There Must Be YOU: Leonard Swidler’s Journey to Faith and Dialogue

There Must Be

you

Leonard Swidler’s Journey to Faith and Dialogue

River Adams

There Must Be You

Leonard Swidler’s Journey to Faith and Dialogue

Copyright © 2014 River Adams. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions. Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

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ISBN 13: 978-1-4982-0213-8

EISBN 13: 978-1-4982-0214-5

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Scriptures taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com The NIV and New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™

Excerpts from THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY: A NOVEL by Douglas Adams, copyright © 1979 by Serious Productions Ltd., and excerpt from THE SALMON OF DOUBT: HITCHHIKING THE GALAXY ONE LAST TIME by Douglas Adams, copyright © 2002 by Completely Unexpected Productions, Ltd., used by permission of Harmony Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Random House LLC for permission.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Prologue: In the City of Neighborhoods: Philadelphia

Part 1: At the Source of the River: After him, the deluge came!

Chapter 1: Of Cabbages, Kings, and the American Dream: Len’s father

Chapter 2: Chubby the Dog

Chapter 3: Dialogue in Utero

Chapter 4: Samuel’s Irish Rose: Len’s mother

Chapter 5: On These Magic Shores: Childhood

Part 2: Downstream

Chapter 6: Naval Engagements and Other Teaching Moments: St. Norbert College

Chapter 7: From Prayer to Contemplation: the Norbertines

Chapter 8: The Road Not Taken: St. Paul Seminary

Part 3: Upstream

Chapter 9: If Feminism Was Good Enough for Jesus . . .

Chapter 10: Hostels, Hostiles, and a Big World: Backpacking Through Europe

Chapter 11: Their Exits and Their Entrances: Graduate Studies, Here and Abroad

Chapter 12: Do We Not Bleed? Healing the Oberammergau Passion Play

Chapter 13: One Man in His Time: Hans Küng, the Global Ethic, and the Founding of ARCC

Part 4: Toward the Ocean—Teaching

Chapter 14: Minds and Hearts: Pittsburgh

Chapter 15: For Living Well: Temple University

Chapter 16: Beyond This Flood a Frozen Continent: Japan

Part 5: Toward the Ocean—Dialogue

Chapter 17: Around the World in 280 Days: the Life-Changing Sabbatical

Chapter 18: Dialogue Decalogue and Other Astute Alliterations

Part 6: The Ocean of YOU

Chapter 19: Church Named Dialogue: Love and Do What You Will

Bibliography

To Mom, always my first and most faithful reader.

At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable . . .

—Henry David Thoreau, Walden.

All streams flow into the sea,

yet the sea is never full.

—Ecclesiastes 1:7

Preface

I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.

—Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt

He steps out of the elevator across from my little apartment, where I stand at the open door. A triumphant grin reigns over his face, and he lifts up his arms to the ceiling, filling the space of the hallway with all of his gangly and laughing nearly-six-foot stature. This is Len Swidler in full glory. Ah! I am on time!

In fact, he is not. He is ten minutes late, but by Len’s standards he is early. Whenever he’s due to come to my door, I usually expect him between 20 and 50 minutes after. That’s if he shows up on the right day.

Today is a Saturday in December of 2012, and we’ve planned to have dinner at 6 o’clock and talk about this book—one of our first real, detailed conversations. Yesterday, exactly at six, my phone rang.

Hello? Len?

I’ll be there in 5 minutes!

You’ll be where?

At your house!

I digested this for a second. Len. Today is Friday. We are meeting on Saturday, remember? I am busy today, and I told you I couldn’t do it. We agreed to meet tomorrow. Saturday. Remember?

Phone static in my ear sounded like the chaos of that moment, then his voice came back. Right! I remember! So where was I supposed to go tonight?

I don’t know.

I made an appointment to meet with somebody tonight, instead.

Did you write it down somewhere? Try to pull over and look.

Right, right. I’ll figure it out. I have Chinese food!

Awww . . .

I’ll put it in the fridge, and we’ll eat it tomorrow.

It is now Saturday, and Len is back. The epitome of an absent-minded professor. I lift my eyes to the bag of Chinese he is holding in his upraised hand.

