I was invited to participate in the G8 Religious Leaders Summit in Osaka and Kyoto — following a recommendation by Prof Michael Pye to the Summit's General Secretary, Rt Rev Yoshinobu Miyake (Director General, Konko Church of Izuo, Sect Shinto).

(I am grateful to the organisers for funding accommodation and everything within Japan, and to the Open University Arts Faculty for funding my flights.)

This was the third Summit of Religious Leaders prior to meetings of the Leaders of G8 countries. At this event, delegates from the G8 countries and beyond participated.

The Summit was entitled "Living with the Earth: Messages from World Religions".

(click here for the pre-conference website (maybe it'll be updated with post-conference info soon)

The final Proposal offered commitments, recommendations and requests to the G8 Leaders.

A pdf copy of the Proposal is available here (164 kb).

You should read the Proposal now — the rest of this page is about my participation, responses, reflections, rants and so on.

OK, lets do some of this with photos.

In Osaka the 47 foreign delegates were booked into the Rihga Royal Hotel

(thank you very much!)

I went for a stroll — partly to recover from the flight and partly because it seems polite to try to greet the place where you are.

The hotel is on an island at one end of which a rose garden is being planted.

not sure if these trees are holding up the earth or if they were feeling wobbly ...

Hopefully this is an image of tree care.

That was nearly the end of the day (26 June 2008) — and what I thought was a fine introduction to the business of the trip: re-thinking how humans might live better within planetary, regional, national and local contexts/locations/communities. I'm not ignoring the fact that I'd flown a long way — never mind "carbon footprint" this is carbon stomping. (Although most of Asia and the Arctic Circle was covered by cloud, we were above all that, and I had my first sight of the midnight sun - endlessly, for hours as we flew east. Something to celebrate in the realm of the relationships between earth, sun and "the all".)

Anyway, as I circled the hotel I found some trees that might make a fine example of what faces us.

First there was a small tree, planted about five years ago, by some conference focused on global water issues. It was being watered by gentle rain when I met it.

Then, right underneath the towering conference centre cubes (the building is a cube standing on four smaller cubes), there were two trees planted a few weeks ago by the G8 Finance Ministers. These will never feel the rain. They will always require the expenditure of money.

So, the trees of a water conference get water, the trees of an economic summit get money ... I'm cynical enough to think this was all carefully planned. We live in a crazy world. Or, rather, we live alongside some crazy people — isn't it time to change?

Yoshinobu Miyake initiates the first plenary of the Summit

After he provided an overview, he handed over to Dr John Taylor IARF Representative at the UN, Geneva, to moderate the session. Statements relevant to the main themes of the Summit were given by more important people (I'll add names later - but I hope that the Summit website will update this information soon!).

One speaker made a powerful statement about "food miles" and how much Japan needs to reduce them. Something about "come to Japan to eat Japanese food that is produced elsewhere".

the complex is home (?) to turtles ...

in this case its turtles all the way up

After visiting the Airin Slum and seeing the downside of Japanese prosperity (thousands of people without homes or health care and only able to survive by irregular, pointless and often humiliating jobs), we divided into the three subcommittees.

The first "Living with Nature" meeting was hosted at the Sumiyoshi Grand Shrine

There's a wikipedia article about the Grand Shrine

and Sumiyoshi Shrine's own website (in Japanese) includes more photos and a guided (flash) walk.
It includes an excellent photo guide to Shinto etiquette in approaching and venerating the kami.
[I tried to use babel fish to translate some of the site, but its obviously not as good at Japanese as it is with European languages]

a sacred / kami camphor tree

800 years old, venerable, beautiful and immensely powerful

a great honour to be present to / with

After the moderator, Prof Yoshinori Yasuda, introduced the session, the various presenters had about five minutes to build on any initial statement they'd circulated beforehand. This is when I offered my contribution, along with several others. In the following discussion session chairing allowed some people to talk rather longer than others, and longer than the presenters ... Although it was all quite polite there was some difference (I thought) about whether the assembled religious people thought that our concern should be with people's souls, hearts, intentions or other "inner" matters of "spirituality" or whether we should be pressing the G8 political leaders in more concrete, material domains.

hope you're getting the idea: the embraiding of sacrality in and through the world

fresh rain, fresh water, fresh insight

the mutual permeation of the need for well being and success within the quest for justice, enlightenment and other "religious" goals

After another plenary in which the moderators of the three sessions summarised discussions so far (or what their own chief ideas had been during the sessions) ...

None of the words of my contribution to the first "Living with Nature" subcommittee were cited, but my action in respectfully greeting the camphor tree (after checking that this was permitted) was mentioned. So perhaps actions do speak louder than words (of course). After that, I boldly encouraged everyone to read Ronald Grimes' article "Performance is Currency in the Deep World's Gift Economy: An Incantatory Riff for a Global Medicine Show", ISLE: Interdiciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 9.1 (2002): 151-64. That might just change the world.

Then we met again in our sub-committees.

Here's Sada-Anand Khalsa offering a passionate Sikh view of what needs to be done ... At last, a sense of urgency in the face of a crisis that is already engulfing us.

