Yes, we have to speak our mind clearly, represent our ideas forcefully, and, depending on our socio-political location, speak truth to power.  All of this will, inevitably, bring about the clashing of ideas and convictions and values.

But if that clash is going to have any hopes of producing conversation which is the precondition for collaboration, then the clashing of our ideas and of our dealings with each other will have to be shot through with a cold-blooded kindliness.

In the very process of confronting those with whom we disagree we have to make the effort to connect with them.  And connection will be possible only if it issues forth from a genuine caring for the person we are confronting.  Another word for “caring” is, for Buddhists, “compassion,” for Christians, “love.”

If the people we are confronting don’t feel that we care about them just as much as we disagree with them, they will never be able to really listen to us.  Psychologically – I would even dare say ontologically – if I feel a person doesn’t like me,  my heart, and therefore my ears, can’t really hear what they are confronting me with.

Unless a cold-blooded kindliness is mixed with the heat of our confrontational conversations, the conversations will go nowhere.

Maybe that’s part of the reason why, especially at this moment, whether in Washington DC or in our local communities, our conversations seem to be stuck.   We can’t hear each other.

Maybe some healthy doses of cold-blooded kindliness will open our hearts and unplug our ears.

The experience of Enlightenment or Awakening for Buddhists includes the realization – not just theoretical in one’s mind, but practical in the way one finds oneself living one’s daily life – that we are part of a larger, inter-connected Reality (wisdom); and to feel this is to feel compassion both for all the other sentient beings who are part of this bigger picture as well as for ourselves.

So the Buddhist experience is one in which one feels oneself energized with a natural, spontaneous necessity to embrace the world in active, love but at the same time one knows that this inter-connecting love is already there, already going on, already complete.

When I ponder this Buddhist realization that wisdom (interconnectedness as given) and compassion (interconnectedness as embraced) are two sides of the same coin, it confirms the central Christian message of having to love and act for what Jesus called the Reign of God. This is at the heart of the Gospel: the call to love one’s neighbor, to act for justice, to “fix the world” (as Jesus’ Jewish teachers might have taught him), to keep acting so as to bring this messed up, suffering world a little closer to the ideal of God’s Reign.

Such loving action for justice is what Buddhists might recognize as compassion. But they then immediately remind Christians that such action for justice and a better world needs to be combined with the wisdom that this world, as it is, is already filled with what Christians might call the interconnected Spirit. As Jesus himself taught, the Reign of God is not only ‘still to come,’ it’s already present. In all the limitations and imperfections, in all the suffering and injustice, the Reign of God is present and taking shape. We have to fix this world, but we can do that only if we work with and in the world as it is. Only when we can accept the way it is (that’s wisdom), can we change the way it is (through compassion).

So when we Christians insist that we have to act to change the world, the Buddhists would definitely agree, but they would add that we should not make too much of a “big deal” of our action. Our actions are important in one way, but in another way, they are not. We have to act, we have to get things done, but the bigger picture is bigger than our individual actions.

Buddhism is here helping me reconnect with what I learned way back in my seminary days from St. Ignatius. He told his Jesuit brothers that they must act, but always with a “holy indifference” (sacra indifferentia). Such holy indifference can be translated nicely as equanimity – a balanced soul, or an easy-going heart.

If we are truly in touch with our Buddha-nature, if we are really “in Christ” as St. Paul puts it, we will be called to give all that we have to loving others and working for a better world, but at the end of the day, or even in the very actions themselves, we will be able to relax and know that even if our actions don’t succeed, even if people don’t respond, it’s no big deal. The bigger picture or the inter-connecting Spirit is still there, still active, still carrying on.

We are to act with all our might, but at the same time, relax. We have to be fully committed, but at the same time, we’d better not take ourselves too seriously.