My Journey into Interreligious Dialogue: Part I
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Professor Ewert Cousins of Fordham University, a longtime member of the MID advisory board, has kindly composed these reflections on the way he first became involved in interreligious dialogue. The present article focuses on his early contacts with the Lakota Indians, his subsequent work at an ecumenical institute in Jerusalem, and his involvement with a remarkable conference at the United Nations in 1975. We will publish a sequel to this article in the next issue of our bulletin.
The Lakota Reservation in South Dakota
My journey into interreligous dialogue began more than forty years ago on a Lakota or Sioux reservation in South Dakota. At that time I was studying theology at a Jesuit seminary in Kansas and could volunteer to spend the summer working with the Brulé Lakota on the Rosebud Reservation. Along with four other seminarians, I worked as an amateur cowboy branding cattle, and also painting window frames, doing handy work in the buildings and on the grounds.
In the evening after work, I would often saddle up a horse and ride into the canyons to visit Chief Hollow Horn Bear, the last official chief of the Brulé Lakota. When I asked him to describe the traditional Lakota religion, he told me the story of the White Buffalo Woman, a heavenly figure, who miraculously appeared to two Lakota braves on the plains. She prophesied that an animal that they had never seen before would come to their village.
If the Lakota welcomed and honored it, then the animal would greatly enhance their lives. This was reported to the tribe who waited in expectation. A short while later a herd of buffalo ran through their village.
When the dust had settled and the buffalo had departed, the Lakota discovered a strange animal that did not resemble a buffalo, rather it looked like a large dog, so they named it “chunckaka” or “big dog.” To this day, the Lakota call it “big dog.” This animal was the horse! Soon other horses came, and with them the Lakota became the most powerful tribe throughout the plains. On the “winter count,” an annual chronology of tribal events, the first time the horse appears is the year Coronado crossed the plains and brought with him horses from Spain. As the White Buffalo Woman had foretold, the gift of the horse enormously enriched the future of the Lakota nation.
On other occasions, I would meet with Jake Kills in Sight, whose grandfather fought with Chief Crazy Horse against General Custer and the Seventh Cavalry. When Custer encountered a huge encampment of Lakota along the Little Big Horn river, he had to flee with his cavalry, but eventually was forced to take a stand. Crazy Horse and his warriors surrounded Custer and his men. Kills in Sight tells the rest of the story. Crazy Horse held his warriors at bay out of firing range. Then he dismounted and picked herbs from the ground and placed them in his war shirt. He then rode directly into Custer’s soldiers who fired their rifles directly at Crazy Horse. The bullets hit him in the chest but did not penetrate. They merely fell to the ground. Crazy Horse returned to his warriors and showed them how the bullets left him unscathed. He said to them, “My medicine is strong today!” Then he shouted the Lakota battle cry, “Hoka Hey” or “Welcome, you!” and charged!
Lakota history was very present in the memory of the tribe as I learned from Chief Hollow Horn Bear and Jake Kills in Sight. This was highlighted by the fact that the last survivor of the battle of the Little Big Horn had died only two years before I went to the reservation and the last survivor of the Wounded Knee massacre was still alive and residing not far from the Jesuit mission where I was working.
In this atmosphere, I found myself penetrating deeper and deeper into Lakota culture, their dramatic history and their profound spirituality. I vividly remember the day, while I was talking to a group of Lakota, that I felt my consciousness, as it were, extend itself out of my body and pass over into their consciousness. From that moment I felt I could see things from their perspective and experience their values from within their world. Also I could look back at my own world and see its values in a clearer light—but also its limitations! The insight of the moment grew over the following weeks. I became increasingly aware of human values that the Indians preserved and that we had lost: their love of the land, their organic harmony with nature, their strong tribal ties, their sense of time as a flowing process rather than a static continuum to be divided into endless schedules, their immersion in myth and ritual, whose language and dynamics they understood with a primordial wisdom. I perceived also their religious sensibility: their awareness of the presence of Wakan Tanka, or God, in nature and in their lives. Nature as a whole was sacred to them, as was life in all its dimensions. Certain areas, for example the Black Hills, were especially sacred to the Lakota. Through the sacred ritual of the Sun Dance, they participated in the animal world-especially the buffalo—the tribe and Wakan tanka.
