Netanel Miles-Yepez is the editor of the book, The Common Heart: An Experience of Interreligious Dialogue, published by Lantern Books,2006. In addition to his editorial work, Netanel is co-founder of the Sufi-Hasidic Fellowship and a murshid ("guide") of the Chishti Maimuniyya Order of Dervishes.

NM-Y: How did a good Roman Catholic and Cistercian monk like yourself come to be involved in interreligious dialogue? There can't have been much of this happening when you made your first ecumenical forays into that territory. 

TK: When I started, there weren't many Roman Catholics involved in interreligious dialogue. Thomas Merton (a fellow Cistercian) was writing about Zen in those early years before his death in 1968 and was definitely a pioneer in this area. It was the documents of the Second Vatican Council that eventually opened up this possibility for me. The declaration of the Relation of the Church to Non-Christians states that "the Church urges its sons and daughters to enter with prudence and charity into discussion and collaboration with members of other religions." Before the Council, most of the Christian traditions wouldn't touch the Eastern religions with a ten-foot pole! There wasn't any incentive to study that material. Moreover, it was looked upon with a lot of hesitation, because it was thought that it might injure one's Christian faith. The Second Vatican Council made a 180 degree turn in this attitude. The Council specifically recommended dialogue with other Christian denominations and with the non-Christian religions. John Paul II wrote and spoke even more strongly in its favor. 

NM-Y: What was the official vehicle of that dialogue within the Church? 

TK: After the Second Vatican Council, a group called the North American Board of East-West Dialogue was formed. The initiative for this group came from one of the new congregations at the Vatican, the Congregation for Interreligious Dialogue. Thinking that Benedictine monks and nuns were the logical people to engage in a dialogue with the monks and nuns of other traditions, because both were interested in spirituality and a lifestyle that supported it, Cardinal Pignadoli, the presiding prelate, approached the monastic orders about this possibility.

The first meeting was held at Petersham, Massachusetts in 1979. It took a while for the group to be well accepted in the larger Benedictine community, but we had, even at that first meeting, quite a spectrum of people who showed interest in it, including several Cistercian abbots, Robert Mueller of the United Nations, Juliet Hollister founder of the Temple of Understanding, Swami Satchidananda, Fr. Basil Pennington, Brother David Steindl- Rast, OSB, and Fr. Raimundo Panikkar. 

NM-Y: Was the meeting at Petersham when you first became involved in this kind of dialogue? 

TK: No, I started getting interested in interreligious dialogue in the late Sixties. I was abbot of St. Joseph's Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts from 1961 to 1981, and even before 1970, we invited speakers from other religious traditions to speak at the monastery. At the time, a number of Eastern teachers were coming to the West. A half-hour up the road from the monastery was the Insight Meditation Center that drew a number of outstanding vipassana teachers from the Buddhist Theravada tradition, and some of them came down and visited us. One of these was Achaan Cha. I was very impressed with him, and we had a great time together; he had the same kinds of problems in his monastery as I was having in mine, and we had great fun comparing notes! He was like an old shoe. He reminded me a lot of Pope John the XXIII, whom I had met briefly, and whom I also greatly admired. Achaan Cha was really laid-back. He ran a very strict monastery and I don't know what he was like there, but he was friendliness itself when he visited us. Another outstanding teacher was Joshu Roshi Sasaki of Mount Baldey near Los Angeles. Just before we met, he was actually heading for Europe to check out Trappist monasteries there. He had heard that they were similar in monastic observances to Zen Buddhist monasteries of Japan. When he heard about St. Joseph's Abbey, he decided that he didn't have to go so far. Anyway, he came and offered to give us a sesshin [a special period of intense meditation], and we accepted. After that, he came to the monastery twice a year for ten years offering sesshin each time. Fortunately, I was able to get to most of them and to hear his teachings first hand. 

NM-Y: What was it about Sasaki Roshi that so impressed you? 

TK: Sasaki Roshi was eager to teach Christian Zen. For him, Zen was not the property of Japan or even of Buddhism, but the basic and universal religious attitude. I admired that perspective and have adopted it in my own life. I found the modest exposure I had to Zen extremely helpful, and Sasaki Roshi's taishos [dharma talks] were mind expanding. He belonged to the Rinzai school of Zen and made a special effort to invent Christian koans for us! 

