Author Archives: Monksway

Two Old Favorites Remembered

Thoughts and memories about two old favorites of mine.  Recently I heard about the death of Thich Nhat Hanh, and I was jarred into an awareness that I had forgotten how much I was inspired by him when I was a young man.  He and D. T. Suzuki and a few others made a home for me in Zen.  That was before I had discovered the Chinese masters and made new friends.

Thich Nhat Hanh was a monk in the Vietnamese Zen tradition, otherwise called  Vietnamese Thien—equivalent to Chinese Chan, and then Japanese Zen.  And this is how we usually term it in the West.  The Vietnamese received this tradition directly from the Chinese, without any Japanese influence, so it has that kind of “softer” feel to it.

Thich Nhat Hanh was not welcome either in North Vietnam or South Vietnam during the war years because of his  nonviolence teaching.  In fact he had to live in France for several decades before he was allowed to return home about 2005.

Here’s a few quotes from him:

“There is no need to run, strive, search or struggle. Just be. Just being in the moment in this place is the deepest practice of meditation. Most people cannot believe that just walking as if you have nowhere to go is enough.”

“The Buddha said, ‘My practice is the practice of nonpractice.’ That means a lot. Give up all struggle. Allow yourself to be, to rest.”

“People talk about entering nirvana, but we are already there. Aimlessness and nirvana are one.”

“Many of us have been running all our lives. Practice stopping.”

“So please, when you practice meditation or walking meditation, don’t make any effort. Allow yourself to be like that pebble at rest. The pebble is resting at the bottom of the river and the pebble does not have to do anything. While you are walking, you are resting. While you are sitting, you are resting.”

“To meditate means to go home to yourself. Then you know how to take care of the things that are happening inside you, and you know how to take care of the things that happen around you.”

“To meditate means to go home to yourself. Then you know how to take care of the things that are happening inside you, and you know how to take care of the things that happen around you.”

“Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the whole earth revolves — slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future. Live the actual moment. Only this moment is life.”

 

Deceptively simple words, and very vulnerable to misinterpretation.  Also, remember the context of these words and  the audience they are meant for: the modern West.  We are folks who are, in his words, “rushing toward the future.”  We practice idolatry with our so-called achievements which have the substantiality of mist, vanishing in a “breeze.”  Thus the anxiety, the fear of loss; in the face of which, the intensification of effort to “roll that boulder up that hill” which seems to be the icon of modern life. .   And when we become religious/spiritual we tend to succumb to that same dynamic (and that’s true for all religious traditions).   But Thich Nhat Hanh is here pointing us toward the “treasure” that rust cannot destroy, moth cannot eat, thief cannot take.  

But there is another still deeper aspect to Nhat Hanh’s words.  We find ourselves with a profound dilemma, an unresolvable paradox.  There are a few Zen stories and koans that illustrate the matter…like this one:

 A martial arts student went to his teacher and said earnestly, “I am devoted to studying your martial system. How long will it take me to master it.”

The teacher’s reply was casual, “Ten years.” Impatiently, the student answered, “But I want to master it faster than that. I will work very hard. I will practice every day, ten or more hours a day if I have to. How long will it take then?”

The teacher thought for a moment, “20 years.”

So we are to act without acting; to do without doing; to seek without seeking; to want without wanting; to grasp by…….letting go.  The spiritual life begins here.

Another quote from Thich Nhat Hanh: 

“Our greatest fear is that when we die we will become nothing. Many of us believe that our entire existence is only a life span beginning the moment we are born or conceived and ending the moment we die. We believe that we are born from nothing and when we die we become nothing. And so we are filled with fear of annihilation.

“The Buddha has a very different understanding of our existence. It is the understanding that birth and death are notions. They are not real. The fact that we think they are true makes a powerful illusion that causes our suffering. The Buddha taught that there is no birth; there is no death; there is no coming; there is no going; there is no same; there is no different; there is no permanent self; there is no annihilation. We only think there is. When we understand that we cannot be destroyed, we are liberated from fear. It is a great relief. We can enjoy life and appreciate it in a new way.”

A very challenging quote; also a deep summary of what is at the heart of all Buddhism.  And also very vulnerable to being misunderstood and misinterpreted.   More words here would not help.  It is not at the level of concepts or notions that one begins to get a sense of what Nhat Hanh is pointing to.  Here we are in the presence of a truth that either one realizes or not.  

The other person I found myself pondering is Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German Lutheran theologian and pastor.  Intelligent, charismatic, he saw the staleness of Christianity in modern Germany, the social, conventional stance of a “nationalist Christianity.”  He touched the hearts of many young Germans with a vision of radical discipleship.  He resisted the Nazi regime from the very beginning.  He was a dedicated pacifist, until things got really bad when he tried to help the men who set out to kill Hitler.  Bonhoeffer was caught and executed.

  Now this was a strange occurrence.  Bonhoeffer had been one of my favorites about 40 years ago when, as a young monk, I was studying theology.  I wrote a paper about Bonhoeffer’s Christology for one of my classes and got an A, but that’s not what drew me to him!  In any case, years later I kind of lost track of his writings, and I honestly had not one thought about him or his writings for at least the last 20 years or so….until out of the clear blue his name popped up, out of nowhere, with no provocation, in the midst of some ruminations.  I could not resist revisiting some of my favorite quotes of his that still cause me to “wake up.”

And here’s a few of them:

“In a world where success is the measure and justification of all things the figure of Him who was sentenced and crucified remains a stranger and is at best the object of pity. . . . The figure of the Crucified invalidates all thought that takes success for its standard.”

“We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.”

“If I sit next to a madman as he drives a car into a group of innocent bystanders, I can’t, as a Christian, simply wait for the catastrophe, then comfort the wounded and bury the dead. I must try to wrestle the steering wheel out of the hands of the driver.”

“The person who’s in love with their vision of community will destroy community. But the person who loves the people around them will create community everywhere they go.”

“Christianity stands or falls with its revolutionary protest against violence, arbitrariness and pride of power and with its plea for the weak. Christians are doing too little to make these points clear rather than too much. Christendom adjusts itself far too easily to the worship of power. Christians should give more offense, shock the world far more, than they are doing now. Christian should take a stronger stand in favor of the weak rather than considering first the possible right of the strong.”

“We must be ready to allow ourselves to be interrupted by God, who will thwart our plans and frustrate our ways time and again, even daily, by sending people across our path with their demands and requests. We can, then, pass them by, preoccupied with our important daily tasks, just as the priest-perhaps reading the Bible-passed by the man who had fallen among robbers. When we do that, we pass by the visible sign of the Cross raised in our lives to show us that God’s way, and not our own, is what counts.”

“Do not worry! Earthly goods deceive the human heart into believing that they give it security and freedom from worry. But in truth, they are what cause anxiety. The heart which clings to goods receives with them the choking burden of worry. Worry collects treasures, and treasures produce more worries. We desire to secure our lives with earthly goods; we want our worrying to make us worry-free, but the truth is the opposite. The chains which bind us to earthly goods, the clutches which hold the goods tight, are themselves worries.”

“Cheap grace means grace sold on the market like cheapjacks’ wares. The sacraments, the forgiveness of sin, and the consolations of religion are thrown away at cut prices. Grace is represented as the Church’s inexhaustible treasury, from which she showers blessings with generous hands, without asking questions or fixing limits. Grace without price; grace without cost! The essence of grace, we suppose, is that the account has been paid in advance; and, because it has been paid, everything can be had for nothing. Since the cost was infinite, the possibilities of using and spending it are infinite. What would grace be if it were not cheap?…
Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.

Costly grace is the treasure hidden in the field; for the sake of it a man will go and sell all that he has. It is the pearl of great price to buy which the merchant will sell all his goods. It is the kingly rule of Christ, for whose sake a man will pluck out the eye which causes him to stumble; it is the call of Jesus Christ at which the disciple leaves his nets and follows him.  Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a man must knock.
Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. It is costly because it condemns sin, and grace because it justifies the sinner.”

“If you board the wrong train, it is no use running along the corridor in the other direction.”

“Jesus calls men, not to a new religion, but to life.”

“The gift of Christ is not the Christian religion, but the grace and love of God which culminate in the cross.” 

Two very interesting and profound human beings.  How do you compare them?  Well, you don’t.  Words can lead you to appreciate the gift you receive in their lives, but also the same words can get in the way of your own realization of the Truth they bear.  Suffice it to say that both lives give authentic witness to the Truth within us.

A Bit of History

Lets begin with India.  Vir Das is a very popular stand-up comedian from India who has been touring the US.   This is from a recent article in the Washington Post:

“The comedian from Mumbai stood onstage Friday night at the Kennedy Center with a camouflage-print shirt on his back and fire in his belly.  Before closing his sold-out show, Vir Das told his Washington audience he needed to talk about his homeland. He didn’t come from one India, Das said, but two Indias, seemingly at odds.  Today’s India is a country that is proudly vegetarian yet oppresses protesting farmers, Das said. It’s a country that worships women but grapples with horrific rape cases. It’s a country brimming with a huge, young population but is led by septuagenarian leaders with outdated ideas.” ( He could have also added, a country that espouses a religious view of reality but also allows one group to call for the extermination of Muslims!)

When this appeared online the response in India was just as expected: outrage and applause.  There were calls for censorship, for muzzling him, even for prosecution.  Not surprising considering the restrictions on free speech that the current government is bringing about or its denial of some of its real problems.  (The US State Dept. issued a travel advisory warning travelers to India that rape has alarmingly increased in India.)  But none of this is the point of this reflection.  I am more interested in the level of awareness of this young Indian, the fact that he understands, at least in part,  the “two” situation.  This can be and has been trivialized by saying that, yes, every culture has some good and some bad in it.  The situation is more complex and more interesting and more problematic than that.  All cultures, all countries, all religions live in a kind of dualism of vision.  There’s the story they tell themselves about their strengths and virtues, their truths, their contributions to the human condition; and then there is another story which is really not told, which holds a nightmare of darkness and chaos and confusion and violence, which we grapple with but try to pretend that it is not really an integral part of our fabric.  In other words, our children do not learn our real history, do not learn what were “the sins of the fathers” and therefore they are cut off from redeeming that past from its delusions and darkness. Thus they become vulnerable to the sloganeering of MAGA, to the fantasy vision of early America, to the arrogance of power, to a delusional sense of what constitutes the “good life” for an American, etc.  To put it in Vir Das’s terms:  we all live in two Americas, whether we like it or not, whether we know it or not.  And each is as real as the other, and it has been that way since the beginning!

Lets recall Norman Rockwell, the illustrator.  He became famous for his “sweet,” heart-warming depictions of life in small-town America….of course almost all white with a few Black people in ambiguous roles.  These drawings appeared as the front page of each issue of the magazine Saturday Evening Post.  When the Civil Rights era unfolded in the ‘60s, he wanted to include Blacks in a fuller way in his portrayals.  The Post would not allow it unless Blacks were shown in a subservient position.  He refused and left.  When he joined Look magazine, his first drawing showed a little Black girl being escorted to school through an angry crowd by a U.S. Marshall.  So…Rockwell had visited both Americas.  The really sad part and the really alarming part is that the majority of Americans seem not to want to know the “other America.”  And this “other America” pervades the whole culture until it is seen for what it is and confronted with the truth.

