6-7 April 2001
Rockwood Manor Park, Potomac, Maryland, USA
Gerald T. Carney

These annual two-day meetings have been sponsored by ISKCON Communications and by the Office of Inter-religious Relations of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB). The large meeting room at the conference centre has been rearranged with three areas: for food, for discussion, for worship. These meetings begin early Friday afternoon with presentations by Christian and Vaisnava scholars. That leaves at least three hours of discussion prior to dinner. After dinner, there is an informal sharing of religious music and song.

After breakfast, the Saturday morning programme begins with a sharing of the variety of forms of prayer that are practised in each tradition. From the Vaisnava side we have devotional songs, kirtana, arati, and commentary on the Bhagavad-gita or the Bhagavata Purana. From the Christians we have hymns, Morning Prayer, reading from the Bible, and preaching on the reading. The discussion time after the prayer - about ninety minutes - has formulated responses to the prayer as well as a continuation of the conversation from the previous day. We have always been blessed with good spring weather on Saturday and have enjoyed the grounds of the conference centre during the lunch break. There is a final ninety-minute block of time for discussion after lunch before the participants devote the final hour of the meeting to planning for the following year. The work of the group was co-directed by Anuttama Dasa (ISKCON Communications) and by John Borelli (NCCB).

The first two meetings (1998 and 1999) of the dialogue had been devoted to the theme 'Spirit in the World' with assigned readings chosen from the Vaisnava and Christian scrip-tures. The 2000 meeting of this dialogue had been focused on reading the fundamental scriptural texts of our traditions so that we could share a deeper appreciation of each other's traditions. We examined selected texts from the Gospel of John and Bhagavad-gita.

This year we had decided to read two classical, but not scriptural, texts on growth in religious life: Saint Bonaventure's The Soul's Journey to God and Srila Visvanatha Cakravarti's Madhurya-kadambini (Cloud Bank of Nectar). Both texts were introduced by a representative from the Vaisnava and Christian participants.

James Wiseman, a Benedictine monk and president of the Monastic Inter-religious Dialogue, showed how Bonaventure's thirteenth-century work illustrated the soul's journey deeper into God, emphasising the importance of human emotions and the world in bringing about intimacy with God: from vestiges of God's presence in the universe and human mind, through the image of God formed to clear likeness in faith, hope, and love, to understanding God as the source of Being and Goodness, and, finally, to abiding in God beyond the capacity of intellect. He suggested links with the Madhurya-kadambini as stressing the primacy of the bhakti path and the Lord's grace, as love itself inspires more love, and as it finds expression in prema and in the spiritual intoxication of the devotee.

Ravindra Svarupa Dasa, a member of the Governing Body Commission of ISKCON, emphasised that the eighteenth-century Madhurya-kadambini, like The Soul's Journey five centuries before, presumes a life of devotional practice, which in the Vaisnava case comes about through the chanting of the divine name. He proposed ten points of encounter between the two works: the single-minded intensity of purpose that they presuppose; the necessity of devotional cultivation through prayer and discipline; the requirement of pro-gressive purification of heart; the attainment of illumination; the perception of God in all things, seeing the world - all things - as God's form; movement toward participation in higher forms of God's presence, until one knows and loves everything in God, develops the spiritual senses to understand God; and, finally, to participate in the divine life. He sug-gested that there were more possible links between Bonaventure's understanding of creation and a Vaisnava sense of divine emanations. Both presentations showed the wisdom of choosing two texts that dealt specifically with the spiritual path and the development of the devotee. In the concrete description of the journey into God and the cultivation of bhakti they represented significant steps beyond abstract doctrinal statements and provided very evocative questions for further discussion.

Throughout the periods left for discussion we focused on issues that seemed to underlie the practical experience of religious life in our diverse traditions: concern over the treat-ment of evil, the role of passion as a path to God, the place of divine embodiment as essential for spiritual advancement, and the relation between the spiritual body in the Vaisnava thought and the resurrected body in the Christian.

The period of shared prayer from both traditions on Saturday morning placed us and our theological discussion in proper context. We returned to discussing the stages of spiritual development as it is understood in our two traditions, particularly the hierarchical process of advancement on the path, and the relation between vaidhi-bhakti and Bonaventure's sense of the 'sacramentality of the created order' as they contribute to spiritual development. Finally, we discussed how the dynamism of God's presence is the foundation for all spiritual growth, and how the fullness of God comes to be shared by those who love God, as one tastes a relationship with God and savours the sweetness of God's name. As we talked, our concern passed from the texts themselves to an informal application to our experiences - similar and different - of the spiritual journey into the life of God.

Several of the strengths of this dialogue process became clear: the very high level of commitment of the participants, most of whom were returning for three or more years; the experience of many participants in both the Christian and Vaisnava traditions; the priority of shared prayer as the context for dialogue; and the high level of trust that has been generated among the participants that leads to serious sharing about our religious paths - we now speak neither from books nor from our heads alone but heart to heart.

Once again we had sumptuous meals prepared by members of the Potomac ISKCON community. For me it was reminiscent of festival meals in Vraja when it was necessary to fend off the efforts of those serving the food to pile more and more onto the plate. The food and the atmosphere of the grounds provided a perfect accompaniment to our conversa-tions.

Before leaving, we reflected on the goals that had been fulfilled in our work thus far: we have moved beyond tolerance to a level of rapport, a deeper understanding of self through the other; we have experienced change at the affective level in our appreciation of our traditions and, more importantly, each other; we enjoyed the retreat atmosphere and the time for prayer, the enthusiastic participation of one and all, and, simply, the fun of coming together. We considered several ways of continuing this sharing of classical texts on the religious life and decided to devote the 2002 meeting of the dialogue to discussing Bernard of Clairvaux's treatise On the Love of God and selections from the Narada-bhakti-sutra. Our journey together, well begun, continues.

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