A Belfast-born Jesuit priest, Father William Johnston, who is to the forefront of Christian dialogue with Buddhism, will take part in an exchange with American Zen master Roshi Norman Fisher in Dublin this evening.
The dialogue will be in the Milltown Institute, on Sandford Road, at 7.30 p.m.
Father Johnston (75) is retired Professor of Religious Studies and director of the Institute of Oriental Religion at Sophia University, Tokyo, where he has lived for almost 50 years. He is the author of 11 books on Zen.
Roshi Fisher was abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center and is founder of the Everyday Zen Foundation. He is co-author of the book Benedict's Dharma.
Both will join the Dalai Lama at the John Main Seminar 2000 in Belfast from October 19th to 21st. Father Johnston will speak on Peace and the Atomic Bomb.
While remaining an orthodox Catholic priest, Father Johnston has managed to integrate elements of Zen and Christianity. He sees mysticism, a spiritual exercise or experience originally taken from the eastern religions, as the trademark and chief support of a reborn Christianity.
He has written that "we are experiencing the painful death of one church and the painful birth of another. The superstructure - cathedrals, schools, hospitals, orphanages, convents - is collapsing. Yet the hunger for spiritual experience has not died: witness already the longing for meditation."
In his recent book Arise, My Love, Father Johnston said that to many in the Catholic Church today "the situation seems desperate. But discerning men and women are less anxious. They know we live in an apocalyptic age when secular and religious institutions are everywhere collapsing. Like Mark Anthony, they know that the evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.
"The sexual aberrations and the cruelty in schools and orphanages live on but the humble service and heroic sanctity are forgotten. So let it be with Caesar.
"This is a time of opportunity. Beneath the confusion the Spirit is at work. Wise old Ignatius of Loyola saw humiliation as the very basis of conversion of heart. One who would follow the Ignatian path must choose humiliation with Jesus humiliated, just as one who follows the gospel is glad to be treated and accounted a fool for the love of Jesus . . . .
"This is a time when the humiliated institutional church is called to experience the power of powerlessness. It is a time of purification. It is a dark night of the soul. It is a time of death and resurrection . . .
"The signs of the times point to a second spring. We are witnessing the death of the old and the birth of the new . . . Through this suffering we are moving toward a Christianity that is richer and more beautiful than anything the world has known," he wrote.