I’ve been his colleague at the Journal of Ecumenical Studies and the Dialogue Institute for six years, his student for five, and his friend for— it’s hard to say—maybe from the beginning. I was raised in Soviet Russia, in a culture of punctuality and responsibility, and for six years I’ve scolded him for his perpetual lateness—nagged and mocked and rolled my eyes—but as we go inside, fill our plates, and carve out some space at my tiny kitchen table, I think to myself, Waiting a while is a small price to pay for having him here after all.

We eat and talk—about the book and about his life, going on tangents and telling stories, plunging into discussions, as we are wont to do. He talks of the students from the Middle East coming to study dialogue in Philly, and of the future of the church. He talks of his trip around the world many years ago, of the tremendous minds and hearts he has encountered, the giants of humanity he calls friends, the revelations of faith, reason, and love that made him who he is. He recalls times of hardship that would make another shudder, and he laughs. He is turning 84 in a couple of weeks.

He was there for the Depression, for World War II, for Vatican II, for the Civil Rights movement, for D-Day, and for Dorothy Day—small steps and giant leaps. He worked in Tübingen with Hans Küng and Joseph Ratzinger, whom Len calls Joe—and again he laughs. I rest my chin in my hands, listening, and egg foo young is going cold on my plate.

You know, he says, people often tell me, ‘Dialogue is nice, but it’s just drawing room entertainment.’ I hear it a lot. He shakes his head.

I know dialogue is more to Len than that. I’ve heard his stories. I know where he’s been.

In early October of 2000, Len Swidler stood on a hilly road’s stretch behind Skopje in Macedonia, shoulder to shoulder with his long-time comrade and co-editor Paul Mojzes, and listened to the choking patter of gunshots from below. Five hundred yards down the highway, cement barriers were blocking the way, and beyond them smoke billowed up in odd, diseased patterns throughout the valley. Not the fires of home—the fires of war.

No one seemed to be able to tell them who was shooting at whom exactly, only that Slavic Macedonians—Orthodox Christians by religion—were fighting ethnic Albanian Muslim separatists. Civil war was brewing in the country.

Len and Paul had come to Macedonia at the invitation of its president, Boris Trajkovski. He called them a few months before, as they were holding their Abrahamic Trialogue in Indonesia: a meeting of Jewish, Muslim, and Christian international scholars. Our traveling show, Len calls it. President Trajkovski got Paul on the phone at the presidential palace in Jakarta and said, We are on the brink of civil war. Our religions are being part of the problem. Bring your Trialogue here, help. Please. We need you.

Orthodox Christians make up the majority of Macedonia’s population, and Albanian Muslims are a significant minority at about 25 percent. There are also Catholic and Protestant minorities and some Jews. Boris Trajkovski himself was a Methodist Protestant with education in law and theology, newly elected to the presidency in 1999. He inherited a country torn by economic strife and ethno-cultural and religious conflict, immersed in the boiling-hot and bitter soup that used to be Yugoslavia.

Bringing the Trialogue to Macedonia wasn’t an easy feat. It took the efforts of the U.S. Institute for Peace, two trips to Skopje, and a grant from George Soros. The leadership of the two major religions were reluctant to participate, especially the Orthodox Metropolitan. He didn’t want public debate with a shmuck coming from the outside, Len explains. And he didn’t want dialogue with the Muslims.

Still, in October, more than two hundred people came together in a great hall, many of them local clergy, and Len’s Trialogue. President Trajkovski opened with a speech, Prince Hassan of Jordan sent his personal delegate to read the lecture he’d written for the occasion, the deans of the Orthodox and Muslim theological seminaries spoke. It was contentious, it was aggressive, and day passed after day. They kept plugging at it and talking. Prof. Mojzes spoke Serbian and conducted a lot of conversation with the local clergy. They took the whole cohort to one seminary and the other, where the deans addressed each other’s flocks. Then something happened.

Literally at the eleventh hour—at 11 o’clock in the evening on the last day before closing—the Orthodox Metropolitan issued an invitation to the leadership, Macedonian and foreign, for a banquet at his home. The main dish was cold turkey.

It’s like a transformation came over the Orthodox leadership. A great conversion experience. Len smiles with the satisfaction of a cat that just found the sour cream.

What do you think prompted his conversion?

We assumed it was all kinds of positive talk from his clergy. Remember, we got fifty local clergy to come regularly and participate. They were talking from the floor, it was not just the podium dialogue. I think this upwelling from below persuaded him he should ride this horse. But whatever the reason, it was a last-minute decision—we’d had a farewell banquet at 6 PM that day.

