Last Saturday, we had the privilege of hosting Awakin Call with Victor Kazanjian.

The Rev. Victor Kazanjian is the Executive Director of the United Religions Initiative (URI), a global grassroots interfaith peacebuilding network of more than 1,000 multifaith groups and one million volunteers working in over 100 countries to build bridges of cooperation between people of all beliefs and cultures. Defying the conventional wisdom that issues of poverty, conflict and violence are best engaged by organizations with a heavy central infrastructure, URI’s decentralized, network-based, light-framed, shared leadership, relational organizational approach is giving people around the world the power to meet their challenges and build cohesive, connected and peaceful communities. “Peace and justice begin at the grassroots,” Victor says. His deep childhood grounding in celebrating “one among many” has led Victor to deeply study, teach and embody Gandhian principles of pluralism and grassroots change.

Below are some of the nuggets from the call that stood out for me ...

• Formative experiences: it was not unusual at my grandparents’ dinner table to have Jews, African leaders from exile, Buddhists, etc. That was the norm for me. I grew up in this rich field of diverse backgrounds, and the curiosity of the “other” was a central piece of how my family lived. The civil rights movement was emerging, my grandfather (the President of Boston University) was very close friends with Dr. Howard Thurman, one of Dr. King’s key mentors.
• For me to be a Christian meant to be “one of many”. There was not a sense that this was the only path. Christian meant for me a particular story of one of the many manifestations of God—as a follower of Jesus and his qualities of compassion for all. It was disturbing to me to realize later that there were strains that viewed it as exclusive, as the one true faith. The Christian teaching of love and justice and turning on its head the structures of power—that makes sense to me. That became my core early practice.
• Ministering to a poor community in the South Bronx, those were the people who really taught me how to serve. They cared for each other, even in difficult circumstances. And they cared for me when I experienced the untimely death of my father; they became my teachers. That experience shaped my whole understanding of ministry and was a place that made me confront my own issues--those of us who grow up in privilege, whether it’s race or gender. I fit all the categories of privilege except for one. Even starting from two years old, I was a stutterer. Imagine being blocked and unable to speak at every phrase. That was me until I was in my 20’s, and that’s still me, now. The world of stuttering is often a world of humility and humiliation, where people don’t know what to do in that moment when someone is stuttering. That experience was the one window for me to have a deep connection to those who are marginalized in the world. What it means to be the object of other people’s projection as their discomfort or fear, etc.
• I was inspired by the teachings of Dr. Thurman, who was a follower of Gandhi. He talked about Christianity in a non-exclusive way. I was also taken by the Gandhi’s whole approach in the garden of humanity and the idea of beauty of all paths and the creating of a community around that. It was one of my greatest experiences to travel to India for the first time with Arun Gandhi, his grandson, as we brought students and faculty to learn about non-violence. One of the first nights, I was sleeping on the floor between Arun and his wife. And I couldn’t go to sleep that night, thinking “here I am in India, sleeping next to Gandhi’s grandson!”
• As Dean of Wellesley College—was asked to envision dismantling a Christian-centered model to one that was a learning community for all citizens of the world. I was reluctant at first, asking them, “Are you sure it’s a good idea to have a man be the first dean of religious life at a women’s college?” For twenty years, I had different roles, as dean of religious life, and then led a peace studies program and then later dean of intercultural communication, exploring being part of the global community in an intercultural context.
• The non-exclusive, interfaith model at Wellesley was unique and now has become a model that many other campuses have followed. It was the women’s colleges that led the way for this more inclusive practice. When you think about the patriarchal model, there was a certain freedom for women in pursuing different models. I do believe that a women’s college community where the relational aspects of life and learning--that’s what produced this new model.
• I met Bishop Bill Swing while I was working in a diocese in California—I saw him as a radical model of justice and compassion. Thirty years later, his organization URI was hiring for an executive director. I learned about the founding of URI, how Bishop Swing was asked to hold an interfaith service at Grace cathedral, and then afterwards, he and colleagues sought to continue the dialogue, by creating a United Religions like there is a United Nations. He went around the world and asked all these leaders and they all said, “No!” He came back and said if the leaders won’t do it, let’s take it to the people. It has been a grassroots organization ever since.
• URI’s interfaith cooperation circles are self-organized, independent, where the wisdom the participants have and know is honored instead of outsiders telling them what to do. Someone recently referred to URI cooperation circles as empathy generators—places where empathy is nurtured. The work I did as a priest seemed like being a spiritual midwife—to help them birth their own spiritual life, to help them birth their own spiritual potential. URI is like a peacebuilding midwife—we don’t have the answers, we just come in as a resource, as a service, of their creative projects. We help them through tools and training and connecting in the network to help them actualize their dreams for their community.
• There are over 1,000 cooperation circles in 108 countries, and they are the backbone of URI. Some of them are 7 people who are working to take on an issue in their community. Some are taking on active conflicts, such as in Sri Lanka, the Philippines, and Uganda. It could look like humanitarian or environmental issues, women’s or youth empowerment. The work is so decentralized—it never comes from the global office in San Francisco. We are on every continent—there’s an infrastructure of staff and support. The grassroots elects the leadership of URI. There are also advisory boards, like the President’s Council, which helps with efforts such as fundraising. It’s an extraordinary global community effort.
• The landscape of interfaith cooperation is changing. There has been in the past a competitive nature, over resources, and in a variety of ways. In the last few months, my dear friend Azza Karam, has been elected Sec Gen of Religions for Peace, and Audrey Kitagawa, chair of the Parliament of World’s Religions, and we are reaching out to many others, and forming a coalition where we are each other’s partners, and we see our work as complementary, to look at where our strengths are and how we can be powerfully involved with each other, supporting each other, and looking outside ourselves to the United Nations’ many agencies.
• There is a creative tension between particularity and universality. One can be fully rooted in one’s own tradition and yet recognize that that it is part of a larger whole. One of the things that is essential to this work is a sense of “radical humility”. In scripture it is written that “now we know only in part.” That to me is the human condition. We can’t know everything because we are human and we need each other in order to gain perspective. Far from being a mandate to have exclusive ownership of the truth, you can find in all religions the point that we are part of a global community, all of us needing each other, struggling together.
• My practices went from being externally focused, confronting the struggles of burning out, and pouring everything into that external “doing “ world. Gradually becoming more and more connected to self-love and to the inner space, is crucial. In the west, being self-centered is viewed as a negative, but to be “centered as self”, means attending to that self-loving space.
• Seeing nature in its biodiversity—interdependence is so obvious. Deep rootedness in one tradition and a feeling of connection to ALL others. I’m in a deep place in my own Christian world as well even when chanting or in meditation.

Lots of gratitude to all the behind-the-scenes volunteers that made this call happen!