For Christmas I got this beautiful book, Road to Heaven, by Red Pine (Bill Porter). What a marvelous work, so refreshing and illuminating–it’s all about modern day hermits in China and the whole hermit tradition in China which has a very venerable and ancient lineage. While making my way through this book I became aware of several journalistic pieces on Chinese hermits. So I think it would be enjoyable to visit with these folks for a while. Sometime back I referred to this article in the British paper the Daily Mail:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/afp/article-2875587/Chinas-mountain-hermits-seek-highway-heaven.html

The photos are fascinating. And the unintentionally ironic photos along the right side of the webpage containing the images of various pop icons of our time–what a combo!

Some items to note from this article: the surprising resurgence of the hermit life in China. During the heyday of the so-called Cultural Revolution in the late ‘60s this tradition was almost totally stamped out by the Communists. Now the official line is very different but still very ambiguous. The official attitude is one of tolerance. Actually the government has rebuilt some of the temples and shrines and wants monks there as caretakers. And it pretty much leaves the hermits alone in the mountains as long as they register with the authorities. It seems that all this is to attract tourist money. And to a certain extent they have a more “Chinese” attitude toward their own cultural heritage: preservation and respect. In any case, with the economy booming for the last 20 years, the paradoxical thing is that there has been quite a growth in people withdrawing from all that toward a hermit life.

Another piece on the Chinese hermits appears on this “official” Chinese website for tourists:

http://www.chinatouradvisors.com/blog/Zhongnan-Mountain-Hermits-1277.html?id=1277

The photos are absolutely precious. Not much new information here, but the photos are a good companion to Red Pine’s book because he talks about this very area of hermit resurgence, so you can picture what he is talking about.

Then there is this fascinating account in the Kyoto Journal:

http://www.kyotojournal.org/the-journal/conversations/alone-with-your-self-the-hermit-experience/

Basically this is an interview with Edward Burger who lived in China for a number of years and made a film about these hermits back in 2005–“Among White Clouds.” Here is an introductory quote by him: “The first time I walked into the Zhongnan Mountains I was 23 years old and I had only read Bill Porter’s book [Road to Heaven] and some thousand-year-old poems. I’d stared at the little woodcutters and zither-toting scholars in the landscape paintings at the Cleveland Art Museum. I had all these ideas about hermits. The thing that surprised me when I met Zhongnan hermits for the first time, was that most of them had very little to say about, and had very few thoughts about themselves as ‘hermits.’ I mean, they don’t care that they are ‘hermits’ and don’t do lots of things we think hermits do.”

Precisely! I am very skeptical about people who make a big deal about themselves as monks or hermits or like to wear that “badge” “very loudly.” The modern self-absorption infects religious seekers also! I always wonder about monks who are too wrapped up in their identity as monks.

The rest of this interview is an absolute must read for a real insight into this contemporary phenomenon. One thing that really struck me was how “underground” this urge was during the repression period. People lived as quiet Buddhists/Taoists, even getting married to maintain appearances. Then, when the ban was lifted, they immediately were ordained as monks and went their separate ways.

Now just a few words about Red Pine’s marvelous book. It’s an account of his journeys to China over several years, around 1990, when this phenomenon was just beginning. The book begins with a brief survey of the Chinese hermit tradition and history including its primordial roots in the shaman traditions of prehistoric China. Red Pine is fluent in Chinese, having studied it in school in the U.S. and then in Taiwan. There he spent some time in a Buddhist monastery and as a hermit for a short time. He knows the hermit tradition quite well from the classic texts, but he is eager to see what if any of this tradition is still alive in China. So he enters China in 1989 in search of real hermits. The traditional place for them is the Chungnan Mountains in Central China, and that’s where he goes to.

Here we need to point out one of the problems in reading this book for a Westerner not deeply steeped in Chinese materials: all the names are difficult to keep track of, and the spellings Red Pine uses are no longer used in current literature, but fortunately the differences are not often major…just annoying. Like the Chungnan Mountains are now the Zhuangnan Mountains…and the ancient capital of this area, Sian in Red Pine’s book, is now on all the maps as Xian. So you have to be alert, and good luck keeping track of all the personal names….!

So Red Pine and a friend begin in Beijing and are told by both some officials and some “official monks” that there are no more hermits up there in those mountains. But they still go there, and by persistence and with good luck and with the willingness to venture into some rugged territory, they meet one hermit after another. They all tell him things aren’t what they used to be but they are getting better now that the government has lifted the ban on religious practice and allows monks and hermits. (So this is about 1990 and now there appears to be thousands of hermits up in those mountains and elsewhere–for example, Han-shan’s old stomping grounds were not these mountains but ones close to the southern coast, just about 30 miles from the ocean, and that too has its own hermit history.)

Some of these hermits are recent arrivals or only there for a few years; others have been living there for decades. There is this one famous quote from the book which makes you think of our Desert Fathers: “A Buddhist layman we met on the trail led us to a cave where an eighty-five-year-old monk had been living for the past fifty years. In the course of our conversation, the monk asked me who this Chairman Mao was whom I kept mentioning …. His practice was the name of the Buddha, Amitabha, Buddha of the Infinite. After so many mountains and so many hermits, we were finally feeling at home.”

Interesting that there are also many women hermits, by some estimates almost half the hermits are women! I once quoted one of these women hermits: “I won’t come down from this mountain until I know who I am.” Also interesting is that there is often a blending of Buddhism and Taoism (new spelling would be Daoism), though they also tend to their respective traditions. There is a whole controversy about the relationship of Chinese Buddhism to Taoism, but we won’t get into that here. Interesting also how universal the problems are in teaching monastic life to people today. Here is a Daoist master telling his story: “To find people who truly believe is the biggest problem we have. Taoism teaches us to reduce our desires and to lead quiet lives. People willing to reduce their desires or cultivate tranquility in this modern age are very few. This is the age of desire. Also, people learn much more slowly now. Their minds aren’t as simple. They’re too complicated.”

Here’s a lovely account of Red Pine meeting one of the women masters:

“One of the nuns at Lungwang Temple told us that Yuan-chao was living in an adobe hut on a small plateau that had been leveled off…. We followed the nun up the slope to Yuan-chao’s hut. She was sitting cross-legged on her k’ang, an adobe bed with a built-in oven….(!) As I walked in, she said, ‘You’re back. Good. Now we can talk. Last time I wasn’t sure. Now I know you’ve come back for the Dharma.’ I was glad I had made the effort to visit her again. She was eighty­-eight, but I’ve seldom talked with anyone as alert…. From my bag, I took out a sheet of calligraphy paper and asked if she would write down for me the essence of Buddhist practice. She put the paper aside, and I didn’t raise the subject again. Two months later, back in Taiwan, I received the sheet of paper in the mail with four words: goodwill, compassion, joy, detachment. Her calligraphy was as strong and clear as her mind.”

Red Pine tells us about Empty Cloud (love that name!), probably the most respected monk in modern Chinese history. He died in 1959 at the age of 120 during the period of repression. He lived in deep solitude in a very remote area of these mountains. But his reputation spread far and wide.

Then there’s this marvelous concluding account. Red Pine has returned to the big city of Xian and is visiting this obscure temple:

“The metal gate creaked. The front courtyard was deserted…. The temple buildings were old and in such sorry repair, I almost turned back. Past the inner courtyard, I went inside the main shrine hall. After lighting some incense and paying my respects, I noticed a small stone Buddha. The attendant told me it had been carved at the end of the fifth century. He also pointed out a T’ang dynasty painting of Kuan-yin. Incredible treasures for such a dilapidated temple. Just as I was leaving, several monks appeared at the door. When they asked me what I was doing, I told them I was visiting hermits. They laughed. One of them said, ‘Then you have come to the right place. We’re all hermits here.’ I couldn’t help but laugh too. The monk’s name was Ju-ch’eng. He was obviously the abbot, though he denied it–he said he was too dumb to be an abbot. Then he explained that Wolung Temple refused to have an official abbot. He said, ‘If we choose an abbot, he has to be approved by the government. We prefer to be left alone. That’s why we don’t fix up the temple. The government has offered us money to repair the buildings. But this is a Zen temple. We don’t need fancy buildings…. He told me there were fifty monks living at the temple. Two of them were in their eighties…. He said they got up every morning at three and didn’t go to sleep until shortly before midnight. They spent most of their waking hours on their meditation cushions. I asked Ju-ch’eng who their master had been, but I should have known the answer. He said, Empty Cloud. We talked for half an hour about Wolung Temple and about the Chungnan Mountains. The temple, he said, had four seventy-day meditation sessions every year. Then he started listing all the hermits he knew in the mountains. I knew all of them. I smiled and told him this was the first time I had met city hermits. He laughed, and so did I. And then I remembered the Chinese saying: ‘The small hermit lives on a mountain. The great hermit lives in a town.’ Having nothing left to say, I bowed and said good-bye.”

There is a spiritual teacher by the name of Lama Surya Das. I don’t know much about him except that he is an older Western spiritual seeker who has apparently achieved a certain mastery of meditation in one line of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. He is connected to the Dalai Lama, and he also is very familiar with the Theravada meditation schools and the Zen of Japan. He has been a teacher of meditation for decades. Can’t vouch for him overall, but he does have sensible, incisive and wise things to say about meditation and its popularity in our culture. I saw an interview with him and here is one quote:

“ So many people seem to be moving narcissistically — conditioned by our culture, doubtless — into self-centered happiness-seeking and quietism, not to mention the use of mindfulness for mere effectiveness. True meditation generates wisdom and compassion, which may be very disquieting, at least in the short term.”

