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1. What do you think is the most important thing to consider when meeting someone professing a different religion? Have you encountered any difficulties in relating with them?

2. After learning about Interreligious dialogue in the Focolare Movement, what do you intend to bring ahead personally and with your community in your local area?

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What to consider:

Empty yourselves,

It helps me to be a member of the focolare and to know that everyone is a candidate to unity,

Important is to have respect for what others say. Being open in listening. If you love you can do dialogue, that is important as Chiara said, Natalia is a model for dialogue to me

DIFFICULTIES encountered:

It is a challenge to work together, since our mindsets are very different, here we truly have to loose; dialogue is a long journey of coming together and understanding one another to the point of being really brothers and sisters.

It is very important to establish trust with one another. That is one of the biggest barriers to overcome. Once trust is there, we truly feel like a family. The way to reach this is to live the golden rule.

Ignorance is also a difficulty in coming together and understanding each other truly.

Sharing beyond just official meetings is important, to learn about each other's family, share the joys and difficulties of everyday life is important. In the Indian context this is very important to establish true relationships which help us to overcome what divides us.

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Manila - Noel Vergara, Janet Argana & Aning Pesito

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Manila - Noel Vergara, Janet Argana & Aning Pesito

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1. When we encounter persons of other faith, we do not have to talk about religion at once. We get to know each other first as persons and talk about various things about life.

2. We greet our friends of different faith on the days of their festivals and special occasions. For the Muntinlupa community, since they are young people, they witnessed during the Local Genfest how people can be united despite differences in religions. That's why they are amazed of the unity and they have become open to unity among religions.

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IRD is the path Chiara gave to India to reach universal brotherhood. We have established contacts with Hindu scholars and friends and youth, groups around us.

What we want to do is to work more with the local church to bring ahead interreligious dialogue the way Chiara taught us (not so much only meetings). This is a true challenge.

The other focus is to continue with younger generations this dialogue among faith.

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1. Chiara already taught us how to live and is already in our DNA and we consider everyone candidate to unity. The art of loving is an important instrument to deal with people of the other religions.

Love is the answer for example when I taught in a Buddhist school in a very new world for me, but I discovered that love is the universal language. In the Philippines there is a lot of prejudice against Japanese because of history, but the dialogue of life with the Risho Kosei Kai has changed our mentality. We see the importance of this formation bacause we meet many catholic who are still not yet open to dialogue with people of different religions, so we need to promote more awareness towards IRD.

2. We would like to organize some IRD in our local community with our interns and maybe to repeat this formation lessons if we can have the materials shared. We can translate and localize in our context.

Promote visits to the temples and meet in persons with the Buddhists for example. To participate and to involve in the different initiatives of the Diocese.

Personally keep contact with them and to remember the occasion in which to greet them for festivities of their religion and keep them in our clusters.

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1.Most of us didn't have a particular difficulty meeting with others. That is maybe we are open and we met them in the boundary of the Movement.

2.We would like to bring the importance of dialogue to the members of our local community.

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I feel that interreligious dialogue within the ambit of the Spirituality of Unity, calls for that continuous and delicate balance, which existed from the onset, between making ourselves one with all whom we meet, to win over as many as possible to Jesus' dream of a "united world", and to avoid any action that could be a stumbling block to fellow Christians.

Vivek

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the important thing is to make friends with them, learn from them by listening first, instead of talking about our doctrine first. Otherwise, they would think that we want to convert them to Christianity and this would close the door of dialogue. We should be humble.

When one day they start asking about our doctrine, our faith, then, we must grasp the chance to share with them our experience as a Christian. This is the case of Chiara Lubich, she talked to the Buddhist in Tokyo or to Muslims in New York because they invited her to talk to them.

We should love "that person", since each one is a mystery, looking Jesus on them, no matter which religion that person belongs to, love them as Jesus would love them, no need to convert them, only God can convert a person. Then, we can easily find goodness in that person.  What we should do is to help Jesus grow in that person.

There are many forms of dialogue, we can start from the dialogue of life, of collaboration, of spiritual experiences first.

One of the difficulties we have encountered is that someone may suddenly ask some questions about our doctrine that we are not ready to respond to, and if the conversation goes in this direction, someone may hurt and break our relationship.

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Q1. Empty oneself, respect them and listen with humility, ask them questions which thus showed our active listening and eagerness to understand them. Let them feel we love and care about them.

We encounter difficulties in relating to them if when we don't know their terminology or ways of expressions.

Q2. We increase our awareness and take the initiative to care about them.

We look for opportunities and create space for dialogue.

We had attended symposium of 6 religions to share our view on the poor n work done.

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The Foundations of Dialogue

We need to create a relationship to the extent of familial bond where there is trust and respect.

Difficulties in dialogue can be avoided by prudence in what we say.

We need to form this family relationship in our communities like visiting when one is sick, being part of family occasions like weddings.

Take advantage of opportunities to share and or make others participate in creating dialogues with other religions like a teacher in the university encourages her student to get to know others of a different religion and making them share their experiences. Following up the experience with sharing the thought of Chiara on the golden rule.