Towards a Culture of Dialogue - a gentle learning curve

A good place to begin is one summer’s day in 1949, at an army camp in Cornwall. I was an 18-year old, on National Service, training to be an instructor in the Royal Army Educational Corps. Some of us had prepared a project on India, and my task was to present and explain the visual aids we had borrowed, specifically on Indian religion and culture.

 

At this distance of sixty years I can remember little of the details of my presentation, but I do remember all too clearly my patronising attitude, and my facile and dismissive remarks about some of the symbols , exhibiting an almost total ignorance of the subject, narrow-mindedness and arrogance.   The officer in charge publicly reprimanded me, and said he hoped he would never hear such a prejudiced performance again. I am grateful to that officer because it started me on a process of conversion that was admittedly very slow, but at least I don’t think I ever sank to that level of crassness again.

 

How on earth did it happen in the first place? Yes, an 18-year old can be forgiven much, I suppose, but is that the whole explanation? Background must have something to do with it. My childhood and schooldays were happy but they were also confined within a narrow space. My first eighteen years were within what is sometimes called the ‘Catholic ghetto’, which (like a Russian doll) was in its turn within a British society which was itself more ‘ghetto-ised’ and restricted than today. There were, for most people, few opportunities for travel, and the population was overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon or Celtic. What is more, we were at the tail-end of our imperial and colonial history, with all the effect this had on our attitude to other cultures and religions. Whatever the full explanation, I had absorbed quite unconsciously an assurance that my Britishness, my Christianity, and within that my Catholicism, were simply the best there were, with little to learn from others. So it came as quite a jolt, and a genuine surprise, when that officer  put me right.

 

Maybe word got round the officers’ mess, because a little later a more senior officer called me to his office, and in a friendly and very positive way spoke to me about Indian religion and culture, and gave me a copy of the Bhagavad Gita. 

 

Then I went up to Cambridge, but as far as openness to other religions went, Cambridge made no difference. This was in no small part due to the enclosed nature of pre-Vatican 2 Catholicism. I say this without bitterness, because although it deprived me of much, the pre-Conciliar Church gave me far more: a thorough upbringing in the Faith, a community of love and friendship, and a chance to grow slowly in other ways, at God’s ‘unhurried pace’.

 

This ‘unhurried pace’ continued while I prepared for the priesthood in Rome from 1953-1960. It was only when back in England that little seeds sown ten years before in Cornwall started to germinate. The reason for this was the Second Vatican Council, and the way it summoned the Church to look outward, critically and from a Faith perspective, yet openly and in friendship, towards other Christians, other world religions, and contemporary society. It called Catholics to work with other Christians to answer the divine call to become visibly one, and it exhorted Christians while witnessing to their own faith and way of life, [to] acknowledge, preserve and encourage the spiritual and moral truths found among non-Christians, also their social life and culture. (Decree Nostra Aetate, 2.)

 

That was a moment of realising what I had been dimly aware of for a long time. It was reinforced during a sabbatical year in Cambridge 1969-70, when I read, and heard lectures on, Anglican and Protestant theology, on the history of Ecumenism, and to a lesser extent on the writings of other religions, especially the Qur’an.

 

Even then my conversion was still on the level of theory rather than practice. The change came when (so far as ecumenism went) I was appointed diocesan ecumenical officer and greatly benefited from the friendship and the knowledge gained from regular meeting and working with those of other Christian traditions, and attending some of their synods and assemblies.

 

With regard to other world religions, the defining moment was when I was invited to join a party of 4 Muslims and 8 Christians , mainly from Bradford, to go to Pakistan on what was called an ‘exposure visit’. I experienced the kindness, the dignity and the hospitality of ordinary people. I was encouraged by the willingness, and the ability, of  ordinary Muslim people to answer our questions about their faith and practice, but frustrated that they evinced no interest whatever in hearing us explain our own. I was stirred by the sheer grandeur of Islam at its best, and I believe its truest. It was refreshing to be in a society where God’s existence and greatness were taken for granted as a simple fact of life, where God was not forgotten or rendered irrelevant but held in the memory, and not only when called to prayer. I witnessed, not only the more austere Islam of the mosque, but also the Islam of the shrines to Muslim holy men, attracting the devotion of the faithful, much as one would see in a Catholic country. 

 

Perhaps the most valuable experience of all was the exposure to our daily evening meeting together, when we Christians and Muslims reflected on what we had seen that day. These meetings were not always easy or without tension.

 

On my return, the Bishop asked me to encourage inter-religious relations as well as ecumenism. I gathered together a small group of people more knowledgeable and experienced than I am, and we worked together to inform and to enable Catholic clergy and laity to take at least some part in improving inter-religious and inter-communal relations. This is no easy matter, because there is an understandable caution, and in places positive hostility, especially when it comes to relations with Islam. Yet, in the name of Christ and of peace we must persevere. 

 

Over these years I have also come to know more about the Jewish community, about Hinduism, and about the Sikhs, who are all present in significant numbers in West Yorkshire. All this has been part of the learning process – the ‘unhurried pace’ of God moving me from the closed world out of which I spoke in Cornwall, to some awareness of the richness of his gifts to other people, other cultures and other religions.

 

Finally, what did this do for my understanding and love for my own Christian and Catholic faith? I would say without hesitation that it has done nothing but good. One thing it did not do was to relativise my belief and love of Christ, or to undermine my conviction that Christ, and Christ alone, is God incarnate and the Saviour and hope of all human beings. What it did do was to make me realise, far more clearly, with what sovereign freedom Christ and the Holy Spirit act for the salvation of each person. Christ is indeed the Lord, and the Spirit blows where he wills, (cf. Jn.3:8) acting through goodness, beauty and truth wherever they are found, including the goodness, beauty and truth of other religions. How this is done, and what relationship this has to the work, the witness and the prayer of the Church, I do not know. It is certainly part of the witness of the Church, sometimes involving the supreme witness of martyrdom, to proclaim Christ as the one Saviour, in season and out of season ( 2 Tim.4:2) and to point to human error and folly, in other religions and indeed in the human institution of the Church.   Yet all this must go along with the glad recognition that

 

G.M.Hopkins, As kingfishers catch fire…