changing our hearts and speaking bravely

14 September 2025, Monastero di Bose, Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross

I just realized the other day that I had completely forgotten about my blog/travelogue. Why? Hmmm… All my writing energy has gone toward conferences and articles, and any free writing (and reading) energy––and there has not been much these last months––has been dedicated to Italian. This visit to Bose and the killing of Charlie Kirk this past week have me facing something that, as my friend Stephen Copeland would say, I need to write my way out of.

 

Almost since I arrived in Italy, but surely since January when I finally settled into my room in Rome, I have been trying to get here to this famous monastery up in the Piedmont region of northern Italy. Founded in 1965, it is known for being both ecumenical and mixed (women and men). Its founder, Enzo Bianchi, has become somewhat infamous now because of a Vatican visitation some years ago after which he was forced to leave the community, but he was undoubtedly first and foremost a fine scholar and visionary. The monks here are also known for their publishing house which carries a superb catalogue of books on spirituality, the fathers of the church, monastic and biblical themes. It is for all those reasons I wanted to visit, but my proximate reason is Br. Matteo Nicolini-Zani is here. He is the head of Dialogo Monastico Interreligioso here in Italy, the most active branch in the world as far as I can see. We organized a visit of Thai Buddhist monks together at the end of June, and now I am going to attend DIM Italia’s annual meeting at an ashram near Savona from Monday night until Thursday. It looks to be a great program with Buddhist and Hindu representatives involved. There was to be a Muslim participant as well, but he already informed us, with regret, that he cannot attend.

 

My experience here at Bose has been really fine. The monks and nuns have been very welcoming and gracious. I did not realize how central hospitality is to this community. They took over an old farming village, complete with its buildings and then added their own structures to it as well over time. The elegant simple church is only from 1995, and the last buildings including the new foresteria where I am staying are from the earlier 2000s. I had heard that they were influenced deeply by Taizé with whom they have a close bond of friendship, and I expected their liturgy to be similar to Taizé’s, but it is not. They get a lot of music from French Cistercians, so I was told. There is a lot of Byzantine influence, with the sumptuous four-part harmony, like the liturgy of the Community of Jerusalem, but also a lot of plainsong. It is very rich in scripture for sure and deeply recognizable as monastic. They certainly have some elements proper to them––parity between the genders, even with women reading the gospel, certain additional acclamations and/or alternative texts during the Eucharist––but nothing wild. There is also tasteful art scattered all over the property. It is so refreshing after being inundated with the dreary Roman rococo and Baroque pageantry for the last year. I am so glad that this movement has not been squelched by a heavy-handed bishop. And certainly it seems so far under Pope Leo that we can all finally breathe a sigh of relief that the much maligned “spirit of Vatican II” is safe. I was talking to Br. Matteo about how sad I have been watching a return to devotionalism over liturgical spirituality in Catholicism, not only in the States but all over the world. It is something like this place that provides an antidote to the many examples of the Novus Ordo purely executed.

 

This is my first outing for the new “season.” As a matter of fact, I am in the midst of my one-year anniversary: I got here to Italy September 1, 2024, I was introduced to the Abbots and Priors Congress September 18, and officially became Secretary General on October 1. Since then, Donald Trump came storming back and has consequently already substantially changed the entire culture of my country of origin (USA) as well as upturned the global order (at least financially), Pope Francis died and Pope Leo was elected, and now, just days ago, Charlie Kirk was heinously murdered, an event which may mark a real turning point (if you will excuse the unintended allusion), at least for the USA. It has been fascinating to watch it all from this shore, especially that last event. I kind of let the first year unfold in front of me.

 

Of course, the new position started in the middle of my sabbatical year and the one just folded into the other, which was some of the rationale for such a quick discernment about whether or not to take the role: what I was doing was already what the job called for, or at least it seemed to be that what I was doing and had wanted to return to after my term as prior––music, meditation retreats, interreligious dialogue and explorations into alternative spiritual practices––could all fall under the mantle of this role and would be a fine way to incarnate it. I have not changed my thinking about that.

 

But, as I said, I did sort of let the work unfold in front of me, going where I was asked and doing what I was asked to do this first year, especially anything asked of me by Abbot Primate Jeremias, to whom I answer directly, or anything for Sant’Anselmo, the seat of international Benedictine monasticism. This coming year I have been more intentional about my itinerary and work. There will still be a lot of travel between now and next summer, but I think I have it laid out well so that there are good periods at home in Rome to rest and renew in between commitments. This trip up here to Bose and the DIM meeting is the first little trip and then I will be back in Rome for ten days before I head to Asia for three weeks.

 

More immediately, every day this week I feel more upset over everything surrounding Charlie Kirk’s murder. First and foremost, I was and am appalled by yet another act of political violence and the death of a young husband and father.

