Substack Conversations

The BodhiChristo Dialogues Begin

a return to the sacred conversation between the Buddha and the Cross

Dear beloveds of Our Collective Becoming—

As promised, here is the next offering in the unfolding tapestry of Substack Conversations. These next two Sundays, I will be preaching again—words formed in the forge of exile, rooted in the soil of grace. You’ll receive those sermons in your inbox, but in the in-between spaces, I’ll continue sharing these dialogues—honest, luminous, and alive with longing.

Today, I’m honored to share a conversation with my friend and sibling on the Way, Bushi.

This is the beginning of the BodhiChristo Dialogues—a humble return to a nearly forgotten path: Buddhist-Christian dialogue. Not for comparison, not for conquest, but for communion. For the kind of listening that births something new.

The Bodhi tree and the Cross have always spoken across time.

What happens when we let them speak again, through us?

This first conversation is a seed. Bushi and I hold it gently, letting its tenderness guide us. We explore what it means to sit with suffering, to live in presence, to practice liberation as daily rhythm and relational breath. In a time of collapse, our traditions—when decolonized and lived—can still be shelter, still be medicine.

And there is more to come: Bushi will be joining us here in Alfred soon, for an in-person gathering at the intersections of the Buddha and the Christ. A moment of touchstone and transmission.

For those of you who support this work—buying me a cup of coffee each month, thank you. Truly. Your support helps me tend to what is right in front of me, to stay faithful to the slow and quiet work of repair. It allows me to keep listening to the underside of history.

Some of you have reached out, longing to gather. I feel that longing too.

So, here’s a whisper of what’s to come: I’d like to invite us into shared space—online circles where we gather as kin in the rebellion of repair. Look for those invitations to emerge. I imagine us there, sharing story, presence, silence, and song.

Until then,

thank you for being here.

Thank you for walking this Way with me.

With fierce hope and soft resolve,

—RCE+

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🪷🌿 The BodhiChristo Dialogues: Returning to One Another in an Age of Collapse ✝️

Dear Beloveds,

We are living in a time of collapse.

The old scaffolds of certainty—nation, institution, tradition—are crumbling under the weight of empire, greed, and a manufactured forgetting. Fascism, in all its seductive brutality, creeps into daily life, not just as policy or violence, but as despair, disconnection, and disembodiment.

In such a time, we must return—not to what was, but to one another.

The BodhiChristo Dialogues arise from this returning. They are not new, though they feel like fresh breath. Buddhist-Christian dialogue has long been a tender meeting ground for those who seek to listen across traditions, to find resonance without erasure, and to walk the hard path of truth-telling with humility. But we have lost much of this practice. And what we lose in interspiritual conversation, we risk losing in our shared humanity.

We gather again to remember and reimagine.

In these dialogues, we bring the wisdom of the Bodhi tree and the shadow of the Cross into conversation—not to collapse difference, but to deepen it. The Buddha’s path of liberation and Christ’s call to beloved community meet here, not in perfect agreement, but in mutual witness. Together, we sit with suffering and with hope. We ask not what is the same, but what becomes possible when we listen with open hearts and grounded bodies.

Religion and spirituality, when not co-opted by empire, offer us more than doctrine or comfort—they offer us rhythm, repair, and rootedness. They teach us how to live and how to die, how to hold grief without closing off joy, and how to move through the world with compassion that is neither passive nor naive. Spiritual practice is resistance when it teaches us to see clearly, act justly, and remain human in the face of dehumanizing systems.

And so, in this season of fragmentation, we claim interspiritual dialogue as a form of sacred resistance.

To sit in dialogue is to refuse the lie that we are isolated, that traditions must war, that power only flows from above. It is to remember that the social fabric of our lives is woven by daily gestures of attention, reverence, and shared longing. BodhiChristo is not an institution. It is a movement of heart and practice, a place where monks and mystics, wanderers and wisdom-seekers, come to drink from one another’s wells.

We need not agree to share water.

We begin here, not because we have answers, but because we are thirsty.

With gratitude and fierce tenderness,

—RCE+