Two years ago, 2019, the NY Times published The 1619 Project, a collection of essays by some historians and other scholars, to memorialize the 500 year anniversary of the arrival of the first ship bringing African slaves to the New World.  But this was far more than some “remembrance”; it examined and highlighted the impact of slavery, the pervasive effects of slavery throughout our culture and economy, how it shaped the racism that infects our institutions and our collective lives even today.  A lot of this kind of analysis has not been taught widely in the history classes of our schools.  Certainly not in the American history class I had in my high school!  And, significantly enough, teachers today who have tried to use some of this material in their classes have run into heated opposition from parents’ groups and others.  Yes, some of the claims made in The Project might be overstated; and yes this material is not really for grade school members; but overall The Project is a bullseye, and can be wisely used in high school history.  When properly used it could help everyone, students and parents, come to terms with who “I” am, who “we” are, and how do we journey as a culture and a society from “here” to “there.”  Sadly many parents want to live only in a fantasy myth of America.  (I won’t go into it here, but it is also interesting to see the academic and elite feathers that were ruffled by The Project.  Don’t think that the “American fairy tale” dominates only MAGA lower classes.)

You might think that slavery and American capitalism have nothing to do with each other.  You won’t learn much about this from the standard history books used in high schools and colleges.  See if this essay doesn’t open a disturbing door:   

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html

Then, there’s the infamous 2nd Amendment of the Constitution, the one which all gun lovers in America swear by.  There are a number of reasons why this constitutional bow to gun-toting citizens was inserted.  Among them, two were connected to the institution of slavery.  Several slave-holding states wanted this provision in the constitution to legitimize the arming of civilians who went hunting for runaway slaves…even to the “free” states.  Also, unspoken, but very real was the fear among slave owners of slave rebellions and the physical danger they posed.  You needed guns to protect yourself from retaliation!  Even today there’s quite a few whites who have this subconscious fear of Black people buried deep within them.  

I bet you never heard of “sundown towns” (sometimes also known as “sunset towns”).  I certainly did not hear of these until very recently.  These were prevalent in the South, but they were also abundantly available in the Midwest and could also be found in significant numbers everywhere else.  A “sundown town” was one where people of color were either explicitly told not to be out on the street after sunset, or there was a general understanding that it was not wise for them to be out at that time.  Here is the wiki page on this phenomenon; read and be shocked:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundown_town

Lets not forget our Native American brothers and sisters.  Most of us have some sense of the physical trauma that Native Americans experienced from White America right from the get go, from colonial times all the way to the beginning of the 20th Century.  Even so, when you become informed of the details you will still be shocked.  But few of us have any real grasp of the psychological and cultural genocide experienced by Native Americans.  Consider the story below:

https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2021/08/28/1031398120/native-boarding-schools-repatriation-remains-carlisle

And I bet you never heard this story in your history class:

   

https://indiancountrytoday.com/archive/theodore-roosevelt-the-only-good-indians-are-the-dead-indians

D. H. Lawrence, the famous British writer, lived for a number of years in Taos, New Mexico.  He was a keen observer of American mythologies and a sharp interpreter of their meaning.  Once, in writing about the frontier myths created by James Fenimore Cooper, he opined:

“But you have there the myth of the essential white America.  All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play.  The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.  It has never yet melted.”

“Land of the Free, Home of the Brave!”  Right?

Admittedly a partial truth here, a grain of truth  here…..but unless the “other part” is admitted, brought out into the light, not for browbeating people but for an authentic and collective healing (recall the scripture readings for Ash Wed. and Lent), unless we really see how we got “here,”  we will continue deteriorating spiritually, socially, economically.  To borrow from Jesus, if the “darkness” is our light, then we truly live in the Dark.

Purity of Heart: A Few Thoughts

“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Matthew 5:8).  Of all the incredibly enigmatic, mysterious, seemingly impossible statements in the so-called Sermon on the Mount, this one is the “most” everything!  We are so used to hearing these words in church services and homilies that we are mostly numb to the mystery, even the shock value of ALL  the mysterious, paradoxical,  statements of the Sermon.  And, sadly, often what preachers and spiritual writers have to say does not help at all.  As if the purpose of religious discourse is to “take the air” out of the Mystery.  Let’s ponder this fragment of the Sermon a bit.

What in the world does “purity of heart” mean anyway?  Too often this has focused narrowly on one’s sexual integrity.  Or just keeping “bad thoughts” out whatever they might be.  The Christian tradition, as a whole, is a mixed bag in this regard.  We find bits and pieces of deep insight that at least point us in the right direction, but also we find so much of impoverished spirituality.   Then there is the other half of the statement:  how in the world can anyone “see” God?  This one is a real mind-bender!   Whatever this word “see” means in this context, it cannot be “see” in our usual sense.  God is not an object out there among the world of objects in front of our eyes.  We are not in a subject-object relationship to God.  Also, it should not be reduced to some metaphorical status as it often has been in Christianity.  Now think of the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, the context for the Gospel.  We are told that no one can “see God and live”(Exodus 33:20).  Also consider this pericope from the Gospel of John (14:8-9):

 “Philip said to him, “Master, show us the Father,* and that will be enough for us.”d

Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you for so long a time and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?e

One implication of these words is a confirmation of the Old Testament understanding that one cannot “see” God directly….you can see God’s “glory”….you can “see His ‘back’” (Exodus 33:23)….you can encounter the Mystery of God in those mysterious angelic encounters of the Bible…., so by “seeing” Jesus we can “see” the Father so to speak, the Absolute Mystery of God, another kind of “indirect” seeing but one that opens for us otherwise unfathomable depths.  But maybe “purity of heart” is even needed to truly “see” Jesus.   A lot could be said here, but I would like to push on in another way.  However, there is one question  that is very important which I will leave unanswered.  Do Jesus’s words here refer to the historical Jesus or to the Risen Christ?

Words from Thomas Merton:

“No writing on the solitary, meditative dimensions of life can say anything  that has not already been said better by the wind in the pine trees.  These pages seek nothing more than to echo the silence and peace that is ‘heard’ when the rain wanders freely among the hills and forests.  But what can the wind say where there is no hearer?  There is then a deeper silence: the silence in which the Hearer is No-Hearer.  That deeper silence must be heard before one can speak truly of solitude.”

Words from an Introduction to a Japanese translation of Thoughts in Solitude.  In my opinion, this Introduction may be one of the most beautiful and deepest reflections in Merton’s writings, and it certainly shows Zen’s influence on him.  In any case, we might want to say the same thing about “purity of heart” and leave it at that.  “Purity of heart” is not just a cipher for a bushel of virtues or a pretext for moral legalism or even the result of spiritual methods and practices.   Rather, however we want to explain purity of heart, it is what opens us to an intimate awareness of the Mystery of God…and so we ‘begin to see” God.  And here silence is best.   On the other hand, a bit of verbal-reflection might still be helpful in pointing us in the right direction.   We shall explore some aspects of  purity of heart through a three-pronged approach.

The first will be Scriptural.  The expression, “purity of heart,” or some variant of it, can be found in both old and modern works of spirituality, especially contemplative spirituality.   We can see it being used even in interreligious dialogue with folks trying to equate that expression with some expression from another tradition.  We’ll come back to that later.  But for now  we cannot get a sense of what this “purity of heart” is by ignoring its scriptural roots.  When I was in the seminary and we had our scripture class, it was interesting to discover how Jesus was presented differently in each of the Gospels, so you could see in each Gospel, and sometimes in various parts of each Gospel, something different and new about who Jesus was and what he was about.  The Sermon on the Mount is one of those moments.  And it is very interesting why this moment is totally absent from Mark and John and very differently presented in Luke; but we will stay with Matthew’s famous version.  Jesus, it is said, goes “up a mountain” and begins to teach the people.  He is presented as the “New Moses” establishing a “New Law.”   Moses came down from the “mountain of the encounter” with the Ten Commandments, which then delineated all of Israel’s relationships, both horizontal and vertical.  Jesus now opens up for us something new and radically different.  From Matthew 5 through Matthew 6 there is a collection of separate statements of truly enormous consequence.  Yes, the statements could be lined up as a series of “laws,” but they are not of that character. (They are also not what one wit called them, “suggestions or guidelines.”)   You have very little of “do not do this,” but rather much more of “do this.”  Take all the statements as a whole rather than isolate each one to figure out what it is saying; and you begin to sense that a whole new way of life, a whole new identity, a whole new level of awareness is  opened up for us.  And it seems that this is, to borrow a Buddhist expression, our “original face,” “our original nature.”

So my first proposal is to consider  the sayings as a whole; and how their revelatory function, all together, point at a radically new reality which is at the same time the oldest reality.  “Blessed are pure in heart” contains whatever else all the other expressions say; and all the other expressions contain, imply, and  exhibit whatever it is that “purity of heart” means.

For the second prong let’s look at the Desert Fathers, the origins of Christian monasticism.  These folks definitely took the Sermon on the Mount as more than just “suggestions or guidelines”!  But first we need to make a distinction between Cassian (and Evagrius) and the grand old monks, especially of that 1st generation.  Among the latter there was hardly a mention of “purity of heart” in direct terms; but for Cassian “purity of heart” was the foundation for his monastic spirituality.  (By the way, it’s interesting to see how someone like Meister Eckhart, by contrast, takes “poverty of spirit”  from the Sermon as the linchpin for developing his mystical spirituality).  In his Conferences, a classic of monastic spirituality, Cassian systematizes what in fact is more mysterious and much more vast in scope.  So he says that the ultimate goal of all monks is the “kingdom of God,” but the immediate goal and the means by which one “gets there” is “purity of heart.” And purity of heart is associated with what today we would call contemplative prayer, and finally it leads to agape, that totally selfless love.   I was taught this when I was a novice, and this sounds reasonable and it is basically ok.  But I found it a bit too pat and structured, like Cassian was trying to coral and tame something much more dynamic and wild and mysterious.  When you start out on the spiritual journey, the “scaffolding” of structures and systems and methods may be a real good, but as you go on you may discover yourself without any “ladder” underneath you!  Incidentally, that is one of the values of engaging the Old Testament:  the encounter with God is never the result of some method or system or “school of spirituality.”  It is good to have a home, but then there is the moment when you find yourself truly “homeless” no matter where you are, and that holy ground might not look like what the books described.

In any case, Cassian supposedly presents the teachings of the grand old monks of Scete; it’s as if he and we are listening to them as they teach.  That’s an effective literary technique, but it doesn’t mesh with the actual sayings and stories from the Alphabetical Collection, for example (translated by Benedicta Ward).  As Merton mentions more than once, the actual sayings for the most part are simple, humble, concrete, existential examples of a certain kind of struggle and journey, not a presentation of a system, and definitely no attempt to “map out” purity of heart.  (By the way, later writers like Palladius, really get carried away at times with fascination for the “odd.”)

Now Evagrius is not quite the systematizer that Cassian is.  He is a true intellectual, well-educated in the Platonic tradition, who has ardently taken up the desert life of the first monks.  He makes some important contributions in the early development of the Christian contemplative prayer tradition.  What Evagrius does is connect purity of heart with Platonic/Stoic apatheia….our word “apathy” comes from it, and sometimes apatheia gets translated as “indifference,” without feeling, etc.  That is a mistake.  Apatheia really means a kind of integration of all our faculties to be working in a harmonious way.  Evagrius pushes this into the depths of our minds and consciousness in the pursuit of what he terms, “pure prayer.”  Once you are no longer driven by chaotic thoughts and feelings, you are laying the foundation for pure prayer; and for Evagrius this is somehow what purity of heart is all about.  Not bad, in fact quite good but very inadequate for getting a fuller sense of what purity of heart is as it impacts all levels of human existence.  And just as with Cassian, the actual sayings and stories of the grand old monks seem to have a different feel and a different optic.

