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G. Stallings: Address to Peace Summit 2023, Session IV-B
Written by Archbishop George Stallings, Jr., Patriarch, Imani Temple African American Catholic Congregation; Chair, IAPD-USA, USA
Wednesday, May 3, 2023
Address to Peace Summit 2023
May 2-5, 2023
Thank you very much, my beloved and esteemed brothers and sisters, for that is who you are. I am your brother, and you are my brother and my sister. There is a commonality that binds us all together into that one human fabric that we call humanity. But you and I are more than humanity. You and I are called to be the embodiment of the divine presence that dwells among us.
I am a Christian, and my faith has taught me that each one of us has been created in the divine image and likeness of God. And when I consider God, that divine, supreme entity or energy, the invisible presence that dwells among us, that fills the universe, it causes me to pause for a moment and think what a work of God that God would decide to reposit itself within us, that we are called to be the tangible and the visible presence of God on Earth. When we look at religion, and we speak of this organization as being the Interreligious Association for Peace and Development, we realize that each one of us has chosen a particular path in life by which to express the very identity, the purpose and the destiny that would define our reason for existence.
It is not by accident or happenstance that any one of us has been born. We were born with an identity for a purpose, to accomplish a mission that will lead us to a destiny. I often say to people that religion is not God-made. Religion is man-made. In the generic context, no matter what the religion may be, God did not create or establish it. It came about as a result of the human mind desiring to find its way back to its original purpose for having been created. God is the author of spirituality, not religion, so that means that if religion is of man with the sanctioning or the blessing or the approbation of God, it means that religion in and of itself is not perfect. It has its flaws. But if religion is centered on reconnecting us with the Creator in the way in which God originally intended it, religion can be good. Just because it is called religion does not mean that it is intrinsically in and of itself good. We have to make it good, the way we handle this religion. Our religion defines whether or not it will lead us back to God in God’s original plan for us, or it will separate us or divide us from one another because we think that our religion is better than someone else’s religion, or we have more access to the truth than the other sector or the other believers.
Since religion is of man, generically speaking, since it originates in and out of us, in our desire to become completely and totally spiritual, we have to have a respect and appreciation and a reverence for one another’s faith that none of us is better than the rest of us. Thus, when we speak about interreligious and interreligious association, it begins with the premise that we are seeking to use a human construct to bring us back into alignment, into divine alignment with our Creator. This means that we are operating in different vehicles to get to the same destination. We must have within us the mind and the heart of God, our Creator when we come together to work to establish a world of true and lasting peace and to develop the mind in such a way that it is focused on the things that are above, if you will, rather than the things that are below. Our task as religious leaders is to come together, united in a common purpose, to ask ourselves just what is our real identity? Namely, that we are sons and daughters of God, that there should not be the things that separate and divide us in the way that we have seen in our world today.
If we state that we are the sons and daughters of God, if we can but realize that we hold this treasure in earthen vessels, that the transcendency of the power may be of God and not of us, that we are mere agents of God, then we are the ambassadors of God. We are the conduits. We are the mediums through which this divine power seeks to take on articulation, take on manifestation, take on a real presence in our world today. We cannot allow religion to continue to separate and divide us when it is supposed to connect us back to Creator so that we can then re-approach each other with a mind and a heart of God—not of humanity, but of God. We are the most privileged people in the world. We look at all of these folks gathered here at this international Peace Summit. All the politicians we heard from, the politicians today, they have a purpose. We have the academicians, we have the sciences present here, the arts. But I think that the greatest gathering of all at this international summit, this international Peace Summit, are the men and women who have accepted the call of God, who have been chosen for such a time as this to create the kingdom of God, the kingdom of heaven here on earth.
And we are doing it through the vehicle of religion. Religion must always be seen as a means and not an end. So as we go forth in this work, as we do our various tasks around our ministries around the world, in our respective places, let us be ever mindful that as an interreligious group our responsibility is to respect one another and to become the very incarnation, if you will, the incarnation of the Word itself. That is why for us as Christians, when Jesus says the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, that is what we are called to do and what we are called to be. We are called to be the visible and the tangible presence of God on earth. Thank you.
To go to the Peace Summit 2023 Schedule page, click here.