Radical Openness: Toward a Christian Spirituality of Interreligious Dialogue in Depth

Alas! The Kingdom of Satan is truly amongst us!!


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By Gregory Perron, OSB

Br. Gregory, a member of the Monasstic Interreligious Dialogue Board, gave the following presentation to his own monastic community, St. Procopius Abbey in Lisle, Illinois, on January 23, 2004. Slightly revised for publication here, it provides a lucid and concise overview of what pioneers like Bede Griffiths, Thomas Merton, and Raimon Panikkar said about the practice of intrareligious and interreligious dialogue. Br. Gregory chose as an epigraph for his presentation the following passage from Raimon Panikkar.

We must distinguish between interreligious dialogue and intrareligious dialogue. The first confronts already-established religions and deals with questions of doctrine and discipline. Intrareligious dialogue is something else. It does not begin with doctrine, theology and diplomacy. It is intra, which means that if I do not discover in myself the terrain where the Hindu, the Muslim, the Jew and the atheist may have a place—in my heart, in my intelligence, in my life—I will never be able to enter into a genuine dialogue with him.

As long as I do not open my heart and do not see that the other is not an other but a part of myself who enlarges and completes me, I will not arrive at dialogue. If I embrace you, then I understand you. All this is a way of saying that real intrareligious dialogue begins in myself, and that it is more an exchange of religious experiences than of doctrines. If one does not start out from this foundation, no religious dialogue is possible; it is just idle chatter.

Introduction

The Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue is presently developing a document on the spirituality of dialogue. This document will be called “A Christian Spirituality of Interreligious Dialogue,” and it will attempt to clarify the Church’s “profound motivations” for engaging in interfaith dialogue and “to encourage its practice.”2 In so doing, it will undoubtedly seek to address some of the many fruitful demands that this dialogue makes upon those who enter into it at the level of theological discourse and religious experience. What I would like to do in this paper is basically anticipate the PCID’s forthcoming document by (a) briefly sketching some of the constitutive theological underpinnings of any Christian spirituality of dialogue, and (b) reflecting at greater length on the actual religious experience of interreligious dialogue so as to better understand the kinds of demands that this practice makes on a person at this level.

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