Building Interfaith Relationships to Build Human Dignity Together

An Interview with William Vendley, the Secretary General of Religions for Peace

Ummah Wide: Can you talk about the important interfaith work that you do and can you talk about why you came to the Muslim Peace Forum?

I am William F. Vendley, Secretary General of Religions for Peace, a global, multi-religious organization that's working on the ground in 90 countries. Its co-lead by Muslims and in its world assembly sincere religious believers of all faiths elected Shaykh Abdullah bin Bayyah to be the co-moderator for Religions for Peace. This is an organization that follows the deep wisdom of the diverse religious traditions, mainly let us respect one another, our specific religious beliefs may differ somewhat but lets do the really important work of tackling the serious threats to humanity. The serious work of building peace that is positive, that honors human dignity, and the way God has created us, let's do that together.

And so happily I have the experience of brilliant Islamic partnerships all around the world, contributions that only Muslims can make and that they are making but shoulder to shoulder with Christians, with Jews, and with the other great religions.

The mystery of the way God gives His goodness is not for us to judge. We are to turn deeply into our hearts and surrender to God as we do that we see God’s goodness manifest in ways that surprise and refresh us. So this is the great work of our age, this is the privilege of our time. The sad things we experience the forms of intolerance and rejection are not the big story of our time. The big story is that through the very eye of our faith each of us respectively has begun to discover each other as true partners and to trust that in the freedom that God has given us that God will bring us all to the destiny that he calls us to and this honors our freedom, this honors our conscious, this honors the deepest teaching of our respective religious traditions.

Ummah Wide: Can you talk about your relationship to HE Shaykh Abdullah Bin Bayyah, and what he has created with the conference here?

Let me say that every religious tradition in the world honors itself by honestly looking into its own heart and discerning the ways that it needs to follow its own deepest calling. So Shaykh Abdullah bin Bayyah is advancing that within Islam, that is the highest form of love and fidelity to your own religious tradition and so one is moved and touched by that, that sets an example, that leads by example to those far beyond Islam that such honesty is the path. Shaykh Abdullah is also leading from within Islam the great collaborative adventure of the world’s religions to find common cause in advancing God given Human dignity and God called for human solidarity. So I observe Shaykh Abdullah as equipped for this second job precisely because of his radical fidelity to Islam.

Ummah Wide: What inspires you from your own faith background to be dedicated to the work that you do?

I am a Roman Catholic Christian and that experience, the experience of God that that tradition has offered me first of all helped me to try however inadequately to surrender my own heart to God but in that effort I have seen through the eyes of faith, the beauty, the glorious beauty, of people living their own faiths. So it may sound like a paradox, it is precisely the eye of faith that my own tradition has helped me with and the deeper I would try to go in it that allows me to see more resplendently the beauty for example, the Islamic faith, so it doesn’t work in inverse relationship.

The deeper I go in my own faith, the more profoundly I see the radiance of God’s love and those who submit to God in other faiths. This is one of the mysteries of faith. If we remain at a superficial level in our faith our eyes are not yet ready to see that God has been calling people of all persuasions to the single course of their existence. So in the mean time let us put it this way- until we go to the step that occurs beyond our deaths we wait in patience and in hope,we wait in trust and we know that any beauty is sourced in the beauty of God. Any truth is sourced in the truth of God. That all goodness that is truly good is sourced in the goodness of God and so our faiths call us to celebrate those, to rejoice when we see them and to be in solidarity together. So this has been true also in my small life, in the experience of ongoing growth one tries to go step at a time but then meeting a person like Shaykh Abdullah one feels encouraged on this path.