Common Ground, Common Word,
Common Mission

We become human by participating in a beloved community,
a common experience and common effort on a common ground
to which one willingly belongs.
                                                                       Wendell Berry

I’ll begin this writing from a tidy hermitage on the sumptuous campus of the Subiaco Retreat Center in Karen, just outside of Nairobi, Kenya, which is run by the Benedictine Missionary Sisters of Tutzing. I am here to take part in a series of events with our Shi’a partners from Qom, Iran, led by Professor Mohammad Shomali, with whom DIM·MID has had a relationship for many years now. I arrived for the tail end of one event, was able to participate in a second, and will attend the first day of the third. I only had a brief window in my calendar when I was asked to come, but I am very glad to have this experience.

I heard Dr. Shomali give the most substantive version of his history of dialogue with Christianity the other day. When he was doing his doctorate in philosophy at the University of Manchester in the UK in the 1990s, he wanted to learn more about Christianity. He began by getting involved with the Focolare Movement, with which he still has strong ties, and visited Mariapolis in the UK several times. Along the way he met a monk-priest from Ampleforth Abbey, Father Jonathan Cotton. When he expressed his desire to visit a Catholic seminary, Father Jonathan invited him instead to visit the abbey where he met the abbot, the late Timothy Wright, spent two days there, and says that he simply loved the atmosphere of the place. In 2001, Abbot Timothy invited him to come back and give a talk on Islam to the monks. The abbot himself pointed out, in a filmed interview, how notable this was for their community in Yorkshire, which had little reference to anything outside of Yorkshire let alone the Islamic world. But the talk went very well and was very much appreciated. The following year Professor Shomali invited Father Jonathan to come to Qom, Iran, the largest center for Shi‘a scholarship in the world where Mohammad was and still is a distinguished teacher. Abbot Timothy insisted on coming along too. Thus, was born a friendship that has had lasting repercussions.

What followed was the first of a series of Catholic-Shi’a dialogues that took place at Ampleforth Abbey and the now defunct Jesuit Heythrop College in 2003, then again in 2005 and 2007. In between there was another visit to Iran. After a little break in time, then-Abbot Primate Notker Wolf got wind of all this and asked that there be something specifically for the wider Benedictine world. At that point Abbot Timothy introduced Professor Shomali to Father William Skudlarek who was then Secretary General of DIM·MID, and another series of meetings began, first at Sant’Anselmo in 2011, followed by encounters in Qom, Assisi, Mashhad (Iran), England, France, Kenya, South Africa, and Senegal.

Along the way Professor Shomali also started an on-going program called Wings of Unity in conjunction with Focolare and Sophia University in Loppano, Italy. His International Institute of Islamic Studies has also developed a close collaboration with Tangaza University here in Nairobi. For the past nine years it has been a regular part of his Iranian seminarians’ training, both women and men, to spend several weeks here in dialogue with their Christian counterparts, always under the theme “Unity of God, Unity in God.” In addition, there is also a Christian- Shi‘a summer school program here that is going on its seventh year.

Of course, what makes this all the more poignant, especially for me as an American, is that the majority of the participants are Iranians. I myself had a hard time getting here. I was told during my long layover in Doha, Qatar, that this was because the war with Iran was causing flights to be cancelled or delayed. Travel was even harder for the Iranians. Mohammad told me that the airport would often be shut down because of the bombing, so they were prepared to cross the border into Turkey by car and fly from there if they had to. Luckily, the airport opened just in time for them to fly out. I had expected there to be drawn faces and stories of terror, but I was surprised at how light-hearted they were about it all, even making jokes. They told me this kind of dark humor is “the Iranian way.” There were many comments like, “Well, we will see what President Trump has to say tomorrow.” At one point, as I was trying to slip between two chairs in the dining hall, someone quipped, “It’s like the Strait of Hormuz!” Mohammad has been careful not to talk about politics and only made the briefest mention of it when somebody asked him a general question about war. His summation was, “Well, we didn’t start this war. America attacked us. Of course we are going to defend ourselves.”

I have been gently trying to learn more about their relationship to the Supreme Leader, both Ayatollah Ali Khamenei who was killed in a US-Israeli air strike in February, and his son and successor Mojtaba Khamenei. There was no joking about that. They saw the Ayatollah’s “murder” as nothing less than a great tragedy, apart from any comment about his policies or those of the government. What I heard in Senegal in January I heard again here with even greater emphasis after these months of active war: The West does not see how many people are taking to the streets in support of the government. The American administration’s threats that Iran would be “blown back into the Stone Age” have only increased the national pride of the Iranians.

