In order to do genuine dialogue of any kind, both parties have make themselves vulnerable. They have to be willing to be shown to be completely wrong.
And that is the reason why Christians are so bad—even dishonest—at it. They are always keeping a little area that can’t be touched or analyzed. That spoils everything. It also makes dialogue impossible.
The part that the Christians won’t mention is the part that they got from the Evangelical heresy, that is, emotionalism. Emotions are thought to be above all, and they confirm whatever you want them to, even when what we speak of as “God” is completely beyond emotion. Emotionalism has, unfortunately, come be thought to be what Christianity is. It is not.
The so-called Second Great Awakening is the origin of evangelical emotionalism. And it goes back to the English Reformation, which was not extreme enough, like it was on the European continent, where so many people who died for their religion in the Thirty Years War. In England the Reformation happened only so Henry VIII could divorce Catherine of Aragon.
Another fatal flaw in Christianity’s supposed participation in interreligious dialogue is the reliance upon ancientness. They always have to have had it first, whether it be hesychasm, or mantras, or whatever. And they always have to keep something safe, that only they have. With Christians it’s usually the atonement of Christ’s death as spoken of in the book of Hebrews. The Christians know, on some level, that this makes no sense. But they’re stuck with it as an inner truth. It cannot be discussed. I have personal experience of this, through my participation in numerous Christian-Zen retreats.
Then there is also the fact that religion is sometimes simply identity; sometimes it is spirituality. I remember going to an interfaith event that involved Muslims. One woman who represented that faith, said she had never read the Qur’an, and she seemed almost proud of that. Clearly, being a Muslim for her was strictly about identity. Unlike for her Christian interlocutors, who would have been embarrassed not to have read the Bible. We are clearly starting from different places, and we don’t know it.
Then there is the simple fact that some religious beliefs are just better than others, and some take quite naturally to dialogue. Others don’t. The Mormons, for example, with their absurd belief system, cannot dialogue with anyone. And why should they? There are also cases where the religion is blatantly there to make society run smoothly. I think of Japanese Shinto as a good example of this. There is no reason for them to dialogue with anyone. They are a state-supporting religion. They know it.
Whenever a religion becomes married to the state, watch out. Someone is about to get shafted. It’s usually religion that loses out. The reason Buddhism often comes out on top is because it has much less often been a part of the state. Not because it inherently naturally embodies twenty-first century style middle-class values.
And then there is this further complication: follow the practices of any religion sincerely and you’ll get to the great truth of nonduality, that all things are basically one, and it is obvious to anyone who perceives that that all beings are, embarrassingly, worthy of love. One could even say that love (it’s a totally inadequate word) is what we are put here to learn. You can find examples of this all over: Ibn Mansour Al-Hallaj (858-923), an Islamic mystic, was executed for saying, “I am God.” Even though it made perfect sense. Later on something similar was said by the Episcopal priest, Cynthia Bourgeault, and by the Trappist monk, Fr. Thomas Keating (1923-2019). Again, it made perfect, logical, sense.
I also think of Judith Simmer-Brown, a professor at Naropa University, the first Buddhist college in North America, whom I got to know a bit at the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting to which we both usually went. Judith has become something of a big interreligious figure herself, after having some big problems with Christianity in her younger days. To be brief, she identifies several different phases in her interreligious journey. It’s phase three (the last phase) that interests me most. In her phase three, the borders of her own identity became somewhat fuzzy. She realized that if she had met the right Christian or Jew she might have become a Christian or Jew. She happened to have met an articulate Buddhist, and that made all the difference. But this is what I especially liked abut her phase three: the fuzzy borders only became apparent when she was making her identity more strongly Buddhist (doing long retreats and the like). It’s sort of like. She had to become more of a Buddhist before the permeability of the borders became obvious. It’s like in order to become less Buddhist she had to be more of one.
Thirty years ago, I read a book calledThe Ground We Share, by Robert Aitken and David Steindl-Rast. A record of a retreat they did together and a valiant attempt at interreligious dialogue. Aitken was the Buddhist; Steindl-Rast was, ostensibly, the Christian. Their method was to concentrate on their practice, as that would be more fruitful for dialogue than focusing on doctrinal definitions. I didn’t get it. Now I do. It was all about love. My lack of empathy was due to the fact that they did not do it very well. But their method was right. Love was the only place they could connect in a way that was true.
So it turns out that interreligious dialogue, like all else, has to look for its basis in what’s called love. “The love that moves the Sun and other stars,” as Dante Aligheri put it. Such love seldom happens, but when it does, it’s a miracle. And I believe interreligious dialogue has to be miraculous in that way to stay real.
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