 

I was also surprised at how out of touch I am: I barely knew who Charlie Kirk was. I’ve gone back now and read and watched and listened. He was a very good debater for the most part––or at least better prepared with facts than most of his opponents were, as a good debater ought to be. (Though he does seem to have gotten bested at Cambridge.) I am sure that he would have made mincemeat out of me in a verbal spar. I am just floored by much of what he said in public though, about Black people, about Muslims, even about Jews. His death was a horrific act of violence, but how do those things gets twisted into someone “defending Christian values, the moral right,” as an evangelical friend described it to me. There is simply no way I could excuse let alone justify the kind of rhetoric he used, especially in such a public forum. And then there was his Christian nationalism, his support of the January 6^th attack on the capital, his denial of climate change and his embracing of the replacement theory. Again, there is no justification for murder, but how do those things get turned into “conservative values”?

 

My evangelical friend said it well: “I think the crux of it comes down to what shapes your vision. Does your vision of right decide your Jesus or does your vision of Jesus decide your right? Too many shape their vision of Jesus around their view of reality, myself included, but that’s the value of being in scripture regularly and allow it to inspect you.”

 

And at the same time again and of course, of course, of course, without a doubt his murder was a heinous act. I listened to a Christian therapist the other day who said that it is okay to, and sometimes we have to, hold two seemingly conflicting sentiments at the same time.

 

I read Bishop Barron’s post on Facebook, and it was nothing but praise for Mr. Kirk. Not a word about how the teaching of the Catholic Church would not support his stances. It also had comments added, thanking him for posting it, and the first ones I saw were from people I actually know, one of whom I think of as a friend. My heart sank. There was also one commenter, respectful (thankfully), who said she was a faithful Catholic, telling Bishop Barron that she could simply no longer follow him after all these years because of his support of the president, that he had “lost his way.”

There is a great divide and I confess I absolutely do not know how to bridge it except to keep preaching the Gospel and trying to be the presence of Christ, like yeast in the dough. From what I am reading, that slice of the American population––white evangelical Christian nationalists, etc., etc.––, like the US president, seem to think that everybody who does not agree with them is the enemy, plain and simple, and that there is a spiritual warfare taking place. I agree that there is spiritual warfare taking place, but what they espouse I do not recognize as the beautiful face of Jesus in the Gospels. I am still asking the same question I was asking last February: whose Christianity? I am sticking with Pope Leo and the teaching of the Church (and also Cardinal Perolin, the Vatican Secretary of State), and first and foremost with the Beatitudes, the Sermon on the Mount in general. That is where my allegiance lies.

 

I will not be debating these folks. It is not in my skill set to do so. But at any rate this is not a victory that is going to be won by a battle of words. (That’s why I am not convinced that apologetics as we know it is really efficacious.) Einstein warned us already in the mid-20^th century that the problems we face are not going to be solved by the same consciousness that created them. He also accentuated that “the real problem” is in human minds and hearts anyway: “We will not change the hearts of other [people] by mechanisms, but by changing our hearts and speaking bravely.” Only then, Einstein thought, when “we are clear in heart and mind––only then shall we find courage to surmount the fear which haunts the world.” If it is a matter of being “clear in heart and mind” then what is needed is a transformation that can only come about by the deep work that accesses and can transform the deepest level of human consciousness, a work that is also brings about a rediscovery of the underlying unity of all that is and all those who are. My whole ministry is dedicated to greater and greater inclusivity, what “people have in common and what draws them to fellowship,” as Nostra Aetate states, the very opposite of what I perceive the followers of Mr. Kirk (may God rest his soul) to be doing. They are not my enemy, but I can state unequivocally I think they are terribly misguided in their understanding the Good News of Jesus.

 

One of my silly tautologies is “You don’t need peacemakers when there are no wars.” And of course, we wouldn’t need interreligious dialogue if all the religions got along. There’s a book on Charles de Foucauld and Islam here which I am going to buy. He is surely one of my hero-saints and has been for many years. And another book by Pope Francis’ friend and collaborator, Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, on ecumenism. Just do it. While others are dividing, someone has to do the opposite, even if in quiet little ways.

The US Tour draws to a close

 Pentecost Sunday, 2025: … each one heard them speaking in their own language. (Acts 2:6) 

I am ending my extended time in the US at St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, in the company of Fr. William, my predecessor and current acting executive director of the American branch of MID, and two other members of the Board, Fr. Michael Peterson, OSB and Fr. Lawrence, OCSO. Several others joined us online as well from around the country. It was a fitting way to end this particular sojourn since it was exactly a year ago that I was here giving the monastic community their retreat when Fr. William asked me if I would be willing to step in as his successor. And the rest of is history, ongoing history…

Of course, a good part of this trip was to both spend some time with my home community in Big Sur, which I did over Holy Week and the Easter Octave, and with my beloved family, besides taking care of medical appointments and other official business. I also had several commitments that blended easily into my role of promoting and engaging in interreligious dialogue.

