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Vol XV No 1 January - June 2025
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The author Venerable Yan Li, Shaolin monk from the Shaolin Temple in Zhengzhou, China.
The Importance of Interreligious Dialogue in Monastic Life Today:
Our Role and Response Last month I met with Gianni La Bella, the head of the Sant’Egidio Community in Rome. This community is involved in diplomatic work for the Church throughouthe world, and Mr. La Bella in particular helped to organize the famous interreligious event in Assisi in 1986 and to keep the flame of that event alive all these years. In conversation, Mr. La Bella said that he thought monasticism had something very important to offer the world right now. I agreed, of course, but I also asked how he would specifically describe what we monks have to offer.
Mr. La Bella believes that all religions and the world itself are suffering from the same illness: materialism. He clarified that he meant materialism in the broadest sense of the word––not just consumerism but also the lack of a sense of, as he put it, “transcendence.” In the face of that lack of a sense of transcendence and of materialism, what monasticism has to offer are
Monasticism, he said, could diffondere i semi della pace––“spread the seeds of peace.”
I will touch on each of those below, but I will tell you right up front that the one that interested me the most in the work that I have been asked to do is that fourth one: How can we as monks and nuns spread the seeds of peace, particularly through interreligious dialogue?
At the outset, I want to remind you, if you know this already, or describe to you, if you do not, of the work of the Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue. In a major document called “Dialogue and Mission,” which was issued in 1984 and then reiterated in 1991 and 2014,[1] it describes four different kinds of dialogue:
The fourth form of dialogue involves sharing spiritual practice with “the religious other.” It calls attention to what I understand to be the principal mandate for Monastic Interreligious Dialogue: engaging in and promoting the sharing of spiritual practice, and experiential encounters. So let me bring in the specifically monastic contribution here, and the reason for a special monastic organization to promote and coordinate interreligious dialogue alongside the work of the Dicastery.
The impetus for our organization came from a letter that the late Cardinal Sergio Pignedoli sent to Abbot Primate Rembert Weakland in 1974. Cardinal Pignedoli was the president of the Secretariat for Non-Christians, which is now called the Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue.”[3] That secretariat had been established in 1964 by Pope Paul VI, a year before the groundbreaking Vatican II document on our relations with non-Christian religions was promulgated––the famous Nostra Ætate.
In his letter to Abbot Primate Rembert Weakland, Cardinal Pignedoli asked the monastic orders in the Church to take a leading role in interreligious dialogue because, as he put it:
Historically, the monk has always been the most representative figure of homo religiosus [the “religious one”] and thus represents a point of attraction and reference for Christians and non-Christians. The presence of monasticism in the Catholic Church is in itself a bridge spanning all religions. If we were to present ourselves to Buddhism and Hinduism, not to mention other religions, without the monastic religious experience, we would hardly be credible as religious persons.
It is because “The monk is a point of attraction and reference” to all people, and “The presence of monasticism in the Catholic Church is in itself a bridge spanning all religions” that the monastic orders should take a leading role in interreligious dialogue. Cardinal Koovakad, the new prefect for the dicastery, also highlighted the important role of monks in interreligious dialogue. In an interview just after he was named he said, “I like to emphasize that interreligious dialogue in India is traditionally linked to monasticism.” He recognized and affirmed that monasticism is something that Christianity shares with other traditions rather than boasting that we were the first or the best.
The Constitutions of my congregation, the Camaldolese, begin with an acknowledgment of the universality of this monastic impetus. I believe they did so because of the influence of Father Bede Griffiths and the work of Father Thomas Matus, a great scholar of Indian philosophy. The very first paragraph of our Constitutions reads
Long before the coming of Christ, humanity’s quest for the Absolute gave rise in various religious traditions to expressions of monastic life. The many different forms of monastic and ascetical life bear witness to the divine destiny of the human person and to the presence of the Spirit in the hearts of all who seek to know what is true and ultimately real.
But why is that so? How is monasticism a bridge spanning all religions? It has to do with the homo religious, which ties into the broader sense of Mr. La Bella’s four gifts of monasticism in response to materialism and the lack of a sense of what he calls transcendence.
