It is hard to believe that 25 years have passed since returning from that uniquely blessed year of living in an ashram in South India and finding an invitation to be secretary of the newly forming “working group” for intermonastic dialogue. After begging our Congregation to permit a small community of our Sisters to embrace this invitation and support the work together, I attended the first meeting along with others invited by the AIM.

In the heartland of America, among the verdant green hills of northwest Missouri, MID began its existence as the North American Board for East-West Dialogue (NABEWD). From January 6-8, 1978, at Rickenbach Center on the grounds of our monastery in Clyde, Missouri, five monastics from North America came together: Abbot Armand Veilleux, OCSO; Sr. Donald Corcoran, OSB; Sr. Denyse Lavigne, OSB; Abbot Jerome Hanus, OSB; and myself, Sr. Pascaline Coff, OSB. (Fr. George Seidel, OSB, had agreed to serve as a member of the group but was unable to attend this meeting.) We were invited by the AIM in Vanves, France, to meet in response to the Abbot Primate’s mandate from the prefect of the Roman secretariat for the Church’s relations with non-Christian religions. Cardinal Pignedoli, in his letter of 12 June 1974 to our Benedictine Abbot Primate Rembert Weakland, had urged the formation of working groups of Christian monastics to promote and develop the work of intermonastic dialogue with monks and nuns of other religions. “The existence of monasticism at the heart of the Catholic Church is, in itself, a bridge connecting all religions,” the Cardinal wrote. It is at the contemplative level that we are one.

A subcommission for Europe was established some months later. The aim of these “working boards” or “commissions” was to assist in the development of dialogue within Western monastic houses by alerting monastic men and women to available resources, by awakening all to the need for and value of East-West dialogue, and by helping sensitize in turn those of the East to our Western spirituality and traditions. In short, both East and West would become aware of their mutual riches and possibilities. And all of this was flowing from the Spirit’s movements in the Second Vatican Council. My heart leapt for joy!

Shortly before arriving for the meeting in Missouri, our chairperson, Abbot Armand Veilleux, had been asked by his community to begin a foundation in Africa soon after our meeting. Therefore Abbot Martin Burne was elected chair for future meetings and I was chosen as executive secretary. Also at this meeting Dr. Robert Muller, former assistant Secretary General of the UN, was chosen to be our first advisor. He had written a moving letter to Abbot Armand that was read at this meeting, and he later gave invaluable advice along the way. Today he is honored as a prophet for our times.

The first issue of our Bulletin was created from the news of this meeting. This issue, only four pages long, was dated January 9, 1978. It was printed on a mimeograph machine at Hogan High School next door to our monastery, then run off by hand on a copy machine and assembled on the floor of my cell in our Kansas City monastery. The community all helped with the mailing to our first 250 potential readers. What a magnificent East-West magazine our present anniversary issue has come to be, thanks to all the creativity and love from our present executive director, chairman , and the members and advisors of MID. Already in 1978 a first, interim logo appeared in the Bulletin’s second issue, and by issue #4 the present logo for MID was settled upon to the complete satisfaction of all. It was created by Sr. Judith Kmiek, a temporary member in our community at Osage+Monastery in Sand Springs, Oklahoma, and was endorsed by the members of the “working group.” I loved creating the Bulletin from the beginning. News just seemed to come from all directions and in everything that the mail brought forth. This was before the cyberspace explosion. To review the first Bulletins now is truly amazing. It was indeed the work of the Spirit.

Prior to being invited to this intermonastic working group I had never thought of becoming involved in interreligious dialogue. I had heard of the Bangkok Conference where Thomas Merton had died, but I thought he had represented Western monastics very well at that gathering and that someone would surely replace him in spite of the great loss for Gethsemani and the entire monastic world. I had been in South India for a year at Fr. Bede Griffiths’ Saccidananda Ashram, popularly known as Shantivanam, seeking the interiority for which the country was known, and one of my surprises that year was finding myself present at many interreligious dialogue conferences. Also, Fr. Bede invited Hindu holy men and women as guests at the ashram on the annual mahasamadhi anniversary (death) celebrations of the two founders, Fr. Jules Monchanin and Abhishiktananda. It was in view of this that Fr. Bede was recommended to our “working group” at its initial meeting as a good possibility for a “roving monk” to visit our North American monastics and share the treasures of Eastern spirituality. During preparations for Fr. Bede’s visit to the monasteries, our first project was the co-sponsoring of the Merton tenth-anniversary celebration at Columbia University in New York in December 1978. The city was enduring a garbage strike the weekend we arrived but the celebration was a great success. This was also the year of the founding of the Abhishiktananda Society in New Delhi.

In July 1979 Fr. Bede, together with Bro. Amaldas, came as “roving monks” lecturing and living life within 15 of our North American monasteries. Brother Amaldas taught yoga in between lectures. The two were warmly received and truly whet appetites for more of this contemplative spirituality from the East. A volume entitled The Cosmic Revelation captured the lectures given at Conception Abbey and was published by Templegate the next year. Bede Griffiths was enthused about the Intermonastic Dialogue Board and the exchanges that were proposed and was delighted to be invited to participate so intimately in the overall effort. The following year NABEWD sponsored an East-West monastic symposium with Fr. Raimundo Panikkar as keynote speaker. Fr. Panikkar had been on pilgrimage in India during the preceding year and arrived on fire with his topic: “The Monk as Universal Archetype, East and West.” “Blessed Simplicity is the monastic principle par excellence” some 80 participants heard him insist in Petersham, Massachusetts. The proceedings were later published in a volume under the title Blessed Simplicity.

