From: gfchindia@googlegroups.com [mailto:gfchindia@googlegroups.com] On
Behalf Of GFCH (India)
Sent: Thursday, April 05, 2012 5:57 AM
To: GFCHINDIA
Subject: Harmony News: Interfaith Pilgrims Circle World on Religious
Tolerance Quest
Interfaith 'Pilgrims' Circle World On Religious Tolerance Quest
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Courtesy: AP
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CLAREMONT, Calif. - Frederic and Anne-Laure Pascal are devout Roman
Catholics who built their lives around their religion. When she lost her job
last year, the young couple decided on an unlikely expression of their
religious commitment: a worldwide "interfaith pilgrimage" to places where
peace has won out over dueling dogmas.
Since October, the French couple has visited 11 nations from Iraq to
Malaysia in an odyssey to find people of all creeds who have dedicated their
lives to overcoming religious intolerance in some of the world's most
divided and war-torn corners.
The husband-and-wife team blogs about their adventures - and their own
soul-searching - and takes short video clips for the project they've dubbed
the Faithbook Tour.
The Pascals travel on a shoestring budget, kept afloat by 115 individual
donors who are mostly friends and family. They say their travels are meant
to illuminate examples of hope and peace in a world that is too often torn
apart by faith-driven fervor. Their conversation, in a mix of French and
English, is peppered with quotes from Mahatma Gandhi, ancient Chinese
proverbs and references to their inspiration, St. Francis of Assisi.
They began the three-week U.S. leg of their trip late last month after
arriving in California jetlagged from Japan and will visit Israel before
hanging up their backpacks.
"There is a saying, `A tree that falls makes more noise than a forest that
grows.' My aim was to meet the people who make the forest grow and not the
people who make the tree fall," said Frederic, 29, as the couple took a
break during a recent visit to Claremont Lincoln University, an
interreligious graduate institute in Southern California. "We have to be the
mirror to reflect their light."
On its face, the project seems almost naive, but in practice, the Pascals'
blend of religious journalism and personal exploration has brought them
face-to-face with some of the world's top religious thinkers and deposited
them in some of the most forgotten parts of the planet.
In their five months on the road, the couple has trekked through the Sahel
in the West African nation of Burkina Faso, explored interfaith schools in
the slums of Cairo and traveled across the Iraqi desert in the dead of night
to reach a camp dedicated to Christian and Muslim children.
Along the way, they have felt their own faith deepen.
"What really hit me in Egypt is the Muslim call to prayer. The more I heard
that call, the more I was called back to my own faith and the more I asked
myself, `How do I pray? Do I pray regularly? Am I faithful in my prayer or
not?'" said Anne-Laure, 28. "There were a lot of things like that where, in
meeting others, we were brought back our own faith and how we live our
faith."
The idea for the trip came last year after Anne-Laure's contract as a
librarian at the Catholic University in Lille wasn't renewed. Frederic
decided to take a sabbatical from his job editing dozens of parish
newsletters. The couple, who met a decade ago through a youth group, delayed
plans to buy a house and start a family and instead spent 10 months
narrowing down what countries they would visit and setting up a foundation
to finance their travels.
They started their tour in October in Assisi, Italy, to coincide with the
25th anniversary of Pope John Paul II's World Day of Prayer for Peace, a
1986 gathering of a rainbow of international religious leaders. From there,
the Pascals set out to visit interfaith projects in nearly a dozen nations,
including Tunisia, Algeria, Burkina Faso, Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq, India,
Japan, Malaysia, the U.S. and Israel.
Over thousands of miles, the two have met with impoverished Christians and
Muslims in the West African nation of Burkina Faso who work together to trap
rainwater and maintain holding ponds in parched desert landscape; mingled
with Sri Lankan leaders at a lay Buddhist monastery in Kyushu, Japan; and
stayed for a week with oppressed Christian families living in the Iraqi
autonomous region of Kurdistan.
In the U.S., they began their visit touring classrooms and talking with
students at Claremont Lincoln, an interreligious graduate school
30 miles east of Los Angeles where students of all faiths study together in
a unique experiment that began last year. They will also stop in San
Francisco, New York, Washington, D.C., Richmond, Va., and Philadelphia
before heading to Israel next month.
For both, the most memorable stop on their trip was in Iraq, where they
spent a week in Irbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan.
They said their Christian host families had only hatred for their Muslim
neighbors and some bore scars from a 2010 attack on a bus filled with
students.
"We wondered, `Why did we choose to come here? There is nothing about
dialogue. There is just hate,'" Frederic said. "After eight days with them,
we were infected by their fear."
Then, a chance meeting led them to a camp in a far northern Iraq dedicated
to fostering friendship between Muslim and Christian children from Baghdad.
The group included some children from Our Lady of Salvation, a Baghdad
church that was attacked by Islamic militants in a 2010 bombing that killed
58 people.
The Pascals arrived at the camp, run by a Lebanese group called OffreJoie
(Offer Joy), after riding through the night on a bus driven by a man with
one arm across a moonlike landscape dotted with burning oil wells. When they
arrived in the pre-dawn hours, the children were singing a welcome song.
During a whirlwind visit, the young couple watched the children work
together to draw maps of the "Iraq of their dreams," play trust games and
find hidden puzzle pieces that, when assembled, revealed a giant map of
their country. There was no hint of the hatred that haunted them just the
day before.
"We got back on the road, strengthened by this encounter, for the rest of
our odyssey," Frederic wrote later on his blog. "And we are reassured that
even where it seems there is no more hope, there will always be
peacemakers."
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