NM-Y: The dialogue has obviously come a long way in the intervening years. Were all the monks as inclined to dialogue as you were in the early days? 

TK: This was brand new territory for us and not looked upon with much sympathy by many members of the community. When Sasaki Roshi put on the Cistercian habit and joined us in the refectory, it was a little shocking to some monks. 

NM-Y: Were there any visits from representatives of traditions other than Buddhism? What about Hindus? 

TK: We had less exposure to the Hindu traditions. But we were pleased to host Swami Satchidananda and several teachers from the Transcendental Meditation movement. I was also very interested in the Hindu-Christian dialogue going on in India initiated by Bede Griffith and Swami Abhishiktananda, both Benedictine monks. They were trying to live the Christian monastic life inside Hindu culture. 

NM-Y: When did Centering Prayer get started? 

NM-Y: Really? When I have observed you in interreligious dialogue or teaching Centering Prayer, you seem to move seamlessly from one category to the other, almost as if there was an intrinsic relationship between the two. 

TK: Yes, there was a lot of interaction between the two, and it has grown over the years. You see, a great many Christians had joined one or other of the Eastern disciplines in their youth because they couldn't find any comparable depth of spirituality in the Christian milieu, whether in churches, parishes or schools. In fact, many have said to me, that had they known there was a Christian contemplative practice, they wouldn't have gone to the East. But, still, they benefited from their Eastern practice and many remained with it. Others returned to the religion of their childhood because they felt more at home there. Our chief reason for presenting Centering Prayer was to contribute to the renewal of the Christian contemplative tradition, and thus to provide an option in the marketplace marketplace for Christians who would never have the time or inclination to learn an Eastern method of meditation. 

NM-Y: Why did you feel this was a need? 

TK: During my early encounters with teachers of other traditions at St. Joseph's Abbey, I met a lot of Buddhist and Hindu teachers and their students, and it was evident, as I said, that they were benefiting from their respective practices. For example, there was a psycho-spiritual wisdom presented in the form of methods articulated in Buddhist meditative disciplines that at the time was not articulated in the same practical way in the Christian scheme of things. The Christian monastic lifestyle is an environment conducive to spirituality, but it isn't a method in the same sense. It has many practical rules and disciplines, most of which are duplicated in almost all monastic traditions, but they are not applied to the individual in the same way that Buddhist practices are. 

NM-Y: It seems to me, looking back over your career and your writings, that you have spent a great deal of time and energy not only articulating a clear "method," but also in making the psychological and contemplative sophistication of Christianity explicit. 

TK: That's true. It was there, but it was distributed over a large number of books. In this work, I benefited a great deal from contemporary science especially developmental psychology, which I feel teaches truths that all of the world's religious traditions need to take into account. Likewise, I believe that the existence of the Unconscious discovered by Freud has tremendous consequences for the spiritual journey. 

NM-Y: You founded the Snowmass Interreligious Conference in the early eighties, didn't you? 

TK: I always saw myself more as its "convener" than "founder." It was really just a big experiment in the beginning, and I didn't know how it would work out. I began planning it in 1983 after taking part in a series of Christian-Buddhist dialogues at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. During these "dialogues," I noticed that the dialoguers were not speaking to each other as much as addressing the audience. But on the two occasions, when the moderator succeeded in bringing us together a day before the conference, we actually got to talk to one another as peers. So I asked myself, what would happen if we got together to talk without any audience? And what if the meeting was broader than a Buddhist-Christian dialogue? Those questions were what sparked the initial motive for getting the first group of teachers together at St. Benedict's Monastery in Snowmass, Colorado, where this dialogue began, and where it got its name, the "Snowmass Conference".

NM-Y: So, the primary purpose was to take the dialogue out of the public arena because you had noticed that the audience was influencing and impeding the intimacy of the dialogue? 

TK: It was dominating the dialogue! The rich interchanges glimpsed in those brief periods the teachers spent together before the conferences began, were all but non-existent when we appeared as lecturers before an audience. So, I thought, let's just come together and talk about what helped us most in our own spiritual practice. In that way, we might come to a better understanding of some of the technical terms we were using in our presentations. You can use the same term as another religious tradition uses, but if you are interpreting it out of your own cultural background and the person you are dialoguing with is presupposing the meaning it has in his or her own tradition, then there is a lot of confusion. 

