Hello, everybody, welcome back to day 13. Our topic today is inter spirituality and world religions. So together we'll explore the meaning of this term inter spirituality, which I would guess is new to many of you. It's relatively new to me as well, as well as a Christian contemplative approach to dialogue and relationships among practitioners of all the world religions and spiritual traditions, and even towards those who practice out of humanistic or no tradition at all. And I want to just note at the beginning here that I offer this as a Christian contemplative approach to world religion and dialogue and inter spirituality. I don't claim to speak for every Christian or for the Christian tradition as a whole.

But I do want to offer a perspective for engaging in this kind of dialogue. Because I think it's particularly important in our increasingly internal dependent and globally connected world. So before we dive into defining terms are going deeper into some of the theory. I want to start with some personal stories here. And I've mentioned before that my own introduction to contemplative Christianity came through the monks and sisters at St. John's Abbey and St. Benedict's monastery in Minnesota. And two teachers in particular, Mark famer and Mary ruder.

Both Benedict ins introduced me to practices like lectio Divina and centering prayer, mystical poetry in the Christian tradition, as well as the poetry of Islamic Sufi mystics, like Rumi and Hafiz. In addition, mark in particular gave me a copy of a book that I still cherish and it's written by the Vietnamese Buddhist monk teak not Han, who wrote a wonderful little book called The miracle of mindfulness, and it's still one of the best introductions to the basic practice of breath, awareness and mindfulness that I still use in my teaching today and go back to for my own practice. So my own encounter with the tradition was already kind of informed by this openness to dialogue, and what we'll call inter spirituality. Another important moment for me came when I was introduced to the practice of yoga, which for me really came at the level of practice before thought or theory.

And I, in my earlier days, was much more into rock climbing and came to yoga, mostly for the physical practice, because many climbers practice yoga for greater strength and flexibility and balance and core power and I walked into a class at the YMCA, taught by Mayra Rucker, who really became my first teacher in the yoga tradition, and remains a good friend to this day, she really not only taught me the physical and breath practice of yoga, but helped me to see that there is a whole contemplative dimension to the yoga philosophy that I was not even aware of. But have has really enriched my own understanding of prayer and a relationship with God. I've even come to think of yoga as a way of praying with the body as Myra wants to put it. So those are two ways that my own contemplative journey has been enriched by encounters with both people and practices and texts of other traditions.

Another story that is told in the Christian tradition goes beyond my personal story. Here is the story of john main another Benedictine monk, as a young Man, john was very interested in learning meditation. And he went to India and found some Hindu Yogi masters to study with, and what his teacher said that he would teach him the practices of meditation and contemplation in that tradition, but said that he wanted john to continue to practice as a Christian himself and not think that he was switching traditions. So john studied and then returned to the United States joined to the benediction order, and had a really interesting experience later where he went back and was reading some of the desert fathers and mothers and classic texts in the mystical tradition, and realize that despite the theological differences that there might be between the traditions, the practices that they were engaging in were remarkably similar.

And john main, in fact, was one of the main teachers who contributed to the development of the mantra form of Christian meditation. I've mentioned previously and is taught through the world community for Christian meditation. So there's an interesting paradox here that the deeper one goes into one's own tradition, the more one is open to and experiences the similarities of encounter at the level of practice. So inter spirituality really focuses at the level of practice. And Wayne teasdale I believe was one of the first people to use the term and he describes it as the shared mystic heart being at the center of the world's deepest spiritual traditions. Another way that I've heard this described by Thomas Keating is he uses the metaphor of a hand and the fingers and thumb on the hand, represent the five largest world religions.

Of course there are hundreds more, but in terms of numbers, you have Judaism Christianity and Islam. And then you have Hinduism and Buddhism. And the way he describes it is that as you go deep into any one of those traditions, and you start to compare the encounter and experience that people have, you start to recognize some similarities in what people are describing and experiencing the level of practice. So again, if I speak out of my own experience, I've been struck multiple times by the similarities that emerge in the ways that Yogi's or Buddhists describe their encounter with ultimate reality, despite the differences in theology or doctrine, that exists more at that level of inter religious dialogue. So for example, when I have explored how Yogi's described the experience of Samadhi Samadhi is the Sanskrit word For the goal of union with the divine in the yoga philosophy, how closely that experience and language resonates with my own experience or what I've read in other monotheistic mystics in the Jewish Christian or Islamic traditions.