So, let me make two proposals at this point:  First of all, I propose that we do not look for a “definition” or a “map” or some schematic explaining what purity of heart is/means for these pioneers of Christian monastic/contemplative life.  Rather, among the grand old monks, especially of that 1st generation, what you get in most of their sayings (certainly not all) are what I would call “markers” or “signposts,” or, to change metaphors, a “fragrant scent” indicating the presence of something transcending the boundaries of what we usually call “life.”

Consider this story:

“Three brothers were in the habit of going to see the blessed Anthony every year. The first two would ask him questions about their thoughts and the salvation of the soul. But the third would keep silence without asking anything. Eventually Abba Anthony said to him, ‘You have been coming here to see me for a long time now and you never ask me any questions.’ The other replied, ‘One thing is enough for me, Father… to see you.’”

This beautiful story is at the same time one of those “markers” of the presence of purity of heart but without naming it or explaining it.  Also it illustrates how someone encounters that reality—not in words, a system of spirituality, etc.—but in a very concrete person.  No words, no explanations are then needed.  And this story is also very important and very exceptional in that it comes from a subculture that pulsates with the expression, “Give me a word, Abba, that I may live, that I may be saved….”  In other words, give me, in my existential predicament, my now need, that particular path for me that leads to…and this expression is never explicitly used…that leads to purity of heart.  Here this third brother no longer needs that word or any words….here is a person already well on the way….  In Anthony he finds his affirmation.  As that old pop saying goes: it takes like to know like.

And here consider this story, quite the opposite of the above, the marker here is for absence of purity of heart:

“The brothers praised a monk before Abba Anthony. When the monk came to see him, Anthony wanted to know how he would bear insults; and seeing that he could not bear them at all, he said to him, ‘You are like a village magnificently decorated on the outside, but destroyed from within by robbers.’”

This story illustrates quite well that these early desert monks understood the nature of a “counterfeit spirituality” and its consequences.  What it doesn’t show and which is illustrated in some other stories is the moment of awakening when the monk realizes the false ground of his spirituality and then begins the journey from the unreal to the Real.  And this brings us to the second proposal.

The second proposal I would like to make is more difficult to express, but it goes like this:  Lets not look at purity of heart as a “something you possess,” a state of mind or heart, a state of being, a condition, etc.  Rather, it is more like a dynamic process, a journey….   To borrow from the Upanishads, purity of heart is really the journey from the unreal to the Real, it is the very dynamism of this journey, involving the whole complex of human life, mind, heart, body, emotions, desires,….  And purity of heart in this sense is not restricted to being a monk; rather it characterizes the most fundamental call of every human being.  

However, it also touches most intimately the monastic identity.  Recall those amazing words of the great Macarius:  “I am not yet a monk, but I have seen monks.”  You are not yet a monk; you are always becoming a monk.  You are engaged in an incredible process of which you could never foresee its true dimensions.  Becoming a monk means that you declare yourself formally and openly to wanting to give yourself totally to this journey.  (I only wish that in our formal monastic institutions when a young person is professing to be a monk, they would ceremonially tell him/her, “you are not yet a monk, but you are becoming one.”  It is not a status  or a state of life but a journey with a particular external modality.)

To see the seriousness and depths of this process/journey let us refer to Gregory of Nyssa.  Gregory emphasized the infinity of God.   Just think what this means.  For Gregory this infinitude means that a limited being, a created being, can never reach a grasp or understanding of God.  For Gregory, however, this is the whole point of existence, our life, and the “afterlife”—from the very beginning and for all eternity we have this constant progression, an ἐπέκτασις in Greek (epektasis), toward a knowledge and vision of the infinite God.  We will for all eternity increase in our knowledge of God, in this movement “into God.”  And this means for all eternity our joy, our happiness, our bliss, our fulfillment will be increasing.  But this journey/process starts right here and right now, and we can call it purity of heart.  We find hints of all this in the New Testament, as in 1 John 3:2:

“Beloved, now we are children of God, and it has not appeared as yet what we will be. We know that when He appears, we will be like Him, because we will see Him just as He is.”

And another hint of this even from an old work by Jean Danielou:

“There is at once for the soul an aspect of stability and possession, which is her participation in God, and an aspect of movement, which is the ever infinite gap between what she possesses of God and what He is…Spiritual life is thus an everlasting transformation of the soul in Christ Jesus in the form of a growing ardour, thirst for God growing as participation in Him increases, which is accompanied by a growing stability, the soul becoming simple, and fixed ever more firmly in God. J. Danielou: Platonisme et theologie mystique, Paris, 1944, pp. 305-307.

Returning to the Sayings of the Desert Monks, my proposal is, then, that many of the sayings are markers or signposts of this  incredible process/journey; and if we want to get a sense of what purity of heart entails, it would help to ponder these sayings in a way that doesn’t make of them simplistic or moralistic or superficial exhortations.  Consider a few of the sayings/stories: 

“Two hermits lived together for many years without a quarrel. One said to the other, ‘Let’s have a quarrel with each other, as is the way of men.’ The other answered, ‘I don’t know how a quarrel happens.’ The first said, ‘Look here, I put a brick between us, and I say, That’s mine. Then you say, No, it’s mine. That is how you begin a quarrel.’ So they put a brick between them, and one of them said, ‘That’s mine.’ The other said, ‘No; it’s mine.’ He answered, ‘Yes, it’s yours. Take it away.’ They were unable to argue with each other.”

“The devil appeared to a monk disguised as an angel of light, and said to him, ‘I am the angel Gabriel, and I have been sent to you.’ But the monk said, ‘Are you sure you weren’t sent to someone else? I am not worthy to have an angel sent to me.’ At that the devil vanished.”

[This monk has “no credentials,” a “no-monk” in Zen terms.]

“One day Abba John the Dwarf was sitting down in Scetis, and the brethren came to him to ask him about their thoughts. One of the elders said, ‘John, you are like a courtesan who shows her beauty to increase the number of her lovers.’ Abba John kissed him and said, ‘You are quite right, Father.’ One of his disciples said to him, ‘Do you not mind that in your heart?’ But he said, ‘No, I am the same inside as I am outside.’ “

“Abba Poemen said of Abba John the Dwarf that he had prayed God to take his passions away from him so that he might become free from care. He went and told an old man this; ‘I find myself in peace, without an enemy,’ he said. The old man said to him, ‘Go beseech God to stir up warfare so that you may regain the affliction and humility that you used to have, for it is by warfare that the soul makes progress.’ So he besought God and when warfare came, he no longer prayed that it might be taken away, but said, ‘Lord, give me strength for the fight.”

[An interesting story which first of all shows a monk recovering from a counterfeit spirituality (what some in this case might call apatheia!).  More importantly, if you don’t get thrown by the “war, struggle” language, you will notice that he moves from a static position, having this “possession” of a credential, “peace,” to a true engagement with his condition so that he can make “progress.”  The essence of a spiritual life is not something static, least of all an “identity,” but more like a journey; and at times it can get very difficult.]

“Abba Lot came one day to see Abba Joseph and said to him, ‘Father, I keep my little rule to the best of my ability. I observe my modest fast and my contemplative silence. I say my prayers and do my meditation. I endeavour as far as I can to drive useless thoughts out of my heart. What more can I do?’  The elder rose to answer and lifted his hands to heaven. His fingers looked like lighted candles and he said, ‘Why not become wholly fire?’”

[An incredibly marvelous story!  So much could be said here, but I will refrain!]

Now we will move to the third prong of our reflection: the interreligious context.  Here you might think there is nothing for us; after all we are dealing with a scriptural term from the Christian tradition.  Partially that may be correct.  It would be a mistake to simply equate “purity of heart” with something in Buddhism or Taoism that looks similar.  On the level of language and concepts there are many possibilities for a spiritual mirage—things seem to be there when they are not really there.  A lot of good people have been fooled this way by being too hasty and overeager to reach out to another tradition.  Merton admitted making this mistake in his dialogue with D.T. Suzuki.  This is from Zen and the Birds of Appetite:

“At this point I may take occasion to say clearly that, in my dialog with Dr, Suzuki, my choice of Cassian’s “purity of heart” as a Christian expression of Zen-consciousness was an unfortunate example.  No doubt there are passages in Cassian and Evagrius…which suggest some tendency toward the “emptiness” of Zen.  But Cassian’s idea of “purity of heart,”…while it may or may not be mystical, is not yet Zen because it still maintains that the supreme consciousness resides in a distinct heart which is pure and which is therefore ready and even worthy to receive a vision of God.  It is still very aware of a “pure,” distinct  and separate self-consciosness.”

(Incidentally, this means that Cassian’s purity of heart is not compatible with a nondualistic spirituality.)

However, given such cautions, we may still find some of the previously mentioned “markers” for what is purity of heart when it begins to be grasped in its depths and in its mystery.  My basic premise is that purity of heart is not just for the Christian monk, but it is an essential dynamic for every human being.  To steal from Cassian:  the immediate goal of being human is purity of heart!  (But understood in a much deeper way.)

Consider Gandhi.  Consider this story about him:

One day a mother brought her young boy to Gandhi’s ashram.  When she met him she asked Gandhi, “Please tell my son not to eat sugar.  It’s not good for him.”  Gandhi looked at them, and then told her, “Come back tomorrow and bring the boy.”  When she came back the next day, Gandhi told the boy not to eat sugar.  The perplexed mother asked him, “Why didn’t you just say that yesterday?”  Gandhi said, “Yesterday I was eating sugar myself!  Today I stopped.”

Gandhi was trying to be “the same inside and outside” like Abba John the Dwarf.  There were truly many moments in Gandhi’s life that illustrated markers for purity of heart, but there is one word that encapsulates everything Gandhi was about and how he, as a modern person, showed a human being fully engaged in that process which can be called purity of heart and that word is:  satyagraha.  It is often translated as “nonviolence,” but literally means “holding on to truth.”  You will not find one clearer marker of purity of heart, not even among the grand old desert monks, than in the practice of nonviolence when it is authentically a defining part of someone’s life.

Then there are the great Zen masters.  A lovely way to end our reflection on purity of heart is with two Zen storys.  The first is about the great Japanese Rinzai master, Hakuin:

“A beautiful girl in the village was pregnant. Her angry parents demanded to know who was the father. At first resistant to confess, the anxious and embarrassed girl finally pointed to Hakuin, the Zen master whom everyone previously revered for living such a pure life. When the outraged parents confronted Hakuin with their daughter’s accusation, he simply replied ‘Is that so?’

When the child was born, the parents brought it to the Hakuin, who now was viewed as a pariah by the whole village. They demanded that he take care of the child since it was his responsibility. ‘Is that so?’ Hakuin said calmly as he accepted the child.

For many months he took very good care of the child until the daughter could no longer withstand the lie she had told. She confessed that the real father was a young man in the village whom she had tried to protect. The parents immediately went to Hakuin to see if he would return the baby. With profuse apologies they explained what had happened. ‘Is that so?’ Hakuin said as he handed them the child.”

[Two comments:  There is a very similar story from the Desert Fathers concerning Abba Macarius.  Secondly, I saw some people’s comments about this story and it was pretty sad.]