They didn’t get to sleep much that night. By the wee hours in the morning, after a marathon of debate and cold turkey, they formulated three commitments to announce at the closing day’s press conference:

• The leaders of the five religious communities would meet twice a year, just to talk, under the aegis of the president of the country;

• The Interreligious Cooperation Council would be set up immediately, to exist 365 days a year, with a member from each community, to collaborate among themselves, with the university, and with the parliament;

• There would be collaboration between the faculty and student bodies of the Orthodox Christian and Muslim seminaries.

The Macedonian Trialogue of 2000 did not prevent violence in Macedonia. Hostilities broke out openly in January 2001 between separatists and the state, and there were battles and casualties, although compared to the wars on their neighbors’ territories these could be called mild. Dozens of lives were lost.

A meeting of two hundred people cannot solve all problems. Language rights, borders, and ethnic tensions did not disappear in Macedonia—even religious conflict, of course, lives on many levels and far outside of Skopje—but Len and Paul went back twice, a year later, and the commitments were being observed. They brought more money from the U.S. Institute for Peace to train Christian and Muslim representatives who would go out into communities and talk with clergy there. Two hundred people in a room did not stop a war, but they did what the President asked them to do: The religious leadership was no longer a problem, and organized religions used their agency to band together for peace.

Len stretches on his chair, his expansive figure making my kitchen feel tinier than ever, his feet touching the stove, hands behind his head, and I can see a seam coming apart under the arm of his thirty-year-old sweater. He never seems to care what he wears.

There is still so much to do! he says, and in the swirls of his eyes I discern the future of international conferences, workshops, grand dialogue initiatives, shelves and shelves of new books, and the breathtaking form of his church, with roots in the earth and steeples in the heavens—bright and unblemished, full of love, and open to all—though Mass in it will never start on time.

You know, he says, lingering on the thought, I think, I am going to be very reluctant to die.

I chuckle. And then, beginning a mental pattern, I make a note to myself: This is going in the book.

And, finally, I take out my pencil.

Acknowledgments

Writing a book, like climbing a mountain, is a long and treacherous endeavor, sometimes exasperating, sometimes lonely and painfully tiring—and always, always beautiful. It is easy to fall to your death, especially as you get close to the summit, so I’d like to give a few grateful nods to the people who caught me, led me, and helped me up.

First, to Len Swidler himself, for being who he is: an inspiration and a friend, on occasion a good-natured flake, but in any case, an agreeable subject. To the many people who gave interviews and lent me their perspectives, whether they made it into the book or not. Everyone’s voice was helpful. To Nancy Krody, the managing editor of the Journal of Ecumenical Studies, who managed and edited through this whole disordered process and went above the call of her duty, at times on very short notice. To Laura Ferris, who, when I begged her for urgent notes, read this manuscript on the airplane and then patiently answered question after question. To my family, who valiantly let me work in peace, even when the pressing questions of what’s for dinner were burning their tongues. And, of course, to my mother, who has always been the first to love everything I do. Never my best critic, she’s always been the best at understanding what I mean.

Introduction

Since his college years Leonard Swidler has had two goals in life: to become an intellectual and to become a saint. You want to laugh now, and I, too, couldn’t hide a snigger when I heard him say it the first fifteen times, but he was dead serious in this pursuit, and in a way, though the word saint has certainly changed and acquired new meaning over the years, it still has never left him. He is now eighty-five years old, and if you ask the many thousands of people around the world who know his name whether he has achieved his goals, their answers will differ: He is hailed as a visionary of peace and dialogue, and he is denounced as the enemy of true faith. If you ask Len himself, his answers are likely to differ as well. Catch him in a pensive mood, and you will hear a reflection on the meaning of sainthood. Catch him in a playful moment, and see him shake his head and laugh. I’m still working on that second one, he’ll say.

I’ve also wondered about this phrase. He repeats it quite a lot. Could he be serious? He has spent his life developing, promoting, and leading interreligious dialogue. Did he find his road to intellectualism in it? His road to sainthood? And is it childish even to think in these terms?