The work portion of the trip began with a weekend retreat at the Jesuit Retreat House in Los Altos, CA in late April. I have been a frequent guest there over the years, but this was the first time I offered something for their retreat program. It was on one of my favorite topics––integral spirituality, and it confirmed what I have been saying all along, that almost everything I do flows in and out of dialogue since I almost always teach from the perspective of what Bede Griffiths called Universal Wisdom, what we share with other spiritual traditions. And it was confirmed once again just how many people there are who have a kind of dual belonging, heavily influenced particularly by one of the traditions of Asia, both philosophically (whether they know it or not) and in terms of practice. This is something I am trying to bring to the forefront in the work of DIMMID, that we can also serve as a bridge for our own co-religionists, we who have seriously studied and engaged with those other traditions. This would be a valuable ministry in and for the Church.

I also had three events in my “old turf,” Santa Cruz, CA, where this work began for me two decades ago. In 2005 I founded an interreligious group for study and practice there called Sangha Shantivanam (after our ashram in India), and that group is still going without me, now celebrating 20 years. Our sangha had been instrumental in a movement called The Tent of Abraham which brought together Jews, Christians, and Muslims for shared prayer and fellowship. It had been in hiatus for some years, but, using my visit as an excuse, it was reconvened now simply using the name “The Tent,” because other traditions were also involved, particularly our Buddhist friends who are very active in that city. I gave a talk entitled “Let Us Come to A Common Word,” that centered around Nostra Aetate. The opening benediction was offered by a local rabbi and then a Buddhist teacher formed in the Tibetan tradition led us in a metta meditation, as dedication of merit.

The next night I performed a concert, which again featured songs from various traditions as well as some new liturgical pieces. But earlier in the day I also had the chance to visit Redwood Vihara. It is a small community in the Chinese Ch’an Buddhist tradition founded from the Land of Ten Thousand Buddhas in Ukiah, CA. There are currently two young monks living there. Their main teacher is our long-time friend Rev Heng Sure who, though now stationed on the Gold Coast of Australia, happened to also be in California at the time, so we had a glorious reunion. I had met the two young monks, Jin Chuan and Jin Wei, online with Heng Sure back in the fall when we were discussing some music issues they are working on, so we kind of knew each other. I was staying at Villa Maria Del Mar retreat house in Santa Cruz and the two drove down to pick me up. We started talking the moment they arrived and talked non-stop for the next five hours except for a brief meditation time together. They brought me up to the vihara, where Heng Sure and another luminous soul were awaiting our arrival, Nipun Mehta, who founded and runs an amazing creative initiative called Service Space. I cannot begin to describe it: check it out here: https://www.servicespace.org. Nipun is from Gurjarat originally but works out of Santa Cruz now. In the course of our conversation, I mentioned my friend and member of my Peace Council advisory board, the pandit from Rishikesh, Siddhartha Krishna, and to my surprise Nipun said, “Oh yes, I know him well.” The world gets smaller and smaller––and more and more beautiful.

The next day, my third event for the time in Santa Cruz was a retreat day just with members of the Sangha celebrating our anniversary.

The next week brought me to Albuquerque where I was a guest of Richard Rohr’s Center for Contemplation and Action. Fr. Richard is an old friend by now from his time at the Hermitage and my time on retreat with him in 1998, and I have also gotten to know some of the “millennials,” as he calls them, who now run the center. I gave a presentation in person and online for the staff of CAC the first morning and then had a series of meetings, mainly with Michael Poffenberger, the executive director, and Paul Swanson and Mike Petrow, who are responsible for faculty of the very successful Living School and content for its formation program. I was pretty tired at the end of my three days but that was only because there was simply one stimulating conversation after another. They are hoping that we can collaborate, with DIMMID as an organization or with me personally. I also got to spend quality time with Richard himself, one long morning visit and a dinner that evening. He has survived five bouts of cancer and is still full of life and whimsy, though he has been weakened by the ordeal, which he acknowledges gracefully and humbly.

My last big commitment was a retreat at the beautiful Redemptorist Renewal Center in an area of Tucson called Painted Rock, surrounded by cacti and petroglyphs and the vast desert sky. The retreat was organized by my close friend the well-known musician Tom Booth and was attended for the most part by people I have known for decades, some over 40 years now, seasoned mature people of faith. It was the first time I had presented this material to anyone, sharing with them what I have learned about meditation and contemplative prayer from the exploration of other spiritual traditions and how that has affected my understanding of God––my practice and my Credo, you might say. I was a little nervous going into it, afraid that this material would have been too foreign to them, but I need not have been. They were very attentive and receptive, and we had an earth-shaking weekend together, praying and meditating, stretching and breathing, and engaging in very profound discussions.

And now I wind up where it all started, here with the welcoming community at St. Johns’s. The board members and I have had good discussions about how to revive the work of MID in America, a similar discussion that I have had and will be having with other directors around the world in the coming months. I feel as if we need to remind people that, just as Vatican II was not a passing fad, so the work of interreligious dialogue is going to be an ongoing perennial ministry in the church and the world. Even if it’s hard to build up steam again post-Covid (and with our aging communities sometimes being in survival mode), we monks still have a mandate from the Vatican to take a leading role in interreligious dialogue. As Cardinal Pignedoli said back in 1974, “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.”

