The Parliament of the World's Religions begins tonight in Melbourne to the sound of clashing symbols.
The Parliament itself is an odd sort of parliament. The Christian season of Advent with which it coincides is an odd sort of advent. And the Great Exhibition which in 1893 gave birth to the Parliament is an odd bedfellow for religion. But when you examine the symbols more closely, they line up pretty well. The Parliament of the World's Religions makes a lot of sense.
The job of parliaments, as we know them, is to pass legislation after debating its merits. They get things done. The Parliament of Religions is confined to conversation on public issues like discrimination, poverty, indigenous welfare and care for the environment. It offers a variety of religious perspectives on these issues, and encourages people to meet in order to work more effectively.
It is much less powerful than the institutions into which parliaments have evolved. But it is not dissimilar to earlier parliaments which brought together ecclesiastical and landholding notables to offer advice to the king, and to temper tyranny.
In the Western Christian tradition, Advent is a period of preparation and waiting that concludes with Christmas, the birth of Jesus Christ. For Christians in the Roman Empire, the image of advent was concrete and vivid. They associated it with the ceremonial arrival of the Emperor into a town.
The advent was presented as the theatre of power: a stern and unmoving Emperor was borne into town in a display of military might and implacability. The advent was preceded by anxious expectation. It could be followed by the examination of books, officials, by the judging of serious crimes, by exemplary punishments.
This top-down image of the coming of the emperor, who had everything to decree and nothing to hear, has little to do with the messy, conversational reality of the Parliament of Religions.
But neither is it consistent with the images of Christ's birth in the Christian Scriptures. Luke's Gospel story subverts the image of the omnipotent lord. He tells of the 'hard coming' of a rural couple to an overcrowded town. It leads to the birth of their baby in a cow stall with shepherds, those conventional figures of anarchy, the only representatives of the civil order.
This is the High King slumming it, learning to see things from underneath. The engagement of the Son of God with humanity