“Transcendence” is a common enough word, but I would prefer to speak of a sense of “the spiritual” or the “spiritual realm” instead of “transcendence.” I would go on to say that the religions of the world are suffering from the same thing that the world, in general, is suffering from––a lack of awareness or recognition of the spiritual, of the spiritual realm, of spiritual solutions, and that lack of awareness leads to more and more consumerism. Monasticism offers a new way to live.
I have just finished re-reading Raimundo Panikkar’s 1980 book Blessed Simplicity, which had a profound effect on many of the monks entrusted with my early monastic formation as well as on many of my friends outside the visible bounds of institutional monasticism. Instead of using the term homo religious, Panikkar simply speaks about the humanum––“the human.” In his book, he makes a subtle distinction that I think many people miss. He is not teaching about the monk as an archetype, but about the archetype of the monk: “There is a human archetype that the monk develops.”
Traditional monks have reinterpreted in their way that “something” that all humans are called to realize in their own way, something that “expresses the growth and the newness of the humanum.” That is why everyone is attracted to monks. However—and this is a direct quote from Panikkar—“The monk is only one way of realizing a universal archetype . . . it is inside and through this [monastic] way that we can access the universal archetype of which the monk is one manifestation.” If I understand it correctly, this archetype is summed up in the title of the book, Blessed Simplicity. The monk stands as a sign of the “one thing necessary.”
In my opinion, this is all related to Mr. La Bella’s notion of monasticism as a witness to the unity of the human race. All human beings have this “call,” this aspiration, and therefore monks become a point of attraction. Almost anyone who sees a monk is struck by that peculiar sign, even the Buddha. At the age of twenty-nine, when he was still Prince Siddhartha, he escaped from the protected environs of the palace and was jolted out of his idleness by what are referred to as the “Four Signs”: an old man, a sick person, a corpse being carried to cremation, and a monk seated in meditation under a tree. He began to think about sickness, old age, and death––and decided to follow the way of the monk.
Christian theology refers to the “Four Last Things”––death, judgment, heaven, and hell. In his famous book, The Perennial Philosophy, Aldous Huxley interprets these four last things in a positive way when he says that in all the historical formulations of the Perennial Philosophy, it is assumed that “the end of human life is contemplation,” the end of life is “the direct and intuitive awareness of God.” Action is only the means to that end. “A society is good,” he says, “in the measure in which it makes contemplation possible for its members; and that the existence of at least a minority of contemplatives is necessary for the well-being of any society.” While popular thought, caught up in materialism, may think that the end of human life is action and contemplatives are “perfectly useless and perhaps even dangerous to the community that tolerates it,”[4] monastic life itself bears witness “to the divine destiny of the human person and to the presence of the Spirit in the hearts of all who seek to know what is ultimately real.”
Father Bede referred to this as the “universal call to contemplation.” As Saint John of the Cross taught, God did not reserve such an exalted vocation to certain privileged souls. On the contrary, God allows everyone to embrace it. The problem is that God finds few souls who allow him to work such sublime things for them. And here is where the ascetical life comes in, which Mr. La Bella refers to as monasticism’s first gift: austerity, not as penance and punishment but as discipline. In every spiritual tradition, the monk represents someone willing to face tribulations, willing to face aridity, even mortification––in a word willing to embrace “blessed simplicity”––not as ends in and of themselves but for the sake of that one thing necessary. This positive approach to austerity is not focused on being saved from but being transformed into. This would also be in keeping with Panikkar’s way of thinking: simplicity by way of integration, not just by way of negation.
I prefer the word “transcendence” because I think the spiritual impulse, in every tradition, often mistakenly leads us to transcend and leave behind, rather than to evolve and include. This is a theme I have been made aware of by many contemporary theorists, but it is an ancient teaching. For instance, the Andalusian Islamic Sufi mystic/poet/philosopher Ibn al-Arabi (1165-1249) greatly influenced Anselm, Thomas Aquinas, and perhaps Dante and John of the Cross. He taught that a so-called “pure intellect” that has freed itself completely from everything physical and material can only see God in God’s transcendence, but reality in pure transcendence is only half of the perfect knowledge of God because it is only one-half of the two basic aspects of the Absolute. The other half is immanence, in Arabic tashbīh. “All knowledge of God is necessarily one-sided if it does not unite transcendence and immanence because God is transcendent and immanent at the same time.”[5] And that is also true of our monastic life.
