Here’s the question: Can you come as you are to the interreligious dialogue?

A peculiar strain of interreligious dialogue warrants an entire chapter of Raimundo Panikkar’s book, The Intra-religious Dialogue.  Because of the long history of Christianity’s participation and support for empire and quasi-imperialistic endeavors that have wrought devastation to impoverished peoples across the globe, some Christians have sought to approach interreligious dialogue with such a compensatory and remedial humility that they attempt to ignore their own commitments and appear before the dialogue partner as a blank slate, a tabula rasa. Panikkar calls this epoché –a kind of suspension of judgment—a  setting aside of one’s own commitments.  In no uncertain terms, he finds this epoché to be an impossible effort, doomed to failure.  Among its weaknesses is the fact that what will ensue is a mere listening session where the Christian passively receives what is offered, and has nothing to offer in return.  This can hardly be called dialogue.  And in any case, once a response of any kind is formulated, it will inevitably be shaped in some way by the stance of the respondent—even if that shaping is as bare and trivial as the choice of what to respond to first, second, etc., even that decision is nonetheless influenced by the commitments or beliefs of the respondent.

Actually, Panikkar has a vision of profoundly personal participation in religious dialogue, which he calls the intra-religious dialogue, as a remedy to the shallow practice of skirting actual encounter by mere talk about dialogue. He says,

“But we often hear more talk about interreligious dialogue than actual dialogue. In order to sidestep this pitfall, I would like to begin by stressing the often-neglected notion of an intrareligious dialogue, i.e., and inner dialogue within myself, and encounter in the depths of my personal religiousness, having met another religious experience on that very intimate level” (p. The Intra-Religious Dialogue, 40).

While I heartily agree to this vision of subjecting oneself to a real risk of transformation, and even potential crisis, this discussion about the necessity of the committed person, and that the deepest interior of the commitment must be risked in the dialogue brings up an important, though ignored aspect of interreligious dialogue.  It seems to me that more and more children are being brought up quite removed from any faith tradition.  I know parents who just don’t  want to impose such a personal thing on their children.  I have known students who, prior to taking my theology class, have never had a forum of any kind in which to explore the faith dimension of their lives.  I do not believe that these people are to be categorically excluded from what we call interreligious dialogue.  In fact, I wonder if it is not precisely in them that an even more profound kind of interior dialogue, that begins without adherence to preexisting commitments, might be allowed to take place, par excellence.

I know I have witnessed in my students the weighing, comparing and contrasting of various religious ways. Of course—none of them begins this dialogue as a barren individual without values or commitments, and perhaps these can be regarded as a quasi-religion that is being put into a polyvalent interior dialogue with other religions. But my only caution is that we should be careful in how we characterize just who is and who is not a legitimate candidate for interreligious dialogue.  The very common criteria that one must come with a firm sense of one’s own religious tradition or beliefs as a precondition to the dialogue might be taken as a disqualifier by these people already sidelined by religion in general.

Proponents of interreligious dialogue should avoid an unintentional marginalization of these worthy potential participants of interreligious dialogue.

Instead of pretending to be what you’re not, or thinking that you shouldn’t join in at all because you’re not ‘qualified’….PLEASE: Come as you are!

And let’s become a new creation, together.