Anyone who has been keeping up with the activities of Monastic Interreligious Dialogue in recent years is already familiar with the work of Sr. Mary Margaret Funk, who has served generously and dynamically as the board’s executive director for the past ten years. She has a wonderful way of reaching out to others and getting them involved in our various projects. Her reminiscences as given below report on only a fraction of all she has done for the board.
Thomas Keating invited me to membership on the MID Board in 1989. The first meeting I attended was at St. Andrew’s Abbey in Valyermo, California, the following year, when the agenda focused on planning. At that meeting I got involved in modifying the structure of the board so as to have a staff person who would function as executive director. Sr. Pascaline Coff, Sr. Katherine Howard, Fr. Thomas Keating, and I subsequently met at Osage Monastery in Oklahoma to draft a job description with all the details that would allow Sr. Katherine be the first paid executive director. She worked diligently with Fr. Dan Ward to shift our board from being a somewhat informal group to a sturdy 501c.3 not-for-profit organization. She also nurtured the bulletin as our principal publication; it was first edited by Sr. Pascaline and then by Fr. James Conner. Sr. Katherine also started the contact-persons workshops, of which the first was on Sufism and held at St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota. I coordinated the subsequent workshops. The one on Hinduism was held at St. Procopius Abbey in Lisle, Illinois, in 1994, while the next was incorporated into the first Gethsemani Encounter in 1996. The fourth and most recent was on the theme of Christ Consciousness and took place at the Benedictine mission house in Schuyler, Nebraska, in 1999. But to say all this is to get ahead of my story.
At the World’s Parliament of Religions in 1993 I was fully engaged as a speaker, as an assistant to Fr. Julian von Duerbeck in planning the liturgies (including a vigil service at St. Procopius), and as a chauffeur driving our monastic participants into the Chicago Loop every day from St. Procopius. On Saturday morning at the Parliament the MID Board hosted a special dialogue on Shunyata and Emptiness that had an amazing cast sitting around the table. As I recall, those present included His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Sr. Pascaline Coff, Sr. Johanna Becker, Sr. Katherine Howard, Br. David Steindl-Rast, Fr. James Wiseman, Fr. Julian von Duerbeck, Wayne Teasdale, Diana Eck, Masao Abe, Jean Houston, and I believe Maha Ghosandanda and one or two others. (Fr. Thomas Keating was ill and couldn’t make it.)
It was at the board meeting following the parliament that I was hired to succeed Sr. Katherine. Our transition was smooth since we had both served as prioresses of our respective communities and therefore had a considerable amount of administrative experience. I was then 49 years old and felt ready for another ministry, while Katherine was ready to devote her time and energy to spirituality and contemplative practice. Fr. James Wiseman was elected chairman of the board at that meeting, so he and I collaborated for the ensuing six years. Highlights of this period for me were coordinating Phases V, VI, and VII of the Spirituality Exchange Program between Tibetan Buddhists living in exile in India and Benedictine and Trappist monastics in North America. Phase V required routing two monks and two nuns to 30 monasteries in the U.S and Canada and hosting them myself at Beech Grove. Phase VI was a major pilgrimage of four American Benedictines, including myself, to Tibet and North India, with visits to 16 monasteries in Tibet and 14 in India. Phase VII was the first Gethsemani Encounter in Kentucky with His Holiness the Dalai Lama and nearly 200 other participants. In 1999 the Dalai Lama returned to the Midwest to give the Kalachakra Initiation Rite in Bloomington, Indiana. At that time MID sponsored a Vigil for Peace at St. Charles Parish in that city with His Holiness and other representatives of the Hindu, Buddhist, and Muslim traditions. In that same year and with the help of Br. Aaron Raverty and Br. Richard Oliver of St. John’s Abbey, Collegeville, MID started publishing a website along with its bulletin. We enlisted the help of a staff in New York for technical oversight of both the bulletin and the website, with Martin Rowe serving as our Webmaster. We felt we needed the same staff to coordinate both editions of the bulletin—the electronic and the print.
One important outcome of the first Gethsemani Encounter was the book edited by James Wiseman and Donald Mitchell and entitled The Gethsemani Encounter (Continuum, 1997). Another, somewhat later outcome was the book Benedict’s Dharma, edited by Patrick Henry and published by Riverhead in 2001. The four Buddhists who reflected on the Benedictine Rule in this book—Joseph Goldstein, Norman Fischer, Judith Simmer-Brown, and Yifa—continue to be in frequent contact with us. The translation of the Rule of St. Benedict that we used in the book was the one done by Abbot Patrick Barry, who delighted us by coming to the conference held at Beech Grove to commemorate the publication of the book and to continue the dialogue with participants from around the country who were friends of MID but not themselves monastics. All of the dialogues referred to in this paragraph have been posted on the web; our website currently has around 1000 visitors per day.
The turn to the year 2000 and a new millennium was marked with a collaborative Vigil for Peace done on New Year’s Eve. MID and AIM provided a booklet of sample prayers and rituals that was used in over a hundred sites at that significant point in our world’s history.
