By Peter Smith
Forty years after two prominent 20th-century spiritual figures met and changed each others’ views about their respective religions, an interfaith group has unveiled a banner in downtown Louisville depicting the Dalai Lama with Thomas Merton.
As part of a quiet ceremony yesterday morning that drew about 100 people, Tibetan Buddhist monks chanted, a Roman Catholic priest prayed and others laid flowers.
The often-reproduced photo on the banner shows the then-young exiled leader of Tibetan Buddhists meeting Merton, a Catholic monk from the Abbey of Gethsemani near Bardstown, Ky., during Merton’s fateful trip to Asia in late 1968.
Merton, who died accidentally later in the trip, had written dozens of books on prayer, peace and interfaith relations.
The image now hangs on the exterior wall of the Center of Interfaith Relations on Muhammad Ali Boulevard, less than a block from Thomas Merton Square.
“This is not just a commemoration of an interfaith meeting between two wonderful men,” said Jan Arnow, the center’s executive director. “This is a reunion of their spirits.”
Merton wrote in 1968 that the Dalai Lama helped show him how one can be “perfectly faithful to a Christian and Western monastic commitment and yet learn in depth from, say, a Buddhist or Hindu discipline or experience.”
And the Dalai Lama, when he visited Merton’s grave in Kentucky in 1996, said the monk improved his understanding of Catholicism. “I always considered him a strong bridge between Buddhism and Christianity,” he said at the time.
Tibetan Buddhist monks living in the United States and India, who came to Louisville for a conference on meditation last week, opened and closed the ceremony with chanted prayers. They tied prayer scarves on a tree in the George Garvin Brown Garden, a park set aside for meditation along Muhammad Ali Boulevard.
The Rev. Bill Fichteman, pastor of the adjacent Roman Catholic Cathedral of the Assumption, paid tribute to the fact that the men respected and learned from each other without attempting to blend their religious traditions.
“Grant that we may learn from them the way to dialogue and understanding, the way to justice and peace,” he said in his prayer.
Reporter Peter Smith can be reached at (502) 582-4469.