At any rate, this common ground in monasticism and the homo religiosus (or simply the humanum) is where the ancient religious cultures of India and Sri Lanka come to the fore. This is the region of the world where the monastic spirit came to birth, certainly the solitary path marked out by the Upanishads and the venerable sannyasa tradition but no less in the entire Buddhist movement that scholars point to as the real birth of organized monasticism.
At the same time, while I do believe that the dialogue of religious experience is the principal mandate for Monastic Interreligious Dialogue (engaging in and promoting the sharing of spiritual practice and experiential encounters), that first dialogue, the dialogue of life (engaging others in our community as neighbors, sharing our daily joys, problems, and concerns) is an especially ripe exchange, especially in this part of the world. India has more than 2,000 different ethnic groups, and almost every state has its own mixture of ethnicities, traditions, and cultures. India has a reputation not only for its religious diversity but for its embrace of religious pluralism. I do understand from conversations and from what I have read in the foreign press that religious liberty is a little more complicated now in the current political climate.[6] That being said, I remember Father Dorathick, the prior of our community in Tamil Nadu, once telling me, “We do not need to hold big seminars on interreligious dialogue at Shantivanam—we simply live it. Our printer is a Muslim, and most of our workers are Hindus.” That is a concrete example of the dialogue of life.
I hardly need to tell you that Sri Lanka has perhaps an even richer diversity of ethnic, religious, linguistic, and cultural groups in its social fabric. If I understand correctly, in Sri Lanka religion is more closely tied to ethnicity.[7] And yet, even though religion has always played a crucial part in the country’s post-independence politics, it is refreshing to learn that religion itself was never deemed to be the direct cause of the armed conflicts that plagued your country for some time. Sri Lanka ranks very high concerning religious freedom, both in popular opinion and in the various family or matrimonial laws specific to different religious communities.
At the same time, I would say this dialogue of life comes naturally to monks in every part of the world and in every age. Villages, towns, and even major cities grew up around monasteries in medieval Europe, and the monasteries themselves became centers of learning and culture and sometimes of commerce as well. The dialogue of life flows into the second kind of dialogue, the dialogue of action, cooperating with people of other faiths in projects of mutual interest. As Saint John Paul II noted in his encyclical Fides et Ratio, in discerning the Church’s promotion of interreligious dialogue, “which finds its inspiration in the Council’s Declaration Nostra Ætate, certain criteria will have to be kept in mind. The first of these is the universality of the human spirit, whose basic needs are the same in the most disparate cultures.”[8] We not only have common spiritual aspirations; we share the ground of our humanity.
In his teaching on interreligious dialogue, Pope Francis focuses much more on our common humanity and the existential human condition that we share than on lofty principles and ideals. This is certainly evident in his 2020 encyclical Fratelli Tutti, where he writes, “Whenever religious leaders gather in a spirit of mutual respect and commit themselves to fostering a culture of encounter through dialogue, mutual understanding, and cooperation, our hope for a better and more just world is renewed and confirmed.” He had already expressed this idea in his 2025 encyclical Laudato Sì: “The majority of people living on our planet profess to be believers. This should spur religions to dialogue among themselves for the sake of protecting nature, defending the poor, and building networks of respect and fraternity.”[9] In his greeting to members of a delegation from Albania on January 16 of this year, he said, “Despite the challenges of the present moment, interreligious dialogue has a unique role to play in the building of that future of reconciliation, justice and peace for which the world’s peoples, and especially the young, so ardently long.”[10] Hence, Mr. La Bella’s aspiration that monks devote themselves to spreading the seeds of peace.
