Annual Meeting of the North American Commission for Monastic Interreligious Dialogue

After a hiatus of several years, the North American Commission for Monastic Interreligious Dialogue (MID) was recently revived with the appointment of a new board of directors and of Father William Skudlarek, O.S.B., former Secretary General of DIM·MID, as its Executive Director.

The newly constituted board met from July 23-25 at Saint John’s Abbey in Minnesota, with the first and third days devoted to board business and planning for the coming year. The second day was devoted to dialogue with six Buddhist monks who reside in Minnesota, providing spiritual care to the various Buddhist immigrants in the state and also offering teaching on Buddhist thought and practice to all who want to learn about this spiritual tradition.

The meeting opened and closed with business sessions and planning for the year ahead, but the heart of the gathering came on the second day, when the board welcomed its Buddhist guests. The Reverend Aizaiah Yong, PhD, Executive Director of the Collegeville Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research, facilitated the ensuing discussions with exceptional grace and skill.

In both plenary and small-group sessions, the participants—nine Benedictine and Cistercian board members and six Buddhist monks, five from the Theravada tradition and one from the Tibetan tradition—shared with notable openness and attentiveness what drew them to monastic life, what sustains them in it today, and where they experience monastic life as most tested and most alive in the present moment. The conversations were marked by candor, mutual respect, and a genuine sense of delight in one another’s company.

After a vegan lunch and attendance at Midday Prayer with the monastic community, Dr. Yong invited the participants to turn toward collaboration. He asked them to consider how Buddhist and Catholic monastics might work together for the well-being of their local communities and the wider society we share, and to imagine modest but realistic possibilities for shared service in their different settings.

While many of those participating in the meeting may not have realized how important such work really is, one of the matters discussed at a small-group meeting brought out very clearly the need for fostering genuine friendship and spiritual dialogue between American monastic communities and persons who follow other spiritual paths.  A participant in one of the afternoon’s small groups reported that a group of young Catholics from a parish in Minneapolis had visited a nearby Buddhist temple.  Their time spent in meditation at that temple was posted on a social-media platform, eliciting about two hundred negative responses by viewers who watched it.  To their credit, the young people themselves wrote a response to those who had expressed a very negative attitude about the students’ practice of meditation in that setting.

This is just one example of why the work done by MID in Canada, the United States, and Mexico is so very important.  After centuries during which the Catholic Church had little or no contact with persons of other religious traditions, Catholics are now called to build bridges to join them to other religions.  Monastics were at first called upon to focus their efforts on the great religions of Asia, where the monastic way of life has long been practiced, but in more recent years the work of MID has expanded to support dialogue with Muslims as well, for even though Islam has no monastic tradition, its spiritual practices of times for daily prayer, the devout reading of Scripture, the practice of fasting, and its strong mystical tradition offer a rich resource for spiritual exchange.  An exchange with Muslims may be especially possible during the MID board meeting next year, for the board accepted the invitation of one of its members, Sister Cecilia Dwyer, O.S.B., to have its annual meeting at her monastery in Bristow, Viriginia, where some of the Benedictine sisters have already established cordial relationships with Muslims living nearby.

At least equally important as the annual board meeting, however, is the admonition of Father Skudlarek that all members of the board should be engaged in one or another form of interreligious dialogue with persons who live in the vicinity of their own monasteries, which are found in all parts of North America, and to be sending reports of their work for publication in Dilatato Corde. All of these efforts are a way of making us more aware of a truth that Thomas Merton once said:  We are already one even if not fully aware of it.