What struck me wasn’t agreement. It was the shape of the conversation. Each person described the sacred differently, but the emotional contour was similar: awe, humility, a sense of being addressed by something larger than themselves. That reminded me of Rudolf Otto’s idea of the numinous—the terrifying and fascinating encounter with something holy. I don’t treat that as proof of a single doctrine, but it does explain why interfaith dialogue can be more useful than interfaith debate.

From a psychology angle, I keep thinking about Jung and archetypes. People may carry different religious symbols, but the underlying pattern—initiation, descent, return, transformation—shows up everywhere. In tarot, I see that as The Hermit followed by The World: one card is the solitary inward search, the other is integration after the journey. Interfaith dialogue, done carefully, is a kind of The World spread: