My Journey into Interreligious Dialogue
By Ewert Cousins with Janet Cousins

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 plan to publish a sequel to this article in the next issue of our bulletin.

Part I

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.

From South Dakota to Jerusalem
From South Dakota I returned to Kansas to complete my theological studies. However, I was not ordained since for a number of years I discerned that the priesthood was not my vocation. I went to Fordham University for further studies and began a teaching career there that lasted forty years. My arrival in New York coincided with the coming of spiritual teachers from the East: Swami Satchitananda from India, Eido Shimano Roshi from Japan, Brother David Steindl-Rast of Mt. Saviour Monastery, Elmira, New York, and Rabbi Joseph Gelberman of New York City. During this period I came to know them very well and took part in their programs. In 1968 I participated with them in a conference entitled “East-West: One Heart” at Princeton Theological Seminary.

At the same time, I had become acquainted with Raimon Panikkar and had been very enriched by his teaching on the Trinity and world religions. Since the ecumenical institute called Tantur was just being established in Jerusalem at that time, he suggested that my family and I spend the academic year there in 1972-1973. This provided me with an extraordinary opportunity to take forward what I had learned about interreligious dialogue with the Lakota Indians in South Dakota.

During the academic year 1972-1973, then, I had the privilege of living, along with my family, in the Ecumenical Institute for Advanced Theological Studies in Jerusalem. This Institute developed out of an initiative proposed by the Protestant observers at the Second Vatican Council to carry on the ecumenical spirit fostered at the Council and to channel it creatively into Christian theology. Living and working together that year were some thirty theologians, representing a wide spectrum of Christian traditions among which were Eastern Orthodox (Greek, Polish, and Rumanian), Roman Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Reformed (Dutch, Belgian, and Swiss), and Seventh Day Adventist. We were privileged to have in our community such leaders in ecumenism as Oscar Culmann and the distinguished Dominican Yves Congar. Living with us at the Institute was also the eminent Old Testament scholar James Sanders who had been assigned the task of editing the Psalms from the Dead Sea scrolls.

Our institute was at a remarkably beautiful site at the city limits of Jerusalem, looking down on Bethlehem and beyond into the Judean Desert. There was a spot on our Institute grounds where we could look down across the desert and the tomb of Herod and see the sun shining like gold on the waters of the Dead Sea. The sights and sounds we experienced every day, for example, of camels and spices, were as exotic to us Americans and Europeans as they were to the Crusaders in the Middle Ages. It was in this setting that I was drawn to “pass over” into the world of Islam as I had previously done with the Lakota in South Dakota.

Since I had been living and teaching in New York City, I had significant contact with Judaism over several years, but very little contact with Islam. In Israel I had abundant opportunities to get to know the Jewish community, to get to know Jewish scholars and to observe the religious practices of the Jewish community. As a result, my main concern was to explore first hand the religious world of Islam. One of my research projects for the Ecumenical Institute consisted in “passing over” into the religious world of Islam, using the techniques I had learned among the Indians: in this case, to share in the everyday life of the Muslims by living in a village and praying with them in mosques.

After some unsuccessful attempts to make contacts, I met a young Muslim named Abdul Jaleel, who invited me to spend time with his family in their tiny village in the mountains outside Hebron. For some five months he took me to mosques in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Hebron, Gaza, and small villages to pray with Muslims in mosques.

My “passing over” followed the same route as with the Indians. I first became immersed in the everyday world of Arabic culture in the Middle East. As with the Indians, I felt that I passed over into the value experience of that world and could look back both critically and sympathetically on my own world in a new light. I remember very sharply the day on which I passed over into the religious experience of Islam. It was less than two weeks since I had met Abdul Jaleel. After spending the night at our apartment at Tantur, he invited me to attend the Friday service at the great mosque in Bethlehem. Since Friday is the Muslim holy day, the service was longer than usual and attracted a large number of Muslims. Over the period of an hour, I joined in the prayers with several hundred men and listened to the chanting of the Koran by a blind sheik. The intensity of the prayer mounted as the group bowed down repeatedly, touching their heads to the ground in submission to Allah the all-powerful. At the peak of that intensity, I felt that I passed over into the heart of their religious experience. I shared with them their sense of the transcendence of God—of his power and majesty which calls forth a response of worship, so dramatically expressed in the Muslim”s bowing to the ground.

This experience of God’s transcendence is central to Islam. It is what we, in passing over, must contact as the primary element of the Islamic religious consciousness. Our method must be that of passing over rather than mere analogy to the Christian experience of God’s transcendence. We must be cautious not to see Islam as a truncated Christianity or assume that God’s transcendence is identical in both Islam and Christianity. In the latter God’s transcendence is bound up with his immanence in the Incarnation, a distinct form of immanence which Islam strongly rejects. It is very difficult for Christians to disengage the Incarnational dimension from their religious consciousness. Only by passing over into Islam as a total structure of consciousness, can Christians understand the meaning of such images as being a slave of Allah and of submission to the will of Allah. If we penetrate deeply enough into the experience of Islam, we will discover the positive—even liberating—meaning these images have for Muslims, in spite of the fact that within the structures of Christian consciousness, with its images of freedom, they would seem repressive.

Having passed over into the central experience of Islam, Christians can come back to their own religion enriched with values perceived in Islam. If, like Muslims, they can grasp the value of God’s pure transcendence, they might be liberated from some of the negative aspects of their own belief in God”s transcendence. Since Christianity focuses so centrally on God’s immanence in the Incarnation, transcendence may become a problem for Christians. They might so emphasize God’s intimate loving presence in the human sphere in Jesus of Nazareth that they ignore or reject the dimension of transcendence that Christians share with Islam. Transcendence may appear only in a negative light, as God’s detached distance from the world or his overwhelming power which threatens the creature’s autonomy. By grasping the value of God’s transcendence in Islam—unrelated to the Incarnation—Christians can discover a dimension of their own tradition that might otherwise be submerged or rejected.

Thus passing over and coming back yields not only new knowledge of other religions, but a clearer understanding of one’s own religion and its complex relationships to other religions.

1. John Dunne, The Way of All the Earth (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University, 1978), ix.

Cousins (continued)

Bulletin 73 • Index