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Meg’s Story —
1993-2003
Anyone who has been keeping up with the activities of Monastic
Interreligious Dialogue in recent years is already familiar with the
work of Sr. Mary Margaret Funk, who has served generously and
dynamically as the board’s executive director for the past ten
years. She has a wonderful way of reaching out to others and getting
them involved in our various projects. Her reminiscences as given
below report on only a fraction of all she has done for the board
Excerpts from Bulletin No. 71 September, 2003 (Monastic
Interreligious Dialogue)
Thomas Keating invited me to membership on the MID
Board in 1989. The first meeting I attended was at St. Andrew’s
Abbey in Valyermo, California, the following year, when the agenda
focused on planning. At that meeting I got involved in modifying the
structure of the board so as to have a staff person who would
function as executive director. Sr. Pascaline Coff, Sr. Katherine
Howard, Fr. Thomas Keating, and I subsequently met at Osage
Monastery in Oklahoma to draft a job description with all the
details that would allow Sr. Katherine be the first paid executive
director. She worked diligently with Fr. Dan Ward to shift our board
from being a somewhat informal group to a sturdy 501c.3
not-for-profit organization. She also nurtured the bulletin as our
principal publication; it was first edited by Sr. Pascaline and then
by Fr. James Conner OCSO. Sr. Katherine also started the contact-persons
workshops, of which the first was on Sufism and held at St. John’s
Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota. I coordinated the subsequent
workshops. The one on Hinduism was held at St. Procopius Abbey in
Lisle, Illinois, in 1994, while the next was incorporated into the
first Gethsemani Encounter in 1996. The fourth and most recent was
on the theme of Christ Consciousness and took place at the
Benedictine mission house in Schuyler, Nebraska, in 1999. But to say
all this is to get ahead of my story.
At the World’s Parliament of Religions in 1993 I was fully engaged
as a speaker, as an assistant to Fr. Julian von Duerbeck in planning
the liturgies (including a vigil service at St. Procopius), and as a
chauffeur driving our monastic participants into the Chicago Loop
every day from St. Procopius. On Saturday morning at the Parliament
the MID Board hosted a special dialogue on Shunyata and Emptiness
that had an amazing cast sitting around the table. As I recall,
those present included His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Sr. Pascaline
Coff, Sr. Johanna Becker, Sr. Katherine Howard, Br. David
Steindl-Rast, Fr. James Wiseman, Fr. Julian von Duerbeck, Wayne
Teasdale, Diana Eck, Masao Abe, Jean Houston, and I believe Maha
Ghosandanda and one or two others. (Fr. Thomas Keating was ill and
couldn’t make it.)
It was at the board meeting following the parliament that I was
hired to succeed Sr. Katherine. Our transition was smooth since we
had both served as prioresses of our respective communities and
therefore had a considerable amount of administrative experience. I
was then 49 years old and felt ready for another ministry, while
Katherine was ready to devote her time and energy to spirituality
and contemplative practice. Fr. James Wiseman was elected chairman
of the board at that meeting, so he and I collaborated for the
ensuing six years. Highlights of this period for me were
coordinating Phases V, VI, and VII of the Spirituality Exchange
Program between Tibetan Buddhists living in exile in India and
Benedictine and Trappist monastics in North America. Phase V
required routing two monks and two nuns to 30 monasteries in the U.S
and Canada and hosting them myself at Beech Grove. Phase VI was a
major pilgrimage of four American Benedictines, including myself, to
Tibet and North India, with visits to 16 monasteries in Tibet and 14
in India. Phase VII was the first Gethsemani Encounter in Kentucky
with His Holiness the Dalai Lama and nearly 200 other participants.
In 1999 the Dalai Lama returned to the Midwest to
give the Kalachakra Initiation Rite in Bloomington, Indiana. At that
time MID sponsored a Vigil for Peace at St. Charles Parish in that
city with His Holiness and other representatives of the Hindu,
Buddhist, and Muslim traditions. In that same year and with the help
of Br. Aaron Raverty and Br. Richard Oliver of St. John’s Abbey,
Collegeville, MID started publishing a website along with its
bulletin. We enlisted the help of a staff in New York for technical
oversight of both the bulletin and the website, with Martin Rowe
serving as our Webmaster. We felt we needed the same staff to
coordinate both editions of the bulletin—the electronic and the
print.
One important outcome of the first Gethsemani Encounter was the book
edited by James Wiseman and Donald Mitchell and entitled The
Gethsemani Encounter (Continuum, 1997). Another, somewhat later
outcome was the book Benedict’s Dharma, edited by Patrick Henry and
published by Riverhead in 2001. The four Buddhists who reflected on
the Benedictine Rule in this book—Joseph Goldstein, Norman Fischer,
Judith Simmer-Brown, and Yifa—continue to be in frequent contact
with us. The translation of the Rule of St. Benedict that we used in
the book was the one done by Abbot Patrick Barry, who delighted us
by coming to the conference held at Beech Grove to commemorate the
publication of the book and to continue the dialogue with
participants from around the country who were friends of MID but not
themselves monastics. All of the dialogues referred to in this
paragraph have been posted on the web; our website currently has
around 1000 visitors per day.
The turn to the year 2000 and a new millennium was marked with a
collaborative Vigil for Peace done on New Year’s Eve. MID and AIM
provided a booklet of sample prayers and rituals that was used in
over a hundred sites at that significant point in our world’s
history.