NM-Y: How does a person's spiritual quality affect the dynamic of dialogue? After all, this must be a consideration in maintaining such a group?

TK: I am not qualified to judge anybody, but some people obviously have been more exposed to the levels of spirituality that are considered advanced in all the traditions, and they affect the quality of the dialogue. It is important however to remember that everybody's contribution is nothing more than that, a contribution. 

NM-Y: Looking back, can you discern any development in yourself from the time when you began to dialogue? Any assumptions that may have changed over time? 

TK: I have more respect and understanding of the other world religions; more openness and admiration for their methods and teachings; a sense of communion with the people who are practicing them; and a sense of the oneness of the human family. It has greatly expanded my own worldview and understanding of the Christian religion, and has deepened and enriched it. I find a lot of insights in dialogue that help me to better understand the Bible and to explain it from a contemplative perspective. 

NM-Y: And what effort was necessary to bring that about? 

TK: In the beginning, given the original narrowness of my perspective, dialogue required me to bracket my own ideas and to be open to seeing my religion from a different perspective. True dialogue is a very ascetical discipline. It challenges one's own presuppositions. Sometimes, you are left trying to figure out how it all fits together. You think, "How can I reconcile this teaching with a Christian perspective? How can I recognize the truth of this non-Christian presentation in the Christian worldview?" Sometimes, the two seem opposed. The confrontation requires a willingness to learn and sometimes a lot of soulsearching. I find that interreligious dialogue liberates one from aspects of one's own tradition that are largely cultural and not the essence of the revelation. These have become so intermingled with the essence over the centuries that one cannot easily discern the difference. Literary criticism and the empirical sciences associated with it have made significant contributions to understanding the available texts and the intention of their respective authors. These ongoing discoveries along with theological reflection must find a place in genuine interreligious dialogue 

NM-Y: Does real dialogue requires a certain spiritual asceticism? 

TK: Yes. Often the question is, "How in the world am I going to harmonize this with what I have always believed?" And the answer is, go slowly and be willing to unwrap your pre-packaged values and beliefs. Those who don't have an adequate grasp of their own tradition (and I am afraid that is the majority of Christians), should engage in dialogue advisedly. Often, when such persons get into certain aspects of dialogue, they don't know how to handle the apparent contradictions. That's why one needs to be rooted in one's own tradition both to contribute to such dialogue and to benefit from it. 

NM-Y: What was the basis for dialogue in the Snowmass Conference? 

TK: Our proximate goal was friendship and respect. The ultimate goal was to understand the other world religions from the inside, from the perspective of someone who had actually practiced and benefited from their highest spiritual disciplines. For the first few years of the Snowmass Conference, we tried to see if we could come up with what was common to us all. Gradually we formulated a set of principles that we could agree on, and the amount of agreement was really surprising! There was not absolute agreement of course, but we felt comfortable enough to say "yes" to each of them, though we might have preferred to express them a little differently here and there. Nevertheless, the "Points of Agreement" represent a commonality that is significant. They have been published in several places including the "Report" of the World Parliament of Religions. After that, we moved on to sharing common elements in the area of practice like fasting, vigils, sacred reading, spiritual guidance, chanting, and trying to live daily life from a contemplative space. All of the world religions have practices like these, though some emphasize some more than others. 

NM-Y: Did you do any work on the "Points of Agreement" in preparation for the first Snowmass Conference in 1984, or did they come solely from the dialogue? 

TK: There was a rough draft of a few statements that we used as points of departure for discussion. Some, we threw out right away, and others we worked on. We revised them again the next year and again for about four years. Then, we started discussing our differences. And that was even more interesting. But we didn't feel it was necessary to make a list of them! 

NM-Y: What do you feel is the primary purpose and contribution of dialogue today? 

TK: There is mutual enrichment in genuine dialogue that gradually dissolves suspicion and allows religious persons to work together in the world in areas of common interest such as the environment and justice and peace issues. I also think that understanding, friendship and respect are contributions we can make not only to our dialogue partners, but also to the invisible spiritual world of Humanity at large. The abiding disposition of universal compassion in each of us affects everybody, whether they know it or not. †