True, and it is amazing how easily any spiritual path can be absconded in a sense and used for purposes almost the opposite of what the path has as a goal. The “meditation movement” in our society is one of these phenomena. Meditation, abstracted from any religious or theological framework and devoid of real spiritual discipline, has become a kind of pop icon for “spirituality”–whatever that is. “Mindfulness” is a key term for a lot of these people, and it is a term that can be applied without any commitment to any religious way of life. Surya Das has some acerbic comments:

“Mindful divorce, mindful parenting, mindful TV. Why not mindful sniping, poaching, or mindful waiting to find the opportunity to take advantage of and exploit someone when there’s a chink in their armor?”

Mindfulness has become a tool for many New Agers and others to become more effective persons, whatever they are engaged in. I have also seen Buddhist meditation practice and Zen promoted as “practices” to enhance your capabilities as a businessperson, as a soldier, as a lover, as an artist, etc., etc. Whatever be the merits of such claims, the heart of the problem is that such an approach only reinforces the ego-identity and in fact inflates it even more so. Nothing like these expensive retreats where mostly it’s your ego that gets massaged–in addition to the rest of you!

Surya Das points to this problem, but he also is worried that only one kind of meditative practice is being pushed as “meditation,” which then discourages people who have a difficult time with this approach. Let’s have him explain this: “’Quiet your mind’ or ‘calm and clear your mind’ are instructions I hear way too much. Some teachers actually encourage people to try to stop thinking, when in fact meditative awareness means being mindful of thoughts and feelings, not simply trying to reduce, alter or white them out and achieve some kind of oblivion.”

It’s important to realize that even within one given religious tradition, like Buddhism, there can be some very real different approaches to the spiritual life and actual practices. It is no good to insist on one and the same approach for everyone. What Lama Surya Das teaches comes from one line of Tibetan Buddhism and it has a strong mental activity aspect to it (like visualizations). This is not everyone’s cup of tea, but then again neither is the silent Zen meditation; and to insist on one approach only is to frustrate a goodly number of spiritual seekers. Surya Das is wise in acknowledging that he is mainly trying to help people who have a hard time with the “silent” meditation approach.

And it is interesting that also within Christianity there is that same variety of approaches to the Divine Mystery. For some it is the words of Scripture pondered slowly and thoughtfully that lead one into the depths of an inner silence; for others it is the rosary; for many others it is a mantra of sorts, like the Jesus Prayer. Merton almost never wrote or spoke about his personal prayer life–except once in a letter to a Sufi friend in Pakistan. He spent a period of time both in the morning and in the evening doing what might be called meditation, but it definitely has this theological framework and very solidly rooted in the mystical tradition of Christianity. What is interesting here is how he explains it to his Sufi friend in terms that would connect to Sufi understanding and at the same time you sense hints here how he was benefitting from Zen and how he would later learn from the Tibetans. Let me quote him here:

“Now you ask about my method of meditation. Strictly speaking I have a very simple way of prayer. It is centered entirely on attention to the presence of God and to His will and His love. That is to say that it is centered on faith by which alone we can know the presence of God. One might say this gives my meditation the character described by the Prophet as ‘being before God as if you saw Him.’ Yet it does not mean imagining anything or conceiving a precise image of God, for to my mind this would be a kind of idolatry. On the contrary, it is a matter of adoring Him as invisible and infinitely beyond our comprehension, and realizing Him as all. My prayer tends very much to what you call fana. There is in my heart this great thirst to recognize totally the nothingness of all that is not God. My prayer is then a kind of praise rising up out of the center of Nothing and Silence. If I am still present ‘myself’ this I recognize as an obstacle about which I can do nothing unless He Himself removes the obstacle. If He wills He can then make the Nothingness into a total clarity. If He does not will, then the Nothingness seems to itself to be an object and remains an obstacle. Such is my ordinary way of prayer, or meditation. It is not ‘thinking about’ anything, but a direct seeking of the Face of the Invisible, which cannot be found unless we become lost in Him who is Invisible.”

What Merton is describing is in a sense pure simplicity, but a simplicity that hides some unspeakable depths that can give one a kind of spiritual vertigo! Many probably would actually prefer a more “complicated” approach to prayer/meditation because it then seems to give the ego something to do. At some point in the spiritual life the simplicity that Merton describes is best–but be assured that is not so easily done or everyone’s way.

What’s in a name? Think about all the possible things names do. They locate x, y, and z–I won’t call them persons or things because I want to include everything. In the social world we inhabit with our language and rationality everything and everyone has a name. Thus we can locate x, y, and z; define them; determine their status; examine them, even control them by use of their name. For some, perhaps for most, their whole reality is wrapped up in a package with a name on it.

If we can name it, we can sell it, play with it, manipulate it, make it into a weapon. Recall how Yahweh gave Adam and Eve the privilege and task of naming all the animals in the Garden of Eden. There is a legitimate place for names, but also naming is at the heart of control-the one who names the reality controls the reality.(For example, if we name a certain incident as “terrorism” then it seems to enable a warlike response; but if we named the same incident as a crime, well, then what we are limited to is some kind of police action.) Now in the case of persons, names mean even more. Most people live by and within a certain name: their national identity, their status, their self-worth, their position in the social order: wife, father, student, monk, priest, hermit, scientist, artist, etc. etc. We mistakenly believe that the name signifies our fundamental reality. This is so much a part of us that we never stop and reflect on this and question it in any way. Recall again the importance of names in the Bible and their consequences.

Now what if there is a whole other aspect of reality that is nameless, especially our personal reality. What if our deepest identity is actually without a name–and so “invisible” and incomprehensible to our rational minds. This kind of thing, this namelessness, seems to threaten our individuality which seems to depend so much on “being named,” and which seems so precious to us that we have this mirage that it is our very personhood that is at stake. But the intuition of namelessness is at the heart of the spiritual life, the contemplative life, the mystical life.   And everyone of us, no matter what kind of life we have lived, at death we experience this denuding of all names whatsoever. Instinctively there is this foreboding and fear because we seem to lose everything that we thought we were. The deterioration of the body seems to confirm this. I won’t go into how the various religious traditions address this issue, but within Christianity this whole thing can be summed up in one central phrase: “death and resurrection.” Unfortunately for too many Christians “resurrection” comes down to something crude like a continuation of our present identity and a kind of enhanced life. Pretty much like, “Hey, death is not real, it don’t happen; we just wake up and get our reward for believing,” or some such language of mythic rewards/ punishments. What is needed is a deeper reinterpretation of the notion of “resurrection” if we are to have a deeper Christian mysticism and contemplative life.

Now we need to really step back and take a look at this “namelessness” as an aspect of the Absolute Reality (which we usually name as “God”). Indeed, even to say this is to slip into the naming process. Now we are going to stay strictly within the Christian tradition, and here all these names are very important, not to be slighted, not optional/superficial designations– they carry a claim of ultimacy, finality, and absolute value: Trinity, Father, Logos, Jesus Christ, etc., etc. Given all this and given what I previously said about the importance of names in the Bible overall, it would seem that namelessness is not part of the Christian view of the Absolute Reality and even of the reality of the human person. Truly, when looking over the centuries and even to today, the primacy of the “named” in Christian theology and piety is upheld by many deep and pious theologians, monks, holy people, spiritual seekers, etc. You could say that at the heart of all their seeking is Augustine’s famous cry: “My God, who are You, and who am I?” It’s as if that call is a seeking of that one name that would encompass both of these poles of ultimate identity–not a bad intuition but mistaken–when in fact that call is really a first intuition into the namelessness of both you and the Divine Reality in your ultimate oneness. For those of us in the other camp, where namelessness has primacy, that deepest identity is beyond all names–yes, even the name of Jesus. In fact it is only in the perspective of advaita perhaps that these two identity questions become one, but this is something that we cannot name– there is only an awakening to it. And there is a long tradition, all the way from the Bible to Abhishiktananda, that, without losing the significance of the “named,” sees the “nameless” as primary and ultimate. Let’s take a brief survey.

The Old Testament.

Recall that fascinating account in the Book of Genesis where Jacob wrestles with this mysterious stranger(32: 23-30). Then they have this exchange: “So he said to him, ‘What is your name?’ And he said, ‘Jacob.’ Then the man said, ‘You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed.’ Then Jacob asked him, ‘Please tell me your name.’ But he said, ‘Why is it that you ask my name?’ And there he blessed him. So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, ‘For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved.’”

So first we have here the named–the man called Jacob even gets a new name, Israel(like the person who enters monastic life!); and this is to indicate a deeper level of identity because he has been “touched” by God. Names are important here but also their fluidity is apparent, and the possibility of ultimate namelessness is hinted at. Now when it comes to the Divine Reality, it simply rejects the naming process. And this prepares us then for the ultimate such encounter with Moses and his calling to liberate the People of Israel from the bondage of Egypt(Exodus 3). Recall that, first of all, the Divine Reality does identify itself with human names: “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac,…” Human names that we give to the Divine Reality are important, and for us they are needed and helpful as long as we are in history and as social beings with language and rationality. But Moses pushes toward the Divine identity, not satisfied with historical/social relations: “But Moses said to God, ‘If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?’ God said to Moses, ‘I AM Who I AM.’ He said further, ‘Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’ God also said to Moses, ‘Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘The Lord, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.’ ‘This is my name for ever, and this my title for all generations.’”

