’s event, each attendee will receive a strip of colored paper that cites a pledge to live more compassionately and embrace the principles of the Charter of Compassion.

“They can sign the paper, and then we’ll take all of those and create a paper chain,” Cordaro said. “We’ll link together all of the strips of paper as one long chain of commitment, collaboration and cooperation.”

[Source: Naperville Sun]