The next Zen story is from ancient China:

“A monk once asked Master Chao Chou, ‘Who is Chao Chou?’  Chao Chou replied: ‘East Gate, West Gate, South Gate, North Gate.’”

Commentary by the Japanese philosopher of religion, Toshihiko Izutsu.

“That is to say, Chao Chou is completely open.  All the gates of the city are open, and nothing is concealed.  Chao Chou stands right in the middle of the City, i.e., the middle of the Universe.  One can come to see him from any and every direction.  The Gates that have once been artificially established to separate the ‘interior’ from the‘exterior’ are now wide open.  There is no ‘interior.’  There is no ‘exterior.’  There is just Chao Chou, and he is all-transparent.”

 

 

Last Thoughts on 9/11…Social and Religious Considerations

Now that the anniversary is over I feel the need to put a few thoughts “down on paper.”  I remember vividly getting up in the morning to go to work and turning on the TV and seeing the unfolding tragedy.  What an unspeakable horror it must have been to the people on the scene and to the first responders.  And so many lives so randomly cut short.  But I also remember thinking to myself “this is going to be really bad,” referring not so much to the destruction here and now but to our response which turned into a decades long nightmare.  

This is not quite how our mass media looked at it during the recent memorialization.  Not how our social, political, or religious leaders looked at it.  Instead we had this orgy of self-pity and self-adulation, illusions of how unified and how strong we are as Americans.  The speeches were mostly a parade of national pride, with the echoes of that chant, USA, USA, USA, USA, as the pall bearers of the tragically taken lives.  

I like The Onion; I like its biting humor and sharp satire.  Often it seems more on target than our great newspapers and all the pundits on TV.  But for sure I thought that they would never touch the 9/11 anniversary.  Boy was I wrong!  They hit it with a ton of bricks.  Only Chris Hedges could have done anything like this.  Here is the headline:

Americans Fondly Recall 9/11 As Last Time Nation Could Unite In Bloodlust

And here is the link to the story:

https://www.theonion.com/americans-fondly-recall-9-11-as-last-time-nation-could-1847607772

But the story is so cogent that I will quote more fully:

“WASHINGTON—As they reminisced 20 years later about a devastating and historic national tragedy, Americans reportedly took note Saturday of how the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks were the last time the country was able to put aside its differences and stand united in a bloody, homicidal thirst for vengeance. “Nowadays, there’s political polarization everywhere you look, but back then, we found a shared sense of purpose and agreed to just kill, kill, kill,” said Cleveland native Lewis Romano, one of the millions of U.S. citizens who waxed nostalgic for the days following 9/11, when Americans from all walks of life coalesced around common demands for widespread death, carnage, and destruction in a faraway place that most of them would never visit. “After those towers fell, it didn’t matter if you were from a blue state or a red state, because we all wanted the same thing—blood—and we wanted it immediately. So we came together, and in a single voice we told the world: We’re gonna drop tens of thousands of bombs on Afghanistan and ask questions later. There wasn’t any hand-wringing about whether we might fuck everything up and make it far, far worse. Republicans and Democrats simply locked arms, pulled the trigger, and let the bodies fall where they may. We were truly one then. It was a beautiful thing.” Asked to point to a map and identify any of the 85 countries to which U.S. counterterrorism operations have since spread, the American populace demurred.”

The Onion hits a bullseye!

Now you may ask, what was the response of religious leaders at 9/11 and its aftermath?   I am afraid that for most, including my Catholic Pope, the response was composed of the expected sentiments, benevolent platitudes, and very little about HOW we should respond.  No so with one religious leader: the Dalai Lama.  He was incredible (and very prescient, considering what happened in the following years).   This statement is so good and so important that I will quote it fully:

“The 11th September attack on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon were deeply shocking and very sad. I regard such terrible destructive actions as acts of hatred, for violence is the result of destructive emotions. Events of this kind make clear that if we allow our human intelligence to be guided and controlled by negative emotions like hatred, the consequences are disastrous.

Taking Action
How to respond to such an attack is a very difficult question. Of course, those who are dealing with the problem may know better, but I feel that careful consideration is necessary and that it is appropriate to respond to an act of violence by employing the principles of nonviolence. This is of great importance. The attacks on USA were shocking, but retaliation by going to war may not be the best solution in the long run. Ultimately only nonviolence can contain terrorism. Problems within human society should be solved in a humanitarian way, for which nonviolence provides the proper approach.

I am not an expert in these affairs, but I am quite sure that if problems can be discussed with a calm mind, applying nonviolent principles and keeping in view the long-term safety of the world, then a number of different solutions may be found. Of course, in particular instances a more aggressive approach may also be necessary.

Terrorism cannot be overcome by the use of force because it does not address the complex underlying problems. In fact the use of force may not only fail to solve the problems, it may exacerbate them and frequently leaves destruction and suffering in its wake. Human conflicts should be resolved with compassion. The key is non-violence.

Retaliatory military action by the United States may bring some  satisfaction and short-term results but it will not root out the problem of terrorism. Long-term measures need to be taken. The US must examine the factors that breed and give rise to terrorism. I have written to President Bush urging him to exercise restraint and not to seek a brutal revenge for the 11th September attacks. I expressed my sympathy but I suggested that responding to violence with more violence might not be the answer. I would also like to point out that to talk of nonviolence when things are going smoothly is not of much relevance. It is precisely when things become really difficult, urgent and critical that we should think and act nonviolently.

At times the intervention of private individuals or non-governmental organizations can prove very effective in resolving certain kinds of conflicts in the world.  Therefore one of the things I suggested to several members of the European Parliament during my recent visit was that, perhaps under the auspices of the European Parliament, a meeting could be arranged of private individuals, people who are concerned about peace in the world, and related non-governmental organisations to discuss how the problem of terrorism can be dealt with and overcome. It would be useful to include people who are considered terrorists or who are seen as supporting terrorism, so that we can learn why they are resorting to or encouraging terrorism. It is possible that some of their grievances are valid. In such cases we need to address them. But where they have no valid grievances or reasons, the true situation should be clarified in order to remove misunderstanding and baseless suspicion.

Human conflicts do not arise out of the blue. They occur as a result of causes and conditions, many of which are within the protagonists’ control. This is where leadership is important. It is our leaders’ responsibility to decide when to act and when to practise restraint. In the case of conflict it is important to exercise restraint before the situation gets out of hand. Once the causes and conditions which lead to violent clashes have ripened, it is very difficult to restore peace. Violence undoubtedly breeds more violence. If we instinctively retaliate when violence is done to us, what can we expect other than that our opponent will also feel justified to retaliate in turn? This is how violence escalates. Preventive measures and restraint must be observed at an earlier stage. Clearly leaders need to be alert, far-sighted and decisive.

Everyone wishes to live in peace, but we are often confused about how that can be achieved. Mahatma Gandhi pointed out that because violence inevitably leads to more violence, if we are seriously interested in peace, we must seek to achieve it through peaceful and non-violent means. We may be tempted to use force because it will be seen as a decisive response, but it is really only a last resort. For one thing, violence is unpredictable. The initial intention may be to use limited force, but violence gives rise to unforeseen consequences. Generally speaking, violence is the wrong method in this modern era. If, on the other hand, humanity were to use more farsighted and more comprehensive methods, then I think many of the problems we face could be resolved quite quickly.

We must continue to develop a wider perspective, to think rationally and work to avert future disasters in a nonviolent way. These issues concern the whole of humanity, not just one country. We should explore the use of nonviolence as a long-term measure to control terrorism of every kind. But we need a well-thought-out, coordinated long-term strategy. The proper way of resolving differences is through dialogue, compromise and negotiations, through human understanding and humility. We need to appreciate that genuine peace comes about through mutual understanding, respect and trust. As I have already said, human problems should be solved in a humanitarian way, and nonviolence is the humane approach.

In this context, to punish an entire country for the misdeeds of an enemy who cannot be found may prove to be futile. Dealing with such situations as we face now requires a broader perspective. On the one hand we cannot simply identify a few individuals and put the entire blame on them, but neither can we target an entire country, for inevitably the innocent will suffer just as they did in the USA on 11th September.

Regarding those who carried the attack
Those who carried out the violent acts of 11th September were also human beings.  If something similar had happened to their family and friends, presumably they, too, would have experienced pain and suffering. And as human beings they would naturally have had a desire to avoid that suffering. Therefore, we need to try to understand what motivated them to behave the way they did, if we are to avoid some future repetition of these awful events. I feel that the hatred and destructive emotions underlying the attacks of 11th September have been completely counterproductive for the cause, whatever it might be, espoused by the attackers.

The world in which we live today is no longer as simple as it once was. It is complex and all its constituent parts are interrelated. We must recognize this and understand that in order to solve a problem completely we must act in accordance with reality. For example, as the global economy evolves, every nation becomes to a greater or lesser extent dependent on every other nation. The modern economy, like the environment, knows no boundaries. Even those countries openly hostile to one another must cooperate in their use of the world’s resources. Often, for example, they will be dependent on the same rivers. And the more interdependent our economic relationships, the more interdependent must our political relationships become.

When we neglect whole sections of humanity, we ignore not only the interdependent nature of reality but also the reality of our situation. In the modern world the interests of any particular community can no longer be considered only within the confines of its own boundaries. This is something I try to share with other people wherever I go. The dreadful events of 11th September have filled people throughout the world with a revulsion for terrorism, whatever its aims. Therefore, what happened has actually undermined what the terrorists hoped to achieve.

What can we learn from this tragic event?
This tragic occurrence provides us with a very good opportunity. There is a worldwide will to oppose terrorism. We can use this consensus to implement long-term preventive measures. This will ultimately be much more effective than taking dramatic and violent steps based on anger and other destructive emotions. The temptation to respond with violence is understandable but a more cautious approach will be more fruitful.

The source of such violence
Generations of suffering and grievances have provoked this violence. As a Buddhist I believe that there are causes and conditions behind every event. Some of these causes may be of recent origin but others are decades or centuries old. These include colonialism, exploitation of natural resources by developed countries, discrimination, suspicion and the widening gap between the rich and the poor. Years of negligence and indifference to poverty and oppression may be among the causes for this upsurge in terrorism. What is clear is that the shocking, sad and horrific terrorist attacks in the USA were the culmination of many factors.

Who are these terrorists?
It is a mistake to refer to Muslim terrorists. I believe no religion endorses terrorism. The essence of all major religions is compassion, forgiveness, self-discipline, brotherhood and charity. All religions have the potential to strengthen human values and to develop general harmony. But individuals twist religious beliefs for their own ends. There are people who use religion as a cover to achieve their vested interests, so it would be wrong to blame their particular religion. Religious divisions have lately become dangerous once more, and yet pluralism, under which everybody is free to practise his or her own faith, is part of the fabric of contemporary society. Buddhism may be good for me, but I cannot insist that it will also be good for you or anybody else.

To the American people
America is a democratic country. It really is a peaceful and open society, in which individuals have the maximum opportunity to develop their human creativity and potential. After these dreadful incidents we saw the willingness with which Americans, especially New Yorkers, worked to help each other. It is vital to maintain this high morale – this American spirit. I hope that people will keep their spirits up and, taking a broader perspective, calmly judge how best to act.