This is a very important pericope, a central one for the development of Christian mysticism. So the Divine Reality allows for the naming process–it has its place as long as we are in history and in our social location engaging in relationships, including worship, prayer, service, etc. But at the very bottom of it all, or to put it better, at the heart of it all, the Divine Reality says NO, there is no name that can enter here, no name that is adequate to name me. So Moses meets the namelessness of God, and what is interesting is that this pericope is composed about the same time that the rishis of the Upanishads have this same intuition in their own language.

Now the whole Old Testament has numerous such pointers toward this namelessness, though obviously in a less intense way than here most of the time. The whole Book of Job can be read that way as one such pointer as it makes the case for the inscrutability of the Divine Reality. And of course the comparable namelessness of the human person is barely hinted at in all these texts, though that is present as well if you have the eyes to see it–thus the Upanishads are a bit ahead of these texts. It is not until we get to the New Testament that we truly meet the mystery of the human person embedded in the Mystery of the Divine Reality.

The New Testament.

Here the central name of Jesus is of utmost importance, and most Christians seem to think that this is all there is. Ok, the “named” does take on a heightened importance here, and there is a whole proliferation of names that seem to draw the boundaries of Christianity itself: the Logos, the Christ, Messiah, the Son of God, Father, Spirit, Love, etc. And then there are a whole bunch of secondary names like king of the Jews, Bread of Life, the Light of the world, the Good Shepherd, etc. It would seem that the “named” has the highest priority in Christianity; in fact to point to the nameless aspect of the Divine Reality looks almost “unchristian.” But perhaps things are not that simple. In another light perhaps the very person of Jesus points precisely to the truly nameless reality of that Ultimate Mystery which he does call “Abba”–and this name is used to indicate intimacy, his real oneness with this Unspeakable Reality–as Abhishiktananda was fond of pointing out, this was the Semitic attempt to articulate Advaita.

Jesus has a kind of dialectics of names: on the one hand he rejects the naming process from the devil in the Temptation in the Desert pericope; on the other hand, he invites Peter to name him–“Who do men say I am?” As I said earlier, this parallels and echoes the Genesis account where humans are invited to name their reality; here they are invited to name a manifestation of the Divine Reality. Note, this is a manifestation…and the naming process is fitting and necessary in the world of manifestation. (By the way, one can ask if the Divine Reality has other valid manifestations, does it not imply other valid names? Or is it all subsumed under this name as traditional theology holds?) But there is also a whole aspect of the Divine Reality that is unmanifest: “No one knows the Father except the Son, and those to whom the Son has revealed him,” etc. So, three things: 1. There is an unmanifest aspect of the Divine Reality; 2. Which Jesus calls “Abba” to indicate a mode of intimacy (perhaps advaita); 3. Which relationship he then “reveals” to us as our very own in our very humanity–not the essence of the Unmanifest, but that relationship of intimacy which has far reaching consequences. And this in itself becomes most manifest in that life as drawn out on the Sermon on the Mount (and one could say then literally lived out by the Desert Fathers!–without any theological language and the most minimal scriptural reference).

In the Gospel of John, which is replete with names, Jesus finally declares his advaita relationship with the Unmanifest, Nameless Divine Reality — “Before Abraham was, I AM.” Indeed. Here Jesus is connected to the Divine Reality as encountered by Moses in the Burning Bush—the Mystery of the Divine Reality, Nameless and beyond all conceptualizations and all schemes. In a sense here we are with Lao Tzu: The name that can be named is not the eternal name.

Finally, when Jesus is on the cross, we again meet this dialectic of names. The soldier names Jesus as son of God; there is the deeply ironic sign, “king of the Jews.” But the crucified one is the ultimate symbol of the ultimate loss of all names. And the crucifix is this symbol within every Catholic church of that ultimate namelessness at the heart of the human-divine reality–that’s why I prefer so much more the crucifix rather than the bare cross which is more common in Protestant churches. The Resurrection, then, must be interpreted as being catapulted as it were beyond all names, not just a recovery of all names, which would be equivalent to resurrection as a kind of resuscitation, life continuing on simply in an enhanced mode. So Easter Sunday now joins with Good Friday as that one feast and one anamnesis of Jesus Christ and of who we are in that one namelessness.

The Christian Mystical Tradition

Here we will briefly consider two voices from this tradition: Pseudo-Dionysius and Eckhart. One of the most important figures in Christian mysticism at its origins is Pseudo-Dionysius, about whom I had written earlier. PD, as I will refer to him, wrote several works, one of which was called On the Divine Names. This is a subtle and sophisticated reflection on the “named” aspect of the Divine Reality and the nameless. He enshrines within the Christian mystical tradition the fundamental importance of the nameless with regard to the Divine Reality. A few quotes: (translated by Colm Luibheid and Paul Rorem)

“ Indeed the inscrutable One is out of the reach of every rational process. Nor can any words come up to the inexpressible Good, this One, this Source of all unity, this supra-existent Being. Mind beyond mind, word beyond speech, it is gathered up by no discourse, by no intuition, by no name. It is and it is as no other being is. Cause of all existence, and therefore itself transcending existence…. Now as I have already said, we must not dare to apply words or conceptions to this hidden transcendent God. We can use only what Scripture has disclosed. In the scriptures the Deity has benevolently taught us that understanding and direct contemplation of itself is inaccessible to beings, since it actually surpasses being. Many scripture writers will tell you that the divinity is not only invisible and incomprehensible, but also ‘unsearchable and inscrutable,’ since there is not a trace for anyone who would reach through into the hidden depths of this infinity.”

PD again:

“It might be more accurate to say that we cannot know God in his nature, since this is unknowable and is beyond the reach of mind or of reason. But we know him from the arrangement of everything, because everything is, in a sense, projected out from him, and this order possesses certain images and semblances of his divine paradigms. We therefore approach that which is beyond all as far as our capacities allow us and we pass by way of the denial and the transcendence of all things and by way of the cause of all things. God is therefore known in all things and as distinct from all things. He is known through knowledge and through unknowing. Of him there is conception, reason, understanding, touch, perception, opinion, imagination, name, and many other things. On the other hand he cannot be understood, words cannot contain him, and no name can lay hold of him. He is not one of the things that are and he cannot be known in any of them. He is all things in all things and he is no thing among things…. This is the sort of language we must use about God, for he is praised from all things according to their proportion to him as their Cause. But again, the most divine knowledge of God, that which comes through unknowing, is achieved in a union far beyond mind, when mind turns away from all things, even from itself, and when it is made one with the dazzling rays, being then and there enlightened by the inscrutable depth of Wisdom.”

So here perhaps we meet a hint of the awakening of advaita within the Christian perspective. And of course it is necessarily connected with the deepest awakening to the namelessness of the Divine Reality, being plunged into the depths of the Mystery of God and the human person.

And one last quote from PD:

“And the fact that the transcendent Godhead is one and triune must not be understood in any of our own typical senses. No. There is the transcendent unity of God and the fruitfulness of God, and as we prepare to sing this truth we use the names Trinity and Unity for that which is in fact beyond every name, calling it the transcendent being above every being. But no unity or trinity, no number or oneness, no fruitfulness, indeed, nothing that is or is known can proclaim that hiddenness beyond every mind and reason of the transcendent Godhead which transcends every being. There is no name for it nor expression. We cannot follow it into its inaccessible dwelling place so far above us….”

And now for some quotes from the Late Medieval period as the apophatic, mystical tradition unfolds. This time we will quote Louis Dupre as he comments on Eckhart:

“What I find at the deepest level of myself is nameless, so nameless, says Eckhart, that God Himself in entering that depth loses His own name. ‘Back in the Womb from which I came I had no god and merely was, myself.’ ‘Womb’ is capitalized here and ‘god’ is not capitalized. The Godhead is before it is named: Being as such has no names. Even the creature in its essence must remain nameless in the pure core of its divine Being. Here I do not will or desire anything beyond what I am…. In my uncreated Being I rest, untrammeled even by God. In its ultimate identity Being is what it is or, as Adonai said to Moses, the One Who is. Only in my creaturely existence does ‘God’ confront me. ‘God’ is the name that man invents after a long religious history. First he conceives of the gods, then of God. But that pure Being, Eckhart’s Godhead, remains beyond what we so confidently name ‘God.’ ‘God’ belongs to the order of manifestation. And so do all his revealed names, even the most sacred, revealed names of the Divine Persons. For Eckhart the Godhead precedes the divine hypostases of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Being surpasses all divine names. “

“To reach that primeval poverty, my poverty, which for Eckhart is also God’s poverty, is the goal of the mystical journey. To attain it, the soul must abandon not only its possessions and its self-will, but also its creaturely identity and even its ‘God.’ In his most radical sermon, ‘Blessed Are the Poor,’ Eckhart admonishes, ‘If one wants to be truly poor, he must be as free from his creature will as when he had not been born.’ We must become totally detached from that individual existence to which we are so attached. We know that this little self is insignificant, but we think we better hold on to it anyway, since without it, we may have nothing left. That is precisely the self we should surrender, according to Eckhart, if we are to partake of the wealth of God’s own poverty.”