His eloquent demonstration of the various harmful effects of meat eating (not only to humans and cows but more pervasively to the global climate and thus to all life) was responded to with a debate about whether the Japanese were once vegetarian or not. Not a particularly helpful response (there was little sense that this putative history should be a model for lifestyle or consumption changes now). It suggests that we'd rather contemplate what cannot be changed than be challenged to think or, gods forbid, alter our lifestyles now.

Nonetheless, Khalsa's talk and the rest of the conversation were among the several brief moments in the Summit where I thought we might actually achieve something great. For example, we managed a brief debate about production, consumption, globalisation, agro-industry, imbalances of power and wealth. All the stuff the G8 Leaders are pursuing. We also talked about CO2 and Methane ...

Apart from that, and not for the last time, I thought "we are not just re-arranging the deck-chairs but we're taking a crowbar down to the hold of our Titanic, and there is no life-raft".

Day 3: 29 June 2008

After breakfast we moved straight to our subcommittees.

The "Living with Nature" group were hosted at the Kamigamo Shrine in Kyoto.

the shrine houses a deity who has been invited to relocate from this mountaintop, Ko-yama, and be enshrined in the shrine.

(Isn't the literal use of "enshrine" wonderful?)

I didn't have time to ask about these cones of gravel but certainly they speak about human attempts to live harmoniously in the world even as we make changes.

(Ah, the website mentions that the Hoso-dono [the building in the background] is "famous for its cone of sand that is said to have purificatory powers". Either there's another cone inside or someone can't count ...)

and the regular practice of purification at Shinto shrines speaks of the urgent need to find appropriate ways to approach other beings (human or other-than-human).

Did I mention Ronald Grimes' article ...?!

In these pictures we enter the shrine for purification and blessing ... and then into our meeting. The Chief Priest, Yasuhiro Tanaka, told us the history and practice of this shrine (similar to what's on the website) and introduced us to the hollyhock plants who participated in our meeting.

What (little) time was left was devoted to conversations in which we tried to sum up what we'd debated in earlier sessions and edged towards some consensus. Well, no, we were nowhere near that ...

Some of us seemed to be happy to offer the G8 Leaders a view that religion is a matter of the heart or spirit. Others of us stated that there is no time for this softly-softly "lets change our hearts first" approach. Anyway, why tell the G8 ideologues of globalised consumerism what they already think they know about religion? Why not tell them that we are passionately involved in a world that is threatened by almost everything that the G8 governments do or permit?

Of course, let's not pretend that the leaders of nation states are really in charge. They've already handed that job over to multinational corporations and big businesses. Perhaps a stand by political and religious leaders together might challenge this terrifying hegemony of irresponsibility.

Has the world changed? Will the world change for the better when the G8 Leaders read the Proposal from G8 Religious Leaders? I think not. There are moments in the Proposal where you get a sense that something else is happening: there are rumours of a Shinto-Buddhist vision of earth-dwelling that contrasts dramatically with the separating tendencies of the dominant modernist culture (and of its deep roots in transcendent emphasis of the Christianity taught by hierarchies). You have to read "deity" and "god" in a different religious accent, for example.

There are some immensely provocative phrases. Here's the final sentence: "This compels us to ask of you that you reformulate our governments' policies to be fair to all life on Earth." That might just mean something. In fact, the more I contemplate the conclusion, the more I hear a different beat and melody. There's still the sound of deck-chairs being moved around. And there's still a lot of further wrenching apart of already damaged panels. But there's also the growing sound of hammering as people begin to repair the damage and construct viable (live-able) ways of being at home here in Earth. And, yes, we gave ourselves and the G8 Leaders a year to see what can be done. In this we followed the lead of the 2007 Summit of G8 Religious Leaders.

And just maybe the participation of a Pagan in such a high-level international Summit might be counted as something in the domain of interfaith encounter. Certainly, the participants in the Summit offered a range of wonderful, creative, and urgent provocations towards solutions to many of the crises facing us. One regular undercurrent, occasionally welling up into a vibrant wave, was that nature, diversity and Africa are worthy of celebration. They aren't only or even chiefly problems to solve. And the interweaving of all three areas of Summit discussion, though only briefly achieved, was of great importance. But I remain unconvinced that you or the G8 Leaders will find much of this passionate wisdom in the final Proposal. May I be proved wrong (again).

After the Summit I went with David Sapperstein, Marla Feldman and Anil Bhanot to Hiroshima.

This is the view from the T-shaped bridge that was the bomb-aimer's target for the first A-bomb exploded over a city.
The A-dome building that once promoted Hiroshima commerce is now a monument to the victims of hyper-modern warfare.
It is within sight and sound of a bell that reverberates a message of hope, a cenotaph that demands remembrance, and a children's memorial that cries out against the continued practice of war and invites us all to creatively practice peace.

This tree survived the blast, not without injury, and only because it was at a great distance from the epicentre.
It has been replanted by the museum in the peace park.

In confronting the horror of the mass extinctions that are taking place now, and the first waves of the catastrophe that confronts us, perhaps the planting of trees and the encouragement of all kinds of diversity ("cultural" and "natural" as well as "ethnic" and "religious" if you will) might be a fine monument in advance, an anticipation that we can do something — something different, something radical, something life- and world-affirming.