We must distinguish between interreligious dialogue and intrareligious dialogue. The first confronts already-established religions and deals with questions of doctrine and discipline. Intrareligious dialogue is something else. It does not begin with doctrine, theology and diplomacy. It is intra, which means that if I do not discover in myself the terrain where the Hindu, the Muslim, the Jew and the atheist may have a place—in my heart, in my intelligence, in my life—I will never be able to enter into a genuine dialogue with him.

As long as I do not open my heart and do not see that the other is not an other but a part of myself who enlarges and completes me, I will not arrive at dialogue. If I embrace you, then I understand you. All this is a way of saying that real intrareligious dialogue begins in myself, and that it is more an exchange of religious experiences than of doctrines. If one does not start out from this foundation, no religious dialogue is possible; it is just idle chatter.(1)

Introduction
The Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue is presently developing a document on the spirituality of dialogue. This document will be called “A Christian Spirituality of Interreligious Dialogue,” and it will attempt to clarify the Church’s “profound motivations” for engaging in interfaith dialogue and “to encourage its practice.”(2) In so doing, it will undoubtedly seek to address some of the many fruitful demands that this dialogue makes upon those who enter into it at the level of theological discourse and religious experience. What I would like to do in this paper is basically anticipate the PCID’s forthcoming document by (a) briefly sketching some of the constitutive theological underpinnings of any Christian spirituality of dialogue, and (b) reflecting at greater length on the actual religious experience of interreligious dialogue so as to better understand the kinds of demands that this practice makes on a person at this level.

A. The Theological Underpinnings of a Christian Spirituality of Dialogue
To begin, let’s look briefly at some of the theological bases for a Christian spirituality of interreligious dialogue. For a Christian, the spirituality and practice of dialogue “flows from the heart of faith in God, a God of [love] and communion, which the mystery of the Trinity enables us to glimpse, a God who is Father for all human beings, Son who has come among us, and Spirit who works in all hearts and religions.” This spirituality is necessarily(3)

centered on the person of Jesus Christ, the Son of the Father who sends the Spirit. It invites the Christian to contemplate Jesus in the Gospels so as to understand his way of meeting every person, even someone from another culture or from another religion. In fact, it is a matter of having the same mind as was in Christ Jesus (see Philippians 2:5), with all the exigencies that this imitation of Christ involves.(4)

Those who are involved with meeting people of other religious traditions

will often have the impression of being on the frontiers of the Church or even going beyond. For this reason it is important to maintain links with the Christian community, to share with it the experience of dialogue and to find support in its prayer. This spirituality of dialogue is therefore also profoundly ecclesial.(5)

Finally, the Christian who is wholeheartedly engaged in the spiritual practice of interfaith dialogue will discover that it

opens us to the dimensions of all humanity and supports us in our traveling with our brothers and sisters of other religions on this “brotherly journey in which we accompany each other towards the transcendent goal that…God has set for us” (John Paul II, “Speech at the Conclusion of World Day of Prayer for Peace,” Assisi, 22 October 1986).(6)

Such then are some of the theological underpinnings of a Christian spirituality of interreligious dialogue. I would now like to share with you some reflections on the actual religious experience of dialogue in order to get a better idea of just how this profound spiritual practice does indeed open us to “the dimensions of all humanity.” To this end, therefore, we can begin by asking: What is at the very heart or center of the spirituality—any spirituality—of interreligious dialogue?

B. The Call to Intrareligious Dialogue
In answering this question, we need to be mindful of two things. The first is the fact that, “[w]hile the sincerity and the honesty of interreligious dialogue with members of other religious traditions presuppose that one enters into it with the integrity of one’s personal faith, it also requires openness to the faith of the other, in its difference.”(7)

Each partner in the dialogue must enter into the experience of the other, in an effort to grasp that experience from within. In order to do this, he or she must rise above the level of the concepts in which this experience is imperfectly expressed, to attain, insofar as possible, through and beyond the concepts, to the experience itself.(8)

The second thing that we need to be mindful of is that this experience of mutual presence and communion that is itself ultimately “beyond words, and beyond speech, and . . . beyond concepts,”(9) this effort or act of interior “comprehension” and “empathy” that Raimon Panikkar has termed “intrareligious” dialogue, is that which constitutes the experiential heart of and indispensable condition for interreligious dialogue.(10) Indeed, while there are many different forms of dialogue that can take place within the overall context of interreligious dialogue—such as the “dialogue of life,” the “dialogue of works,” the “dialogue of theological exchange,” and the “dialogue of religious experience” (with which MID is primarily concerned)(11)—intrareligious dialogue defines the ultimate spiritual task and religious horizon of all authentic dialogue in depth. In fact, one could say that intrareligious dialogue points in an experiential or existential way to that “depth of field” which alone “allows dialogue to be engaged in . . . at the spiritual and religious level.”(12)