“Inevitably we will become discouraged about our efforts to comply with the requirement of absolute poverty. More seriously, we may feel that we have disappointed God. But for Eckhart the soul that still worries about the quality of its relationship with God has not become truly poor. Indeed, it must give up all ambition to acquire any knowledge of God…. As long as we are still concerned about finding a place for God in ourselves, we are not truly poor. God must create His own place in me. Indeed, Eckhart insists, eventually we must free ourselves of the ‘God’ we know, for that is still a private possession.”

“That ultimate poverty is also the true humility. Too often we confuse humility with false modesty. We secretly hope that if we accuse ourselves of imperfection, God may contradict us, assuring us that we are not all that bad. But God will not contradict us, for the imperfection is real and goes to the core of our existence. That existence itself needs conversion. [Here Dupre is echoing the sentiments of many Sufi mystics, like Rabia]….   The meaning of this humility and this poverty is not simply that of being a means to an end. It is not motivated, as many think, by the idea that by giving up ambition and possession now I shall be compensated for it later. Rather than being a means, poverty is a method of giving way to God. Since to be united with God is simply to be devoid of oneself, poverty and humility are the goal! For Eckhart God means absolute emptiness and poverty.”

“In poverty and humility I abandon all that I have and even let go of what I am, in order to reach the uncreated core of my being–God’s own creating act. God himself dwells in the absolute poverty that knows no possession, not even that of a name. As we move more deeply into that divine poverty, we shall be less and less inclined to place labels on God or His creatures…. Only through Gelassenheit do we reach the point of nowhere in the midst of all movement, the nothingness at the heart of all being. We cannot even actively seek it. For if we know what we are seeking, we shall never find it. As Thomas Merton wrote: ‘Don’t try too hard. Don’t be too much concerned about your own perfection and progress from day to day. Once you become aware of yourself as seeker, you become a possessor. You’re lost. But if you are content to be lost, you will be found without knowing it, precisely because you are lost. For you are at the last nowhere, which is where God is.’”

A few comments:

• Dupre is a lay Catholic philosophy teacher, and his talk was given at the Trappist Abbey of Gethsemani. You can talk like this to monks, but I wonder how this kind of language would have gone over with the average lay Catholic audience? The Church teaches a watered-down spirituality mostly, where it emphasizes morality, virtuous living, praying to Jesus as if he were some entity “out there,” engaging with the “saints” for intercession with God, etc., etc. In very little of this do we hear or feel Augustine’s anguished cry: “My God who are you, and who am I?”

• We find here the real meaning of the religious values of poverty and humility. They are both symbolic and initiatory into the nameless depths of our being in the Divine Mystery. Not the kind of external exercises that Merton once termed “making faces in the mirror.” Namelessness is the ultimate poverty and the ultimate humility and it is something in which you and the Divine Reality share as one.
• So here we see a hint of an awakening to Advaita within the Christian context. We plunge into the abyss (as Abhishiktananda puts it) of our inner depths, losing all our names as we enter there (no wonder it is a scary place for so many); and there in the ultimate poverty of our utter namelessness–so well symbolized by the bodily poverty of the sannyasi–and the infant Jesus!!–we awaken to a pure and unspeakable awareness in which even the Divine Reality has lost its names and we dwell now not “as two” in the world of names, and not “as one” as if that were another name; but…here Eckhart’s language is best: “The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.”

• Recall the Rinzai Zen Master with his demanding and challenging koans. When you come in for your interview you better come up with an “answer” that shows you have seen into the koan…or you will get whacked with a paddle! So in a sense every Christian should be made to answer: Who are you? Show me! If you come up with some name, whack!! No, you must not give a name; a name does not answer a koan; it’s only another word. And THEN: Who is this God of yours? Show me!! If you give him a name, WHACK!! Ouch!!!

Fear

During the Depression Era President Roosevelt famously reassured the American people with words like this: “There is nothing to fear but fear itself.” I don’t know about that, but today’s leaders, pundits, commentators and the general populace–both here and in Europe– seems to have some very focused fears. It all can be summed up in one word: terrorism. A recent New York Times poll showed that the American people have responded with a pervasive fear, that infects how we think and see the world, and more so than at any other time since 9/11. Several important points to consider here, especially if we are to have any spiritual clarity about what is going on.

*The real focus of this fear is what is usually termed as “extreme Islam”–whatever that is–though often even the word “extreme” is simply dropped. People forget that people of Islamic faith are present in Congress, have fought and died for the U.S. in the Armed Forces, and are actually the ones fighting ISIS on the ground in Syria and Iraq. And ISIS is something that we, the U.S., created inadvertently by our arrogant and blind policies in the Middle East.

*Recently there was a gathering of people investing in the defense industry. Lots of money there. And all the top dogs from the major companies were there, like Lockheed and so many others. One of the spokespersons was recorded; in his speech to the gathering he pointed out how the investment outlook looked really great for these companies considering the instability in the Middle East. Nicely put–translation: the more fighting, the more money we can make. War is still very, very profitable for certain people. And believe me, here in the U.S. “terrorism” and homeland security are an incredible cash cow also for a lot of folks. There’s a lot of money to be made in all this. With that in mind we should not be surprised that “fear” is actually promoted, subtly but truly, and of course with certain people it is not even subtle.

*But what is more troubling, if that be possible, is that this focus on terrorism and this pervasive fear generated in the mass media and the public mind, blinds us to what is really going on and what we are becoming. With this kind of fear as motivational energy we begin to tolerate and accept all kinds of horrible things, like the drone attacks, like the bombing of the hospital, like torture, like government surveillance, etc., etc. But even beyond that, what is most troubling is that all this distracts us from seeing what we are becoming as a nation, as a people, as a civilization. Consider: there were 355 mass killings in the United States this year(the killing of 4 or more people)–and the year is not yet over as I write this. Only a handful of these were done by very sick people who claimed the Islamic faith. This country is saturated in killings, in guns, in death. Perhaps it is time to start fearing something else. Here is a brilliant piece of writing by William Rivers Pitt putting this in sharp focus:

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/33958-the-butcher-s-repast

I wish this had been written by one of my Catholic bishops; I would have been more hopeful then. Why is it that they just put out these dull church documents and show no prophetic leadership and never, never seem to address the heart. Why don’t the bishops condemn the NRA and this whole gun culture? Is there any spiritual maturity in our land….anywhere? Our leaders want to bomb and kill our way out of the problems facing us; is there another way? The Dalai Lama said that we need to talk to ISIS. I think he is naïve as all heck, but that’s a lot saner than bombing and killing.

And finally, reading what Pitt wrote, do you really think we are entering some new golden age of awareness, of consciousness, where spiritual possibilities will flower? And do you think all this vaunted electronic connectivity is bringing all of us together? I have my doubts.

 Nepal

In a season of a lot of bad and sad news a little-noted story of something positive: first woman elected as President of Nepal.  Ok, she was not elected by popular vote but by the parliament, but that is still something.  I was always intrigued by Nepal.  A truly beautiful, even awesome place–I mean how can it not be so when you have the Himalayas and all the religious history like one of Milarepa’s caves on the border of Tibet and Nepal.  I have often dreamed of becoming an expatriate monk there.  A very monastic environment.  Mostly Buddhist, but also with some Hinduism, especially with pilgrims from India going up the foothills of the Himalayas.  Also very, very few Christians–making it especially attractive!!  Yes, I am a “total Christian” but there is something about being in that intense religious environment rather than in the pseudo-Christianity of a lot of our society.

 Sheldon Wolin

One of the truly great political thinkers of our time just died having lived to a good old age.  He was always someone to listen to as he understood our social situation extremely well. In fact as a Jewish secular political philosopher he articulated a vision of society closer to the values of Catholic social teaching than many Catholics did, especially the conservative ones.  Also, he was very sensitive to the dangers we are facing now. Here is a short piece by Chris Hedges explaining his importance:

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/sheldon_wolin_and_inverted_totalitarianism_20151101

 Death

Speaking of death, when you get my age you start seeing so many of your contemporaries start to die off.  It cannot but nudge you to think of your own death as it approaches.  This is not a morose thought but something quite healthy, normal and indeed quite necessary.  The passing of someone need not make us sad; the realization of our own death should not make us fearful.  I can see missing someone dear and close who passes away; I can see a place for authentic mourning; but really if you think about it death is THE greatest adventure of our existence and the most troubling.  Now of course I am not referring to someone who dies in some horrible accident or due to some awful disease or still young or gunned down in violence; no, I am referring to those of us who live to a nice old age and the time is coming to “go.”  Simple as that.  Yes, there is also the fact that a lot of death is accompanied by pain, drugs, total physical disability, etc.  Yet apart from the extreme situations, I think there is an inner and interior confrontation that all this that you called reality is slipping away from your grasp, and you are “invited” to let it all go. But there is another very, very strong dynamic rooted in the body’s built-in will to live; you find yourself “fighting for life” simply because that is a dynamic built into you, but then comes a moment when you “give up,” yield to something Greater, etc.   Really all our renunciations in life, the little ones and the big ones, are merely a symbolic enactment of this moment.  Yet what an incredible moment that must be, when all our ideas, our images, our everything just dissolves into the Presence of Absolute Reality.  In death we lose every name(every title, every designation, positive or negative, etc)that we clung to in life, and I think this is the real underlying scary thing about death for many–who are we when we lose EVERYTHING?  (This is what makes sannyasa the perfect sacrament of this ultimate moment.) This seems so frightening that we then make up all kinds of mythic language about “receiving our reward” and we have these mythic pictures of some place called “heaven,” and sometimes that gets very crude.  But we lose all our names, the ones we cherish and the ones we think really identify us.  We lose “who we think we are,” and we enter into our true Reality.  (This is, I think, the real meaning of the Christian Mystery of the Resurrection.)  We shall reflect on this some more in the next posting.

