As I sat in the chapel overlooking the Pacific Ocean at the Villa María del Mar Retreat Center in Santa Cruz, California, I contemplated a teaching from the traditions of Sanātana Dharma, what some people call Hinduism. In these traditions, the ocean is a metaphor for consciousness. The ocean represents the essence of who we really are as living beings, in a universal and timeless sense. The unique expressions of our lives are like the rise and fall of the waves. Some are small, others are large. And then there are waves that will make a tremendous, perhaps destructive impact. The waves will inevitably return to the ocean from whence they came. And a wave can never cease to be the ocean.
I found myself at this retreat center, operated by the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary, to complete my primary residency requirement for my program at the Chaplaincy Institute, an interfaith seminary with an international reach. I beamed at the wonder of this convergence, grateful that a Catholic retreat center consistently welcomes my school and their mission of honoring the diversity of global wisdom traditions and spiritual paths.
Such radical hospitality to those of us studying interfaith chaplaincy is, in my view, a very Catholic thing to do. This hospitality also affirms that commitment to a learning exchange with other faith traditions, not just engaging in dialogue, is possible. When we Catholics engage in a reciprocal exchange and allow ourselves to be transformed by the beauty of other traditions, our faith may be enriched and our passion for justice may be further emboldened.
In those moments of contemplation in the chapel, I experienced a great sense of pride in the Catholic Church being my home tradition. Even though I spent the week on this retreat learning practices such as Jewish morning prayers and approaches to meditation from Buddhist, Sufi, and Indigenous traditions, my core remains Catholic. The realities of being Catholic and living as an interfaith practitioner can and do intersect for me and for many Catholics around the world.
The Catholic Church supports interfaith endeavors, especially with our Jewish and Muslim siblings, as articulated in Nostra Aetate (On the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions). However, when Catholics dialogue only to evangelize, this can make the people with whom we exchange ideas feel uncomfortable, belittled, and judged.
In reality, there are many ways to practice our Catholic faith. I do not see my interfaith studies and endeavors in ministry as a way to evangelize with the intention to convert. We can approach evangelization as sharing the good news of our faith while also being open to the good news that others share with us about their faiths. We can experience a God that is too numinous to fit into the box of any one religion. Reciprocity is key.
When I receive a teaching like that of the wave and the ocean from Sanātana Dharma, I have another lens through which to explore the mysteries of God and the universe. The metaphor of the ocean and the wave can also apply to the divinity (the ocean) and the humanity (the wave) of Christ that reflects in each of us. In approaching my faith in this manner, I follow in the footsteps of many Catholic trailblazers, including Father Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk remembered for his practical scholarship on the traditions of China. I am inspired by Father Bede Griffiths, a vowed religious who was assigned by his Benedictine superior to lead a Christian ashram in India. He later took the name Swami Dayananda. Catholic women such as Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister and Rosemary Radford Ruether have worked across faith traditions to address justice issues that affect us all, even if that means criticizing Catholic teachings where appropriate and admitting where the Catholic Church has caused harm to people of other faith traditions.
I’ve wrestled with my own theological questions about whether I can continue calling myself Catholic, considering my multireligious interests and formal pursuit of interfaith ministry. Then I came across the words of Ramon Riley, an Apache elder living on the lands we presently call Arizona, and the answer revealed itself. Riley was baptized Catholic and still attends Mass while also participating in sweat lodge ceremonies and the cultural traditions of his people. When a reporter from the Guardian asked him how he reconciles his Catholic faith and its legacy of inflicting trauma on his people with practicing his Indigenous spirituality, Riley responded, “That’s a stupid question. That is a white-person question.”
In the same article, Riley explains that the Catholic and Apache God are, in a way, identical. And he is dismayed at the binary way that white people and their institutions try to categorize the divine. As a white person steeped in this binary way of thinking, I believe that Riley unearths both the problem and the solution. He identifies what can keep Catholics, and indeed all Christians, from seeing God in their neighbors who practice other traditions. And this failure to see God, or the ocean, in the various waves that we encounter keeps us not only from experiencing our own divine nature, but also from experiencing peace in this world.
There are Catholics who will call me a heretic for thinking in this way. Such a judgment for my choices puts me in good company. Meister Eckhart was censured and investigated in his lifetime for heresy. His teachings are so revered in interfaith seminaries and movements, I was shocked to learn that he was a Roman Catholic priest in the Dominican Order when I investigated his background. One of his most frequently shared quotes, “The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me,” makes me wonder if he studied Vedantic philosophy in India. In modern times, several popes, including Pope Benedict XVI, have spoken positively about his theology.
Another mystic of Germany’s Rhine Valley and one of my personal inspirations, St. Hildegard of Bingen, is revered in spiritual traditions beyond Catholicism. Benedict declared her a doctor of the church in 2012. Like Eckhart, she too was censured, although in her case it was for standing up for the rights of an excommunicated man to be buried in a consecrated cemetery. People practicing a variety of earth-based and Indigenous spiritualities deeply cherish her teaching of Viriditas, or “the greening power of God.” A gifted herbalist and healer who investigated what cut off that greening power in peoples’ lives, Hildegard represents a powerful bridge between the Catholic Church and people with other approaches to spirituality.
For me, being an interfaith Catholic is more than having dialogue with people of other faiths. In these times when hatred and division threaten to destroy us, can we make an effort to truly learn from people who see the divine differently? Can we take a risk, as Jesus did, to get to know people whom others shun as strangers? At the very least, we might learn something that can help us more fully answer Christ’s call to embrace love as his greatest commandment. Through encountering other faces of the divine, as Merton, Griffiths, Nicholas Black Elk, and many others have, we may forge a deeper connection to Jesus Christ, the very embodiment of love without boundaries.
This article also appears in the October 2026 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 91, No. 10, pages 16-17). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
Image: Pexels.com/Kanishka Madushan
