Volume 4 Issue 2 Fall 2018

4 S p i r i t ua l i t y S t u d i e s 4 - 2 Fa l l 2 0 1 8 Let me open our dialogue with a question – a bit broader and personal at the same time: How this historical awareness of transformational moments in your monastic tradition influenced your understanding of your own personal identity – an identity of a Christian, a Benedictine, a priest, a monk engaged in interfaith dialogue of spiritual experience? This is not an easy question to respond to because so much of my identity as an ordained Benedictine Christian has been shaped by social and cultural dynamics that affected me in ways that I – at least in my earliest and most formative years – was not conscious of. I grew up on a farm in a region of central Minnesota that was almost 100 % Catholic, but in a township where one’s identity was also determined by one’s German or Polish descent. At the age of 12 (it was a different era!), I entered the minor seminary (high school) at Saint John’s. Even though Saint John’s was only 10 miles from where I grew up, its religious and intellectual culture made it a world quite different from the one I knew. When I was a child, many people still spoke German and Polish – my great grandfather, who lived with us, spoke only Polish. High school not only forced me to overcome my “Stearns County accent”, it also gave me my first opportunity to study a language (Latin) and whetted my appetite for learning other languages. I suspect that my fascination with the different ways people put into words their experience of the world around them laid the foundation for my interest exploring religious worlds different from the one that initially shaped and continues to shape my religious identity as a Roman Catholic Benedictine monk. 2 Identity & Interspirituality The topic of identity – its development and transformations – has its relevance not only for experimental and clinical psychology (E. Erikson, J. Marcia etc.), but for spirituality as well. In the spiritual context, it opens up a wide variety of questions, the question of multiple spiritual or/and religious identity among others. First and foremost, is multiple spiritual or/and religious identity possible at all? What is your view of the issue? Togo, a tiny West African country with less than eight million inhabitants, has 39 tribal languages. All formal education, however, is in French. On a visit to a monastery in Togo in 2009, I met a relative of the superior of the monastery who had been a school teacher for many years. When I asked her if she had forgotten the language she was born into, she replied, “One never forgets the language of one’s mother!” A well-known dictum – at least among Catholic sacramental theologians and liturgists – is that Christians are made, not begotten. Theologically, I believe that is correct. At the same time, I would not hesitate to say that I was born a Catholic. Even if I wanted to forget my Catholicism, I doubt that I would be able to. To continue with the linguistic analogy, although my parents were able to speak some Polish, I was born into a primarily English-speaking world. That is my linguistic identity, and I can’t imagine that I will ever forget how to speak English, even though I speak other languages, a couple more or less fluently. I have learned about and from other religious traditions, but my Catholic religious identity, like my mother tongue, was given to me ab initio, and it is from that identity that I appreciate and draw on the beliefs and practices of other religious traditions. The double or even multiple spiritual or/and religious belonging enquiry brings us to another contemporary concept, the notion of interspirituality. The term itself was introduced by Wayne Teasdale and described as a movement that is bringing together people who simultaneously follow two or more spiritual traditions of various religious backgrounds while staying rooted in a particular religious tradition (W. Teasdale, The Mystic Heart, 1999).

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