 A very sad Church.

Recently with the release of a new movie we are once more reminded how bad the child abuse scandal was in the Catholic Church.  The movie is Spotlight, and it is a portrayal how several Boston newspaper people exposed the machinations of the Boston Archdiocese in trying to conceal and protect priest pedophiles. It is a reminder of how bad that situation was.  Cardinal Law fled to Rome, to the Vatican, and was given a cushy position there to protect him–this was done under the office of Pope John Paul (now canonized as a saint!) and Pope Benedict.  Even today I don’t think most Catholics realize how bad that situation was, so the movie is important.  And the official Church, including Pope Francis, have not in my opinion responded adequately to all this.  I mean apologies to the victims is practically an insult.  And it is amazing how the Church only begins to compensate the victims when forced by a court.  

Then, just when you thought the worst was over, there was this story just a few days ago:

http://www.startribune.com/accused-monk-at-st-john-s-abbey-reports-more-than-200-sexual-encounters/353241311/

This is an incredible story that again the Church was forced by a court order to reveal.  This time it was St. John’s Abbey in Minnesota, one of the largest Benedictine monasteries in the U.S.  This nightmarish account is beyond any comment.  Suffice it to say that I don’t believe this kind of thing is a “surface problem” as so many Catholics believe; no, I think it strikes at the very roots of what the Church claims it is….

Years ago, back about 1977 or so, as a young monk I was sent to St. John’s to a monastic conference of sorts.  I remember how the place felt creepy to me, but I thought that was simply some problem of perception that I had.  Looks like maybe my intuitions were on target!  Frankly I hope all the victims sue that abbey out of existence.

 Back into the Light: Some favorite sayings of Abhishiktananda.

“The solitary in the Church is the minister of the Silence of God.”

“For at the profoundest depth of the inwardness, there no longer exists a within or without but only the uncircumscribable ocean of the unique Mystery, radiant in all with its particular and infinite light.”

“Shantivanam…henceforth interests me so little.  Arunachala has caught me.  I have understood  silence…  Now sannyasa is no longer a thought, a concept, but an inborn summons, a basic need, the only state that suits the depths  into which I have entered, that reveals it, realizes it.”

 Bose

Recently a friend sent me this short piece on this unique monastic community:

http://parabola.org/2015/10/28/signore-parabola-visits-the-monastero-di-bose-in-the-foothills-of-the-italian-alps-by-roger-lipsey/

Very interesting read.  I had mentioned Bose when I wrote about the New Monasticism, and it is a good example of something authentically new and real and rooted in the tradition.  It’s not exactly my favorite “flavor” of monasticism, that being more eremitical in character, but from what I see they are doing a good job.  I have heard some criticism of them from sources I consider responsible, but you know that is inevitable in any venture–some aspect of it is bound to not suit somebody.

 Paris Attacks

What can you say about these horrible events?  There is more than one level of tragedy and evil here.  Yes, the needless loss of these lives in such a horrible way is truly tragic, but there is a deeper and larger evil at hand and that is the consequence of these attacks throughout Europe and the U.S.  Think of the consequence for the Syrian refugees.  Hate-mongers, Islamaphobes, and so many right-wingers have resorted to fan the flames of irrational fear in France, in Europe, in the U.S.  So many voices calling to close our hearts and our borders to these refugees; and even to turn against the Muslims already living among us for years.  The insanity and the widespread prevalence of these views is very discouraging.  Just think: these refugees are fleeing precisely the murderous rage of ISIS and other deadly chaotic situations.  If we really close our doors to these refugees, we will be doing exactly what ISIS wants–creating a new recruiting ground for them among the rejected and alienated.  It is truly ironic that all this is happening as the Christmas season is beginning.  Mary and Joseph and the child Jesus were refugees fleeing the murderous rage of Herod!

And then there’s this whole attitude of denigrating Islam by a lot of Westerners.  Do they have that one wrong!!!  These folks should take a long look at the mirror to see who are the real pros at killing people.  Here is a short piece to illustrate the problem:

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/no_muslims_are_not_more_violent_than_people_of_other_religions_20151115

And a very discouraging but accurate analysis by Chris Hedges:

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/states_of_terror_20151122

One last point:  Around Christmas time back in 1890 at a place in South Dakota called Wounded Knee a contingent of U.S. soldiers gunned down, a small tribal encampment of about 300 men, women and children of the Lakota tribe.  It was a slaughter, a massacre, truly a war-crime, yet a number of these soldiers got medals for their efforts.  More people were slaughtered by official U.S. forces at Wounded Knee than by ISIS at Paris.  I wouldn’t let any Americans into my country; can’t trust these folks.

The word “advaita” is a little Sanskrit word that means “not two.”  Very simple, very little words, right?  Well, not exactly.  These words point to the most profound, most mystery-laden, most mystical of all realities.  They refer, of course, to our own identity in relationship to the Ultimate Absolute Reality which we call God.  In English terms these words are often termed “non duality.”  A perfectly good term, which I don’t particularly care for (but it’s very popular)  because I think it is just a bit abstract, a very typical Western move to translate something that sounds very concrete, “not two,” into a more abstract-sounding notion or concept, “non duality.”

“Advaita” comes, of course, from India, from one branch of Hinduism.  It does not represent all of Indian religious consciousness; there is a large segment of Hinduism that is quite dualist.  So Advaita does not necessarily represent the “majority opinion” even in Hinduism. It does however have an ancient pedigree going all the way back to the Upanishads.  And it does have some very profound proponents, like Shankara.   Dualism means that the Divine Reality and your personal reality are two separate and distinct realities.   God is the Ultimate Other.  Advaita says, no, they are one Reality.  BUT in what way can they be said to be one? What is this “oneness” all about?  Those are very big questions and no answers on the level of concepts or notions are apparent. This presents all kinds of problems even within Hinduism, and then when we get to Christianity we find what seem like insurmountable obstacles in order to affirm a kind of Christian Advaita.  Let’s take a look at some of these problems and some of the possibilities.

The first thing is that we need to emphatically assert that no conceptual analysis of Advaita will ever reveal its reality.  No amount of metaphysics, philosophy, or theology will ever unfold this reality to your heart.  Learned folk are often enticed to dwell within their clever words, or else even mistake their interesting analyses for the very reality that they are talking about.  In some cases a good analysis can be truly helpful in sorting out what is true and what is ersatz and getting a handle on some aspect of the spiritual life. (Of course there are numerous books out there about Advaita that are totally bogus and written solely to make money for their authors, but about these we are not speaking.)  But with Advaita nothing, not even the most profound reflections and the deepest presentations, nothing can touch it, either positive or negative–all words, notions, concepts merely circle around this reality and perhaps in a way that can be helpful in getting a sense for it, but it will mostly be through a kind of symbolic and mythic language that barely recognizes itself as symbolic.  With Advaita only deep mystical experience can guarantee any kind of grasp of it–and even to put it that way is misleading. There is simply an awakening to it and then you no longer know it in terms of any words.  And if one awakens to this reality then no demonstration of its “incompatibility” with Christianity will be able to stand–and this is key.   Or as Abhishiktananda put it, all vanishes in a Consuming Fire.

Our goal here is not to reflect on Advaita in any general way or within its proper Hindu context but to ponder the possibilities of Advaita within the Christian mystical tradition. (My favorite guide in all this, Abhishiktananda, has of course gone the furthest in all this, but there is always more to address.)  And just to “open the door” a bit more we will consider two seemingly major problems, but closely related, that are most obvious but keep needing to be dealt with.  The first one can be called the “problem of pantheism” or “monism.”  This kind of problem arises when we depend too much on an intellectual/philosophical analysis of Advaita.  And it is also the kind of problem that is alarming to both Christian theologians and spiritual seekers alike.  Both begin to see this mirage of pantheism/monism.   After all Advaita does mean “not two,” and the inference then is that what we have is “one,” a oneness of the Ultimate Reality and me in my “I-ness” (or perhaps for some in my consciousness). So for Christian thinkers (in the negative) and for certain Hindu thinkers (in the positive) this oneness equates to something like “I am God,” or “God is me.” (By the way, my dear and favorite al-Hallaj, that most holy of holy men, did not fall into this mistake when he famously said while crucified “I am the Truth”–here meaning that he at that point was a totally transparent manifestation of the Divine Reality.)  So this is a crude way of putting it, but there are lots of representatives of Hinduism who would put it in some such way and there are many Christian thinkers and church people who believe that’s what Advaita leads to.  Both camps are wrong. Yes, “not two” does point to a kind of oneness, but this “oneness” is beyond conceptualization and properly speaking Advaita would be best expressed in another phrase: “not two, not one.” 

