Journeying to God in Communion with the Other

Abstract

This dissertation is a comparative phenomenological and theological analysis on Catholic and Muslim traditions of pilgrimage to sacred tombs and shrines in south central Java, Indonesia. Both in the Muslim and Christian traditions, pilgrimage is a rich and complex religious practice that has served as a privileged milieu in which pilgrims and their communities attempt to foster diverse kinds of communion with God and His spiritual company of saints and other sacred figures, including the founders and paradigmatic ancestors of the local community. Precisely due to its richness and complexity as a spiritual and religio-cultural practice driven by the deeper and inclusive dynamics of communion, pilgrimage has also become a crucial practice in which a distinctive and hybrid religio-cultural identity is forged and negotiated in creative and fruitful ways--among others through the process of engaging various forms of otherness including other religious traditions and cultures--in the context of a long historical continuum that is also marked by tensions and ambiguities. Based on the underlying and multifaceted category of communion with God, the self, and the other that lies at the heart of the pilgrimage traditions in Islam and Catholicism, and guided by the method of the new comparative theology, this study attempts to offer a focused analysis of the major ways in which this dynamic of communion is played out in the deeper shared features and intimate encounters that exist between these two pilgrimage traditions in south central Java. Carried out from the perspective of the Catholic tradition, this study also seeks to explore the ways in which the extraordinary depth and breadth of these dynamics of communion in the Muslim and Catholic pilgrimage traditions--that in Catholic theology can be placed under the inclusive category of the work of the Spirit (pneumatology)--can serve as a creative avenue for a comparative theological enrichment of our contemporary understanding of the Catholic doctrine and practice of communio sanctorum ("communion of saints and the holy"). Drawing from both the most salient features of both the Muslim and Catholic pilgrimage practices in south central Java as well as the corresponding insights from the larger Islamic and Catholic traditions, this proposed pneumatological framework for a renewed understanding of the Catholic theology of communio sanctorum can be seen as the modest constructive fruit of this study's comparative theological engagement with the dynamics of pilgrimage in these two traditions. Through this process, the Catholic theology and practice of communio sanctorum is also made more richly anchored in the Catholic principles of communion, mediation, and sacramentality. And since this very process includes other religious tradition(s), the Catholic doctrine of communio sanctorum becomes remarkably inclusive and expansive as well, thus becoming a profoundly "catholic" theological vision.