Theoretically, monasticism has a much larger role in spreading peace in both of your countries than it does in most Western European countries until now. And when you do it right, Western/European countries can learn from you, because Western/European countries are now more ethnically diverse. Despite the recent rise of white nationalist and supremacist groups in the United States, for instance, the nation’s non-white population has almost doubled over the past four decades, growing from about 24% of the population in 1990 to over 40% in 2023. (To be honest, the growth of the non-white population may be the cause of the ugly rise in white nationalist and supremacist groups in my country.) According to the Pew Research Center, only a few decades ago, a Christian identity was so common among Americans that it could almost be taken for granted. As recently as the early 1990s, about 90% of U.S. adults identified as Christians. But today, only about two-thirds of adults identify as Christians. The situation in Western European countries is even more dramatic. From my recent travels in England, Germany, Poland, Italy, as well as Australia, there is no doubt that all those countries are also more and more ethnically and religiously diverse.
Here I want to bring in Mr. La Bella’s first point again. While we can be concerned about cooperating with people of other faiths in projects of mutual interest, we need to remember that what we monastics specifically bring to dialogue is an austere, non-consumerist lifestyle. Mr. La Bella mentioned that “austerity” sounds bad to Italians because it brings back memories of wartime when lack of food and fuel was responsible for austerity measures. I would imagine that in societies that have more than their share of poverty—I think the poverty rate is about equal between Sri Lanka and India, around 24%––austerity measures also leave a bad taste in the mouth. And yet, even though religious life can be seen as climbing the socioeconomic ladder, our witness of a non-consumerist lifestyle, elected poverty, and simplicity of lifestyle stands as a stark sign to young people who may think that the goal of life is to amass great riches, or at least to climb as high as middle-class comfort. When they see a monk––Hindu or Buddhist or Christian––living a simple austere lifestyle, maybe even the life of a wandering parivrajaka, they are led to ask, “Why? How?” When everything in them wants to climb out of poverty, why would someone take a vow of poverty? This is not to say that everyone is called to a life of monastic poverty or that all monks are called to live as mendicants. It is only to say that the simplicity of the monastic lifestyle is a sign that there is something more important than possessions.
Our work, labora, also points to the one thing necessary. Our former Prior General Don Benedetto Calati wrote years ago that work becomes a great equalizer in Christian monasticism. And more than that, it “enables the monks to associate with, and even evangelize, the poor, the uncultured, the farmers.
For most people in ancient times, working the land was the thing that could turn servants into free people, but monks instead “offer themselves as servants of Christ and brothers of the poor. . . . The land is possessed by the community not as an exercise of power, as will happen later in feudal society, but as a playground [the Italian word he used is palestra, usually translated “gymnasium”] of liberty, of equality among the brothers, through the law of work accepted in evangelical liberty.[11]
In the time of Saint Peter Damian (1007-1072), there was a lot of corruption in the ranks of the clerics and canons. Some of them wanted monks to be forbidden from ecclesiastical apostolate, basing their argument on the fact that monks, especially hermits, are supposed to be dead to the world. So why are they meddling in the apostolate? They didn’t want some annoying ascetic coming in and telling them how to run their parishes, their cathedrals or dioceses. Some even thought that monks should not exercise the office of priesthood because their monastic vocation impeded it. As our former Prior General Anselmo Giabbani wrote, Peter Damian answered with “irony worthy of the subject,” that it is “precisely for this reason, that we are dead to the world and profess a life in perfect antagonism with the principles of the world, that we have the liberty to act in the ecclesiastical field.” In other words, who better to speak about any matters concerning the church, than those who have died to riches and power, those who have no agenda or personal claim, those whose lives are hidden with Christ in God?
