We become human by participating in a beloved community,
a common experience and common effort on a common ground
to which one willingly belongs.
Wendall Berry
I’ll begin this writing from a tidy hermitage on the sumptuous campus of 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 DIMMID has had a relationship for many years now. I arrived for the tail end of one event, was able to participate in a second one, 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 at the University of Manchester in the UK in the 1990s, he had the desire to learn more about Christianity. He first got himself involved with the Focolare Movement, with whom he still has strong ties, and visited Mariapolis in the UK several times. Along the way he met a monk-priest from Ampleforth Abbey, Fr. Jonathan. When he expressed his desire to visit a Catholic seminary, this Fr. Jonathan invited him instead to visit the abbey where he consequently met the abbot, the late Timothy Wright. Mohammad 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 very 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 Fr. Jonathan to come to his home in Qom, Iran, the largest center for Shi’a scholarship in the world where Mohammad was and still is a distinguished teacher, but the abbot insisted on coming along too. Thus was born a friendship that has lasting repercussions.
What followed on that was the first of a series of Catholic-Shi’a dialogues that took place between 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 Benedictines and at that point Abbot Timothy introduced Professor Shomali to Fr. William Skudlarek who was then Secretary General of DIMMID, and another series of meetings began, first at Sant’Anselmo, followed by encounters in Qom, Assisi, Mashhad (Iran), Kenya, South Africa, and Senegal.
Along the way Professor Shomali also started a program called Wings of Unity in conjunction with the Focolari and Sophia University in Loppano, Italy, and his relationship with the movement continues. His International Institute of Islamic Studies has also developed a close collaboration here in Nairobi with Tangaza University. 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 a Christian-Shi’a summer school program here as well which 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 because of cancelled and delayed flights, mainly due to the rerouting because of the war, I was told during my long layover in Doha, Qatar. For them it was worse. Mohammad told me that there was a brief window when the airport was open between bombings but that they were prepared to cross the border into Turkey by car and fly from there if they had to. Luckily the window opened again 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 I was trying to slip between two chairs in the eating hall and someone commented, “It’s like the Strait of Hormuz!” ––and everyone laughed. Mohammad has been very careful not to talk about politics and only gave the briefest mention of it once 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. About that there was no joking; they saw the Ayatollah’s “murder” as nothing less than a great tragedy, outside of any comment about their policies or those of the government. What I heard in Senegal I heard again here with even greater emphasis after these months of active war; they say that the West does not see how many people take to the streets in support of the government, and that support has increased due to national pride in the face of threats of being “blown back into the Stone Age,” the opposite of what the American administration was counting on.
I, along with another gentleman from Canada and his son, have been staying with the women at this Benedictine spiritual center and convent, Subiaco, in a luscious part of Nairobi called Karen. (The other men have been housed across town.) This 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 it also stays cooler in the hot months. I am told that the area is actually named Karen after a British woman of the same name who claimed it for the British during colonial times, as a matter of fact the famous Karen Blixen of “Out of Africa” fame. Now it is inhabited by other wealthy folks, government officials and foreign businesspeople.
I was supposed to be a part of the end of their period at Tangaza but I didn’t arrive until Thursday morning instead of Tuesday evening. I had prepared about six pages of notes on the theme of justice in Islam and Christianity, as had been requested of me, and I was sorry not to get to use the whole thing. My second event was to speak at a one-day conference at St Paul’s University the day I finally arrived, and so after a shower, a shave and a brief nap, myself and another recently arrived guest were ushered across town to that. Whereas Tangaza is a consortium of Catholic religious congregations, St. 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 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”––and based my remarks on that. I explained that the Catholic Church’s approach to interreligious dialogue always starts with our common humanity. I love the way Nostra Aetate 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. The Holy Father has been re-echoing this repeatedly, even in his powerful remarks addressed to migrants the other day in Spain. Then I slip in that the guiding documents out of the Dicastery speak about the four different kinds of dialogue. The first two, before we do any kind of active evangelization or theological exchange, are the dialogue of life and the dialogue of action, a call to cooperate with people of other faiths in projects of mutual interest. This, again, is because we always begin with that common humanity. Pope St. John Paul II in Fides et Ratio said, concerning discernment in interreligious dialogue, that the first criteria must always be “the universality of the human spirit, whose basic needs are the same in the most disparate cultures.” That is “the ground we share”: the universality of the human spirit.
The men and women participants were altogether on the long bus ride home from St. Paul’s back to Subiaco. The men were a great bunch, 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 with the gentleman I sat next to about the spiritual life, him asking me lots of penetrating questions about monasticism and the priesthood, comparing it to the householder life of a husband and father. It reminded me of my friend Hassan, another Iranian who I met in 2024 at a conference in Kerala during another long bus ride.
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 grown to be very careful about generically referring to people as being from “Africa” as opposed to their own country in Africa and also slow to call something an “African proverb.” So it was interesting to be at a conference that was dealing 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 a Western European import. There were very scholarly presentations by various African theologians and scholars as well as two Italians dealing with questions such as “Could faith and spirituality be the panacea to the contemporary societal reality to the realization of personhood?” and a de-colonized approach to religion and academic structures, 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, and so 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 women’s meeting, mainly with introductions, and then me giving a report on my work with DIMMID and Professor Shomali giving an opening address. Parallel to the other encounters here in Kenya, it was Fr. William who instigated this now regular meeting of Benedictine and Shi’a Sisters here at Subiaco because, as Sr. 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 less 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. As a matter of fact, two women publicly praised the deceased Imam Khamenei for bringing greater respect to women and boasted that 60% of Iranian women have degrees of higher learning.