The key words that have stayed on my mind these weeks are the two verbs used to describe my role: to promote and engage in interreligious dialogue. I see the first, promote, as intrareligious, that is, within our own tradition, especially within monasticism, proselytizing about the ongoing importance of dialogue; whereas engage is extra-ecclesial, going to folks outside of our tradition, hopefully on their turf, an activity that I find stimulating and refreshing––and vitally important. I do think that two months is too long to be away from home base, but I am also very grateful for the encounters I have had and the work I get to do. I’m anxious to get home to Pope Leo’s Rome and see if there is any change in the general feel of the city. More than anything I can’t wait to be in my own room again. This time it feels like a more permanent move to Italy.

I ended up my American tour last night joining Bro. John Hansen for his regular Sunday night gig, playing music at a sandwich shop in nearby St Cloud. John is one of the finest guitarists I know, mainly in classical and jazz repertoire, but has given himself over to performing acoustic folk and standards these last years. He is joined by a fine jazz guitarist named Russell and I had a blast sitting in with my SG mini Taylor. A fine way to end my trip.

And when I awake…

 (This was my homily for Easter Sunday here at New Camaldoli Hermitage)

I remember exactly when this happened. I was on the train in north India, traveling from Delhi to Haridwar, and I was reading Abhishiktananda’s book Saccidananda. Briefly put for those who are not familiar with him, Abhishiktananda was a French Benedictine monk who spent the second half of his monastic life in India. He was one of three founders of our ashram there and he was deeply engaged in Indian thought and made great efforts to re-articulate Christian thought using the language of India instead of Greek philosophy. And in this particular section of the book he is writing about the experience of what’s called advaita, non-duality. To again put it simply, advaita is described as when the self, our small self, disappears into God, the Great Self, “like a drop dissolves in the ocean,” as the saying goes. Some consider this to be the highest expression of the Indian spiritual experience.

 

Well, before he was a wandering sadhu in India, Abhishiktananda was just a plain old Benedictine monk and I found out that he was a rather scrupulous liturgist on top of that. And in this book he says that one of the best phrases to describe Jesus’ awakening is the entrance antiphon for Mass on Easter Sunday morning, which he quotes in Latin, from Psalm 139:18: Resurrèxi, et ad hoc tecum sum––“I have arisen, I am still with you.” And he says something that is rather controversial in the intellectual circles I run in, though it may not be so for you: he seems to suggest that there is something beyond the experience of advaita, non-duality, something beyond the experience of the self disappearing into the Great Self of God. The Good Friday and the death experience was that––the shattering of everything and the equivalent of that experience of non-duality, the total death of self. But when Jesus awoke on Easter Sunday, he was still there, and God was there too. His death, his loss of self had not been annihilation. We have the beautiful simple refrain that Fr. Thomas wrote that we sing for Easter, and it was not ‘til that moment that I understood it: “Awake at last, I am with you still, your right hand holds me fast.” That’s the great surprise, you might say, of the resurrection. (Later I wrote a song and put a whole album of music for Lent and Easter together called “Awake at Last” based on this same image.)

 

And that moment when I read that on the train rushing toward Haridwar, I had something like a little enlightenment experience, a buzz of the skin of my scalp, tears in my eyes. “And when I awake, I am still with you.” Death is not the end.

 

Yesterday we celebrated Holy Saturday, traditionally in the Church the day we remember that Jesus descended into hell. We have to remember that hell is not just a place: hell is a state of being, a state of being separated from God. How many times do people say or have I said, “I went through hell”? Do you remember Jesus’ last words on the cross? ‘My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?’ Jesus went so far into human misery so as to feel what we feel at times––in hell, that is, totally separated from God, as if there were no reason to live, no life, no love, no light. The great theologian Hans Urs van Balthasar thought that because of Jesus’ descent to hell even the netherworlds now belong to Jesus. There is light even in hell, in that place called hell. But more especially and immediately in that state called hell, and in all our little hells, when we feel totally powerless and separated from God.

 

And when Jesus awoke, he was still there and so was his Father. Death had not been annihilation.

 

We have to remember this when we go through our personal hells and our own experiences of being emptied, our own kenosis. The dying we have to do is not always the dramatic one nor the final one. What is even more afraid to die than our body is our bloated ego or, as we sometimes call it, or false self, that self that we have constructed for the world, the self that the world has constructed of us, the self of our petty crimes and compulsivities, the self that avoids pain and increases pleasure, the self that puts its-self ahead of others. There’s the death we have to die every time we choose not to act out in anger; every time we choose peace instead of the violence of our petty sense of justice; the death we have to die every time we don’t pick up the phone or send a text and get in touch with that person we think we just can’t live without even though we know the relationship is killing us; the death we have to die in accepting the inevitability of growing older and falling apart gracefully. The death we have to die may mean walking away from the bar, or from our friends who are getting high, or just pushing away from the table from that one more indulgence in a heart-stopping something to eat, or stopping ourselves from doom-scrolling Facebook or TikTok or whatever website holds us captive.