I am reminded of the Taoist tradition of China, during the Golden Age of Chinese Philosophy, sometimes called the Hundred Schools of Thought that were spread by itinerant philosophers, like Lao-tzu himself. A characteristic of the philosophical thinking of ancient China was its concern for the challenge of governing people. Throughout the Tao te Ching, that amazing mystical philosophical poetic text, Lao-tzu, as well as his successor Chuang-tzu, shows himself to be keenly interested in the art of ruling an empire while being at the same time detached and deeply involved. The term he used for such a ruler is sheng-jen, meaning “the perfect one,” though usually translated as “the sage or the wise.” The idea is that just as the Tao itself is positively engaged in the whole created world––“the ten thousand things”––down to the minutest details of individual events through the principle of wu-wei–“non-doing,” so too the sheng-jen, the wise one, is positively interested in the world. Chapter 10 teaches, “Loving all people you govern the land, / but can you rule without ruling?” The sheng-jen does so by following “the way of heaven and earth,” the Virtue of the Way, the te of the Tao. By remaining indifferent to petty interests in the world, the sheng-jen can be interested in the great problems of the world. I am thinking here of Mr. La Bella’s fourth possible contribution of monasticism: “Peace in the heart leads to peace in the world.” Or as the great Russian monk Saint Seraphim of Serov taught: “Acquire the Spirit of peace and a thousand souls around you will be saved.”[12] To that I can add a wonderful quote from Father Bede: “My view is that the deeper your contemplation, the nearer you are to God. The nearer you are to God the more open you are to the world, and that is where the hope lies.”[13]
I also want to make a case for the third form of interreligious dialogue, the dialogue of theological exchange, when specialists seriously study each other’s theology, spirituality, history, and philosophy. This is where our studia comes in, and it does not apply only to specialists. Let this be the tie-in with Mr. La Bella’s third point. I was glad that he said Ora, labora, and studia, because most people think the Benedictine motto is only ora et labora. We know that Benedict allotted just as much time to lectio divina as to those other areas. By lectio divina I mean lectio in the broadest sense of the word, which could include the fine arts, culture, and literature.
Lectio divina could also mean, and certainly does for me and has for many years, lectio with non-Christian sacred texts, both as part of our commitment to dialogue and for personal growth. As “Dialogue and Proclamation,” the second major document to come out of what was then called the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, we seek to learn how the Spirit works and speaks differently in other traditions than in the ways we already know. “This allows for real communion and real possibilities for mutual transformation. Increasingly, we become a true wisdom community.”[14] In this day and age, I think it is vital that we all, especially we religious, know something about the theology, spirituality, history, and philosophy of “the religious other” who is our neighbor and with whom we share life. I know that at least in some monasteries in this region that is already happening; perhaps you can later enlighten me on how widespread that is.
We may not realize what a gift this is and could be for the world around us, even including our fellow Christians. One of the things that impressed me so deeply in my earliest encounters with Father Bede was his ability to re-articulate the Christian kerygma in a language other than Western European philosophy. His ability to do this, by the way, did not only speak to Indians; it spoke very much to the heart of many Westerners, myself included, for whom the typical scholastic language of theology had grown stale and who were by that time, and still are, delving into various forms of Asian spirituality, often like sheep without a shepherd who might be able to ensure that the Christian conception of prayer, its logic and requirements are not obscured in this study, but rather expanded. I see this as relevant as ever, although the neo-traditional pushback in seminaries throughout world means that fewer and fewer in ministry have the capacity for it or interest in it.
Interestingly, a mostly unknown document called Optatam Totius, Pope Paul VI’s 1965 Decree on Priestly Training, suggests that seminarians should “be introduced to a knowledge of other religions which are more widespread in individual regions.” Why? So “that they may acknowledge more correctly what truth and goodness these religions, in God’s providence, [already] possess,” before they learn to “refute their errors.” And thus they would “be able to communicate the full light of truth to those who do not have it.”[15]
Support for this positive approach––that we have something to learn and receive from studying other traditions––is given by one of the great Christian humanist philosophers of the twentieth century, Pope Saint John Paul II, who, in his encyclical Fides et Ratio––“On the relationship between faith and reason, writes as follows:
In preaching the Gospel, Christianity first encountered Greek philosophy; but this does not mean at all that other approaches are precluded. Today, as the Gospel gradually comes into contact with cultural worlds which once lay beyond Christian influence, there are new tasks of inculturation, which mean that our generation faces problems not unlike those faced by the Church in the first centuries.
My thoughts turn immediately to the lands of the East, so rich in religious and philosophical traditions of great antiquity. Among these lands, India has a special place. A great spiritual impulse leads Indian thought to seek an experience which would liberate the spirit from the shackles of time and space and would therefore acquire absolute value. The dynamic of this quest for liberation provides the context for great metaphysical systems.