I have been staying at Subiaco, the spirituality center run by the Missionary Benedictine Sisters of Tutzing. The center and the monastery are located in a part of Nairobi called Karen. I am told that the area is named after the famous Karen Blixen of “Out of Africa” fame, who claimed it for the British during colonial times. Now it is inhabited by other wealthy folks, government officials, and foreign businesspeople. The area is verdant and well-cared for, full of large, gated compounds. No trees are allowed to be cut here, and because of the thick growth the area is cooler during the hot months.

I was supposed to speak at the concluding session of the program the Iranians took part in at Tangaza, but that didn’t happen since I arrived on Thursday morning instead of Tuesday evening. The second event I was to speak at was a conference on Thursday at Saint Paul’s University, and so after a shower, a shave, and a brief nap, I was driven across town to that event. Whereas Tangaza was founded by a consortium of Catholic religious congregations, Saint Paul’s is run by the Anglican Church of Kenya and hosts students from various Protestant denominations. The theme there was also “Justice and Dignity from Islamic and Christian Perspectives” but Professor Shomali wanted me to speak about Monastic Interreligious Dialogue, and specifically our relationship with Islam.

I had missed my scheduled speaking spot, but they squeezed me in after lunch, limiting my time to 15 minutes. As I got up to speak, I suddenly had the inspiration to sing, a cappella, the refrain of “The Ground We Share”:

The holy ground is the ground that we share
like the holy city Jerusalem,
the prophets’ land and my parents’ land,
the land of peace and the ground that we share.

After singing it, I explained that the Catholic Church’s approach to interreligious dialogue always starts with our common humanity. Nostra ætate begins by recognizing that “One is the community of all peoples, one their origin, for God made the whole human race to live over the face of the earth. One also is their final goal, God.” For us that means that every person possesses an inherent dignity and therefore deserves fair treatment regardless of race or social standing. Pope Leo has been re-echoing this conviction repeatedly, most recently in the powerful remarks he addressed to migrants in Tenerife during his apostolic journey to Spain.

Then I went on to say that the guiding documents out of the Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue speak about the four different kinds of dialogue. The first two are the dialogue of life and the dialogue of action, a call to cooperate with people of other faiths in projects of mutual interest. They precede any kind of theological exchange because we always begin with our common humanity. When speaking about discernment in interreligious dialogue, Pope Saint John Paul II said that the first criteria must always be “the universality of the human spirit, whose basic needs are the same in the most disparate cultures” (Fides et ratio, 72). That is “the ground we share”: the universality of the human spirit.

The men and women participants were together on the long bus ride from Saint Paul’s back to Subiaco. The men were more like a football team on holiday than staid seminarians. They were very affable and immediately wanted to get to know me. I had a marvelous conversation about the spiritual life with the gentleman I sat next to. He asked me lots of penetrating questions about monasticism and priesthood, comparing my way of life to that of the life of a husband and father.

The next day we were all guests at a day-long conference at Tangaza sponsored by the African Academy of Religions. As a Westerner I have become careful about generically referring to someone as being from “Africa” rather than from their own country, and I am also slow to call something an “African proverb.” For that reason, I found it interesting to be at a conference that dealt with “The Ambivalence of Faith in Africa: Power, Knowledge and Gender Dynamics” and to get a glimpse of progressive post-colonialist African theology. I heard some of the same issues that were and are at play in India, the tension between inculturation and syncretism for instance, as well as the delicate work of sifting through what is authentic Christian Catholicism and what is a Western European import. There were scholarly presentations by several African and two Italian theologians and scholars who dealt with questions such as “Could faith and spirituality be the panacea for the contemporary societal approach to the realization of personhood?” and “How can religion and academic structures be approached in a decolonized way, shifting from Eurocentric scholarship to collaborative learning?”

I have grown to suspect that the concept of Ubuntu, so often quoted by Western progressives, ––“I am because we are; and since we are I am”–– was far overused and perhaps misused. For that reason, it was interesting to hear it employed several times in reference to the “bottom up” approach and “the collective finger theory,” both of which focus more on communities than on institutions. I particularly loved what was introduced to us simply as “an African proverb”: “Until the lion learns to write, his story is always told by the hunter.”

That afternoon we began the meeting of Shi‘a women and Benedictine sisters with introductions, my report on DIM·MID, and an opening address by Professor Shomali. it was Father William Skudlrek who instigated this now regular meeting of Benedictine and Shi’a women here at Subiaco because, as Sister Lusina told me, “the women are closer to the children.” This was their fourth encounter, and I was told there were more new faces than old, and fewer Muslim women from Kenya in attendance this time, for whatever reason. To see the friendship and ease between these women is truly inspiring. The Muslim women are so fascinated by Benedictine monastic life, and the nuns are obviously so fond of their Muslim sisters. The Iranian women, as far as I could tell, were all dressed in the full-length chador that only reveals the face, and about half of the women who come from far-flung lands were dressed in long beautiful hijabs and the traditional robe-like abaya, sometimes with beautiful woven shawls. Listening to them and interacting with them would surely dismantle the stereotype that many Westerners have about women in Islam. They were confident, proud, and articulate, and as they introduced themselves and their backgrounds, I was impressed to find out that many of them were seminary students and several of them already held doctorates. One woman had three doctorates, one was a medical doctor, and another was a pediatric neurologist. In fact, two women publicly praised the deceased Imam Khamenei for bringing greater respect to women and boasted that 60% of Iranian women have graduate degrees.

