Through the portal together

I never got to be a close friend of Joan Dunham, who died in 2008. She was always in a breathless hurry when she came into our Catholic Worker bookstore in the 1980s. She bought stacks of books, including titles by Thomas Merton and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel.

We’d have a quick chat about her choices while I rang up her purchases and off she’d go to her next “mitzvah,” a Hebrew word for good work. Joan was a faithful Irish Catholic from Brooklyn who was about “tikkun olam,” which means to repair the world according to God’s plan.

About 135 of us gathered on a recent Sunday afternoon at the community room of Congregation Ohav Shalom in Albany for a discussion to honor Joan’s dynamism and compassion as one of the unfaltering pillars of the Jewish-Roman Catholic dialogue in the Albany Diocese.

Dr. Mary Boys, SNJM, of Union Theological Seminary in New York and Dr. Edward Kaplan of Brandeis University in Boston spoke on “Abraham Joshua Heschel and Thomas Merton: Inspiring Jewish-Christian Life Together.”

Dr. Boys is one of the major Catholic theologians in the dialogue; Dr. Kaplan is perhaps the world’s preeminent Heschel scholar and a prominent member of the International Thomas Merton Society.

Joan Dunham’s numerous “mitzvoth” on behalf of Catholic-Jewish understanding followed overtures that date back 40 years to when the Albany Diocese was under the leadership of Bishop Edwin Broderick.

Back then, she organized afternoon teas for members of the two faiths to chat informally — but she didn’t stop there. Tea parties led to pilgrimages to each other’s houses of worship and later to Rome and to Israel.

These were the early movements “from fear to friendship,” a phrase used as the title of the prayer service held at Albany’s Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in 1986 during which Bishop Howard J. Hubbard publicly apologized to the Jewish community for the sins of the Church against the Jewish people.

Merton and Heschel began their relationship through correspondence. Eventually, Heschel was able to visit Merton at the Trappist Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky.
In her talk, Dr. Boys mentioned a phrase from Celtic spirituality, which Merton began to explore in the 1960s. She spoke of the “thin places and times” where “our hearts are opened [and] the sacred becomes present to and in us.”

While she acknowledged that not all encounters are transcendent moments, she suggested that potential when the holiness of participants is accepted and cherished.

Dr. Kaplan pointed out one of Merton’s most incisive assertions about Christian-Jewish dialogue: “It is precisely in prophetic and therefore deeply humiliated and humanly impoverished thirst for light that Christians and Jews can begin to find some kind of unity in seeking God’s will together.”

Dr. Kaplan described how Heschel envisioned the basis of interfaith dialogue. It was at “the level of fear and trembling, of humility and contrition,” he said, “where our souls are swept away by the awareness of the urgency of answering God’s commandment, while stripped of pretension and conceit.”

I knew of Joan’s deep interest in Thomas Merton not only because she bought his books. When we met at diocesan functions or at the annual Kieval Institute Colloquium at Siena College in Loudonville, Joan would rush up to tell me how much she wanted to attend a session of the Thomas Merton Society of the Capital Region, which I coordinate.
She never made it. Her time was well-spent “mending the world.” Nevertheless, Joan Dunham will be in the midst of our local Merton Society for many years: At her death, through her children and Rev. James Kane of the diocesan Commission for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs, Joan’s Merton books were donated to our local Merton Society.

Reading Merton from one of Joan’s books takes one through a portal at a thin place.

(Mr. Chura is a local Catholic writer, lecturer and retreat director who attends St. Luke’s Church in Schenectady.)

(11/05/09)