Odette Baumer was born of French parents in Belgium in 1913 and attended a secular school until she was nine years old. She transferred to a nun’s boarding school conducted by the Ladies of Mary. When describing her spiritual journey many decades later, Odette highlighted this change in her life as greatly significant. Among many other studies she found herself in a religion class, a dogmatic study on the mystery of the Holy Trinity. At the end of the year her teacher, a well-known theologian of the day, announced: “Mesdemoiselles, I have taught you all that can be known about God’s Mystery.” Odette broke out in tears wondering what she was to do with the rest of her life if now she knew all that one could know about God.

Fortunately, the next year their teacher was a Jesuit professor from Louvain offering lectures on missiology. His opening words “pierced” her to the heart as he said: “In missiology one has to begin with the learning of the great world religions, so I am going to introduce you to those religions existing outside Christianity.” And from that very second Odette knew what she was going to do “all her life”! The lectures went on for some weeks, offering both students and nuns some rudiments of Hinduism and Buddhism. But alas! The nuns found this way of teaching missiology much too revolutionary and Father no longer came to their school. For Odette it was enough! A direction had been given: study, contact and dialogue with those of non-Christian religions. So as soon as she left school she joined the Ecole des sciences philosophiques et religieuses of Louvain University because she felt the need to begin with a deepening of her own Christian roots.. She also began to read everything she could find on Hinduism and Buddhism.

Odette spent the rest of her life studying, contacting, and being in dialogue with persons of non-Christian religions. She eventually traveled to many foreign countries, including India sixteen times and Japan four times. Here she sought spiritual mentors and tutors and shared her own Christian heritage and the enriching teachings of the three founders of Shantivanam Ashram in South India: Fr. Jules Monchanin, Fr. Henri Le Saux (Abhishiktananda), and Fr. Bede Griffiths, as well as the teachings of the medieval Flemish mystic Hadewich and the Beguines. Early on she met Dom Godefroid, OCSO, who was later elected abbot of Citeaux and who was already well known for his deep mystical experience. She referred to this as the second grace that influenced her life’s work. She told him about her attraction to Jan van Ruusbroec and his teachings on the “fathomless sea of the Godhead” and he told her “if you are inwardly convinced, follow that way.” Odette said she took this as a “nihil obstat” and plugged herself into Ruusbroec’s thought as well as into that of teachers in other religions who use similar language, without diminishing in any way her Christian faith.

As a young woman Odette married Werner Baumer, who remained her loving and devoted husband until her last breath. Their one son Christophe is a distinguished scholar, author and businessman. Both husband and son generously supported Odette’s East-West ministry. She reserved a small upper room in her home in Switzerland for East-West meditation and lectio divina. While typing some manuscripts for others she came across Swami Abhishiktananda’s teachings and wrote to him—the beginning of an in-depth relationship that lasted even beyond his death in 1973. It was during an early trip to India in 1956 that Odette met both Abhishiktananda and Fr. Monchanin. Of this meeting she exclaimed: “My path was now determined, as I was conquered. My passion for East-West dialogue had a face. Abhishiktananda and I corresponded for seven years with regularity.” Her son Christophe and she were with him in India in 1973 just months before his passing away. After his death Odette worked for the publication of all his posthumous French manuscripts, which Abhishiktananda himself had entrusted to her.

When at home during those years she entertained a so-called intramonastic religious dialogue in order to deepen her own personal spirituality and outreach. Between 1967-1991 she organized in her home a series of lectures by speakers belonging to different traditions: Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Taoist, Confucian, and tribal. The presenters had to be committed to both an academic and a spiritual level of attainment in their own lives in order to receive an invitation. These gatherings in her home attracted over sixty participants each time.

In 1980, Odette wrote to the editor of our NABEWD (later renamed MID) Newsletter to ask if she could attend our Intermonastic Conference, Blessed Simplicity, at Holyoke, Massachusetts, where Fr. Raimon Panikkar, a longtime friend of Odette, was to be the keynote speaker. She was warmly welcomed and hosted by the community at Osage+Monastery in Oklahoma. She delighted her companions with her sharings while driving to and from Massachusetts for this conference. Of this first experience with dialogue in the United States she said: “It was in Holyoke that I spoke about the life and spiritual journey of Abhishiktananda to an American audience. They invited me to become an advisor to the group that was then called the North American Board for East-West Dialogue, later renamed Monastic Interreligious Dialogue as the English speaking counterpart of Dialogue Interreligieux Monastique.” She found the annual board meetings very meaningful for exchanging thoughts between the two continents, and crossed the ocean as often as possible during those sixteen years.

In 1995, Odette made a presentation at the MID contact person’s workshop, held at St. Procopius Abbey in Lisle, Illinois, and was the only laywoman from Europe to participate in MID’s historic Gethsemani Encounter the following year. She helped the board plan the 1999 contact person’s workshop on the theme of Christ-consciousness while she attended the 1998 board meeting at Oka Abbey near Montreal. It was here she offered her resignation “only because at long last European nuns and monks had themselves found their way to the States. The provisional bridge role I had been providing during those sixteen years had become fulfilled!” Yet, she said she was not “unemployed” because she had become a contact person for DIM in the French-speaking part of Switzerland and served as a consultant on the European level.

Truly Odette’s life was all she envisioned—and more—from that early experience in school in Louvain: study, contact and dialogue with others of non-Christian religions. At age 87 she was still giving lectures and continuing a steady flow of correspondence with people all over the world until a stroke incapacitated her. She was lovingly cared for by her husband at home until her death on September 28, 2002. Her funeral service was celebrated on the Feast of St. Francis, October 4, in the church of Frauenfeld-Oberkirch.

In the crucial and delicate realm of East-West dialogue the human family has lost a great gift in Odette’s passing and yet many of the fruits of her labors of love remain with us in her family and friends who knew her well. And she did promise to intercede through the starry heights from the throne above. Odette loved the stars and truly became one in the realm of interreligious dialogue in our day.