In India particularly, it is the duty of Christians now to draw from this rich heritage the elements compatible with their faith, in order to enrich Christian thought (72). In order to enrich Christian thought!
He adds that “What has been said here of India is no less true for the heritage of the great cultures of China, Japan and the other countries of Asia, as also for the riches of the traditional cultures of Africa, which are for the most part orally transmitted.”
That word “duty,” by the way, is also implied in Nostra Ætate, when it says, “The Church, therefore, exhorts her children” to “recognize, preserve and promote the good things, spiritual and moral, as well as the socio-cultural values found among these people.” That is certainly more than a suggestion!
Dialogue and Mission insisted that no diocese or local parish is exempt from the duty of dialogue and that Church leaders should help the faithful respect the “values, traditions, and convictions of other believers.”[16] I certainly highly recommend to anyone doing formation with younger monks and nuns to study other traditions so that they could encounter and “acknowledge more correctly what truth and goodness these religions, in God’s providence, already possess,” as well as find a way to express our own faith using the native genius of the culture in which we are planted. Again, as the saintly pope declared, this is no less true for China, Japan, and the other countries of Asia, as for the traditional cultures of Africa and South America.
Before I close, I would like to highlight one other area that has not been mentioned in either of those two framing devices but has been foundational for me. I was speaking with a rather well-known monastic writer recently (who may not want to be named) and I asked him if he thought dialogue with the spiritual traditions of Asia has had any lasting impact on monasticism. He first narrowed the question down to specify Benedictine monasticism, but his answer was less than enthusiastic. It was something like, “No, aside from the fact that a few monks do yoga once in a while.”
Cardinal Koovakad, in the same interview I referred to earlier, mentioned the Jesuit Father Roberto De Nobili who as early as 1600 “adopted the clothing and customs of Indian monks, learned local languages, and sought to assimilate whatever could be valued in these traditions.” I also think of the nineteenth-century Brahmadab Upadaya, who dressed in a turban and the khavi robe of a sadhu, a wandering ascetic monk, because he saw himself as a Christian sadhu. In more recent history, we can point to the generation of twentieth-century pioneers, many of whom have gone to their reward––not only Bede and Abhishiktananda, but Jesuits such as William Johnston and perhaps Amasamy, and women like Sisters Vandana and Ishpriya in Rishikesh. Both Bede and Johnston were openly critical of the old forms of asceticism and of the renewal needed in religious life. Father Bede suggested at one point, in his typical courteous understated way, that perhaps the idea of “mortification of the flesh” derived from the Fathers of the Desert, with their tendency toward extreme asceticism “had passed its usefulness.” He wrote that “they aimed to conquer the flesh by watching, fasting and bodily mortifications. . . . They probably found these disciplines necessary but it had a very bad effect on the Christian tradition of asceticism.” And the result was “that many people reject asceticism altogether.”[17]
He also thought that asceticism such as that found in Thomas à Kempis’ classic Imitation of Christ is not a good model for today because it is limited and negative. William Johnston adds an even stronger claim. He wrote that the old religious training “contaminated by Stoicism, Neo-Platonism, rationalism and Jansenism” had not merely passed its usefulness, but that these ascetical practices had actually “strayed far from the authentic spirit of the Gospel.” Furthermore, as the study of psychology began to plumb the depths and understand the human psyche more, it became clear that much of the traditional training in houses of formation, novitiates, and seminaries, was downright “unhealthy, dehumanizing and destructive.”[18]
I sense that many religious shared that opinion, and after the Council, they simply tossed out the old asceticism. But the problem was that they did that without necessarily replacing it with a new and healthier one. On the other hand, the folks whom I have just mentioned did not simply toss out the old––they found a new asceticism, a new practice, and a new way to embody a new spirituality more informed by the native genius of Asia. That applied to new personal practices––especially silent meditation and various beneficial psycho-physical exercises––and new “containers,” that is, new ways of life, such as the sannyasa tradition and the ashram model.