 

It’s very practical and may not be very dramatic. All the little deaths that prepare us for the total gift of ourselves to God. And we think we are going to die if we have to go without this or that, and we go through hell going through the withdrawal from this relationship or that drug––but we don’t. When we wake, we are still there, and God is there too. God’s right hand has held us fast.

 

The cave that we have to enter, the tomb that we have to enter, isn’t any other place than the tomb of our own heart. This is where we have to go to die, over and over again. The Good News is that what we will find there is that there is a light behind our deepest darkness, that there is something deeper than our pain. St. Paul says that the love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Spirit living in us. That Spirit, that love, is the same Spirit, the same love that raised Jesus from the dead. What we find in that cave of our own heart, after we have died whatever death we have been called to die, is the strength to rise. We find that we are still alive, and God is still there. What we find is that there is light behind our darkness.

 

What can separate us from the love of God? Paul asks. Nothing! When we wake from out of our darkness, when we have endured our own private hells, we will be happy to find that we are still alive, and God is still with us!

 

It’s significant for me that when Jesus brought Lazarus back from the dead it was Jesus’ voice from outside the grave calling him out and telling them to roll away the stone. But in the case of Jesus resurrection, no one has to roll away the stone, no one has to do anything from the outside. The power was on the inside, the light from inside that cave blasted out of the tomb. And, believe it or not, so with us! Because God’s love has been poured into our hearts, there is a light in the cave of our hearts that can blow the stone away that keeps us closed in our graves. When we go through our hells, we will find out that Jesus has already been there, and he has left something for us––he left the white garment that he was wrapped in. And do you know what that white garment was? That was our Baptismal garment, and when we wrap ourselves in it, we receive the Holy Spirit through our dying with Jesus, and the love of God is poured into our hearts so that, as St. Paul tells us, when we die with the Lord we will live with the Lord, and if we endure with the Lord we will reign with the Lord. And when we wake up from our deaths, we will find that we are still alive, and God is there with us.

 

What can separate us from the love of God? Nothing. God is behind our darkness; the light is inside of our tombs. Jesus blows the stone away from the entrance from the inside out with the power of the Holy Spirit who has been poured into our hearts. If we endure with him, we shall reign; if we die with him, we shall live.

 

And when we wake, we will find that we are still alive––and God is there too.

the heart of a reformer

 (This was my homily from Friday at the ISBF meeting in Bengaluru.)

Most of the Church remembers St. Peter Damian as the bishop, a cardinal, a reformer. But he was first and foremost a monk. As a matter of fact, we Camaldolese claim him as one of the greatest saints of our congregation, mainly because he was the biographer of our founder St. Romuald, and his monastery at Fonte Avellana in the Marche region of Italy is one of the crown jewels of our congregation. Peter Damian was a major proponent of the eremitical life, though the congregation that he headed was in large part cenobitic as well. But he is mainly known in the rest of the Church for his work in greater ecclesial reform. One author wrote that he was one of the outstanding personalities of the 11th century, if not the entire Middle Ages. He was much sought after for advice by a series of popes, and eventually named bishop of Ostia and then a Cardinal. That’s when he got involved in protecting the rights of the church against secular corruption and in the reform of the secular clergy and the episcopacy.

    When I think of someone like Peter Damian, I can’t help but wonder: what is it that fires the heart of a reformer? If it’s just someone who has a personal agenda, the reform is going to go nowhere. St. Francis of Assisi wouldn’t have lasted; our St. Romuald wouldn’t have lasted; the Cistercian abbots wouldn’t have lasted if their reform was only their personal agendas at work. Like Saint Peter Damian, the true reformer’s zeal always has to be rooted in personal conversion—as today’s gospel tell us (Mk 8:34-9:1) everyone has to take up their cross and follow Jesus—and the reform grows from out of that. It’s an organic thing. If we try to orchestrate it, it’s destined to fail. St. Francis heard the call: “Rebuild my church.” But that was based on him rebuilding Francis first. 

            This is the lesson we have to learn from Peter Damian––not to go out and reform, but to go in and reform. His first movement was there––to the inner journey, to the inner work, to what we in the monastic tradition call conversatio. The thing is, if we do this work of conversatio, we never know where the Spirit is going to take us, what the Spirit is going to do with us when we have been molded into what Spirit wants us to be. We might be sent to evangelize! We might be sent to our deaths! We might get asked to push a cart and be a chai wallah in downtown Bangalore. And we might be called simply to stay home in our cell and sit waiting, patiently, content with the grace of God. 