During my years as executive director I also coordinated board meetings at St. Procopius Abbey, St. John’s Abbey, the Trappist abbey in Oka, Quebec, St. Benedict’s Monastery in Snowmass, Colorado, the Abbey of Gethsemani, the Fetzer Institute in Kalamazoo, the Benedictine mission house in Schuyler, Nebraska, and at my own community, Our Lady of Grace Monastery in Beech Grove, Indiana. The next two board meetings are already in the planning stages: in 2003 at the Trappist abbey in Mepkin, South Carolina, and in 2004 at the Camaldolese hermitage in Big Sur, California. A few prominent recollections from these meetings include the warm hospitality and beautiful chant at Oka and the early-morning vigils at Snowmass, but there were definite highlights at each meeting.
Over the years I’ve witnessed much growth in the board. We’ve shifted from function to dialogue as the content and real heart of our meetings. We always meditate and do the full round of Eucharist and Liturgy of the Hours as constitutive of our dialogue, which is specifically monastic. At our next meeting we will revisit the topic of our mission and ask whether we are expressing our core reality and whether our activities are faithfully representing the monasteries we serve and our counterparts in other countries who also have boards of monastic interreligious dialogue. Ideas are plentiful, whereas funding has always been scarce, though just enough. Board members bring rich experience and carry out the many facets of our formal and informal dialogue gatherings. Toddy Daly has been assisting with the office work and events since 1998. She and I both find that email is the single swiftest tool for dialogue that has ever existed; my data base contains email addresses from literally all over the world.
There have also been some special meetings that I was privileged to attend. One such was a debriefing of the Gethsemani Encounter, facilitated by Ewert Cousins at St. John’s, Collegeville; another involved writing by-laws with the help of Fr. Dan Ward in Washington DC; a third was hosted by Abbot Leo Ryska in a board room at the Interchurch Center in New York and had as its agenda the coordination of our publications; and a fourth was a meeting at St. Anselm’s Abbey in Washington, DC, that helped plan the transition from Fr. James Wiseman’s chairmanship to that of Fr. William Skudlarek in 1999. There has also been some travel abroad. Sister GilChrist Lavigne and I gave a report at a DIM meeting in Spain in 1995. It was in some ways just a regular meeting, but I will never forget the passionate intervention of Dom Christian de Chergé, who pleaded with us to broaden our scope to include Muslim dialogue in the MID/DIM mission. We met Fr. Christian later at the Trappist monastery of Tamié, France. A few months later he was beheaded by Islamic fundamentalists while serving in his home monastery of Atlas in Algeria.
In my capacity as executive director I have also been invited to participate in a number of other meetings, conferences, and symposia that were not directly sponsored by MID. One of these was the Purity of Heart Symposium in 2000, with Fr. Bruno Barnhart, Father Joseph Wong, and others of the Camaldolese community at Big Sur. Another meeting commemorated the 100th anniversary of Vedanta in the United States, with talks remembering Swami Vivekananda and his lecture at the 1893 Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago. I also served on a panel at Princeton, New Jersey, with Professor Diana Eck of Harvard, who served for some years as one of our MID advisors. There was likewise the commemoration of the 25th anniversary of Vatican II’s declaration of the relationship of the Catholic Church to other religions, Nostrae Aetatae, held at the international Benedictine athenaeum Sant’Anselmo in Rome, and a workshop in New Harmony, Indiana, sponsored by the Friends of Benedict and having the Buddhist Rev. Kusala and myself as the principal presenters. At the Pacific Rim Conference at University of San Francisco I was a speaker along with Ven. Heng Sure, and at a Buddhist-Christian conference in Malibu, California I shared some thoughts about how my book Thoughts Matter includes teaching that parallels some of the training of the mind in Buddhism. On another occasion I traveled with Fr. Julian von Duerbeck and Br. Gregory Perron to Deer Park near Madison, Wisconsin, for a meeting at which we were hosted by Geshe Sopa. Over ten times I’ve been a guest of Dr. Norbu, the Dalai Lama’s oldest brother, who now resides in Bloomington, Indiana, and for seven years Dr. John Borelli of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has invited me to the table of dialogue at an annual USCCB-sponsored Catholic-Muslim dialogue in Plainfield, Indiana.
The text underneath the story of my years with MID would be all the relationships that shaped and called me to my monastic way of life. At this writing I’ll name several persons who continue to astound me: Odette Baumer-Despeigne was a grand woman who pioneered the dialogue. Sr. Pascaline Coff’s role could not be exaggerated. His Holiness the Dalai Lama shared himself with us both as a teacher and a host at his temple in Dharamsala. Lalitha Krishna tutored me in Hinduism, while Dr. Shihad Athar opened for me the window to Islam and Rev. Kusala the window to orthodox Buddhism. Pema Tsultrim’s exchange was warm and personal; our paths crossed three times and we still correspond. Pema first came to the U.S. with other Tibetan monastics on one of the spirituality exchanges and stayed in our guest hall in Beech Grove. We next met when I visited her monastery in North India, where she gave me her bedroom. As she was then the superior of that community in Tilokpur, she had a huge image of the Buddha that entirely covered one wall; when I awoke the first morning I certainly had some reorientation work to do! Our third meeting occurred when she returned to the States with some other Tibetan monastics to study health care, computers, and English while in residence at Benedictine monasteries. Finally, Fr. Pierre de Béthune has been instrumental in forming MID into a worldwide network of intermonastic dialogue. Although I never met pioneers in dialogue like Thomas Merton, Abhishiktananda, or Bede Griffiths, I feel privileged to be part of the second-generation that has carried forward the work that those others began with so much courage and foresight.