My own wish and prayer is for everyone to remain calm. These negative events are the result of hatred, short-sightedness, jealousy and, in some cases, years of brainwashing. I personally cannot understand people who hijack an entire plane with its passengers to carry out such destruction. It is quite unthinkable. But these were not acts of spontaneous negative emotion. They were the result of careful planning, which only makes them more terrible. This is another example of how our sophisticated human intelligence and the sophisticated technology we have produced can lead to disastrous results. My fundamental belief is that unhappy events are brought about by negative emotions. Ultimately the answer to whether we can create a more peaceful world lies in our motivation and in the  kind of emotions and attitudes we foster in ourselves.

I am sure everybody agrees that we need to overcome violence, but if we are to eliminate it completely, we must first analyse whether or not it has any value. From a strictly practical perspective, we find that on occasions violence indeed appears useful. We can solve a problem quickly with force. However, such success is often at the expense of the rights and welfare of others. As a result, even though one problem has been solved, the seed of another has been sown.

On the other hand, if your cause is supported by sound reasoning, there is no point in using violence. It is those who have no motive other than selfish desire and who cannot achieve their goal through logical reasoning who rely on force. Even when family and friends disagree, those with valid reasons can state them one after another and argue their case point by point, whereas those with little rational support soon fall prey to anger. Thus anger is not a sign of strength but of weakness.

Ultimately, it is important to examine our own motivation and that of our opponent. There are many kinds of violence and nonviolence, but we cannot distinguish them through external factors alone. If our motivation is negative, the action it produces is, in the deepest sense, violent, even though it may appear to be deceptively gentle. Conversely, if our motivation is sincere and positive but the circumstances require harsh behaviour, essentially we are practising nonviolence. No matter what the case may be, I feel that a compassionate concern for the well-being of others – not simply for oneself – is the sole justification for the use of force.”

Nothing more needs to be said.  Nobody has delineated a vision of a true response better.

To Tech or Not to Tech:  That Is An Important Question

First, before we get to the topic at hand, my apologies for the misuse of language…turning  a “slangy” noun into a “slangy” verb….just can’t help myself!  Secondly, a prefatory word about the so-called contemplative life.  In Catholic culture, especially pre-Vatican II, but even afterwards to this very day, contemplative life is too often seen as simply another “layer” of life on top of all the other layers as it were.  It was something “you did” in addition to all the other things you do.  So you had all these articles, pamphlets, books on the topic of “contemplation and ……..”  There is no “and” in true contemplation.  It is Life lived in a particularly deep way, with a certain vision of the whole of Reality, and an awareness that transcends what’s in front of your nose!  Merton and Abhishiktananda, among others, pointed this out time and again.  Abhishiktananda once wrote to a housewife who had written to him that she could be more of a contemplative than a “professional monk.”  It was a matter of a certain state of heart and mind.

Now for two interesting stories:

First, very recently there appeared a piece in SF Gate with the following title:

“How saying ‘yes’ to tech devices saved one Bay Area family’s Yosemite vacation”

Written by Matt Villano, it describes how he as a father observed his young daughters enjoying their yearly stay at Yosemite in a new way.  Here is the link to the full story:

https://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/Bay-Area-family-travel-Yosemite-devices-hike-16416706.php?IPID=SFGate-HP-CP-Spotlight

Villano takes his family camping to Yosemite every year.  He is obviously a good father, an intelligent and sensitive man, and someone who has some appreciation for the wilderness.  On this trip he senses a new problem.  His youngsters have, during the pandemic, become very attached and proficient in smart phones, social media, and the whole internet thing.  Now they want to bring this to the wilderness.  He writes, referencing John Muir:

“How else would the conservation icon, travel writer, and poster child for the Sierra have reacted to the way my three daughters leaned into technology during our most recent visit to Yosemite National Park? What would he have said about my kiddos making TikTok-style videos amid the big trees?

Muir, a Scottish immigrant,…. wrote his wife that at Yosemite, ‘only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness.’ My kids — ages 12, 9 and 5 — took a markedly different approach, bringing an iPad, a Kindle Fire and an iPod Touch to document, and more deeply engage with, every waking moment of their journey.”

He relents, as long as they promise to use the gadgetry to “enhance” their experience of Yosemite, not to shield them from it.  As you read this you see that everyone is truly enjoying the experience.  Villano concludes:

“I couldn’t help but marvel at how a more liberal use of technology had empowered my girls to connect with a familiar park in thrilling new ways. Weeks later, they’re still chortling at their dance videos and still talking about how much fun they had. They’ve even started asking if we can go back again before the first snow of the season.  Maybe Muir wouldn’t have minded after all.”

Ok, I get it.  But I wonder if our author is missing something in his reflection, making a serious mistake.  (It could be that I’m just an old “fuddy-duddy.”)   Yes, for his young girls that was probably a good thing, enjoyable, and maybe it might lure them someday into a deeper encounter with the wilderness.  Very often, however, tech gadgets and the social media world proves to be very addictive and in fact begins to substitute for the Real. 

Villano uses the word “connect.”  A very important word in the techy world.  Certainly there is all this tech gadgetry that facilitates communication and connection at a certain level, a real benefit in modern living.   What is amazing is how much felt need there seems to be for this “connection,” how isolated many people feel.  But no tech can engender true communion, a sense of oneness—it very often simply enables people to bond with similar minded people and this sharing of your “one world” is just a more advanced form of “tribalism”; you encounter only the world of your tribe or you project the world of your tribe everywhere.  

 The encounter with Yosemite that Villano celebrates is not the encounter that Muir invites us to.  That would be more like something from the previous posting: the Romantic vision and the Chinese Taoist; or, to put it more simply, it is a call to a contemplative vision.  And a sense of communion.

Secondly,  there appeared in the Washington Post a story about a British farmer that really intrigued me.  The title was:

“He is Britain’s famous shepherd-author-influencer. He wants to transform farming to save the planet.”

Here is the link to the whole story:

 https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/uk-farming-james-rebanks/2021/08/27/1cbf89b2-fabe-11eb-911c-524bc8b68f17_story.html

The story is about James Rebanks, Oxford grad, a very smart guy who inherited a 600-year-old family farm and has become a “rock-star” farmer in England.  Here’s how the story starts:

“Britain’s rock-star shepherd and best-selling author, James Rebanks, is out at the family farm, giving the tour, waxing rhapsodic about his manure. The glory of it — of the crumbly, muffin-top consistency of a well-made plop from a grass-fed cow.

‘Has anyone in your life ever truly explained grasses to you?’ he asks. And we think, not really.

It’s not just ruminant digestion. Don’t get the man started on soil health. Rebanks is a soil geek, with the zeal of the convert. We’re soon on our knees, grubbing in the dirt. Sniffing. He’s distracted by a red-tailed bumblebee, then by the surround-sound of birdsong. ‘I don’t trust a quiet farm,’ he says. ‘It should be noisy with life.’

This is a man with a very different vision of what farming should be like.  He doesn’t believe it is healthy for us or the planet to have these giant industrial farms.  He has created something different on his little patch of land.   In his words:

“The shepherd riffs on the circle of life, the frenzy of lambing season, the deliciousness of grilled mutton and the wisdom of sheepdogs — speckled with rants against the alleged ruinous stupidity of industrial farming ‘where the field has become the factory floor.’”

He is not into the Amish/fundamentalist thing of being anti-technology or science; in fact he uses it but quite wisely.  The root of his farming, the foundation of his kind of farming is a wholly different vision of nature and our relationship to it.  The “other way” is not simply another choice; it is a kind of suicide on a planetary scale, social, natural, cultural, psychological, even spiritual suicide.  He wrote a book about that.  From the article:

“On one level, the book is about how cheap food culture, globalization and super-efficient, hyper-mechanized, highly productive modern farms (giant monocultures of beets, wheat, corn) are terrible for nature (insects, rivers, climate) and our health (obesity, diabetes) and our farmers (indebted, pesticide-dependent, stressed).”

The German philosopher, Heidegger, proposed that now technology “enframes” our vision of reality.  We have become creatures who seem to be only able to see reality through the optic of technology.  And this distorts not only our relationship to it but also our own self-understanding.  Again, this is not being anti-science or a call to some silly “return” to a world that never existed in the first place.  Rather, it is a proposal to see ourselves and our world in a different and deeper way.

A Tale of Two Visions

Way back in 1959, when I was in 8th grade, I watched one of the early programs on the new public tv channel.  It was Alan Watts discoursing on Eastern spiritual traditions.  He very emphatically made the point that the Eastern vision, especially the Chinese Taoist vision,  of the human being, of nature, of reality, is so radically different from the Western version of these.  He illustrated it by comparing a painting from ancient China and one from the Renaissance in Europe.  I found the whole thing so mesmerizing; never forgot the experience.  I would like to “re-live” the experience as it were, but with two different paintings that I think are even more interesting in this illustration, and maybe they show things may be more complex and more nuanced than Watts presented.  So….let us begin.

Sometimes no words are needed.   All you need do is LOOK.  What you see, what you think you see, and what you don’t see are all interesting.  Here two different sets of artwork invite comparison and contrast.  So, lets begin by just looking and pondering…..

The first painting is a prime example of German Romanticism, early 19th Century, Caspar David Friedrich.

The second one is from China: by Shih T’ao in the Ming Dynasty, 17th Century.

And just for emphasis I’ve included a third painting, another from China, something surprisingly very similar, by Shen Zhou,  also in the Ming Dynasty, 16th Century.

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Some notes on the Friedrich painting:

Romanticism as a movement in Western art, literature, and music is a fascinating phenomenon.  One of its key aspects, but certainly not the only one, is the reaction and revolt from the classical formalism of medieval and renaissance art and the scientific rationalism of the Enlightenment Period.  Furthermore, the very place of nature changes radically; it is no longer merely the backdrop, the landscape, the stage on which the human drama unfolds.  Here it becomes almost the protagonist which engages the human.  In classical, medieval, and renaissance art, the religious and spiritual is primarily mediated through the human and its various institutions.  In the Enlightenment all this crumbles (and a lot of Romantic art shows that….like ruins of old churches).  One of the most striking aspects of Romanticism, then, is the mystical human-divine encounter that is now mediated by nature and no longer by the human constructs of civilization.  There is more emphasis on Mystery rather than the clarity and the human-centeredness of earlier art. 

 However, this must also be noted:  at times  in Romantic art the human is “writ-large.”  The human being is not a part of the Whole, but the centerpiece if you will, even if at times the human presence in the scene is minimal.   And nature itself is something “out there,” something outside us, which mediates the Mystery and mysticism of reality.    Romantic art “seeks to convey a subjective, emotional response to the natural world.  The human focus is for all practical purposes on the ego self, human feelings, even irrationality (as opposed to rational thinking), subjectivity, etc.

An interesting note on Friedrich’s art found in Wikipedia:

“The visualization and portrayal of landscape in an entirely new manner was Friedrich’s key innovation. He sought not just to explore the blissful enjoyment of a beautiful view, as in the classic conception, but rather to examine an instant of sublimity, a reunion with the spiritual self through the contemplation of nature. Friedrich was instrumental in transforming landscape in art from a backdrop subordinated to human drama to a self-contained emotive subject.] Friedrich’s paintings commonly employed the Ruckenfigur—a person seen from behind, contemplating the view. The viewer is encouraged to place himself in the position of the Rückenfigur, by which means he experiences the sublime potential of nature, understanding that the scene is as perceived and idealised by a human. Friedrich created the notion of a landscape full of romantic feeling—die romantische Stimmungslandschaft.  His art details a wide range of geographical features, such as rock coasts, forests, and mountain scenes. He often used the landscape to express religious themes. During his time, most of the best-known paintings were viewed as expressions of a religious mysticism.”