 Pantheism (or in another context “monism”) is really an intellectual abstraction, a mind game that the mind plays when it cannot affirm duality.  Duality after all is the very structure through which the mind perceives the world–everything is in a subject-object relationship seemingly including even the Divine Reality.  But that of course is seen as false as soon as we grow out of a superficial piety into a deeper sense of the Divine Reality, so in the negation of the dualism it reverts to another conceptualization: pantheism: everything is God.  Now certain Hindu figures and certain Hindu-oriented Westerners try to get around this dilemma in another form of rational trickery: the appeal to consciousness.  Basically the Divine Reality and your “I” are reduced to one transpersonal consciousness.  A lot of consciousness language by these folks!  But it all amounts still to pantheism, though in a more subtle form.  (And here we are not being critical of a legitimate use of the word “consciousness” as in Abhishiktananda’s “awakening” to Advaita.)

Can’t speak for the Hindus on this, but from the standpoint of Christianity this leaves a lot to be desired as a solution.  Christianity upholds the irreducible value of personhood–what Merton called Christian Personalism.   But this is not the modern focus on individuality and the self; it is more what Merton called the True Self, the person you are in God, not the creation of swirling images and illusions of selfhood within the social construct of our reality; the faces you make in the mirror of the world.  Furthermore, your true self, the true subject before every encounter, and the deep down reality of self that only God knows is not and cannot be the object of your apprehension or comprehension.  And why is this?  Well,  what if the Divine Reality is really the Subject within the subject of every subject-object encounter.  As Augustine put it, God is closer to me than I am to my own self.  Or as Paul hints at that:  I live now, not I, but Christ lives in me.  So to borrow and adapt from the Sufis, and as I have quoted this borrowed Sufi vision often in this blog, then upon realization, then we can say it is the Risen Christ who walks with my feet, it is the Risen Christ who sees with my eyes, it is the Risen Christ who hears with my ears, it is the Risen Christ who touches the world with my hands, etc. Or as Eckhart put it: the eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me. When that superficial “I” is effaced (again a Sufi way of speaking), that “I” that is a psychological and social construct is dissolved in a new vision–  we no longer have “two” realities; but yet it is not one in the abstract sense of one substance, monism.  This Advaita is way beyond any such formulations and the mind cannot grasp it.   All it can utter truly is: “not two, not one.” Neti, Neti, not this, not that.

But we have not gotten out of our dilemma or solved anything about the possibility of Advaita in Christianity.  We have merely hinted at one way of looking at this seemingly impossible possibility.  There is one deep-down problem which probably illustrates best the hurdle facing us–at least in conceptual terms.  As an introduction to all this let me begin with a couple of quotes.  The first one is from Monchanin, co-founder of Shantivanam with Abhishiktananda, deeply learned in Christian thought and deeply interested in Indian spirituality and monastic expression with Abhishiktananda but who later has a falling out with him precisely over such issues as we are pondering.  Here is Monchanin writing to a friend and criticizing Abhishiktananda:

“It seems to me more and more doubtful that one could recover the essence of Christianity beyond advaita (Shankara’s non-duality).  Advaita, like yoga, and more so than it, is an abyss.  He who immerses himself in it with a feeling that he has lost his balance (vertigo) cannot know what he will find at the bottom.  I fear that it may be himself rather than the living Trinitarian God.”

And here is a quote from Abhishiktananda that illustrates at least in part the problem we face if we want to uphold BOTH traditional Christianity and Advaita:

“Truly speaking, there is no such thing as advaitic prayer.  Advaita is the central teaching of the Upanishads, and no prayer remains possible for him who has realized the truth of the Upanishads.  The equivalent of what is called in monotheistic religions the ‘experience of God’ has here nothing to do with any notion of God whatsoever, for the duality which makes it possible for man to think of himself as standing in front of God has disappeared in the burning encounter with the Real, sat.”

And so there was this real anguish that Abhishiktananda wrestled with for over a decade and which really never subsided, due to the “twin loyalties” he now found pulling at him: the new-found and profoundly unexplainable experience of advaita, and his traditional Christian experience of prayer, of sacraments, of theology.  The irreconcilability of these two cannot be overstated–it is a serious problem.  Bede Griffiths, who followed Abhishiktananda at Shantivanam, thought that Abhishiktananda had gone perhaps “too far” in this direction and proposed a kind of modified non-duality, a kind of qualified advaita for Christians.  I am not so sure about this; I feel he is playing some games with some words in order to salvage some aspects of advaita and still maintain a Christian theology and a Christology that is recognizable in terms of Christian tradition.  Personally, I am more with Abhishiktananda and want my advaita straight, no dilutions!  But let us face the problem head on.

There are basically two very different paths, two different visions, two radically different views of that most profound fundamental experience of the Absolute Divine Reality, the Infinite Mystery.  A number of theological and spiritual writers have commented on this situation, but here I will follow mostly the work of an Indian Jesuit, Sebastian Painadath.  I will quote extensively from one of his essays: “The Spiritual Encounter of East and West.”  To be sure, Abhishiktananda knew about this kind of analysis and wrote of it himself–you can find an example of this line of thinking in his collection The Eyes of Light, an essay called, “The Experience of God in the Religions of the Far East,” written in 1973, toward the end of his life.  In any case, we will follow Fr. Painadath first just to have a different voice on this issue.  He begins by basically labeling these two different approaches as “the interpersonal approach” and the “the transpersonal approach” (by using this term I suspect Fr. Painadath is trying to save that western emphasis on the person and not lose it).  He begins with laying out a map of the interpersonal approach:

“In the interpersonal approach the Divine is experienced as a personal God.  As a result an interpersonal relationship between the human person and God evolves; this is a relationship in the pattern of I-Thou.  God, who is I, encounters the human thou in love; the human person, who thus becomes aware of his/her subjectivity, responds to the divine Thou in surrender.  Encounter with the divine Thou is expressed through personalistic symbols like father, mother, lord, king, friend, and bridegroom.  The primary medium of communication between I and thou is the word: when one speaks the other listens.  There is a constant dialectic between revelation and response, between  the demanding word and obedient surrender.  Disobedience to God’s Word and Will is sin.

“The I-Thou relationship between the human person and God finds articulation in doings: God enters the lives of human persons through events which are considered to be salvific events.  Human persons respond to God’s demands through acts of “doing God’s Will.”  Thus the relationship between the human person and God gives rise to a spirituality with ethical overtones and a dominant sin-consciousness.  Justice becomes the central concern of religious existence.  Interpersonal relationship with God creates human communities with a keen spiritual sensitivity to interpersonal human relationships.  Religion thus inevitably promotes social responsibility and creates salvific communities.  Believers feel themselves bound together in a spiritual community in and through which they experience the demanding and saving presence of God.  In the community a history-consciousness evolves, because of the salvific doings of God in the world.  History thus becomes salvation history.  This communitarian and historical understanding of the salvation process is the consequence of an interpersonal relationship between human persons and God.  God’s revelation is understood to be taking place in history and through the community.”

So….you begin to see the ramifications and consequences of this line of thought and this path toward the Divine Reality.  It is of course very much characteristic of the Christian path. And you can see that this is tailor made for a dualistic spirituality.  I mean it is really hard to see it as anything else, though I think some Christian mystics in their experience pushed into the arena of advaita without even being aware of it in those terms.  Folks like the Flemish mystics go way beyond any I-Thou piety of traditional Chrisitianity.

  Abhishiktananda has a slightly different take on this path, and he also lays out its dualistic tendencies but in a more mystical sense;  so let us listen to a small part of his account:

“There is the specifically religious approach called prophetic, also called ‘monotheistic’:  Man lays himself bare before Another, of an All-Other, so completely other that this other defies any definition of otherness that man can ever devise.  The presence of this Other is shattering, it is pure ‘Transcendence.’  He is Yahweh of the Bible, the Allah of the Koran.  I depend totally on him.  It is He who created me, he alone who maintains me in being.  I depend on him totally…he alone can bridge this abyss which my sin has placed between Him and me.  The dependence is total and the distance between us is infinite.  It is on the base of such an experience of God that the revelation received by Abraham is founded, the base of the entire Old Testament.  Only divine love can bridge this distance between man and God……..  At the time of the Gospels, however…there was no longer to be a simple external covenant, a Law…the word of God transmitted through intermediaries.  The Word of Yahweh, who created the world, who spoke through the prophets, itself becomes flesh, man, a member of the chosen people.  This infinite distance, this yawning chasm that stood between man and God is now bridged.  God sends to earth His own Son,…uniting the mystery of God and the mystery of man, at one and the same time, in his theandric nature…….  The whole biblical and Christian tradition of the experience of God leans upon this intuition of the God-Other; of a God who must needs bridge the abyss between Him and us and who,…calls us to Him, permits us to become His own children in His only begotten Son, who invites us to a union with Him in a similar fashion, and thus to participate in the mystery of his intimate life that the Spirit bequeathes to us in his very interiority.”

