Zen and the Spiritual Exercises: A Dialogue between Faiths

Abstract

ONE OF THE CRITICAL and characteristic issues confronting Christian faith in the contemporary world is the growing dialogue with the East. The ecumenical involvement of the Roman Catholic Church, which took its rise in the earlier decades of this century, has been complemented, with the encouragement of the Second Vatican Council, by the increasing engagement with other religious whose seeds were sometimes already planted by God in ancient cultures prior to the preaching of the gospel. The difference here is significant. The ecumenical movement was and is an interchange within Christianity, within a basic Christian faith, seeking for a deeper unity which expresses that common commitment to God's self-communication in Christ. The discussions with other religious traditions are a dialogue between faiths whose beginnings are quite separate and whose existence has continued for millennia with separate concepts and languages. The separate histories of these religious cultures suggest a different kind of dialogue, one that is more rooted in direct religious experience than in doctrinal or theological formulations. These traditions come together as two people meeting for the first time with quite different languages. If two such people meet in a dark room with their different languages and with no common visible world of experience to point to, communication is long and arduous. But if there is some visible world to which they can point, things move better and faster. The Buddhist and the Christian are something like that. If they simply share on the level of their different words and concepts, communication is very limited. If there is a shared experience to fall back on, communication is better, and eventually the languages too can be sorted out. The dialogue between faiths in the contemporary world is better conducted as a dialogue between faith-experiences than as a dialogue between theologies. This is the intention of the following paper: an attempt from within the Catholic tradition in its Ignatian form to understand better another