But exactly what is intrareligious dialogue? In terms of its actual practice, what does it entail? What does this dialogue in depth, at the spiritual and religious level, actually look or feel like? We can begin to better understand the precise nature of intrareligious dialogue if we keep in mind that it is in itself above all “a religious act—an act that neither unifies nor stifles but re-links us (in all directions). . . by helping us discover the ‘other’ in ourselves.”(13) As such, it is an act that

takes place in the core of our being in our quest for salvific truth. . . . We engage in such a dialogue not only looking above, toward a transcendent reality, or behind, toward an original tradition, but also horizontally, toward the world of other people who may believe they have found other paths leading to the realization of human destiny. [In this], the search becomes an authentic prayer, a prayer open in all directions. . . . [It is] open [because] it is no longer locked in the jail of egotism; it is open to the religiousness of our neighbors, [whom we come to love as our very selves, as] [t]heir beliefs become a personal religious question. [And this prayerful dialogue] is also profound [since] it is no longer concerned with mere formulations [but, rather, with]. . . the meaning of reality [or] salvific truth. . . .(14)

Through, with, in and by this internal or intra-religious dialogue, then, we learn to contain both our faith tradition and that of the “other” in ourselves and to transcend them both in an experience of surrender to a Truth that is greater than and incorporates both self and other. Consequently, we can say that, in Christian terms, intrareligious dialogue is, of its very nature, a perichoretic and kenotic act of eucharistic assimilation that “tries to assimilate the transcendent into our immanence”(15) by means of what one author has referred to as a continual “passing over and returning,”(16) where “passing over” means “encountering both the other and the religious experience which that other bears within, together with his or her [world view]; [while] ‘returning’ stands for reflecting on [and learning from] the impact made by the faith of the other on one’s own faith.”(17) Moreover, insofar as this eucharistic act constitutes the very heart and horizon and center of interreligious dialogue and, hence, any spirituality of interreligious dialogue, we can say further that interfaith

dialogue, when properly understood, is not a compromise with error but a process of enrichment by which each religion opens itself to the truth to be found in the other religion, and the two parties grow together in the common search for truth. . . . Thus we begin to realize that truth is one, but that it has many faces, and each religion, is, as it were, a face of the one Truth. . . .(18)

In light of this, when we attend to the depth dimension of not only interfaith dialogue in particular but of the spiritual practice of dialogue in general, it is clear that, at the level of religious experience, genuine dialogue is, fundamentally, “opening myself to another so that he [or she] might speak and reveal my [truth to me] that I cannot know by myself because it is [in a certain sense too close or too]. . . self-evident [to me].”(19) In this,

Dialogue is a way of knowing myself and of disentangling my own point of view from other viewpoints and from me, because it is grounded so deeply in my own roots as to be utterly hidden from me. It is the other who through our encounter awakens this human depth latent in me in an endeavor that surpasses both of us. [And in] authentic dialogue this process is reciprocal. Dialogue [therefore] sees the other not as an extrinsic, accidental aid, but as the indispensable, personal element in our search for truth, because I am not a self-sufficient, autonomous individual. In this sense, dialogue is a religious act par excellence because it recognizes my religatio to another, my individual poverty, the need to get out of myself, transcend myself, in order to save myself.(20)

It is thus a truly spiritual practice of “radical openness,”(21) of personal exposure, without fear, to an often painful struggle with both impoverishment and enrichment—a struggle that simultaneously presupposes and fosters forgetfulness of self and unconditional welcome of the other; a struggle therefore that “faces the untidiness of life, and bears this encounter . . . without imposing judgments and dogmatic truths.”(22) Viewed from this experiential perspective of depth, then, dialogue is seen for what it essentially is at its most authentic: a religious practice that points beyond itself to, and in a certain sense embodies, an order of being that is ultimately beyond words, beyond speech, and beyond the concepts of sameness and difference, self and other. As such it is

a detachment from the constructed languages and identities with which we clothe and hide ourselves that frees us to bear in our hearts both the opaqueness and transparency of the human condition and spirit. Spiritually it is a surrender to the ambiguity of life and to the mysterious remainder that exceeds and surpasses all containment.

Conclusion
Such, then, are the kinds of demands that this practice of dialogue in depth makes on a person at the level of spiritual and religious experience; such are the demands of the call to the communicatio in sacris(23) that is intrareligious dialogue. In conclusion, therefore, I would just like to note that any spirituality of interreligious dialogue, be it Christian or otherwise, must take these demands and this experience into adequate account. For, at its very heart, the spirituality of dialogue in general and of interreligious dialogue in particular is and always will be a spirituality of radical openness and surrender that is lived out courageously in faith, hope and love.(24)