So here we have a very clear exposition of what you might call the “two-ness” of traditional Christian theology and spirituality, which expresses an authentic experience of the Divine Reality—but is it the only “way”?  No, there is still another path, also expressing an authentic experience of the Divine Reality, and here we will turn again to Fr. Painadath:

“In the transpersonal approach the Divine is experienced as absolute mystery.  No personalistic symbol can truly express the ineffable mystery of the Divine.  Hence the seeker goes beyond all names and forms in search of the God-beyond-God. {Important to note: Fr. Painadath is echoing Eckhart here}  Transpersonal symbols–like ground of being, depth of existence, ineffable silence,…and the ultimate Self of all–may surface in the course of this inner pursuit.  The medium in which one awakens to this awareness of the Mystery is contemplative silence.  In silence one enters into the deeper levels of consciousness and even into the experience of oneness with the Ground of being.  Transparency to the divine reality is the basic dynamic of this apophatic spirituality.  Opaqueness to the Divine Light is sin; it is ignorance: not realizing what one truly is….  Here spirituality assumes cosmic dimension.  When the divine Light within shines forth, one ‘sees the Divine in all things and all things in the Divine.’  This gnosis (jnana) recreates the life of the human individual.  Such an outlook on reality has mystical underpinnings.  A holistic vision of reality is the fruit of enlightenment.  Integration and harmony with all beings becomes the central concern of religious existence.  Alienation of the individual from the totality of reality is considered to be the cause of all suffering; it is the possessive attitude of the mind that causes this alienation.  Spirituality, therefore, means progressive liberation from egoism and insertion into the totality of reality….  Hermitages, spirituality centers, monasteries, and ashrams attract those who seek spiritual integration.”

So it is fairly clear that this approach to the Divine is much more amenable to the experience of Advaita, but it is also clear that this approach is not central in traditional Christianity but rather marginal if not totally absent in many instances.  Now let us listen to Abhishiktananda’s even more radical presentation of this approach and now within the experience of advaita:

“Over against this experience of God-Other, there is the experience that does not even allow for the possibility of recognizing this Other, either by name or by a distinguishing feature.  So crushing was this experience that it brings about the feeling of an emptiness in being.  Here one can recall the words of the Bible: ‘God is a consuming fire, none can behold him and live.’  And here it is not first and foremost a question of the life of the flesh.  What has been consumed by the flame and what has disappeared, as it were, is its thought, its selfhood, its consciousness of being, the ‘I’ that man thinks and pronounces throughout the day.  It is no longer a question of merely saying: ‘Thou art all, my God, I am but naught.’  For as long as this naught, this presumed nothingness still says that he is nothing he still considers himself something by virtue of this very utterance.  No, here there is place for naught else but silence.  Not, however, the silence of someone who would have ceased to speak.  Rather it is pure and absolute silence, as a matter of fact, there is no longer a person to speak…. In this experience man is no longer able to project anyone or anything opposite to himself, or to place in any part of the Real another pole to which he would conform himself and call God.  Having arrived, in effect, at the center of his inmost self, man is seized by the mystery that thenceforth it is beyond his power to pronounce either a Thou or an I.  The mystery has so engulfed him in the depths of his selfhood that it is as though he has vanished from his own sight.”

So…..Abhishiktananda has taken us to the furthest edge of what words can do here, and we are more than ever left with Monchanin’s question:  do we perhaps at the end of this journey meet only our own self and not the Living Triune God?  And what of these two very distinctive paths or approaches within Christianity?  This is an important question because it is only in the second approach that we find the fullest possibility of Advaita.  To repeat myself, no conceptual analysis, philosophical or theological, can solve these problems.  To be sure, a certain kind of integration of the two approaches is needed if one is to follow the path of Christian mysticism and contemplation, and this is what Fr. Painadath proposes:

“These two approaches to the experience of the Divine are not mutually exclusive paths of spirituality; rather, they are the two poles that are dialectically related in the evolution of an integrated spirituality.  The dialectics between the transpersonal and the interpersonal, silence and word, wisdom and love, being and doing, transparency and surrender, contemplation and devotion, harmony and justice is the constitutive dynamics of a liberating spirituality.  In the concrete cultural evolution of spiritual experience in a particular religion, one dimension may eventually dominate the other.  In general, the religions of Semitic origin tend to uphold an interpersonal relationship between the human person/community and God, while the religions of Indian origin move towards a transpersonal experience of the Divine.  Though mystical streams have always been present in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the dominant powers of theology and authority hold them in check for fear of disruption in the community of believers.  Devotional forms of surrender to the divine Lord and prophetic movements of protest are found in Hinduism and Buddhism; but they have been subordinated to an overarching world view that is evidently cosmic and mystical.  A creative dialogue between these spiritual hemispheres would promote the integration of these dynamic elements of spirituality.”

I like what Fr. Painadath says and I basically agree with him, but I think he is being a bit too sanguine about the possibilities of these two approaches “living together.”  We shall see.  It was very difficult for Abhishiktananda, and we see him toward the end of his life abandoning a lot of traditional theology for a radical reinterpretation of the very foundations of Christianity–if Advaita is to be considered within the Christian sphere.  Maybe that is what is called for, but until some of his other unpublished papers are published we won’t be able to say how far he was willing to go down this road.

One last thing.  It surely seems that the Advaita perspective is badly needed within the Christian perspective if we are to make any sense of the writings and sayings of the many Christian mystics. And I think many ordinary people practicing ordinary piety sometimes slip into this experience and of course they are not able to name it.   But beyond that, a Christian who feels truly at home in Advaita, a true Christian Advaitin will also have the highest respect for and truly engage in all the symbols, devotions, rites and rituals of his community.  It will be an exceptionally rare Advaitin who is called beyond all these into a world of awareness that we cannot describe.  Most of us live in time and history and within a certain loka and a community of faith and these are a part of the Divine Manifestation in our lives.  So the little old lady praying the rosary (like my grandmother)who begins with the ordinary piety of I-Thou but who then becomes immersed  in a Great Silence that becomes One with her and in which she loses her self, well, perhaps this is a good exemplar of what Fr. Painadath is pointing to.

There is a spirituality that lies within well-established and well-recognized boundaries, and this is good and normal and to be heeded–like Jesuit spirituality, like Franciscan spirituality, like monastic spirituality, etc. etc. (but many times I wonder about these neat designations and how really superficial they are). However there is also a spirituality whose elements, at least some of them, lie “outside the lines.” These are not elements you learn about in spiritual books or spiritual daydreams or in imitation of anyone or anything or through any practice or method or discipline or by becoming a member of some group. These elements may be “outside the lines” because they are truly hidden and nameless, lost in a mystery that one is unable to articulate and so hidden from all except those whose hearts have been duly prepared; or they may simply be very “unneat,” like in a messed up life that suddenly finds itself unaccountably in the Presence of Absolute Reality(like the thief crucified next to Jesus). Or it may be something that is completely overlooked but right in front of one’s nose. You could put your finger on it but you will never understand its significance. Like the wilderness. Or it may be something that is distasteful, distressful, painful, or just plain ugly–not at any rate part of any respectable spirituality that allows us to be respectable while plumbing the depths of the Infinite within our hearts. At any rate these are some of the parameters; there are many more. What I hope to do here is just bring to your attention some of the “markers” of this spirituality “outside the lines” because in many ways this spirituality is more important and more critical to us than the straightforward one. And these are “markers” that are in fact “no-markers” because they merely delineate some of the shadows of this spirituality “outside the lines”–its essence is way beyond all formulations. Also, this spirituality “outside the lines” is very ecumenical–it can be found in all the major religious traditions in one form or another; and it may signal a more profound encounter with another religious tradition than any discussion or sharing or conference. All of us at one time or another touch base with this spirituality “outside the lines” simply because that’s where we really plunge into the depths–some, very few actually, live there most of the time, not because of some choosing on their part but because that is their own special gift. That we cannot explain. We won’t even be discussing this spirituality directly–partly because that is beyond our language and partly because it doesn’t seem right to want to “nail it down” as it were even if we could. No, we will simply lay out some “markers” and perhaps some comments and leave you to connect the dots. So let us proceed.

*“Everything painful and sobering in what psychoanalytic genius and religious genius have discovered about man revolves around the terror of admitting what one is doing to earn his self-esteem. That is why human heroics is a blind drivenness that burns people up; in passionate people, a screaming for glory is as uncritical and reflexive as the howling of a dog.”

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

Comment: So apart from the more obvious significance of this statement, it also points to that poisoned use of spirituality and religion in order to gain self-esteem and a feeling of self-worth. This mechanism is deeply ingrained in us and it takes quite a bit of spiritual maturity to recognize its workings and not to be discouraged at the same time. That self we want to prop up is so ephemeral, just like a little wisp of smoke, so much like a phantasm, that one day we discover that there is nothing there to prop up….perhaps a key insight in every religious tradition. But maybe for that to happen we may need to step “outside the lines.”

 *A donkey with a load of holy books is still a donkey.

                           Sufi saying.

*“On the fourth day of sesshin as we sat with our painful legs, aching backs, hopes and doubts about whether it was worth it, Suzuki Roshi began his talk by slowly saying. ‘The problems you are now experiencing [will go away, right? we were thinking] will….continue….for….the….rest….of….your….life.’

The way he said it, everyone laughed.”

                               Ed Brown in Essential Zen

Comment: True spirituality and religion are not there for solving problems in your life–at least not in any way that we usually think of these things–“stuff” that happens to you. So if you want health and wealth and good relationships and success, etc. you go to Jesus or whatever your path….so goes the pitch of this kind of spirituality. The false promises and gimmicks of ersatz spirituality and religion promote this view that religion has this “usefulness.” Of course the only real problem in the deepest sense of the word is simply the self itself! That cannot be “solved.” It is not a knot that can be untied. Religion can even make that knot tighter! But once you touch base with the spirituality “outside the lines” you may discover how the knot dissolves–so then who is having all these problems….?

 *Rags and again rags,

Wearing rags all my life–

I somehow get food at the side of the road;

My hut is left to overgrown mugwort.

Gazing at the moon all night I chant poems.

Getting lost in the flowers I don’t come home.