It took my studying the whole portrait of the man to understand how dialogue, faith, and intellectual inquiry fit together in his mind and in his life—and, once I did, I better understood how they fit together in the world. To Len, reality itself is dialogical. I’d like to sketch that portrait for you now. And at the end of the book, I will tell you why I believe that, when we talk about dialogue, faith, and intellectual inquiry in Len Swidler’s life, we are not talking about three different things but one—one and the same.

What to expect from this book

This is not an exhaustive biography. When a century from now experts look for a definitive source of all things Swidler—names, places, and events, arranged chronologically on a timeline—this will not be it. I rather tell the story of Len’s search for himself and for his place in the world—and of the place he’s found. He’s traveled a long road, but for Len all things—war, Antisemitism, religion—have come together and brought him to his life’s cause: dialogue. This story will meander sometimes back and forth in time, and sideways into considerations of our own choosing, Len’s and mine.

The structure of this book is a little unusual in that it contains three somewhat distinct genres intertwined with each other throughout. Mainly, the progression of Len’s life will be traced in the chapters. You will read there about his remarkable international and interfaith family, his quest to become a priest and the devastating loss of vocation, his graduate school days sparkling with adventure and the adventures of world travel, the discoveries of spirit he found with his students in Philly and on the other side of the world, his friendships with the giants of the church, and his life’s work.

Every so often, I will step briefly out of Len’s story into historical interludes that venture into the roots of the world that made him who he is. These segments bring forth the people and places he has encountered along the way and give voice to his times, because in many ways the history of Len is the history of the twentieth century, and, after all, the history of us all is that of humanity. In historical interludes, more than in the chapters’ main text, you will hear my voice, taking up on occasion the issues of ethics, politics, and controversy. This is where I’ll think out loud about the world, and when you wish to make an argument, it will be with me.

And then you will hear Len’s voice directly. All throughout the book he will be present in quotes and in conversation with me. Within the body of the chapters, you will see short bits of our interviews moving the story along, where Len’s personality and gentle humor sparkle so that I didn’t want to change a word. Between chapters, separate sections titled Talking to Len will take us often away from events and into the realm of Len’s reflections, convictions, findings, and faith journey. A few of the interviews are with people who know Len in unique and interesting ways, and their names will be indicated at the top of each interview, but then the participants are identified by their initials. You will see that LS always stands for Leonard Swidler and RA for River Adams.

Talking to Len sections are not dialogue, at least not formal dialogue. They are excerpts from months and months of couch talk in Len’s living room about the things we all ponder, struggle with, and are shaped by—the questions that grow into wisdom in the diligent seekers’ gardens. It’s about faith of many kinds, exploration, flying and falling, and, most of all, discovery. My roles in these conversations are mixed. I am his student and his friend, and I am his oral historian and biographer, and I am sometimes a challenger of his views, digging for something more or other. There is a freedom in this format but also limitation. I tried deliberately to direct our conversation as little as possible, and so it roams away at times from its starting topic, and it is more natural this way and more interesting, but it also means that I might leave an issue before Len gives me an answer that satisfies. No question of depth, of course, can be mined to its fullest, so I leave it to you to decide, to pursue, and to persuade.

I have omitted many events from Len’s life in this book because, if I hadn’t, his eighty-five-year-long Odyssey would have produced a multi-volume series, and because his journey has been driven less by events and more by evolution. Still, to make sense of the journey, some facts are needed as guideposts.

Brief facts about Len Swidler

Leonard Swidler was born on January 6, 1929, in Sioux City, Iowa, and grew up in Green Bay, Wisconsin. His father, Samuel Swidler, had come to America as a Jewish immigrant from Ukraine, eventually to become a Christian and an American citizen. His mother, Josephine Marie Reed Swidler, was a Catholic from an Irish family. He had two younger siblings: brother Jack and sister Sandi. All through his childhood and college years, Leonard’s nickname was Leo.

From 1946 to 1950, Leo attended St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wisconsin, where he first became involved in a Catholic Reform group, and right after graduation he entered the Norbertine Order as a novice but was found to be excessively serious and asked to leave shortly before the taking of vows in 1952. I got kicked out of the monastery for being too pious, he often says.

From 1952 to 1954, Leo was preparing for parish ministry at St. Paul Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota but left, this time of his own accord, before ordination and started his graduate studies from scratch out in the world. In 1955 he earned a Master’s degree from Marquette University and in 1961, a PhD from the University of Wisconsin—both in history. To write his dissertation, he received a grant from the German government and lived in Tübingen and Munich from 1957 to 1960. He returned, having been introduced to Protestant-Catholic dialogue and having become, to his knowledge, the first Catholic layperson in modern times to earn a degree in theology.

