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Dilatato Corde 5:1
January - June, 2015 
INTERRELIGIOUS FRIENDSHIP AFTER NOSTRA ÆTATE If I were to use an image to characterize this book, I would compare it to a multicolored textile. Reading the pages of this volume is like letting one’s heart be moved by a series of stories that have been woven together to produce a colorful fabric. Another image might be a photo album in which each picture offers a detail of a wider panorama. The concluding words of the book offer yet another image, comparing this collection of personal testimonies to a necklace made up of precious pearls that are held together with the clasp of friendship (p. 251). This is a fascinating book in that the reader is introduced to a wide range of individuals through sixteen brief reports of how Catholics have become friends with Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and African indigenous believers. Some of the contributors speak of lives dedicated to interreligious dialogue, others discuss friendship among those whose work bridges formal dialogue and shared experiences, others describe interreligious friendships that blossom through work or happen in the context of the family, and still others show us how non-Catholic teachers became friends with Catholic disciples. This collection of essays is also a difficult book because each tale of interreligious friendship is only a tiny fragment of a more complex story of friendship that lies in the background and whose features remain to a large extent unknown to the reader. We cannot demand a uniform model for narrating, reflecting on, and extrapolating from personal experiences, but the result of this plurality of models is that the reader can become lost in this forest of personal histories. Furthermore, those readers who pick up this book with some theological expectations will find there only raw materials, rather than a more developed “product.” Perhaps an essay that tried to bring out the theological implications of the individual experiences would have been useful. The conviction that lies behind the book is that interreligious friendship—spiritual friendship, in particular—is a form of Christian spiritual practice and should therefore be considered a (new) theological virtue for the twenty-first-century Church. All the contributions to this volume could be regarded as evidence for or confirmation of this conviction, which was developed by James L. Fredericks, one of the book’s two editors, in a recent article, which, I think, it would have been well to include in this volume.[1] For me personally, the essay that provides the deepest insight into the meaning of “spiritual interreligious friendship as a “new theological virtue” is Reid B. Locklin’s “Jivanmukti, Freedom, and a Cassette Recorder: Friendship beyond Friendship in the Tradition of Advaita Vedanta” (pp. 111-124). As he puts it in the concluding passage of his essay, My experience of Swamiji’s friendship and, beyond this, his co-presence in my own life and consciousness, sensitized me in a new way to the friendship and co-presence of God the Spirit as the sole true author of such virtues [joy, peace, kindness, generosity, gentleness] in me. . . . I have come to perceive in this friendship a reflection (abhasa) of the life of grace, a life of divine freedom, a life defined by ever-greater attentiveness to the liberating co-presence of God the Holy Spirit. I would say that Swamiji became a sacrament of the Spirit for me, and thus also a sacrament of Christ (p. 122). The close link between spiritual interreligious friendship and theological reflection in fields such as theology of religions, comparative theology, and theology of interreligious dialogue emerges from some of the contributions. Since it is impossible to review all the many issues covered by the essays, all of which praise the “grace of interreligious friendship,” I will only reflect briefly on this particular aspect. Already in the Introduction (pp. 1-7), James L. Fredericks highlights the fact that Nostra Aetate, the Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions (28 October 1965), “would never have come into being were it not for the friendships that inspired, nourished, and sustained those who labored on this council document” (p. 1). At the same time the Council’s Declaration made possible “the abundance of interreligious friendships [that] the present collection of essays bears witness to” (p. 1). In general terms, more than one author confesses that “the blessing of sitting together”—the title of Elena Procario-Foley’s essay (pp. 31-48)—affects how a theologian thinks theologically ( see p. 43) and can give a depth to academic pursuits that no library can supply (see p. 56). Through friendship believers—and theologians as well—“seek the face of God in the face of the other” and “come to know God through the other” (see p. 72). Long experience in academic research has led the Jesuit Francis X. Clooney to speak of a “chemistry of study and friendship” (p. 106), in which “the study and the friendships are not . . . alternatives, but two dimensions of integral (interreligious) learning” (p. 101). From the African context, another theologian speaks of how “an African religionist’s disposition to friendship models the values of dialogue to a Christian” (p. 202) and how friendly “encounters were essential to clarifying and developing an inclusive religious pluralist stance” (p. 208). Another African voice describes how interreligious friendship shaped her own gradual conversion (see p. 191) and reshaped her sense of how to be a Christian (see p. 196). An essay I particularly recommend for its balanced combination of intellectual clarity and spiritual freedom is James L. Friedericks’ contribution on “Masao Abe: A Spiritual Friendship” (pp. 155-165).