And now for something different!

A note from David Hinton on the first Chinese painting:

(David Hinton, a noted translator and student of Chinese poetry and thought, has commented on Shih Tao’s painting).

“Like countless other paintings in the Chinese tradition, this painting by Shih T’ao appears at first glance to show someone gazing into a landscape, an artist-intellectual accompanied by his attendant. But mysterious dimensions quickly reveal themselves, suggesting there is much more here than meets the eye.  The poem inscribed on the painting describes a landscape that includes ruins of city walls and houses, abandoned orchards and gardens, but there is no sign of such things in the painting. The painting’s visible landscape isn’t realistic at all. It feels infused with mystery: depths of pale ink wash; black lines blurred, smeared, bleeding; mountains dissolving into faint blue haze. And there’s so much empty space in the composition, so much mist and sky. This sense of empty space is expanded dramatically by the soaring perspective: the mountain ranges appearing one beyond another suggest the gazer is standing on a mountaintop of impossible heights. And he seems a part of that emptiness, his body the same texture and color as the haze suffusing mountain valleys. Finally, there is the suggestion that the image is somehow a rendering of the gazer’s mind, an interior landscape we may possibly share when looking attentively at the painting. Or perhaps that the gazer has returned to some kind of originary place where mountains are welling up into existence for the first time, alive and writhing with primeval energy? Perhaps both at the same time: an originary place indistinguishable from the gazer’s mind, and even indistinguishable from our own minds?”

While Romantic art can look a lot like Chinese Taoist art in many cases, the differences are significant and, I think, more interesting.  As defective as the Romantic vision is, the situation today  sadly lacks even its stronger points, and we have succumbed to an incredible blindness  .  Now nature is more of a resource available for our exploitation, as a money-maker, or simply as another “toy” we play with, a stage setting for our “cultural selfies.”  As for the Chinese Taoist vision, we are so far from it that it almost seems incomprehensible to most people today.

A More Reasonable Discussion

A few weeks ago Pope Francis came down hard on the traditional Latin Mass in the pre-Vatican II mode.  This caused a flurry of reactions from all sides of the issue.  There were quite a few so-called liberal Catholics who hailed the move, saying it was about time the Vatican put an end to this “crypto-separatist” movement that questioned the authority of Pope Francis.  Of course these are also the same voices often calling for more “diversity” in the Church and quite willing to challenge any pope on an issue they disagree, etc.  On the other side, there were the elements proclaiming an apocalyptic moment for the Church and western culture.  “The sky is falling!”  A more restrained but still negative evaluation was provided by Ross Douthat, an intelligent New York Times writer on matters of religion with whom I find myself disagreeing most of the time.  He has a way of seeming to explain things by framing the argument in terms of these labels: conservative vs. liberal, right vs. left.  Really this explains nothing, neither in religion nor in politics.  These labels are a kind of convenient shorthand, a code for a complex cluster of beliefs, opinions, views, self-understandings, etc., but in themselves they explain nothing.  The labels may be convenient, but you have to see beneath them to understand what is really going on.  In other words, you have to set your heart on the truth, no matter what label is attached to it.  Gandhi used this word in reference to his philosophy and his movement:  satyagraha, truth force, or holding on to the truth.   We see this lacking very much in both our politics and our religious culture.

A refreshing example of something much better is this recent op-ed piece in the National Catholic Reporter by Rebecca Bratten Weiss:

“The Traditional Latin Mass is not the Problem with the Traditionalist Communities”

https://www.ncronline.org/news/opinion/traditional-latin-mass-not-problem-traditionalist-communities

There is a very serious problem with the “traditionalist” communities, but it’s not the Latin liturgy.  Weiss is very good at rooting this out and illustrating how this brouhaha over the presence/absence of Latin and the traditional liturgy is a smokescreen that obfuscates the very real problems for both the liberals and conservatives in the Church.    She merely opens a little crack on this problem; there is so much more to see here. 

 An interesting historical sidelight:  two prominent icons of “liberal Catholicism,” had a love for the Latin liturgy….Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day.   Merton, to his dying day prayed his Office in Latin.  He was totally conversant in Latin, and on the other hand he often lamented on the banality of the English translations.  Day strictly adhered to the protocols of the Roman Mass, and she would not allow the use of cupcakes or anything like that in her Catholic Worker community in New York, a practice  which was common among “liberal” Catholics in the late ‘60s.  The young people there chafed at her “authoritarian” stance in this regard!

What I see in the Pope’s Latin liturgy edict and in so many other moves and in our President’s actions in so many things is the very common seeking of a solution to a sensed problem but applying a “band aid” instead of dealing with the real cancer deep within.  Weiss catalogs the real symptoms (and Latin is not one of them), but even she doesn’t venture  to ask the hard questions:  WHY has the Church had so much sexual abuse in its priesthood?  WHY did it tolerate slavery?  WHY did it participate in a cultural genocide of Native Americans?   And WHY did it privilege the insights and language of western theology (something Abhishiktananda wondered about and at the end of his life had pretty much given up any hope of any real change in the Church’s blindness and narrowness)?   And so, so much more….

Woke

 Being “Woke”

Franz Kafka wrote a number of very strange and unsettling stories.  Probably the most surreal and best known is “The Metamorphosis.”  Written in 1915, at the start of World War I, here is the famous opening sentence:

“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into an enormous insect.”  (better translation might be “monstrous vermin”)

This opening is just as disturbing as in Orwell’s  1984:

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” 

As one commentator put it:  “This line perfectly sets up the idea that everything is not quite as it seems and manages to plunge you into an alien world without any explanation.”

What is especially striking is Gregor’s reaction and his family’s reaction to this shocking and horrible change in his identity in its external condition.    Gregor at first thinks this is a temporary condition and he can wait it out for a change.  Then, when nothing happens, he begins attempts at “living with it.”  His family is perplexed and troubled;  but they also in a sense “negotiate” with the new condition and are finally relieved when Gregor dies of starvation.  It is hard to imagine a more surreal story!

To borrow a term from modern urban slang, Gregor is “woke” but he hardly seems capable of dealing with his situation to say the least.  The real nightmare begins as he awakens.  We come up against an unsettling paradox:  to be “woke” means to be aware of the “nightmare” one is living in.   The current situation in Afghanistan seems to be one of those moments.  

But the “nightmare” did not begin just now; it goes back over 30 years.  And it involves at least 5 presidents; both Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals in our political culture.  You might say it begins with President Carter (but really it goes so much further back!).  During the Carter Administration we began to secretly arm various Afghani tribes and clans so they could fight the invading Russians.  It was the Cold War, and we wanted to mess up the Russians without getting our hands dirty.  That part worked; the Russians fled Afghanistan just as we have, but the people whom we armed evolved into the present day Taliban.   Whenever you join hands with violence, the results are never a blessing.  Fast forward to 09/11, Bin Laden hiding out in Afghanistan achieves a catastrophic terrorist attack on us.  President Bush commences military actions against Afghanistan including a full scale invasion.  Instead of treating Bin Laden and cohorts as a criminal gang and getting an international coalition to hunt them down and bring them to justice, we launched this war, and then, incredibly enough, another war on Iraq which had never been involved in any attack on us, but the war was built on a total lie.  And almost every member of Congress supported this, both Dems and Republicans (not Bernie Sanders, who was an independent at the time).  Incidentally, the vast majority of the Islamic world was shocked at the act of Bin Laden in the name of Islam, and many were prepared to help the U.S. in bringing him to justice.  There was even a Guardian story, which I can’t verify, that the Taliban were willing to turn Bin Laden over to the International Court but not into U.S. hands.  (By the way, the destabilization of Iraq contributed greatly to the formation of ISIS and that nightmare.)

So the war continued and also the delusions and lies.  Obama, who is so often portrayed as a commendable president by the liberal establishment, had his own contributions to this nightmare.  This extended quote is from a Washington Post story about the history of our involvement in Afghanistan (Craig Whitlock):

“President Barack Obama had promised to end the war, so on Dec. 28, 2014, U.S. and NATO officials held a ceremony at their headquarters in Kabul to mark the occasion. A multinational color guard paraded around. Music played. A four-star general gave a speech and solemnly furled the green flag of the U.S.-led international force that had flown since the beginning of the conflict.

In a statement, Obama called the day ‘a milestone for our country’ and said the United States was safer and more secure after 13 years of war.

‘Thanks to the extraordinary sacrifices of our men and women in uniform, our combat mission in Afghanistan is ending and the longest war in American history is coming to a responsible conclusion,’ he declared.

But for such a historical day, the military ceremony seemed strange and underwhelming. Obama issued his statement from Hawaii while he relaxed on vacation. The event took place in a gymnasium, where several dozen people sat on folding chairs. There was little mention of the enemy, let alone an instrument of surrender. Nobody cheered.

In fact, the war was nowhere near a conclusion, “responsible” or otherwise, and U.S. troops would fight and die in combat in Afghanistan for many years to come. The baldfaced claims to the contrary ranked among the most egregious deceptions and lies that U.S. leaders spread during two decades of warfare.”

Then this morning I saw this op-ed piece in the NY Times:

I Was a Marine in Afghanistan. We Sacrificed Lives For a Lie.

Well, that is one “woke” Marine!  Unfortunately there are so many military, political, and intelligence folks who still believe we were somehow “protecting” America over there.  Well, trillions of dollars later (which could have paid for everyone’s health care during the last 20 years) and thousands of American soldiers dead or injured, the Taliban are still in control!

Chris Hedges, the ultimate “woke guy,” had, as usual,  predicted this long ago.   Just a few weeks ago he was writing this:

“The debacle in Afghanistan, which will unravel into chaos with lightning speed over the next few weeks and ensure the return of the Taliban to power, is one more signpost of the end of the American empire. The two decades of combat, the one trillion dollars we spent, the 100,000 troops deployed to subdue Afghanistan, the high-tech gadgets, artificial intelligence, cyberwarfare, Reaper drones armed with Hellfire missiles and GBU-30 bombs and the Global Hawk drones with high-resolution cameras, Special Operations Command composed of elite rangers, SEALs and air commandos, black sites, torture, electronic surveillance, satellites, attack aircraft, mercenary armies, infusions of millions of dollars to buy off and bribe the local elites and train an Afghan army of 350,000 that has never exhibited the will to fight, failed to defeat a guerrilla army of 60,000 that funded itself through opium production and extortion in one of the poorest countries on earth.

Like any empire in terminal decay, no one will be held accountable for the debacle or for the other debacles in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Yemen or anywhere else. Not the generals. Not the politicians. Not the CIA and intelligence agencies. Not the diplomats. Not the obsequious courtiers in the press who serve as cheerleaders for war. Not the compliant academics and area specialists. Not the defense industry. Empires at the end are collective suicide machines. The military becomes in late empire unmanageable, unaccountable, and endlessly self-perpetuating, no matter how many fiascos, blunders and defeats it visits upon the carcass of the nation, or how much money it plunders, impoverishing the citizenry and leaving governing institutions and the physical infrastructure decayed. “

You can read the whole piece here:

https://scheerpost.com/2021/07/26/hedges-the-collective-suicide-machine/

And from the satirical website, The Onion, there was this headline:

Critics Warn Withdrawal From Afghanistan Paints Entirely Accurate Picture Of U.S. Government

And last, but not least, in my opinion, the most woke guy in the modern era: Gandhi.  And he knew how to respond to the nightmare.