This experience was decisive for me. It broke the invisible blinders of my own culture and opened an experiential world I had not even dreamed existed. For a while it alienated me from my culture, for I realized that I had been trapped within my culture without knowing it. I became aware that, while my culture had given me values that the Indians had not received, it also deprived me of values that were theirs. Only some five years later was I able to resolve this tension, by traveling to Greece and perceiving how the self-reflective consciousness of Greek culture had emerged out of primal consciousness.
It was decisive academically as well. Since I had discovered a new world of experience through the Indians, I realized that there existed many other such worlds beyond the horizons of my culture that I could explore in many ways.
Some years later, I became aware of a formula that summed up my experiences with the Lakota and with my continued journey into interreligious dialogue. In his book The Way of All the Earth, John Dunne,1 of Notre Dame University, describes this process. He writes in his preface: “Is a religion coming to birth in our time? It could be. What seems to be occurring is a phenomenon we might call “passing over,” passing over from one culture to another, from one way of life to another, from one religion to another. Passing over is a shifting of standpoint, a going over to the standpoint of another culture, another way of life, another religion.” According to Dunne, passing over leads to a return: “it is followed by an equal and opposite process we might call “coming back,” coming back with new insight to one’s own culture, one’s own way of life, one’s own religion.” Dunne sees this process as characteristic of our time: “Passing over and coming back, it seems is the spiritual adventure of our time.” I believe that statement captures the essence of my experience with the Lakota and my continued involvement in interreligious dialogue.
Although I did not have the clarity of John Dunne’s formulation, I grasped the essence of dialogic consciousness. Before leaving the Lakota reservation that summer I made a plan to follow with other cultures and religions the same path I had discovered with the Lakota: namely, (1) to immerse myself in the total concrete life world of some followers of a religion; (2) with the plan to participate empathetically in that consciousness; (3) to return enriched to my own. The rest of my life has been a spiritual journey into interreligious dialogue. Where this will ultimately lead it is too early to tell, but for many who have been drawn this way, passing over and coming back is the distinctive spiritual journey of our time.
My journey into interreligous dialogue began more than forty years ago on a Lakota or Sioux reservation in South Dakota. At that time I was studying theology at a Jesuit seminary in Kansas and could volunteer to spend the summer working with the Brulé Lakota on the Rosebud Reservation. Along with four other seminarians, I worked as an amateur cowboy branding cattle, and also painting window frames, doing handy work in the buildings and on the grounds.
In the evening after work, I would often saddle up a horse and ride into the canyons to visit Chief Hollow Horn Bear, the last official chief of the Brulé Lakota. When I asked him to describe the traditional Lakota religion, he told me the story of the White Buffalo Woman, a heavenly figure, who miraculously appeared to two Lakota braves on the plains. She prophesied that an animal that they had never seen before would come to their village.
If the Lakota welcomed and honored it, then the animal would greatly enhance their lives. This was reported to the tribe who waited in expectation. A short while later a herd of buffalo ran through their village.
When the dust had settled and the buffalo had departed, the Lakota discovered a strange animal that did not resemble a buffalo, rather it looked like a large dog, so they named it “chunckaka” or “big dog.” To this day, the Lakota call it “big dog.” This animal was the horse! Soon other horses came, and with them the Lakota became the most powerful tribe throughout the plains. On the “winter count,” an annual chronology of tribal events, the first time the horse appears is the year Coronado crossed the plains and brought with him horses from Spain. As the White Buffalo Woman had foretold, the gift of the horse enormously enriched the future of the Lakota nation.
On other occasions, I would meet with Jake Kills in Sight, whose grandfather fought with Chief Crazy Horse against General Custer and the Seventh Cavalry. When Custer encountered a huge encampment of Lakota along the Little Big Horn river, he had to flee with his cavalry, but eventually was forced to take a stand. Crazy Horse and his warriors surrounded Custer and his men. Kills in Sight tells the rest of the story. Crazy Horse held his warriors at bay out of firing range. Then he dismounted and picked herbs from the ground and placed them in his war shirt. He then rode directly into Custer’s soldiers who fired their rifles directly at Crazy Horse. The bullets hit him in the chest but did not penetrate. They merely fell to the ground. Crazy Horse returned to his warriors and showed them how the bullets left him unscathed. He said to them, “My medicine is strong today!” Then he shouted the Lakota battle cry, “Hoka Hey” or “Welcome, you!” and charged!
