Interfaith Studies: principles of inter-monastic dialogue

spirituality

In his book By Faith and Hospitality, Pierre-François de Béthune, Secretary General of the Commission for Monastic Interfaith Dialogue, points out some of the lessons which have been learned:

The real cause of religious totalitarianism is feeling oneself to be such a recipient of God’s fullness as no longer to experience any need of others” ... An extreme example of this was a leaflet, distributed by opponents during the Day of Prayer for Peace at Assisi in 1986, which said “Why do we need the witch-doctor from Togo? Why have the Crow Indian chiefs smoking the pipe of peace when a hundred thousand Catholic priests say Mass every morning and ask God for peace? Should that not be enough?”’ (Fr. Moingt, p28)

2. It is not enough to receive a believer of another faith in the ‘hallway’ of our religious life, making exchanges with him about techniques of meditation or the history of religions. We must be prepared to receive him at the hearth of our faith life. (p14)

3. Prayer is indeed the shortest route between two people. When two people pray, God is not a third: he is the First, welcoming the one and the other’ (p19)

4. Dialogue with other faiths must become such a living exchange. This “intra-religious” dialogue, as Raimon Pannikar calls it, consists in reaching out from our own experience to the religious experience of the other, in some measure making it our own. Only thus can a true encounter between hearts take place. We are not afraid of letting our hearts be affected, wounded even. (pp25-6)

5. At a deeper level, people rooted in their own religious traditions can share their experience of prayer, contemplation, faith and commitment, expressions and methods, in their search for the Absolute... Interreligious dialogue naturally leads people to share with others their reasons for their own faith, and does not stop in the face of differences, which are sometimes profound, but submits with humility and trust to God “who is larger than our hearts” (John 3.20). And so, the Christian has an occasion to offer the other the possibility of knowing, in a way that is lived, the values of the Gospel.’ From The Attitude of the Catholic Church Towards Believers of Other Religions, published in 1984 by the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue. (p32)

Pope John Paul II to a group of Buddhist and Christian monks - 20.9.89 - ‘Your dialogue at the monastic level is truly a religious experience, a meeting in the depth of the heart, held in a spirit of poverty, mutual trust and profound esteem for your respective traditions’ (Bulletin of The Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, 73, 1990). (p32)

The impossibility of receiving our Buddhist friends to Eucharistic communion during our meetings reminds us of the impassable barrier separating us. The discovery of radical incomprehensibility is even more painful because it happens at a time when a deep bond can be formed...The shock of meeting undeniable experiences of the absolute which are yet not possible to assimilate into our own experience, considerably broadens our religious understanding. (p39)