 

Price Tags, Moments, and Memories

“Save Money.  Live Better.”   I am in a large store, and I see these words on a sign, very prominently displayed.  These words appear In a number of places in the store.  They are obviously meant as an important statement in this place, and in fact they express a foundational principle of the founder of this company.  In a sense these words are a trivial truism, and certainly there is nothing wrong with “saving money.”  However, in that very moment when we nod our assent to this truism, we slowly succumb to a corruption of our vision and our understanding.  The phrase conceals that with an innocuous truism that appeals to our “everyday selves” but which in fact poisons our ability to discern what might be the nature of this “live better.”   But this is what advertising is always doing by filling our mental, emotional and even spiritual environment with slogans and phrases that keep us from thinking and seeing the “nature of the beast.”  So….I propose an alternative phrase for the store:  “Buy Less, Have Less.  Live Better.”    Come to think of it, the Gospels would prefer this sign:  “Give up your possessions.  Live Better.”  See what I mean? 

Many, many years ago, when I was in my late teens, one summer night I was sitting on a porch, chatting with a lovely girl for whom I had developed quite an infatuation.  Anyway, suddenly above the trees there rose this incredible full moon.  It was so amazing that for a while we just looked at it in silence.  Then, out of the clear blue, I offered it to her as a present…..  I said, “It’s absolutely free; it’s all yours as a gift.”  She just laughed, and she was a bit puzzled.  I can’t say that I knew what I was saying, but it just seemed to sum up my own inner self somehow and I was trying to find something deeper between us.   As we chatted some more it was clear that she found no meaning in this beautiful moon being “free,” and if she could not take it back to her room it was not much of a “gift.”  It was only years later when I became a monk that then I began to understand what I felt at that moment.

Recently I saw this minor little story on one of the news sites.  It caught my eye because it mentioned a “neighborhood” I lived in for a number of years: Big Sur.  The story was about Ventana, a luxury resort in the storied mountains of Big Sur along the central coast of California, an incredible place.  The news story mentioned that it now costs about $2000 a night to stay at Ventana.  I was amazed.  Wondered what you get for that….  It is the essence of capitalism that a “fair” price is determined by the “market.”  That means you can charge as high as you want as long as someone is there to pay it.  A full discussion of that would take us far afield and perhaps unnecessary.  But anyway, why would anyone pay that amount?  Just a few miles down the fabled Highway 1 there is a monastic community that invites people to stay with them  a few days with basic accommodations starting at $135 a night.  Still a bit steep for me, but I do appreciate what’s involved.  In any case, that slogan does apply here:  Save money.  Live Better.

 Do you remember  “Big Yellow Taxi,” a fun song from long ago by  Joni Mitchell?  One line from the song stands out:  “They paved over paradise and put up a parking lot.”  Actually there is quite a lot packed in that one sentence, but I would like to focus on just one word:  paradise.  On the first and obvious level it refers to the awesome and beautiful natural world around us.  It is the vision of John Muir and Edward Abbey, among many others.  The line refers to the destruction of that “paradise,” exploiting it for profit, making it into a commodity.  But the word “paradise” also resonates with meaning far beyond what Joni probably initially intended.  It immediately connects us to the Biblical myth and its many echoes and re-echoes through the ages.   Recall the Book of Genesis, how it begins with the creation story, and by chapter 2 we are with the first human beings, Adam and Eve, in Paradise, their home.  It is the natural world in harmony.  Adam and Eve are created in the “likeness of God,” and in Semitic terms, “they walk with God as with a friend,” meant to live in his Presence all their days…as the Psalms keep repeating.   But they screw this up; “they pave over” this Paradise.  They want this “likeness” on their terms, as a “my possession,” not recognizing it as a gift, not grasping the nature of the gift.  They become unable to experience their world as originally intended, as Paradise, and the Bible is very concrete in what that entails for them.  They have committed themselves to what the Buddhists call “dukkha,” that insatiable and seemingly endless grasping for satisfaction (recall the Rolling Stones’ song, recall Sisyphus rolling his big rock up the hill).  Both personal and social life become very problematic…as the Bible slowly unfolds.  But I want to bring in a modern voice to illustrate a contemporary, unvarnished view of this deterioration:  John Lennon, just before his death.  I remembered this quote of his from one of my early blog postings back in 2014:

 “Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I’m liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That’s what’s insane about it.” 

Echoing some Desert Fathers….and the legendary Chinese hermit, Han Shan…..

Lets jump ahead in the Bible now, all the way to the New Testament, to the Gospels.  Recall Jesus’s words to the thief crucified alongside him: 

“Today you will be with me in Paradise.”  Luke 23: 43

Implying that there is a way of “returning to Paradise.” (Reminding one of Gandhi’s classic words: “I know a way out of hell.”)  Indeed, there is a whole Patristic tradition of Easter homilies and writings in which Christ is portrayed as having “descended into hell” (what later theology calls “limbo”—a place of illusory separation from God) at his death, and in his Resurrection he led all the people who were there into Paradise.  So, there is this aspect of this mythic language about “paradise” and a “return to paradise,”  and you can kind of see what it’s getting at.  However, it can also be seriously misread where paradise is something outside you, after you die, a “container,” if you will, of your life, an environment that is pleasant, etc.  This is one of the dualistic pitfalls within Christianity.  A modern Orthodox holy man, St. Innocent of Alaska, points us in the right direction of understanding this myth:   In brief, Adam was in Paradise, and Paradise was in Adam.”  When we became alienated from this Paradise within, we no longer could see the world we live in as Paradise, and so like fools we turned it into a “parking lot” and our lives became vehicles of dukkha.  

The person of Christ in the Gospels, his death and resurrection, means there is a way to “return to Paradise.”  But instead of a locus, a place, “out there” beyond me, this Paradise is my very being, in which this human being and God “walk together as friends.”  Here I would like to point out a wonderful work from ancient Christianity, a Syriac text which is a collection and translation of various Desert Father traditions from Egypt, from Palestine, from Syria, and from Iraq; and it is marvelously entitled:  The Paradise of the Holy Fathers.  Herein you will find the landmarks of the Paradise within:  humility, poverty, simplicity, silence, peace, compassion, mercy, and above all, purity of heart.  

Let me conclude with a few quotes from Dostoevsky’s Father Zosima, the holy monk and spiritual father in The Brothers Karamazov.   One who certainly “returned to Paradise.”

As a young man Zosima is a military officer with a servant.  One day he strikes his servant on the face and then on top of that also challenges somebody to a duel:

“Why is it, I thought, that I feel something, as it were, mean and shameful in my soul?  Is it because I am going to shed blood?  No, I thought, it doesn’t seem to be that.  Is it because I am afraid of death, afraid to be killed?  No, not that, not at all….  And suddenly I understood at once what it was:  it was because I had beaten Afanasy the night before!  I suddenly pictured it all as if it were happening over again: he is standing before me, and I strike him in the face with all my might, and he keeps his arms at his sides, head erect, eyes staring straight head as if he were at attention; he winces at each blow, and does not even dare raise a hand to shield himself—this is what a man can be brought to, a man beating his fellow man!  It was as if a sharp needle went through my soul.  I stood as if dazed, and the sun was shining, the leaves were rejoicing, glistening, and the birds, the birds were praising God…I covered my face with my hands, fell on my bed, and burst into sobs.  And then I remembered my brother Markel, and his words to his servants, and his words to the servants before his death: ‘My good ones, my dears, why are you serving me, why do you love me, and am I worthy of being served?’  ‘Yes, am I worthy?’ suddenly leaped into my mind.  Indeed how did I deserve that another man, just like me, the image and likeness of God, should serve me?  This question then pierced my mind for the first time in my life.  ‘Mother, heart of my heart, truly each of us is guilty before everyone and for everyone, only people do not know it, and if they knew it, the world would at once become paradise.’  ‘Lord,’ I wept and thought, ‘can that possibly not be true?  Indeed, I am perhaps the most guilty of all, and the worst of all men in the world as well!’  And suddenly the whole truth appeared to me in its full enlightenment:  what was I setting out to do?  I was setting out to kill a kind, intelligent, noble man, who was not at fault before me in any way, thereby depriving his wife of happiness forever, tormenting and killing her.”

So….Zosima doesn’t go through with the duel in a truly incredible way…he lets the other man shoot at him, the shot misses, and he refuses to fire back and throws the gun away.  He has this  “enlightenment” moment, and I am sure that many modern readers will be put off, misunderstand, and misread all that language about “guilt” and “being worst,” etc.  It is a kind of code language for a reality that they don’t know how else to express.   Zosima (Dostoyevsky) is speaking in traditional Desert Father/mystic language which does not lend itself to modern sensibilities about self-image and self-regard.  This particular language here does not point to a pathologically sick self-awareness.  The modern concern about people with self-destructive self-images is valid, but this is a completely different dynamic.  For the people that Zosima represents, the issue is not good self-image vs. bad self-image, but it is this enlightenment/illumination that in effect explodes the very notion of a self-image and leads to a completely different self-presence.  It is also at the same time an unveiling of our profound interrelatedness and interconnectedness.  

As Zosima’s military comrades castigate him for his “failure” in the aborted duel, he responds:

“’Gentlemen,’ I cried suddenly from the bottom of my heart, ‘look at the divine gifts around us:  the clear sky, the fresh air, the tender grass, the birds, nature is beautiful and sinless, and we, we alone, are godless and foolish, and do not understand that life is paradise, for we need only wish to understand, and it will come at once in all its beauty, and we shall embrace each other and weep….’”

And then when he is an elder monk, teaching:

“Brothers, do not be afraid of men’s sin, love man also in his sin, for this likeness of God’s love is the height of love on earth.  Love all of God’s creation, both the whole of it and every grain of sand.  Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light.  Love animals, love plants, love each thing.  If you love each thing, you will perceive the mystery of God in things.  Once you have perceived it, you will begin tirelessly to perceive more and more of it every day.  And you will come at last to love the whole world with an entire, universal love….  My young brother asked forgiveness of the birds; it seems senseless, yet it is right, for all is like an ocean, all flows and connects; touch it in one place and it echoes at the other end of the world.  Let it be madness to ask forgiveness of the birds, still it would be easier for the birds, and for a child, and for any animal near you, if you yourself were more gracious than you are now.  If only by a drop, still it would be easier.  All is like an ocean, I say to you.  Tormented by universal love, you, too, would then start praying to the birds, as if in a sort of ecstasy, and entreat them to forgive you your sin.  Cherish this ecstasy, however senseless it may seem to people.”

Amen!

There is then this mysterious encounter.  Old man Karamazov comes to the monastery with his three sons to have one of the Elders arbitrate a major dispute between them.  The old guy is a buffoon, an egomaniac, a thorough liar, a lecher, etc.  (Kind of makes one think of a  certain modern day figure in politics.)  When the Elder Zosima comes into Karamazov’s presence and looks at him, he prostrates himself before the old buffoon and scorner.  Then he gets up.  There were a number of people in the room, and everyone is mystified about what has happened.  No one understands the gesture.  I know that there are quite a few people who would object to such a gesture before such a man; there are some more who would totally misconstrue the gesture and turn it into something superficial; and there are a few who might catch a glimpse of the meaning of such a moment.  Fr. Zosima is teaching about Paradise not just with words, but just like a Zen Master, with a gesture that becomes a continual echoing koan.  