The men dropped in briefly for our session on Saturday morning, which of course brought a whole new wave of energy. I was dressed in full white habit by then and, to my surprise, several of the men were really impressed by that. That led to several lively quick conversations over tea about the meaning of the habit and monastic life in general. There was also one genial chap who put his arm around me and started singing to me, in Farsi, poems of the great Sufi mystic Hafez who was from this man’s hometown, Shiraz. A very solid and pleasant image of Iranians is starting to congeal in my mind. The men were on their way to the Focolare center at Mariapolis to begin a Week of Unity there. The women joined them there on Sunday after their encounter was over and on Monday, Sister Lusina and I were to go as well, but just for the day since I needed to fly out Tuesday.

I have heard Professor Shomali speak several times now, particularly at our January Monastic-Muslim meeting in Senegal, but the two talks he gave on Saturday were the best I have heard him deliver thus far. To our small group of the women plus me he laid out his vision for what he calls the School of God. His underlying approach is relatively straightforward: he does not speak of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as three different religions, but one religion, which in and of itself could be a controversial position to take in some circles. He stated that God has always revealed only one message, but through many messengers, each one speaking through the language and the culture of their particular community. I assume he did not simply mean Hebrew, Greek, or Arabic, but ‘language’ in the broadest sense of the word. He cited Surah 16:36 of the Qur’an (Surah An-Nahl): We surely sent a messenger to every community, saying, “Worship Allah and shun false gods” and Surah 14:4 (Surah Ibrahim): We have not sent a messenger except in the language of his people to clarify the message for them.

Mohammad would like to found this School of God which he says would have as its theme “One School, One Curriculum, Many Teachers,” where students of the various traditions could come and learn from teachers of the various traditions about the common wisdom that we share. In another place he described it as “One authority (God), one wisdom (divine justice), but many teachers.” He did not lay out a practical curriculum but obviously some of this is already taking place as he sends his seminarians to Kenya to learn from their Christian counterparts. And I saw firsthand how eager they are to learn from us and about us. Later that same afternoon the talk he gave to the sisters of Sacred Heart Priory on human dignity and justice was simply excellent, and I caught a glimpse of why this man is such a respected and popular teacher. I won’t even begin to summarize it here, but I was glad to find out it was filmed and can be found on YouTube.

Besides all of this, there was also interaction with the Benedictine community at Sacred Heart Priory. Friday was the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, their titular feastday. Sister Lusina, in her understated way, warned me that the 7 AM Mass “might take a little longer than usual.” The music was joyous from the first moment, with eight sisters dancing up the aisle, leading the procession with a song in Swahili accompanied by the choir in three-part harmony, organ, drums, and other percussion and punctuated by the most jubilant ululation I have ever heard. All the while the other sisters and the rest of us who were not timid were pretty much dancing in our pews as well, or at least making synchronized full body gestures. I had to leave at 8 AM for the conference at Tangaza, at which point we had only reached the offertory procession, which was again accompanied by dancing up the aisle with the gifts. I was sorry to have to leave.

That same evening Sister Lusina invited me to join the sisters in their refectory for dinner and asked if I would please sing a few songs for the community as well––an invitation I am always hoping for, to be perfectly honest, though I am always nervous about how a borrowed guitar will do for me. This one worked out fine. I sang two songs, “Behind and Before Me,” a ballad version of Psalm 139, and then taught them the ostinato for my “Streams of Living Water,” which they not only learned almost immediately after one listen but spontaneously added a perfect alto harmony in typical African choral style. Buoyed up by that strong bed of vocals, I was free to improvise on the obligato verses over the top. I have probably sung that piece thousands of times, but this may have been the most memorable performance ever. When we finished singing, Sister Rosa, the prioress, asked me to say a few words about DIM·MID, and as she came up to thank me the sisters spontaneously broke out singing it again, this time very rhythmically with handclaps, which totally changed the character of the song, and then then adding ululation at the end. The music for Sunday Mass, was almost as jubilant, and many of the Muslim women who were there commented how moving the experience was for them.

The Week of Unity is an outgrowth of Shomali’s work with Wings of Unity,an academic initiative that advocates for profound dialogue between Christianity and Islam. According to the website of United World Communities

Students and academics come together to build bridges in a global effort to ease cultural tensions. In a world fraught with cultural and religious tensions, initiatives that are capable of building bridges become particularly valuable. Since 2016 Wings of Unity has provided a space for academic gatherings and profound dialogue between different religions.