Or similarly, Buddhists describe enlightenment as an experience into a vast, open nothingness, a luminous void. And this can be remarkably similar to the ways that some mystics describe experiencing God is a vast openness that feels like a void or a Cloud of Unknowing because God so far transcends what we can comprehend with the human intellect, our mind. So again, inter spirituality doesn't reduce different religious traditions to a common denominator or even suggest that they're all the same, but highlights the core experience at the heart of all these mystical or contemplative traditions. Another way of thinking about this, that I would like to offer comes out of a document in called dialogue and proclamation that was published by the Pontifical Council for inter religious dialogue, part of the Vatican of the Catholic tradition in 1991. And they suggest that there are four levels of encounter and dialogue that we can have.

We can have a dialogue of life, kind of just daily life living together with people who are of different traditions, dialogue of action, so mutual commitment to goals or ends or social action. There's dialogue of theology. This is the more intellectual dialogue or inter religious dialogue about differences and similarities in doctrine and teaching. And then there's the dialogue of religious experience and practice. And here is where I would suggest inter spirituality takes place at that dialogue about experience and practice. In my own experience, I'm always drawn back to the question that Jesus posed to His disciples in the gospels when he says, Who do you say that I am.

And I think the very fact of the even the historical fact of Jesus and His existence, and then the Christian claims about his resurrection from the dead, his status as the Son of God, or the Messiah, or his nature as both fully human and fully divine. All of these, I think, demand some kind of a response. There's a kind of what theologians call this scandal of particularity. The fact that Jesus presents something kind of radically unique that demands a response from us. So that's one piece of it. And at the same time, it seems clear that Jesus is preaching of the kingdom of God is truly a message of universal hope and salvation for all people.

And in the Christian New Testament. Here's how the author of First Timothy puts it writes, God desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of truth. So there's something both particular about the claims of Jesus as a historical revelation of God, and universal about the fact that this is meant for everyone regardless of where they come from, or where they happen to live on the earth. So if I return to a metaphor that I borrowed, previously from Thomas Merton, about those seeds of contemplation that are always drifting by it seems to me that in that metaphor, God is always reaching out at all times in love and offering grace. contemplative practices in the Christian and other tradition, are intended to facilitate the process of saying yes to those seeds of accepting them with gratitude, humility and love. So it seems that practitioners of other traditions or people have no particular Tradition may indeed be responding to those seeds of grace in their own lives.

And then working them out articulating them, and trying to describe and live that experience in the language and the ways that makes sense to them, even if those are ways that I can never understand or fully appreciate. So for me, it always comes back to that experience and trust in the process of grace that is at the core of contemplation. So at a very practical level, go back to your practice, which I continue to encourage you to engage in daily as possible. So when you're sitting, when you're doing your formal setting, practice and the contemplative silence, you're noticing your thoughts, and you're returning to your sacred word or you're repeating your mantra, or a phrase from Scripture, or you're catching yourself in practice of daily life when it's not formal practice. Every time you do That you're letting go of those false images of God. And that ego self, as we've talked about before.

The 14th century anonymous monk who wrote a text called the Cloud of Unknowing calls this basically entering this Cloud of Unknowing this mystery at the heart of the of the experience. So here in the mystical tradition, and awareness emerges that our language and our concepts that we use to describe or talk about God are always limited. And recognizing the limited nature of this creates a deeper sense of humility, right? We recognize that we don't possess the fullness of the truth, but rather that we are possessed by a truth that reaches out to us and love. Out of that humility, I think then can also emerge, as we've talked about, that virtue of love, or solidarity, that realization of our oneness. Not only with God but with all other persons and with all of creation.

So this is a natural part of the process and it can open into that inter spiritual encounter that helps us to continue to refine our sense of ourselves and our sense of who God is, as part of that broader dialogue. It's also worth noting that what Christians would call witness or evangelization, that is a sharing of the good news of Jesus Christ are definitely essential parts of the gospel so inter spirituality doesn't suggest that we leave that behind. However, a contemplative approach to inter spirituality or to dialogue helps us to see how we can witness to the truth, beauty and goodness, that as Christians we find in the person of Jesus in relationship with God, while also with the faint at the same time, affirming that which is good And true and beautiful, and others and in other traditions. And here is where I think this can be a deeply healing approach to spiritual practice and belief, and one that is much needed in our divided world today.

Thank you again for being here on this ongoing journey. And we're honing in on our last day tomorrow where we will explore where to go next. So I look forward to being with you one more time. At least one more time tomorrow.