Buddhist-Christian Dialogue has produced many things in my life: friendships, new beliefs and convictions, courses taught and re-taught, and academic publications. I take this assignment to aim at a report on something distinct from these---deeper and harder to capture. It asks how that process shapes my continuing moment-to-moment reality. It seeks a kind of self-conducted spiritual x-ray, with all the liabilities that attend self-reporting.
The enduring impact of dialogue on my inner life has been to make that life itself a new country, where my own presence at times takes on alternative forms. In other writing, I have described three ways in which the Buddhist teaching of emptiness might interweave with Christian ideas of being a creature: what I have called diagnostic emptiness, therapeutic emptiness, and redemptive emptiness. In this essay I will try to address this not as a discursive argument, but as an account of my own experience.