Some Notes on “I,” “Me,” “Mine”

I am not going to delve into grammar or the use of language, though that is a topic worthy of reflection also.  This is simply a collection of observations, reflections, questions, etc., on a topic of enormous importance for all the great spiritualities and all the major religions.  To put it more negatively way, though clearer, if you get this  wrong, you will get lost in a serious way.  I speak from experience!  So:  Who am I?  What is being pointed at when we have the word “I”?   The great spiritual question!

Lets start with Monchanin and Abhishiktananda.  Monchanin was a genuine intellectual, a brilliant thinker who was well-read in theology and philosophy, and at the same time a true spiritual man who sought to somehow translate the spiritual heritage of India into Christian terms.  Abhishiktananda was very different in personality and in his approach to India once he really got into it.  He was very impatient with intellectual /conceptual investigations, but rather sought to dive straight into the experience of India’s Advaita tradition, especially as exemplified by the sannyasi.  The two men respected each other, and each had their own strengths and weaknesses.  But also each had their criticisms of the other.  Monchanin had this interesting thing to say about Abhishiktananda toward the end of their companionship at Shantivanam.  He was worried about the so-called experiences that Abhishiktananda had related from his extensive sojourns in solitude and meditation.  Here is the quote from a letter he wrote:

“Serious divergences between us have cast a shadow over these last years; I think he goes too far in his concessions to Hinduism, and it seems to me more and more doubtful that the essence of Christianity can be recovered on the other side of Advaita.  Advaita, like yoga and more than it, is an abyss.  Whoever in an experience of vertigo throws himself into it does not know what he will find at the bottom.  I am afraid he may find himself rather than the living trinitarian God.”

Very interesting indeed!  That last sentence is very telling, and it shows a faulty line of thought.  But how to proceed to evade Monchanin’s conceptual trap? 

From a certain standpoint it is impossible to tell what another person is experiencing, but there are certain signs and signals about what that experience may be all about.  When it comes to the Ultimate Reality which we call God, I certainly don’t mean anything dramatic—I am not a member of the “miracle and special effects” school of religious authenticity.  No, what we might look for is a depth of person there, a deepening of compassion, a broadening of vision, an inner freedom….and from what I can tell from Abhishiktananda’s diary and letters, that is largely there.  But, then again, we really can’t know, and it’s best to leave individual cases alone.  But Monchanin’s words do raise a legitimate possibility of an inquiry in a general sense.  He seems to be saying that when we go deep into our self in meditation we might only encounter our own self OR God.  He assumes the “separate self” that then must be “united” with God.  This is who you are and the whole point of life and existence and Christian identity.  But advaita presents a different vision of who we are.

 Monchanin approaches advaita conceptually, and it’s practically impossible to reconcile that with these Christian concepts of “who I am,” and Christian concepts of that “I’s” relationship to the Ultimate Reality.    But Monchanin’s concern is legitimate because there is a very real way of getting trapped within one’s own ego identity within one’s extensive meditation.  Some American Zen people have written a whole book about it.  And consider these cautionary words from Ramana Maharshi:

“He meditates, he thinks he is meditating, he is pleased with the fact that he is meditating; where does that get him, apart from strengthening his ego?”

(Words that resonate well with our Desert Fathers!)

Authentic advaita is NOT about “supersizing” the ego self; quite the contrary.

But I also fear that Monchanin’s words do seriously lead one away from a most deep and profound realization.  I think he misses something important because he is so intensely committed to standard traditional theological language; and that great philosopher of language, Wittgenstein, warned us:  the limits of our language are the limits of our world and our thinking.  A Christian advaita definitely shatters the usual patterns of Christian theology, and also how we answer that question:  Who am I?  A number of Christian mystics and profound theologians have caught a glimpse of a Christian advaita without using that same language.

Consider these quote from Catherine of Genoa, a late medieval mystic:

“In God is my being, my I, my strength, my bliss, my desire. But this I that I often call so…in truth I no longer know what the I is, or the Mine, or desire, or the good, or bliss.”

“I see without eyes, and I hear without ears. I feel without feeling and taste without tasting. I know neither form nor measure; for without seeing I yet behold an operation so divine that the words I first used, perfection, purity, and the like, seem to me now mere lies in the presence of truth. . . . Nor can I any longer say, “My God, my all.” Everything is mine, for all that is God’s seem to be wholly mine. I am mute and lost in God…God so transforms the soul in Him that it knows nothing other than God, and He continues to draw it up into His fiery love until He restores it to that pure state from which it first issued.”

And then there’s this more radical statement from her:

“My “me” is God nor do I recognize any other “me” except my God himself.”

Basically, Catherine is a pointer to a Christian version of nondualism.  It is there.  And it can be found in a number of other Christian mystics, like Eckhart.  (And interestingly enough, Catherine’s words are very much in tune with Rabia, the great female Sufi.)  Abhishiktananda discovered this nondualism through his immersion in India and the Upanishads, the sannyasi tradition, and the lived experience of the holy men he encountered there.  He discovered that the “I Am” of God is spoken in his heart, and from that Absolute flows the little, the relative, the contingent “I am” of his own being.  This “little I am” is what we might call the peripheral ego, the “nafs” of the Sufis; and modern spirituality speaks of “letting it go,” the Sufis call it “fana,” “annihilation(!), the old Christian mystics call it a “death of the self.”  Your “I am” gets lost in the “I Am” of God.  But this will seem like becoming “nobody,” a nothing with no name, etc.  

Modern sensibility is not comfortable to say the least with the language of classical spirituality of any tradition; you know, all that stuff about “me” dying to self, annihilation,  etc.  (even the language of Jesus in the Gospels causes some to wince or just ignore or interpret very metaphorically).  The science of psychology is all about building up the ego, helping it function well.  It does not know or recognize the area of experience which we are alluding to.  A pop guru of the ‘60s, Ram Dass, once said that psychologists are “fender repairmen”—might be good to remember that he had been a Harvard psychologist before he “dropped out.”  What he means is that psychology is really only concerned with the periphery of the human identity, not the core reality.  It cannot answer the question: who am I?  It cannot recognize that the ego self is embedded in a much deeper sense of self that cannot be objectified, cannot be the object of our analysis.

An entry from Abhishiktananda’s Diary, a reflection on the moment of his massive heart attack that soon led to his death:

“Seeing myself so helpless, incapable of any thought or movement, I was released from being identified with this ‘I’ which until then had thought, willed, rushed about, was anxious about each and every thing.  Disconnection!  That whole consciousness in which I habitually lived was no longer mine, but I, I still was.”

Perhaps we can borrow something from Buddhism to shed some more light on this topic.  Mahayana Buddhism has this central doctrine of the Two Truths: relative truth and absolute truth.  There are extensive and elaborate explanations of these, but here is a brief, succinct account from the magazine Lion’s Roar:

“What is the relationship between absolute reality-whatever that may be-and the relative world we inhabit? That question is at the heart of all religions. Mahayana Buddhism’s answer is called the two truths.

Relative truth includes all the dualistic phenomena- ourselves, other beings, material objects, thoughts, emotions, concepts-that make up our lives in this world. These are sometimes called maya, or illusion, because we mistakenly believe they are solid, separate, and independent realities. But the problem is not relative truth itself, which is basically good, but our misunderstanding of its nature. That is revealed when we understand….

Absolute truth is the reality beyond dualism of any kind. It’s also the true nature of relative phenomena. In Mahayana Buddhism, it can be called emptiness or interdependence. Thich Nhat Hanh uses the term “interbeing.” In Vajrayana Buddhism, absolute reality is also referred to as space, complete openness, or primordial purity.

The two truths are what’s called a provisional teaching in Buddhism-helpful for where we are on our path but not the final truth. The final truth is that there is only one reality, and it unites the relative and absolute. Absolute truth is the true nature of the relative. Relative truth is the manifestation of the absolute.”

So perhaps it can be helpful to see our little ego self to be part of that relative truth of our everyday conventional existence.  It has its importance as it is the ground of the manifestation of the absolute truth of our existence and our identity.  Therefore it is good and proper to have a healthy ego, and the psychologist has a true role in this; but he/she do not have access to the absolute truth of our identity with the tools of their profession.

All human beings, but especially Westerners, have this amazing capacity to build up this ego self, becoming an elaborate construct like one of those fantastic sand castles some kids build out of beach sand.  And I am afraid this ego construction is about as durable as that beach construction!  Thus, the deep-seated anxiety about the whole project, and the therapist is there to help us live with that.  We use wealth, power, status, achievements, reputation, sex, badges and markers of all kinds, etc., etc. in this construction.  Even formal religion does not always provide a true diagnostic of what’s going on but in fact enhances the whole project with a religious clad version of all the above.  Thomas Merton once said that it is truly a gift to meet the Zen “man of no title.”

The issue is “personhood.”  I am a person; God is a person.  Think how important that is especially in western thought.  Politics and philosophy and religion and economics and psychology all are focused on this “reality.”  Every one is looking for personal happiness, personal fulfillment, personal success, personal satisfaction, etc.  But what is this “person,” what is personhood?”  Again, what is this “I” that is doing all this seeking?  Conservative Christians reject Buddhism and other Asian religions because these seem to deny or diminish this reality we call “personhood,” in regard to both the human and the divine.  After all, what’s important for them is the “personal relationship” to Jesus, to God.  The personhood of God and the personhood of the human being are the two poles around which their whole religious consciousness moves.  In a sense one can see what their concern is; but one can also see the danger in this language of utter superficiality and trivializing the religious journey—which happens all too often.  The “nafs,” the peripheral ego, becomes the norm and the guiding light to delineate “personhood.”  Modern western culture almost automatically sets you up for this problem.  But they also make the same mistake that Monchanin made, overlooking something very important.

Here I will recall one of my favorite quotes from Aquinas:  “At the end of all our knowing we know God as something unknown; we are united with him as with something wholly unknown.”  Indeed.

And who we are, then, is immersed in the depths of that very Mystery.  At one point Abhishiktananda asks: “what constitutes personhood?”  What Jesus communicates is  at the heart of personhood in the absolute sense: that experience of being “from the Father” and “going to the Father.”  If you wish you can drop that Semitic metaphor of “father” and simply insert “Mystery.”  Who you are is embedded in the Mystery of the Ultimate Reality.  As Abhishiktananda well recognized, Jesus reveals the ground of our advaita.

Let us conclude with a poem from Thomas Merton, “The Fall”:

“There is no where in you a paradise that is no place and there

  You do not enter except without a story.

  To enter there is to become unnameable.

 Whoever is there is homeless for he has no door and no identity 

          with which to go out and to come in.

Whoever is nowhere is nobody, and therefore cannot exist except

           as unborn.

No disguise will avail him anything.

Such a one is neither lost nor found.

But he who has an address is lost.

They fall, they fall into apartments and are securely established!

They find themselves in streets.  They are licensed

 To proceed from place to place 

They now know their own names

They can name several friends and know

Their own telephones must some time ring.

If all telephones ring at once , if all names are shouted at once and

             all cars crash at one crossing:

If all cities explode and fly away in dust

Yet identities refuse to be lost.  There is a name and number for

                everyone.

There is a definite place for bodies, there are pigeon holes for 

                ashes:

Such security can business buy!

Who would dare to go nameless in such a secure universe?

Yet, to tell the truth, only the nameless are at home in it.

They bear with them in the center of nowhere the unborn flower

                 of nothing;

This is the paradise tree.  It must remain unseen until words end

                 and arguments are silent.”