The Week of Unity is an outgrowth of Shomali’s work with Wings of Unity and also a fruit of Mohammad’s long relationship with the Focolare Movement and its Sophia University Institute in Loppano, Italy. This Week of Unity took place at Focolare’s Mariapolis Piero about an hour outside of Nairobi. Seeing and being welcomed by all of our sister and brother Muslim friends there in a new context was a particular delight—though I did get greeted by one who said in a slightly reproving tone of voice, “You are not wearing your beautiful white robes.” Among the participants were many others, perhaps 100 in all, from all over Africa; I know for sure that Cameroon, Tanzania, and Uganda were represented.

The program was supposed to start at 9 AM, but nothing was happening. Then Mohammad came up to me at about 9:30 and said, “Our first presentation is delayed, and everyone is here. Can you do some music to fill in time for a half an hour?” I had told him about a song I had written two years back called “People of the Book” for which I chant the verse of the Qur’an on which it is based, Surah 3:64: “People of the Book, let us come to a common word between you and us, that we will worship none but Allah alone…” So he said, “Sing the one where you chant from the Qur’an.”

When I am asked to perform at an interreligious gathering, I do so with great respect lest I offend anyone’s sensibilities by daring to chant their sacred words. I begged out and promised I would sing it later, giving myself some time to relax and practice it again. The first of the two songs I did sing was the full version of “The Ground We Share.” which, along with quotes from the psalms of ascents and the Book of Revelation, also quotes Surah 17 of the Qur’an about the Prophet’s night flight, al-Isra’ and ascension, al-mi’raj in Jerusalem, though in English. Next, I sang “Compassionate and Wise,” which combines a Hindu mantra (the mahamytrumjaya, “the great mantra for overcoming death”) with the Buddhist dedication of merit. I provided a bit of explanation for both, and they were warmly received.

Then, as promised, after two other presentations, an introduction to Christianity and an introduction to Islam––imagine trying to do either one of those in 30 minutes!–– I finally got to give my presentation on justice in Islam and Christianity. I began by telling the story of Pope Benedict’s famous misstep in 2006 when in his address at Regensburg, he accidentally offended Muslims worldwide. What came out of that faux pas was “A Common Word,” that beautiful document in which 138 Muslims scholars wrote an open letter to the Holy Father, basically quoting Jesus in the Gospel of Mark 12:30 (repeated in Matthew and Luke) teaching that the greatest commandment is ‘you shalllove the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.’… And the second, like it, is this:‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater thanthese. These Muslim scholars then say that this is a common word between you and us because this is also taught in the Qur’an and in the hadith of the Prophet (PBUH). My whole talk was thus based on the premise that we should always start with our common humanity, as all of our Church’s documents on interreligious dialogue do, insisting on “the universality of the human spirit, whose basic needs are the same in the most disparate cultures” (Fides et ratio).I also added that even if we never get beyond that, that would be fine too. I ended by quoting Pope Leo in his marvelous statement of the common mission that flows from our common ground and common word that he made in his greeting to the participants of the eighth colloquium between the Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue and the Royal Institute for Inter-faith Studies on May 11, 2026:

Christians and Muslims, drawing from the richness of our respective traditions, are called to a common mission: to revive humanity where it has grown cold, to give voice to those who suffer and to transform indifference into solidarity. Compassion and empathy can be our instruments as they have the power to restore the dignity of the other.

At the end, I stepped out and performed “People of the Book.” I must say, there are few feelings more satisfying than singing someone else’s sacred words for them, and for them to be so appreciative and moved by it. For this I thank my background in liturgical music, which taught me how to approach a sacred text with dignity and respect.

There was a flurry of conversations before, during and after lunch. I also was lucky enough to share a little song fest with a young Cameroonian guitarist who was also in attendance, swapping songs in the company of several other newfound brothers from Tanzania and Canada (by way of Iran and Iraq). As we drove away, I told Sister Lusina that I was just exhausted, but it was the best kind of exhaustion––to be so overwhelmed by the success of an encounter as to be left without adequate words to describe it.

All in all, this was simply a very fruitful stay with marvelous people in Kenya. The driver who picked me up from the airport when I arrived was named John, and he also brought me back to the airport through the early morning mist and darkness. He had taught me a few Swahili words on Thursday––asante-“thank you,” habari yako-“how are you?” rafiki-“friend,” and a word I heard and saw over and over again during my short stay in Kenya, karibu-“welcome.” As we were pulling into Jomo Kenyatta International Airport at 5 AM, I was surprised to see the words karibu tena on the sign for departures. When I asked young John about why you would say “welcome” to someone as they were leaving, he explained that it meant “You are welcome again.” In other words, “Come back!” That word, I must admit, still brings tears to my eyes when I think of all the beautiful souls I encountered in my brief stay. May it be so.