During my years as executive director I also coordinated board
meetings at St. Procopius Abbey, St. John’s Abbey, the Trappist
abbey in Oka, Quebec, St. Benedict’s Monastery in Snowmass,
Colorado, the Abbey of Gethsemani, the Fetzer Institute in
Kalamazoo, the Benedictine mission house in Schuyler, Nebraska, and
at my own community, Our Lady of Grace Monastery in Beech Grove,
Indiana. The next two board meetings are already in the planning
stages: in 2003 at the Trappist abbey in Mepkin, South Carolina, and
in 2004 at the Camaldolese hermitage in Big Sur, California. A few
prominent recollections from these meetings include the warm
hospitality and beautiful chant at Oka and the early-morning vigils
at Snowmass, but there were definite highlights at each meeting.
Over the years I’ve witnessed much growth in the board. We’ve
shifted from function to dialogue as the content and real heart of
our meetings. We always meditate and do the full round of Eucharist
and Liturgy of the Hours as constitutive of our dialogue, which is
specifically monastic. At our next meeting we will revisit the topic
of our mission and ask whether we are expressing our core reality
and whether our activities are faithfully representing the
monasteries we serve and our counterparts in other countries who
also have boards of monastic interreligious dialogue. Ideas are
plentiful, whereas funding has always been scarce, though just
enough. Board members bring rich experience and carry out the many
facets of our formal and informal dialogue gatherings. Toddy Daly
has been assisting with the office work and events since 1998. She
and I both find that email is the single swiftest tool for dialogue
that has ever existed; my data base contains email addresses from
literally all over the world.
There have also been some special meetings that I was privileged to
attend. One such was a debriefing of the Gethsemani Encounter,
facilitated by Ewert Cousins at St. John’s, Collegeville; another
involved writing by-laws with the help of Fr. Dan Ward in Washington
DC; a third was hosted by Abbot Leo Ryska in a board room at the
Interchurch Center in New York and had as its agenda the
coordination of our publications; and a fourth was a meeting at St.
Anselm’s Abbey in Washington, DC, that helped plan the transition
from Fr. James Wiseman’s chairmanship to that of Fr. William
Skudlarek in 1999. There has also been some travel abroad. Sister
GilChrist Lavigne and I gave a report at a DIM meeting in Spain in
1995. It was in some ways just a regular meeting, but I will never
forget the passionate intervention of Dom Christian de Chergé, who
pleaded with us to broaden our scope to include Muslim dialogue in
the MID/DIM mission. We met Fr. Christian later at the Trappist
monastery of Tamié, France. A few months later he was beheaded by
Islamic fundamentalists while serving in his home monastery of Atlas
in Algeria.
In my capacity as executive director I have also been invited to
participate in a number of other meetings, conferences, and symposia
that were not directly sponsored by MID. One of these was the Purity
of Heart Symposium in 2000, with Fr. Bruno Barnhart, Father Joseph
Wong, and others of the Camaldolese community at Big Sur. Another
meeting commemorated the 100th anniversary of Vedanta in the United
States, with talks remembering Swami Vivekananda and his lecture at
the 1993 Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago. I also
served on a panel at Princeton, New Jersey, with Professor Diana Eck
of Harvard, who served for some years as one of our MID advisors.
There was likewise the commemoration of the 25th
anniversary of Vatican II’s declaration of the relationship of the
Catholic Church to other religions, Nostrae Aetatae, held at the
international Benedictine athenaeum Sant’Anselmo in Rome, and a
workshop in New Harmony, Indiana, sponsored by the Friends of
Benedict and having the Buddhist Rev. Kusala and myself as the
principal presenters. At the Pacific Rim Conference at University of
San Francisco I was a speaker along with Ven. Heng Sure, and at a
Buddhist-Christian conference in Malibu, California I shared some
thoughts about how my book Thoughts Matter: The Practice of the Spiritual Life includes teaching that
parallels some of the training of the mind in Buddhism. On another
occasion I traveled with Fr. Julian von Duerbeck and Br. Gregory
Perron to Deer Park near Madison, Wisconsin, for a meeting at which
we were hosted by Geshe Sopa. Over ten times I’ve been a guest of
Dr. Norbu, the Dalai Lama’s oldest brother, who now resides in
Bloomington, Indiana, and for seven years Dr. John Borelli of the
United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has invited me to the
table of dialogue at an annual USCCB-sponsored Catholic-Muslim
dialogue in Plainfield, Indiana.
The text underneath the story of my years with MID would be all the
relationships that shaped and called me to my monastic way of life.
At this writing I’ll name several persons who continue to astound
me: Odette Baumer-Despeigne was a grand woman who pioneered the
dialogue. Sr. Pascaline Coff’s role could not be exaggerated. His
Holiness the Dalai Lama shared himself with us both as a teacher and
a host at his temple in Dharamsala. Lalitha Krishna tutored me in
Hinduism, while Dr. Shihad Athar opened for me the window to Islam
and Rev. Kusala the window to orthodox Buddhism. Pema Tsultrim’s
exchange was warm and personal; our paths crossed three times and we
still correspond. Pema first came to the U.S. with other Tibetan
monastics on one of the spirituality exchanges and stayed in our
guest hall in Beech Grove. We next met when I visited her monastery
in North India, where she gave me her bedroom. As she was then the
superior of that community in Tilokpur, she had a huge image of the
Buddha that entirely covered one wall; when I awoke the first
morning I certainly had some reorientation work to do! Our third
meeting occurred when she returned to the States with some other
Tibetan monastics to study health care, computers, and English while
in residence at Benedictine monasteries. Finally, Fr. Pierre de
Béthune has been instrumental in forming MID into a worldwide
network of intermonastic dialogue. Although I never met pioneers in
dialogue like Thomas Merton, Abhishiktananda, or Bede Griffiths, I
feel privileged to be part of the second-generation that has carried
forward the work that those others began with so much courage and
foresight.
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MEG
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