Lakota history was very present in the memory of the tribe as I learned from Chief Hollow Horn Bear and Jake Kills in Sight. This was highlighted by the fact that the last survivor of the battle of the Little Big Horn had died only two years before I went to the reservation and the last survivor of the Wounded Knee massacre was still alive and residing not far from the Jesuit mission where I was working.
In this atmosphere, I found myself penetrating deeper and deeper into Lakota culture, their dramatic history and their profound spirituality. I vividly remember the day, while I was talking to a group of Lakota, that I felt my consciousness, as it were, extend itself out of my body and pass over into their consciousness. From that moment I felt I could see things from their perspective and experience their values from within their world. Also I could look back at my own world and see its values in a clearer light—but also its limitations! The insight of the moment grew over the following weeks. I became increasingly aware of human values that the Indians preserved and that we had lost: their love of the land, their organic harmony with nature, their strong tribal ties, their sense of time as a flowing process rather than a static continuum to be divided into endless schedules, their immersion in myth and ritual, whose language and dynamics they understood with a primordial wisdom. I perceived also their religious sensibility: their awareness of the presence of Wakan Tanka, or God, in nature and in their lives. Nature as a whole was sacred to them, as was life in all its dimensions. Certain areas, for example the Black Hills, were especially sacred to the Lakota. Through the sacred ritual of the Sun Dance, they participated in the animal world-especially the buffalo—the tribe and Wakan tanka.
This experience was decisive for me. It broke the invisible blinders of my own culture and opened an experiential world I had not even dreamed existed. For a while it alienated me from my culture, for I realized that I had been trapped within my culture without knowing it. I became aware that, while my culture had given me values that the Indians had not received, it also deprived me of values that were theirs. Only some five years later was I able to resolve this tension, by traveling to Greece and perceiving how the self-reflective consciousness of Greek culture had emerged out of primal consciousness.
It was decisive academically as well. Since I had discovered a new world of experience through the Indians, I realized that there existed many other such worlds beyond the horizons of my culture that I could explore in many ways.
Some years later, I became aware of a formula that summed up my experiences with the Lakota and with my continued journey into interreligious dialogue. In his book The Way of All the Earth, John Dunne,1 of Notre Dame University, describes this process. He writes in his preface: “Is a religion coming to birth in our time? It could be. What seems to be occurring is a phenomenon we might call “passing over,” passing over from one culture to another, from one way of life to another, from one religion to another. Passing over is a shifting of standpoint, a going over to the standpoint of another culture, another way of life, another religion.” According to Dunne, passing over leads to a return: “it is followed by an equal and opposite process we might call “coming back,” coming back with new insight to one’s own culture, one’s own way of life, one’s own religion.” Dunne sees this process as characteristic of our time: “Passing over and coming back, it seems is the spiritual adventure of our time.” I believe that statement captures the essence of my experience with the Lakota and my continued involvement in interreligious dialogue.
Although I did not have the clarity of John Dunne’s formulation, I grasped the essence of dialogic consciousness. Before leaving the Lakota reservation that summer I made a plan to follow with other cultures and religions the same path I had discovered with the Lakota: namely, (1) to immerse myself in the total concrete life world of some followers of a religion; (2) with the plan to participate empathetically in that consciousness; (3) to return enriched to my own. The rest of my life has been a spiritual journey into interreligious dialogue. Where this will ultimately lead it is too early to tell, but for many who have been drawn this way, passing over and coming back is the distinctive spiritual journey of our time.
Notes:
1. John Dunne, The Way of All the Earth (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University, 1978), ix.
2. Ervin Laszlo, Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2004).
1. John Dunne, The Way of All the Earth (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University, 1978), ix.
2. Ervin Laszlo, Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2004).
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Ewert Cousins, served for many years as an advisor to Monastic Interreligious Dialogue. He was the chief editorial consultant for the 100 volume Paulist Press series, The Classics of Western Spirituality and was also General Editor of the 25-volume series, World Spirituality: An Encyclopedic History of the Religious Quest. He wrote Christ of the 21st Century, and Bonaventure and the Coincidence of Opposites. He was on the theology faculty of Fordham University, served as Co-Convenor for the Commission on World Spirituality and was Consultant to the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, 1973-1984. He died in 2009.