Ever since a crucial year in India twenty years ago, interfaith dialogue has been part of my inner journey under every aspect of my faith. Most particularly, my monastic way of life and formation has enabled me to open up to other faiths, and likewise my meeting with other faiths has fed my monastic life and practice. I simply find that in dialogue with other faiths I have been drawn to God of the depths. And I have been stimulated by both the common and the uncommon ground. For instance, Buddhist dedication to meditation has encouraged me, but also the lively popular involvement of quite foreign South Indian temple worship.

Interfaith encounter has led me to delve deeper into my own roots of faith. I find that if I am truly rooted here, in my place, I am already there, in the other place, the place of the other faith. Consciously or intentionally to go over there may in fact distract and deflect me from my search for God. If I were to go out there and leave my here behind, my personal commitment would be left out of the encounter, and I would merely bring more superficial intellectual and emotional baggage with me. My own place is the best place for me to be, the right place, as it were my source. My lifelong task is to know and to own this place as fully as I can.

Being human and free I find in myself a deep need to serve and worship a Lord, indeed to surrender myself and obey some One greater than myself. This need to worship comes from my desire for love that no human love can satisfy, an ultimate longing implanted by God out of his love into the hearts of all. I am committed to the way of Jesus Christ, and Christ, himself icon of the ineffable God, is my Lord. Others have as their Lord the Buddha or Krishna or Yahweh or the Torah, or the All-Merciful One or his Word in the Qur’an, or the Tao.

For me, to be faithful to my faith and practice is more than merely meeting others, listening and sharing what I believe. It means rather learning from them, being inspired by them, finding new insights into my Christian faith and new inspiration for my practice.

On reflection, I find I have made use in interfaith encounters of what Abhishiktananda termed epoché, once defined by the philosopher Husserl as “a certain suspension of judgment, combined with a conviction of the truth that remains unshaken.” Epoché allows us paradoxically to suspend for the time being the judgments of our faith while yet holding onto the roots of this same faith. This is only a matter of suspension—not denial—of faith whose instinct is ever to search out the truth. Of course there are things I can, in the last resort, never give up, even if I can suspend some belief temporarily.

But I have a question too to my friends of other faiths: If Jesus is the one who has opened the Kingdom of God to humankind by dying on the cross and rising from the dead, and his sufferings are not just exemplary, as are the life and teaching of the Buddha, but are also efficacious, will my friends likewise be happy to suspend faith in order to hear and engage with this fundamental stance of mine? I hope they may be.

I have found increasingly helpful the idea of a cosmic person that runs as a thread through a number of faiths. Today even contemporary science is hinting at the emergence of the archetype of such a cosmic person, an anthropic principle imprinted in the very matter and energy of the universe, a figure who links the cosmos, the human and the divine worlds. Teilhard de Chardin spoke of the presence of the cosmic Christ manifested throughout the universe and drawing the evolutionary process towards its fulfillment.

At the early morning meditation of an interfaith retreat about ten years ago at Amaravati, a Theravada monastery in Britain, we were seated together before a large, golden image of the Buddha. I felt I was seated before Christ, and yet for a moment I had the clear intuition that the figure of the Buddha and the figure of the Christ were overlapping. Do the Buddha, the Purusha and the cosmic Christ in some indefinable way overlap? I do not know, but I hope that they do.

So I ask: Has any of the mystery of this cosmic Christ been revealed beyond our Christian confines, e.g. in Hinduism, Buddhism or Islam? And in what sense does the New Testament reveal the whole Christ? I am happy to see that theologians are now asking questions about the cosmic Christ. And indeed, will the Buddhist say that the Buddha is such a cosmic figure? Will the Hindu recognize this cosmic figure in the Purusha? And who might such a cosmic figure be for Islam: the perfectly surrendered servant of the All Merciful One perhaps?

Being really open to other faiths does not have to entail syncretism, as is so often feared, even less sinking differences and joining together in one new faith. The more I have entered with integrity into the interfaith place, the more I feel I have really grown in my own faith commitment. The differences matter.

But judging which is the best or superior faith has to be avoided. If I walk trustingly in my own faith I shall learn to walk with the other person also. That is, rather than seeking a strategy to solve the paradox of interfaith relationships I can adopt, tactically as it were, an approach of just walking with those of other faiths while suspending my judgment. While I am still on pilgrimage I have not arrived, for everything in this world is transitory. What ultimately matters is that we shall all be united in God. Then all religions will be superseded. Once the river is crossed all the rafts are to be abandoned on the further shore.

Some are called to live “on the edge” and to explore the overlapping. Abhishiktananda is for me one model of this living on the edge, having, it seems, passed beyond the separating divisions of Christianity and Hinduism and yet remaining faithful to both identities to the end. Living on the edge cannot be the task of everyone, but, just as in other human fields, a few may perform this task for all humankind. It may be that I am called in some small measure to live like this.