Dear Editor,
I wish to commend our President for leading our people and country into a day of Fasting and Praying, and the call to “Lift up each other”. I do believe that the religions of our fore-parents are the best starting points for us and our young people to grasp acceptable purposes and ends for our lives and living, and tolerable means thereto: they are filled with good lessons for life and ways of living. Religions at times have kept peoples apart but in our Guyana at this time, the prospects are good for us to lean on our religions to help in bringing us together, as he has sought to do. Our country and people have been blessed with little, if any hostility, between our various religions and their adherents. In this, we have been fortunate since our primary challenge has been to come together as one people descending from six fore-parents, in our circumstance of a strong overlap between our different groups of people and our different religions. We have not had the intensity of troubles that overlapping, reinforcing differences often bring.
Coming together is advanced mostly in social settings, settings of free associations in which we talk and laugh as we seek to learn of, and to influence each other on some matter and into some way of thinking. It is in such socializing settings that knowledge of and familiarity with each other are formed, that we get to know each other better, which is the basis for the strong bonds between people in a society. Whilst there has been little hostility between our various religions, and we live well with each other, most socializing takes place within and under some religious umbrella – occasions marking births, marriages, promotions, deaths, etc. – bringing together largely one group of people although a number of people from other groups would have been welcome. We may say in our context that our sensitivities between our various religions, though weak, still inhibit our socializing – the socializing in which the knowledge of each other and becoming comfortable with each other which lay the bases for the strong bonds between us, are formed.
Weakly inhibiting religious forces have been creating the order (groupings) in which our strong bonds are developed and our fasting and praying together should turn those inhibitions into welcoming doors, increasing the number of deep person-to-person bonds across existing groupings. Schools and workplaces, often places of association with others, which otherwise would not have been, are places of common experiences and bonding. We learn to put up with, and get along with the strangers alongside us and find that many of them are not so bad. However, not enough of these associations go beyond the school and plant gate. I believe greater comfort on our religious front would extend our associations at school and work. We need to fast and pray together, become more comfortable in offering to join others in prayers and inviting others to join with us in our prayers. I think of Bishop George inviting Dr Jagan to share in Christian Communion and Dr. Jagan accepting, at the dedication of the Anglican Church of the Transfiguration (on Mandela Avenue) no doubt both of them being moved by the successful completion of a work begun with the granting of the land by a pre-1964 Jagan/PPP Government.
Now that enough ice (residual insecurities) has been broken, perhaps we can keep going with the greatest of respect, in steadily learning about and becoming more comfortable with the customs, festivals, rituals and beliefs of each other’s religions. We must keep working in every way towards “One Guyana”. Whilst I appreciate the arguments in the context of those times which saw successful movements to delink particular, often favoured religions, from schools, I do think that a lot was lost and have been wondering what might be a better approach. It might well be a good thing for knowledge of the religions of all our fore-parents to be presented sensitively, together, in graded texts from kindergarten through to the end of university, a task that our IRO (Inter Religious Organization) may be well placed to lead.
Whilst those texts should contribute to us Guyanese becoming steadily more knowledgeable and comfortable with each other’s religion, dissipating residual inhibitions, facilitating us in becoming steadily more “one people from six”, I think those texts would be good for our World, good for all Mankind, as we contemplate and work to leave our earth. Who knows? Perhaps ten thousand years from now around some distant star, children of our descendants, still recognizably human, will be educated with graded texts, “The Religions of our Fore-parents”, to which we might have contributed some sparkle.
Sincerely,
Samuel Hinds
Former Prime Minister, and
Former President