[2] Friedericks’ most original thought is that true spiritual depth in an interreligious friendship of lasting value can only be possible if “a friend . . . remains a stranger” (p. 158): this is the only “way to embrace and honor what I cannot become” (p. 159). The contrary, namely, “the loss of the otherness that forms the basis of . . . friendship” (p. 160), would be a betrayal of it. The theological consequence arising form this spiritual practice is clear and demanding: Our strangeness to one another has brought a depth of spiritual purpose to our friendship. This depth of purpose, however, has been a pearl purchased at a great price. My friendship with Masao Abe has required me to find my way in a territory uncharted by my own religious tradition (p. 159). My Buddhist friend has run me off my theological roadmap. . . . Learning to live off the roadmap is what makes this interreligious friendship such good, if difficult, spiritual practice. A friendship with someone who follows another religious path calls for a spirituality that resists the attempt to overcome differences and to incorporate the other into “simply more of the same”. The strangeness of my Buddhist friend is not merely provisional. His otherness is not something to be overcome. My friend’s Buddhist life cannot be situated comfortably within my Christian understanding of the world without doing violence to Buddhism and our friendship (p. 160). In honoring my friendship with Masao Abe — even at the expense of theological coherence—I have had to learn how to stand in “the place where there is no place to stand”. Without ceasing to be a Christian believer, my friendship with Masao Abe has required me to move off my Christian theological roadmap. In doing so, I have not become a Buddhist. Nevertheless, I have been changed profoundly by the Buddhist truth of emptiness. . . . The sacramental instincts of my Catholic spirituality pose a great temptation to redraw the lines of my friend’s face into my own image and likeness. I cannot abandon my Christian faith and I will not abandon my Buddhist friend. Therefore, in my own way, I have had to learn how to stand in “the place where there is no place to stand” (pp. 161-162). A final, more personal remark. It is a pity that only on the very last pages of the book is the reader made aware of monastic interreligious dialogue and interreligious friendship arising from this dialogue of spiritual experience. Not a single tale of interreligious ties between Christian and other religions’ monks and nuns is included in the collection of stories that make up this volume. The Benedictine Sister Mary Margaret Funk’s conclusion (pp. 215-219) only very briefly mentions her personal involvement in monastic interfaith dialogue, describing it — or, better, not doing so — in discrete “apophatic”, terms: My own story . . . involves nuns and monks from a variety of religious traditions. Monastic interfaith dialogue is unique, for while the difference of religious thought and practice are real, the similar lifestyles bring us together in deep ways. But it requires particular discretion, in order to protect and respect our friends’ vowed membership in community. Our dialogues are intensely personal and often confidential. Our stories are often too sacred, too close to report in public forums or books. I cannot yet share my own stories of interreligious friendship. To do so would be to violate friendship’s bonds and possibly harm the people I love (p. 218). Yet, even if it is absolutely true that spiritual dialogue is a confidential and “secret” one, it also bears a prophetic and Church dimension that cannot be hidden. On the contrary, it needs to be shared with others in order to be appraised and developed further, as Pope Francis urged in his Apostolic Letter on the occasion of the Year of Consecrated Life (21 November 2014). One way “to review the progress made, to make consecrated persons aware of this dialogue, and to consider what further steps can be taken towards greater mutual understanding and greater cooperation in the many common areas of service to human life,” the Pope writes, “is to give witness to the manifold experiences monastics have lived in the field of interreligious dialogue in the last decades all over the world. To collect such experiences is exactly the main purpose of Dilatato Corde, the journal that welcomes this review. This is, I think, the greatest contribution the monastic world could offer the Church and the best way for it to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Nostra Aetate. Notes: [1]See James L. Fredericks, “Inter-religious Friendship: A New Theological Virtue”, in Journal of Ecumenical Studies 35:2 (1998), pp. 159-174. [2]Originally published in Spiritus 3:2 (2003), pp. 219-230. |
_Web.jpg) Matteo Nicolini-Zani is a monk of the Community of Bose and coordinator of the Italian Commission of Monastic Interreligious Dialogue. He earned a doctorate in Chinese language and literature from Ca’ Foscari University in Venice with a dissertation on Gli studi cristiani accademici e il fenomeno dei “cristiani culturali” nella Cina contemporanea. Duringthe years 1996 to 2000, he spent several months studying in the Republic of China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. His main field of research is the history of Christianity in China. In recent years he has also studied the history and literature of the first Christian mission in central and eastern Asia—East Syrian Christianity in the second half of the first millennium. matteo@monasterodibose.it |