But that’s not our business. Our business, again as today's gospel tells us, is to lose our lives for the sake of the gospel. Our business is to be clay in the hands of this God, to reform our lives continually and make ourselves available to the Spirit. We have in our congregations what is known as the triplex bonum, the threefold good of solitude, community and this third thing that we don’t like to name, but originally it was missionary martyrdom. We like to think of it as some kind of absolute availability to the Spirit, losing your life for the sake of Christ and the gospel. Whatever we do even in terms of our own inner healing and growth, what we do in terms of personal conversion itself, is a gift to the Body, making ourselves an instrument for the Spirit. 

Peter Damian himself wrote to a hermit-recluse at Sitria, in what I think of as the most eloquent defense of the eremitical life and the contemplative life in general, “The Church of Christ is united in all her parts by such a bond of love that her several members form a single body and in each one the whole church is present.” (I, by the way, used that for my ordination announcement.) So it goes both ways: what goes on in us is also important to the whole Body; on the other hand what goes on in the Body is important to us. If we are living true to our vocations, if we have really died to the world, then not only do we have a gift to offer the rest of the church––we become the gift that we offer to the rest of the Body.

So let’s pray for that ourselves, that we might take up our cross and follow Jesus, that we may lose our lives for the sake of the gospel, for the fresh new way of thinking that comes from our experience of union with God through contemplation, prayer and meditation, and the energy to embody it and enact it, so as to be a gift to the whole Body of Christ in the bond of love.

a common word

Feb 20-22, Asirvanam, Bengaluru

 

I was to preach in the morning Friday, the last day of the meeting, and my talk was to be the very last conference on the very last day, at 3 that afternoon. I wanted to open and close the talk with a song, as is my wont. But this time I had decided to try traveling without having to check any baggage, so I wrote ahead and asked if I could possibly borrow a guitar while I was here. I got an enthusiastic response back, Yes! I knew I was taking a chance, but, hey… So the prior Fr. Jerome did scrounge me up a guitar. It was small (smaller than my Taylor mini SG) but at first strum it seemed adequate for two songs. But then the ebullient prior decided that I should do a concert on Tuesday night. In any other circumstance with my own guitar I would have said absolutely yes, but the guitar was really bad, just this side of a toy, and the low E string was totally out of tune after the second fret. Everything else on the higher frets was pretty bad too but I could have found ways around that. But he insisted and then he announced it to great applause. Humility. I spent most of the day practicing, meaning trying to find ways to play around the tuning problems and picking songs that were not going to be a problem, trying to rely more on the voice than on guitar pyrotechnics. Long story short, when the time came ‘round, I was ready for the humiliation of it all but felt I could pull something halfway decent off. Dorathick told me of an old Tamil proverb that a skilled craftsman could turn a blade of grass into a tool. And so… 

As fate would have it, some of the young guys who were helping to set up were surprised at what I was playing on and told me that there were better guitars around. Five minutes before the “concert.” And one of them set off looking for it. So I launched in on the toy and pulled off a pretty decent version of “Circle Song” to wild applause. Just as I was finishing that song the chap showed up with  another guitar, much better. It had heavy gauge strings (I use extra light) but the sound and the tuning were a world apart. I had decided to do two poems ("Circle Song" and "Awakening"), two liturgical pieces ("Streams of Living Water" and "Unless a Grain of Wheat") and two interreligious pieces ("Lead Me" and "The Ground We Share"). It was a smash hit with everyone, especially there young pre-postulants who are finishing their schooling, maybe 18-21 years old. The admiration and appreciation on their faces was very moving. Some of them do not yet speak English well and just stood there stammering but you could read it in their eyes.

 

But before that… As I finished, singing a soft nama japa from Shantivanam (Hare Yeshu) with the crowd to close the night, Prior James then invited an American girl from New Jersey who is here to teach English to come up and sing some more songs in English. She spoke very indistinctly into the microphone and told everyone that she didn’t really know much music and she wasn’t very good but she had learned a couple of sea chanties. She then balanced her smartphone on her knee and played Rory Cooney’s “Canticle of the Turning.” She had to stop occasionally to scroll the lyrics. She then launched into a rendition of “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” a very long song with so many words that I can’t imagine anyone understood. It was bizarre. Then the prior invited Sr. Lynn, also from the US, who is the head of Communio Internationalis Benedictinarum, the women’s version of the Benedictine Confederation, to sing something. She wisely decided to lead the crowd in the Salve Regina and call it a night.

 

Anyway, aside from the post-performance additions, it was a real success of a night, and reminded me yet again of how the addition of music changes everything. And yes: from now on I always being my guitar.