During the Benedictine sesquimillennial year of 1980 Abbot Armand returned from Africa and was unanimously elected chairperson of NABEWD once again. The following year we were requested by the Naropa Buddhist Institute in Boulder, Colorado, to share our mailing list of interested monastics in exchange for free scholarships to their summer East-West Conference featuring Bro. David Steindl-Rast, Fr. Thomas Keating, and other prominent speakers. Abbot Lawrence Wagner and I, representing the board, attended the conference during which H.H. the Dalai Lama was a guest speaker, so we asked to be included in an audience with the latter. In a group of some 30 others, we asked His Holiness if he would be interested in sending some of his monks to visit our American monasteries. He replied, “Yes, but I have no money!” Abbot Lawrence volunteered: “Our American abbots will be happy to chip in and cover the air expenses, Your Holiness.” The Dalai Lama said: “You wait for me after this is over,” and it was then that the groundwork was laid for our eight subsequent “hospitality exchanges” between Tibetan and Christian monks and nuns.

The first year (1982, Phase I) Ven. Konchuk Sithar visited six mid-American monasteries with such goodness and finesse that he returned to Tibet in Exile (Dharamsala) as “Brother Konchuk” with an invitation for three more monks to visit our monasteries the following year (1983, Phase II). These exchanges were deeply fruitful, for they brought monks from a foreign land and a foreign religion right onto our own turf and vice versa. They were informative, stretching and bonding. We couldn’t wait to inquire if the exchange could include female monastics and so, with delight, the next exchange (1986, Phase III) found six of us from NABEWD—three monks and three nuns—visiting 26 monasteries and four nunneries in North and South India. The Tibetan people both in and out of their monasteries were so gentle, compassionate, selfless, and joyful that it was hard to believe that they had already suffered so much at the hands of the Chinese militants. Phase VII (1995) took some of us into Tibet itself, where we marveled at the Himalayan peaks and were horrified at the presence of so much military presence everywhere.

With the eighth exchange (1996) we had the great joy of hosting H.H. the Dalai Lama at Gethsemani, Thomas Merton’s own monastery, but this is getting ahead of our story. The highlight of each of these exchanges that took us Christian monastics to India and Tibet was our scheduled time with H.H. the Dalai Lama. He always rose from his chair and came out with open arms to greet us on the porch of his residence. Some of us were also present in California the day the announcement came that he had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He was scheduled to speak in a large gymnasium and appeared stooping through a darkened igloo decoration on a stage. The standing ovation was overwhelming as people rattled their stadium seats and danced for joy. We were given formal invitations to his 60th Birthday party in New Delhi and again in Dharamsala. Out of these intermonastic hospitality exchanges we also created an education program for Tibetan monastics in our American monasteries whereby the Tibetans became apprentices at computer science, nursing, and English-language skills while following our daily schedule and making snowmen and going sledding in between.

Meanwhile, Fr. Bede Griffiths had returned again to the United States in 1983 at our invitation to be the keynote speaker at our East-West monastic symposium “Formation and Transformation According to an Eastern Perspective.” This was held at the seminary in Kansas City, Kansas, and was deeply appreciated by both monastics and the laity. The latter begged for more such conferences.

We requested a contact person from each of our North American monasteries who would receive and disseminate our news and needs as a dialogue board. Therefore, in 1986 we held the first regional contact persons’ meeting and encouraged these monastic leaders to create similar local gatherings. That same year the members of NABEWD enjoyed creating a series of five videotaped sharings on “Challenges to Monastic Life Today” and then made these available to the monasteries.

Fr. Thomas Keating, OCSO, was elected our chairperson in 1984 and was unanimously re-elected three years later at a time when he was unable to be present. His car leaving Snowmass had skidded on the ice and he was hospitalized with collarbone complications. Subsequent giftful and gifted chairpersons included the Benedictines Fr. Timothy Kelly, Fr. James Wiseman, and currently Fr. William Skudlarek.

What was the highlight for me in these 25 years? There were so many, but the Parliament of World Religions in 1993 touched my heart as did no other experience. This was what the Monastic Interreligious Dialogue Board was founded for: to be a bridge at the contemplative level with other religions and to help make the spiritual riches of East and West more available to monastics of both regions of our earth. The actual dialogue at the Parliament occurred mainly as informal sharing between scheduled events, but the whole experience of being together in one place with those of so many other religions, cultures, and countries, riding up and down the escalators in the Chicago hotel, seeing on all sides a hue of variegated colors (turbaned, robed, saried), greeting one another with smiles, bows, and other reverent gestures—all this made communication/communion tangible. The Lord crowned my awe by placing me next to H.H. the Dalai Lama during our Tibetan-Christian intermonastic panel. And to think that all of this occurred because a holy Hindu, Swami Vivekananda, had come from India to the United States a hundred years earlier and shared his religious beliefs so eloquently.

Being executive secretary of the board and editor of the Bulletin during those initial years of NABEWD was almost full-time work, richly rewarding and energizing as our small community simultaneously struggled to become a regular monastic ashram in the Forest of Peace, Osage+Monastery, in Sand Springs, Oklahoma. I am and shall be eternally grateful for all the love and goodness of everyone along the Way! To me the spirituality of the dialogue will always be “communication that becomes communion!” East-West interreligious dialogue was important back in 1978 but now in 2003 we know it is crucial for life and peace on earth as we allow the Divine to manifest to us and through us.