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, as Hassan did on the bus trip in Kerala, started singing to me, in Farsi, poems of the great Sufi mystic Hafez who was from this man’s hometown, Shiraz. A very solid 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 Sr. Lusina and I were to go as well just for the day on Monday since I needed to fly out Tuesday.
I have heard Professor Shomali speak several times now, particularly back in Senegal, but the two talks he gave on Saturday were the best things 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 mean simply 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. So 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 from any of the traditions 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 sincerely are to learn from us and about us. Then later that same afternoon the talk he gave on human dignity for 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 published on YouTube.[1]
Besides all of this, there was also the interaction with the Benedictine sisters there at Sacred Heart Priory. Friday was the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which is their titular feast. Sr. Lusina, in her understated way, warned me that 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 to a song in Swahili accompanied by the choir in three-part harmony, organ and drums and other percussion, 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, at least making synchronized full body gestures. That carried on into the other acclamations. I had to leave for the conference at Tangaza with the women at 8 AM, by which point we had just 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 Sr. 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 by the second iteration in typical African choral style. I of course, buoyed up by that strong bed of vocals, was free to improvise pretty freely on the obligato verses over the top. It may be the most memorable performance of that piece ever after probably thousands of times singing it. When we finished singing, Sr Rosa, the prioress, asked me to say a few words about DIMMID 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 ululating at the end. The music for Sunday Mass, was almost as jubilant and many of the Muslim sisters were in the back row for the entire celebration, commenting afterward how moving an experience it 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. In it, “students and academics come together to build bridges in a global effort to ease cultural tensions,” as their own website describes it. “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.” It also is a fruit of Mohammad’s long relationship with the Focolare Movement and the Sophia University Institute in Loppano, Italy. This Week of Unity took place at Focolare’s Mariapolis Piero about an hour outside of Nairobi. They were to be together for five days, but I had to leave for Rome on Tuesday, and so Sr. Lusina and I decided to stay on at Subiaco and just go on Monday, so to be able to be there at least for the opening day.
After a traffic bound drive across Nairobi, we arrived just in time for breakfast. 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 a slightly reproving tone of voice from one who said, “You are not wearing your beautiful white robes.”) Along with them of course were many others, perhaps 100 persons in all, from all over Africa; I know for sure Cameroon, Tanzania, and Uganda were all represented. I had told Mohammad that if he wanted me to do anything I would be available just that day. We had the borrowed guitar, and I brought along my notes from the talk that I did not get to give the week before.
The program was supposed to start at 9 AM. We had a running joke about whether that was Kenya time or American time because I kept showing up for everything as punctual as the trains in Switzerland only to be left with lots of time on my hands. But this time the wait was really extending. Suddenly someone came up behind me and said, Fr. Joseph, who was to speak first, “wants you to give your talk at 12:00.” What talk?! Okay, not a problem. And then Mohammad came up behind 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 a 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.” If I had ever sung it in front of everyone it was going to be with fear and trembling––meaning with deep respect and care not to 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. But I did do two songs. First of all, the full version of “The Ground We Share” again, which incidentally also quotes Surah 17 of the Quran about the Prophet’s night flight, al-Isra’ and ascension, al-mi’raj in Jerusalem (though in English) along with quotes from the psalms of ascents and the Book of Revelation. The explanation of that one is a long teaching in and of itself. And then I sang “Compassionate and Wise,” which combines a Hindu mantra (the mahamytrumjaya, “the great mantra for overcoming death”) with the Buddhist dedication of merit, the explanation of and story behind which again takes a little bit of time. They were both 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 spent a little time going over generalities about our common ground and “the common word,” beginning by telling the story of Pope Benedict’s famous misstep in 2006 when in his Regensburg Address he accidentally offended Muslims worldwide. Of course what came out of that was this beautiful document in 2007, “A Common Word,” 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 shall love 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 than these. 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 then is based on the premise that we should always start there, as all of our Church’s documents on interreligious dialogue do, on our common humanity, “the universality of the human spirit, whose basic needs are the same in the most disparate cultures,” as Pope John Paul II wrote in Fides et Ratio, before any theological arguments. I also add that even if we never get beyond that, that would be fine too. I also ended by quoting Pope Leo in this marvelous paragraph. After common ground and a common word, we also have a common mission:
… 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.[2]
And then finally I stepped out and performed “People of the Book.” And I must say, there are few more satisfying feelings than singing someone else’s sacred words for them, and for them to be so appreciative and moved by it. For this of course I thank my background in liturgical music that taught me how to approach a sacred text with dignity and respect. They truly loved it and watching the filmed version of it later, from someone’s iPhone, it was a good performance as well, for which I was grateful. That led to a flurry of short 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 Sr. Lusina that I was just exhausted, but it was the best kind of exhaustion––to be so overwhelmed by the success of an encounter that you are left speechless.
All in all, simply a very fruitful stay with marvelous people in Kenya. My driver from the airport when I arrived was named John, and he also brought me back to the airport through the misty darkness early morning Tuesday. 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, C”ome back!” Which 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.