In 1957, Leonard married Arlene Anderson, who preferred Len to Leo, and together they had two daughters, Carmel and Eva. Arlene, who was a feminist Catholic scholar, writer, and editor, collaborated with Len on many projects throughout their married life and, by his admission, inspired him both in theory and in practice. In the early 1990s, she began showing symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease and eventually passed away at home in 2008. He has one granddaughter.

In 1960, Len took a teaching position at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and there he lived through the Second Vatican Council and founded his first major organization: the Journal of Ecumenical Studies. Soon JES would become a flagship publication in the field of ecumenical and interreligious dialogue. In 1966, he and his family moved to Philadelphia so Len could begin work at Temple University, where he is teaching to this day.

Since that time, he has founded multiple organizations and initiatives, most notably the Dialogue Institute (1978), International Scholars’ Abrahamic Trialogue (1978), and the Association for the Rights of Catholics in the Church (1980). He has written or edited eighty books and over two hundred articles. He travels the world to organize, to lead, and to lecture, to seed local groups, to garner support, and to start conversations.

He is most widely known for his thunderously controversial 1971 article with a self-explanatory title Jesus Was a Feminist and for his 1983 editorial in JES that flew around the world and into dozens of languages, taking on a life of its own: Dialogue Decalogue: Ground Rules for Interreligious Dialogue.

Brief facts about River Adams

River Adams is the pen name of your humble author. I have known Leonard Swidler since 2006, when JES needed help with the book review section and I first met its founding editor. I soon became his doctoral student and then, without realizing quite when, his friend.

Len and I have a few surprising things in common. Similar to his father, I am a Russian Jew, and my family and I left my homeland when the collapsing economy of the dying Soviet Union raised a swell of Antisemitism so mighty that it almost swallowed us whole. Samuel Swidler came to America a fifteen-year-old immigrant. I came in 1991 a nineteen-year-old refugee.

I was a classical pianist in Russia and share with Len his love of music, but a wrist trauma shortly after the move to America ended my first career. I was raised an atheist child in an atheist world—not at all like Len—and yet, much like him, I found myself searching intensely for the meaning of life and the reasons for suffering, and I found the most profound questions in the wisdom traditions of the world, in the field of religious studies. I became a theologian, began to teach and to write, and practiced Zen Buddhism and dialogue, but my friendship with Len rose to a new level of spiritual sharing in 2010, when a conversion experience of an unending kind—the embrace with the Divine—created out of me a Catholic Christian mystic. When people ask me what happened, I often say that I ran into Jesus. It’s as good an answer as any.

Shortly after my baptism, I entered into discernment of religious life, and Len and I have had countless hours of musing and cogitating about it.

prologue

In the City of Neighborhoods: Philadelphia

Philadelphia was the first city to foresee the advantages of a Federal constitution and oatmeal as a breakfast food.

—Christopher Morley, Travels in Philadelphia

We live in Philadelphia, Len and I—a city of history proud and painful, a city of neighborhoods: South Philly with its bustling Italian market that mixes the smells of fish and custard, with its local dive bars where everybody knows your name; West Philly with its honking din and Ethiopian and Moroccan restaurants and mind-wrenching pot holes; and the sprawling Northeast, where Russian, Jewish, Georgian, and Uzbek shops and eateries still bear signs in native tongues, and where older immigrants can still be identified by their old-world clothes and the ineffable mannerism of their gaits.

This is Philadelphia. Here Len has had a home since 1966. From here, he flies away to his innumerable conferences and workshops in Jordan and Kurdistan, to teach summer courses in China, and to give talks on dialogue in Washington DC. And here he comes back, and on his way from the airport crosses the bridge at the confluence of the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers, past the shipyard, where an oil refinery washes a wave of foul odors through the car, and the tallest smoke stack reigns over a dystopic landscape, spewing into the sky a conical mass of steam that merges with the clouds like a bizarre, backwards tornado.

This is Philadelphia, a city we love despite itself and like despite ourselves. Olde City is now just another neighborhood here. Independence Hall still stands, and the Liberty Bell still hangs, cracks and all, behind thick glass. Red-brick walls and buckled alleys, it