My impression is that by now we have all settled into a new post-conciliar status quo. I have been told that the ashram movement has lost its momentum. I am sad about that; it is something that has appealed to me greatly and a model I carried into my ten years as prior of our hermitage in California because I think it has something valuable to offer typical Western cloistered life, both for our own benefit as well as for our ministry to the greater world and church. I sense that outside of the visible bounds of classical monasticism, there is something that still wants to be born out of it, something similar to what Saint John Paul II said about the new evangelization: that is should be characterized by “new ardor, new methods and new expression.” I believe that in our dialogue with other traditions, we can find creative inspiration and energy for this enterprise. I am also speaking from personal experience here, having lived an experiment with an alternative model of monasticism very much inspired by these same folks with real success. Cardinal Koovakad mentions that “such attempts are not without risks,” but, as the pope teaches us, “stepping out and moving forward always carries risks.”
Even if––and this is a big “if”––even if the ashram movement were dead, what’s next? What does the world need of us now? What does it need us to be, need us to offer, need us to model and witness to? To what kind of creativity is the Spirit calling us? In a word, how can we monks and nuns once again take a leading role in interreligious dialogue and, through our lives, spread the seeds of peace?
Postscript
I know that not all Benedictine monks think of themselves as contemplatives, even though I assume that monastic life is contemplative by its very nature. So I ask you to receive my concluding remarks in that context.
For some years now, I have been quoting this piece of wisdom from Albert Einstein: “No problem can be solved from the same consciousness that created it.” The problems that we face as a human race today will not be solved by the same consciousness that created those problems in the first place! Our choices as human beings have altered the course of evolution, “God's perfect plan.” Therefore, the next step has to be an evolution of our consciousness to a new consciousness, what Bede Griffiths called "a new vision of reality." We need a new consciousness, an evolved way of thinking, or, as Saint Paul said in his Letter to the Romans, we need to "not be conformed to this world but transformed by the renewal of our minds" (12:2) with a new consciousness so that we can make enlighted choices.
It is equally important to add that the only real agent of that transformation, the evolution of our consciousness, is rooted in “deep practice,” through the Spirit and the spiritual life. This transformation can only happen through meditation, prayer, and a renewal of the contemplative dimension of our spirituality.
No politician or world leader, on the right or the left, has the solution to the problems we face unless they too are doing this deep work. This, however, is what could be our gift to the world.
Notes
[1] “Dialogue and Proclamation” #42 and “Dialogue in Truth and Charity” #34.
[2] See also “Praying to the Buddha, Living amid Religious Pluralism,” Peter C. Phan (January 26, 2007 / Volume CXXXIV, Number 2 of “Commonweal”).
[3] With the reform of the Curia under Pope Francis, all of the secretariats and congregations lie at an even level and are re-named as “dicasteries.” See the Apostolic Constitution Praedicate evangelium: On the Roman Curia and its service to the Church in the world.
[4] Huxley, 398, trad.
[5] See Toshihiko Izutsu, Sufism and Taoism, 16.
[6] Some are saying that “the world’s largest democracy is starting to trample religious freedom on its path to Hindu nationalism,” while others think that that is overstated.
[7] Buddhism is practiced by a majority of the country’s Sinhala population; a larger portion of Tamils is Hindu; and Muslims are for the most part a mixture of Arabs, Persians, and Malays. Christianity is followed by both Sinhala and Tamil people. Ethno-religious identity is somewhat fluid between Sinhala and Tamil communities since some people from both these communities share a common religion.
[8] Fides et Ratio, 72.
[9] Laudato Sì, #201.
[10] Also present at this meeting was Rabbi Yoel Kaplan who was appointed by the Albanian government to be Chief Rabbi of the small Jewish community there, less than 200 people.
[11] Benedetto Calati, “Orazione e lavoro” in Sapienza Monastica, 446.
[12] 1754-1833.
[13] Bede Griffiths, 1984, Shalom News, Kansas City, KS, 5-6.
[14] Dialogue and Proclamation, #40. This is actually quoted from the new document being prepared by the Dicastery, “A Christian Spirituality of Interreligious Dialogue.”
[15] Optatam Totuis, 16.
[16] Dialogue and Mission, #3.
[17]Bede Griffiths, River of Compassion, 114; New Creation, 26-27.
[18] Wm. Johnston, Arise My Love.
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