 

Thursday was an outing for the rest of the group and I had orchestrated going for another visit to Jyoti Sahi and his wife Jane, but this time I wanted him to meet Dorathick and Jyoti wanted to meet him. Not much to add to what I wrote about my encounter with them last March: Jyoti as always a fountain of wisdom and experience, and Jane the model of hospitality. I am quite inspired that Jyoti is still painting every day and still reading copiously. As a matter of fact he showed me his well marked-up copy of Rediscovering the Divine which he said he found “helpful.” His knowledge of Indian culture is astounding, and he writes in a  very scholarly way himself. Dorathick as always shows himself to be an even deeper well than he appears at first in terms of the breadth of his knowledge and his ability to articulate complex things in a straightforward way. He actually has just self-published his first book and gave it to Jyoti, on The Cosmic Christ.

 

Friday was rougher and I almost don’t know if I can write about it. Just the facts.

 

I preached in the morning. The odd thing was when I showed up for morning prayer at 6 AM (Mass was at 7), there was hardly anyone there outside of the young monks of Asirvanam. None of the participants in this meeting! They had had their outing to Mysore yesterday, a three-hour drive. I thought that they were just going to visit our Camaldolese nuns there, but they also added in a trip to the famous palace and something else, and didn’t get home until 1:30 AM. So the prior had told them to skip morning prayer. Those that dragged themselves into 7 AM Mass (certainly not all the men) looked like something the cat dragged in (as Mom used to say).

 

I blame it on the fact that I am a born performer (not entertainer, mind you) and a communicator, but I work so hard on even little events like this. I get five maybe ten minutes to say something to an important group of people––not important like VIPS, important like nuns and monks, superiors, from Sri Lanka and India––and I want to make the absolute most of it. It was the feast of “our” St. Peter Damian and I had adapted an old homily from a few years back on “the heart of a reformer.” (Maybe I’ll clean it up and post it too.) That morning at about 5 AM I cut out half of it. (Do you know the old saying, “If I had had more time I would have written less”?) Presiding at Eucharist in a new place is somewhat awkward anyway, but here they have a certain way of wearing the priestly garb, and certain seating arrangement, etc etc. But it went really well.

 

But then I was told that my afternoon session was going to be shifted to a third morning session: one at 9, one at 10:30, and me at 12, because so many people were going to leave at lunch. That sounded like a long morning on the last day for something the cat dragged in but I said, okay, no problem. I spent hours and hours on this particular talk, overshooting the intellectual level by a good bit. I had already slashed about a third of my 14-page outline, and that morning I slashed another two pages (with footnotes). I also had a PowerPoint. To be fair, I want this to be the basis of my regular talk at monasteries around the world, and perhaps also to make an article of it. (This I will also post at some point on the DIMMID website.)

 

However… the speaker before me was a diocesan priest from Kerala named Fr. Anthony Tharekkadavil. He is a biblicist and a professor in the seminary. As a matter of fact several of the young monks from Kerala studied under him and are very much under his sway. He also told me, later, that he is an apologist. His topics were supposed to be “Living in a multi-religious context in India today” and “World Peace multi-religious perspective.” But in reality both of his presentations were entirely devoted to being vehemently anti-Islam. I am not slandering him by saying this. This was a public presentation, and he is very proud of it.

 

I’m sure all of this has to be nuanced, but I took copious notes. I wish I could have a copy of his slide show and videos. It was very detailed. It started out beautifully tracing biblical history. But the points that all that led to were:

 

We do not worship the same God as Muslims (YHWH is not Allah).

 

Islam is a false religion (like some others)

 

He bases his thinking on Cardinal Ratzinger’s Dominus Iesus, not on Lumen Gentium or Nostra Aetate because those latter two contradict the Credo.

“You cannot be friends with a Muslim” (that was the exact title on one of his slides) because they will eventually turn on you out of obedience to the Qur’an.

 

He kept referring to “them” and “they” as if all Muslims were like this, and then played clip after clip of extremism Islamist preachers who contradict the Bible, and evangelical preachers preaching against Islam. Also a clip of someone reading from the writings of Don Bosco in which he describes how absurd Islam is.

 

He also listed all the ways that Islam says that Christianity and the Bible are wrong. That is fair enough. I think that is worth a hard conversation. How and when and in what tone is up for debate.

He played a clip of a Lebanese woman evangelical preaching about how Lebanon was ruined by the Muslims and harmed even more by the influx of Palestinian refugees, and quoted a Swedish report saying how the migration of Muslims is destroying Sweden. He listed terrorist attacks around the world so as to say “This is what happens when you let Muslims into your society.”

 

He kept saying his main point was that “the only way to real peace is evangelization,” and by evangelization he meant proclaiming Jesus as Lord and converting people. I suppose this might have been his attempt at addressing his assigned topic, "world peace from a multi-religious perspective." 

 

Also Donald Trump, who I think of as anti-Christ if not the anti-Christ, is a great Christian leader because he is protecting Christianity. (It begs the question, as I heard a marvelous Black pastor say on YouTube the other day, “Whose Christianity?”!) That was the cherry on the icing on the cake and it was all I could do to stay in my seat and stay silent.

 

I will not go into my rebuttals of any of this. It’s all so complicated. But at the end of the first session I was literally having heart palpitations with… anger? Frustration? Helplessness? Grief? He was very good, very convincing, fiery. The young guys from Kerala especially seemed to be eating it up.

 

We ran into each other in the corridor between the first and second session and exchanged some pointed (maybe even harsh) words. I started out by saying, “You have ruined my entire talk. You have cut the legs out from my argument based on the Church’s official teaching,” especially about him dismissing Vatican II, which he doubled down on. (The Vatican Dicastery has experts on Islam and they would never never never speak in this way.) He kept saying, “I’m an apologist” as if that justified his tone. (It came to my mind that there are those who doubt whether apologetics actually is evangelization but that is another question.) I finally was able to stammer out, “What do you want them to walk away with from your session? Fear? Anger? Hatred? Violence?” These are people who living cheek to jowl with Muslims. He is from Kerala and there have been violent acts Muslims against Christians, I understand.  Rightly to be concerned, but what is the proper Christian response? “You cannot be friends with a Muslim.” And evangelize using the social media.

 

Thanks be to God I did not engage him anymore, especially not publicly. My Sicilian was up and I would have spouted stupidaggine. I seriously contemplated not giving my talk at all. I sat through the second session taking copious notes and looking over my own upcoming talk. There was nothing I was going to say that was directly related to what he was saying––I was afraid there would have been pushback about Hinduism!—though I was going to be quoting Popes Paul VI and John Paul II, Vatican II and all the documents of the Vatican Dicastery over and over again.

 

I started out singing a cappella a little bit of the new song, “People of the Book (Let Us Come to a Common Word),” which begins with the Arabic verse from the Qur’an and then: “People of the Book, let us come to a common word: that God is love and those who abide in love abide in God and God in them.” The only time I mentioned his talk was to say, as I was quoting Nostra Aetate, that I did not agree with Fr. Anthony that this was against the Credo. When I got to the part about studying texts of other traditions I also said that I agreed with him that we should study our own and others’ texts before we speak. It’s all in the talk. I also said at one point, “You don’t need peacemakers where there are no wars. Just like we wouldn’t need interreligious dialogue if we were all getting along harmoniously. That’s why we do it.” In the name of Jesus.

 

My question to him, which I was only able to formulate later in my mind, was “What if half this crowd were Muslims, how would you have addressed these issues? They are all worthy of the ‘hard conversation’ but how would you have tried to win them over? By making fun of them? By calling out the worst extremes of their tradition? By brow beating them intellectually (the same thing that some imams are doing with the Scriptures)?” And “dialogue is evangelization, showing the best face of Christ and the Church.”

 

Anyway, once I took a deep breath, my talk went well, and I made a point later of stopping to speak with Fr. Antony in front of everyone in the refectory, very civilly, wishing him peace. I also asked him if he had anything written in English (most of this stuff on this is in Malayalam), mainly because I have a lot of homework to do and his work would be good material. He said no, because there were several other priests doing this work better than him and they had written a lot. Sigh. But I guess all I have to type into Google is “Why Islam is a false religion” and plenty will come up. I can’t imagine the Holy Father or the Dicastery ever ever ever using inflammatory language like that.

 

It was only later that I realized again that Fr. Anthony never touched his topics— “Living in a multi-religious context in India today” and “World Peace multi-religious perspective”. But I was happy that I spoke to both of these, and specifically to our response as monks. I kept thinking of the Trappist monks of Tiburine too, the best example ever of the Third Good in modern times, when the Muslim villagers say to the monks, “We are the birds, you are the branches.”

 

And one more thing… during the Q&A I used a line about the US with them I have been using for many years––to be honest it refers to Newt Gringrich saying that “Palestine is an invented country", but that is only one such example: “A lot of powerful people in my country are saying some very ignorant things about other religions. And the problem is when somebody says something ignorant on this end, somebody on the other ends gets killed for it.” I hope Fr. Anthony will not wind up with blood on his hands from his inflammatory remarks yesterday—or anyone.

 

Oddly enough also (classic over-developed sense of duty), by this time I was the only one of the Western VIPs left: Abbot Primate, Abbot Bernard of AIM, and Sr Lynn of CIB were all gone by then. Most everyone else drifted off slowly in the afternoon and by evening prayer there were only two or three of us left. The last evenings I have been going for an hour of meditation in the Eucharistic chapel in the back of the church where mostly only the pre-postulants, postulants and novices go at 6:30 for “meditation time” before Vespers. Sitting on the floor with nice enough rugs. I’m sad that only these young guys go—and like at Shantivanam maybe only because they have to go—and only one or two of the elders, but I was really glad to have availed myself of that time with them. The young guys are so sweet. I only knew them from the concert and from hanging around at meals trying to learn their names, but they kept wanting to engage, and one of them wound up accompanying me to the airport at 11:30 PM. Now in Abu Dhabi waiting to board my flight home to Rome.

 

Let us come to a common word, shall we? God is love and those who abide in love abide in God––and God in them.