Since leaving my nourishing community,

Mistakenly I’ve become this hobbled old horse.

                        Ryokan (as translated in Essential Zen)

*”And if He closes before you all the ways and passes,

   He will show a hidden way which nobody knows.”

                        Sufi saying.

*Dongshan asked a monk, “What is the most painful thing in the world?”

The monk said, “Hell is the most painful.”

Dongshan said, “Not so. If you wear monk’s robes, and underneath, you have not clarified the great matter, that’s the most painful thing.”

                        From Essential Zen

 *The Fool for Christ. Among the various markers of this spirituality “outside the lines, the most obvious, the most direct, the most uncompromising, the most unmistakable is the Fool for Christ. This type, without reference to Christ of course, can be found in practically all the great religious traditions, but here I want to refer only to the most intense and most visible manifestation of this character: within the Russian Orthodox “culture of the heart.” From about the 14^th Century to the beginnings of the 20^th Century the Russian Fool for Christ, the iurodivyi, was a remarkable presence in the religious consciousness of the Russian people. I don’t know the situation today, but I would be surprised if he/she is not present even today. Not much has been written about this character, partly because he is so unusual and we Westerners especially have little sensitivity to his significance (and so it is with the spirituality outside the lines). We like our well mapped-out institutionally-approved religious paths, so someone who goes “outside the lines” becomes invisible as it were. Anyway, the best short write-up of this phenomenon is by the Orthodox Bishop and monk, Kallistos Ware, although John Saward has also written quite well on this topic and there’s a few others. For our purposes here we will rely on Bishop Ware and his sources.

Ware quotes from a remarkable Russian author, Iulia de Beausobre, who has written about the Fool from a Russian perspective:

“He is nobody’s son, nobody’s brother, nobody’s father, and has no home… From a practical point of view, no useful purpose is served by anything that the iurodivyi does. He achieves nothing.”

Here we might add that this figure sounds strikingly similar to the Indian sannyasi as described by Abhishiktananda (though with obvious differences).

And then Ware quotes a certain Cecil Collins:

“The fool is the symbol of the lost ones of this world who are destined to inherit eternal life. The fool is not a philosophy, but a quality of consciousness of life, an endless regard for human identity…not the product of intellectual achievement, but a creation of the culture of the heart.”

 And then there is Tolstoy with his remembrance of his boyhood days when a Fool by the name of Grisha came into his wealthy family’s house:

“The door opened and there stood a figure totally unknown to me. Into the room walked a man of about fifty with a long pale pock-marked face, long gray hair and a scanty reddish beard… He wore a tattered garment, something between a peasant tunic and a cassock; in his hand he carried a huge staff. As he entered the room he used the staff to strike the floor with all his might and then wrinkling his brow and opening his mouth extremely wide, he burst into a terrible and unnatural laugh. He was blind in one eye, and the white iris of that eye darted about incessantly and imparted to his face, already ill-favored, a still more repellent expression… His voice was rough and hoarse, his movements hasty and jerky, his speech devoid of sense and incoherent… He was the saintly fool and pilgrim Grisha.

“Where had he come from? Who were his parents? What had induced him to adopt the wandering life he led? No one knew. All I know is that from the age of fifteen he had been one of ‘God’s fools,’ who went barefoot in winter and summer, visited monasteries, gave little icons to those he took a fancy to, and uttered enigmatic sayings….”

All over Russia, at various times, there were numerous such figures. Significantly enough these figures did not always elicit a positive response and a real discernment was necessary. Ware:

“Tolstoy speaks of the sharply conflicting opinions that others held about Grisha: ‘Some said he was the unfortunate son of wealthy parents, a pure soul, while others held that he was simply a lazy peasant.’ The fool is equivocal, enigmatic, always a disturbing question mark. When dealing with the vocation of folly for Christ’s sake, it is an exceptionally delicate task to distinguish genuine from counterfeit, the holy innocent from the unholy fraud, the man of God from the drop-out…. How are we to ‘test the spirits’? The frontier between breakdown and breakthrough is not clearly marked.”

 Interestingly enough one of the earliest examples of this “Fool” is found in Palladius’ account of early Christian monasticism, and what makes it even more interesting is that this “Fool for Christ” was a woman. Ware:

“Feigning madness, she worked in the kitchen, with rags wrapped round her head instead of the monastic cowl. She undertook all the most menial tasks and was treated with general contempt, kicked and insulted by the other nuns. One day the renowned ascetic Pitiroum visited the community. To the consternation of everyone he knelt at her feet and asked her for a blessing. ‘She is mad,’ the nuns said. ‘It’s you who are mad,’ retorted Pitiroum. ‘She is our amma {spiritual mother}–mine and yours.’”

Well, the account goes on to say that this holy figure, once “unmasked,” left with no one knowing where to or who she was. Along this same line and back in Russia there were figures like St. Xenia in 18^th Century St. Petersburg and Pelagia who was a disciple of St. Seraphim and who rebuked a bishop by slapping him in the face; and then there was Pasha of Sarov who around 1900 prophetically pointed to the demise of Czar Nicholas II. So women have had a place at this table over the centuries, unlike the priesthood!! It is fitting that the marginalized would fit as icons of a marginal spirituality! But whoever they were the point is that these characters were all pointers to this “spirituality outside the lines.” What is striking is that at certain times and in certain places there was so much “room” you might say for this spirituality to unfold; and I should add that it seems also connected in some mysterious way with a healthy and vigorous monasticism, like the hermit life–the two flower together and wilt together–and we have not even touched upon the many other manifestations of this “foolishness.” 

*”Thus it is said:

     The path into the light seems dark,

     the path forward seems to go back,

     the direct path seems long,

     true power seems weak,

     true purity seems tarnished,

     true steadfastness seems changeable,

       true clarity seems obscure,

       the greatest art seems unsophisticated,

       the greatest love seems indifferent,

       the greatest wisdom seems childish.

       The Tao is nowhere to be found,

         Yet it nourishes and completes all things.”

                        From the Tao Te Ching as translated by Stephen Mitchell

*”In a sense all the virtues are contained in spiritual poverty (al-faqr), and the term, al-faqr, is commonly used to designate spirituality as a whole. This poverty is nothing other than a vacare Deo, emptiness for God; it begins with the rejection of passions and its crown is the effacement of the ‘I’ before the Divinity.”

            From Introduction to Sufi Doctrine, by Titus Burckhardt

Comment: While it is absolutely true that the highest realization of all mysticism manifests itself as love, mercy, compassion, it is also important to note that existentially speaking the most important aspect of the path is poverty…especially spiritual poverty. My Jesuit classmates in the seminary used to joke around when they produced their credit cards to pay for something: “a gift from Our Lady of Visa!” Ok, very funny, but I wish more religious people would recognize that simple material poverty is a true gateway (but only a gateway) to the deeper and more essential reality of inner poverty. It is not until this poverty reaches the level of the “effacement of the ‘I’” that we begin to love with the very love of God, with a love that has no trace of self-centered motivations. This has to go pretty deep to get to that point, and perhaps only when one touches the spirituality “outside the lines” does this happen. Here is another Sufi saying that points in the same direction.

 *”My servant draws near to Me…. Then…I am his hearing through which he hears, his sight through which he sees, his hand through which he grasps, and his foot through which he walks.”

                                               Sufi saying.

*”The returners to God are destitute of everything other than God.”

                                             Sufi saying. 

We will let Lao Tzu have the last word. With words like these we can begin to perceive where the spirituality “outside the lines” and perhaps only that spirituality can take us.

*“The tao that can be told

   is not the eternal Tao.

The name that can be named

   is not the eternal name.

   The unnamable is the eternally real.

   Naming is the origin

   of all particular things.

   Free from desire, you realize the mystery.

     Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.

     Yet mystery and manifestations

     arise from the same source.

     This source is called darkness.

     Darkness within darkness.

     The gateway to all understanding.

The Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu as translated by Stephen Mitchell

The problem of “false religion” displacing “true religion” is age-old and universal. It infects all the world religions. Note the superstitions, the superficialities and nationalisms of Buddhism, the violence of Orthodox Judaism and certain factions of Islam, the violence and xenophobia of certain strains of Hinduism and so on, and so on. In this reflection I just want to pay attention to the Christian version of this problem, and to push our reflection to some deeper roots than various social phenomena. Otherwise we will only be skimming the social surface of the problem rather than the roots. No matter how awful or how dramatic these various exhibitions of false religion, these are not the deep down problem; they are merely the symptoms of something else that’s hard to name. But we shall try to “circle” this falseness, at least as far as Christianity goes.

People who get fixated by this troublesome surface–and troublesome it truly can be and quite hurtful/discouraging–sometimes lose their own balance and make poor choices, like abandoning religion altogether. There’s a significant number of people in the West who grew up in some Christian ambience but can no longer stand it for its ossifications, obtuseness, narrowness, outright stupidity, petty dogmatism, authoritarianism, etc., etc. With a list like that who can blame them! Of those who leave religion, some simply turn to a kind of heedless hedonism of our current consumer culture; others turn to this new phenomenon of spirituality without religion, that is spirituality without any grounding in some institution of a religious tradition. They want to be “spiritual” without the confinements of a religious tradition–meaning its checkered history, its very human leaders, its seemingly limited belief system, its lack of what they see as necessary changeability, its tawdry witness, etc., etc. But I think this is a serious and an unfortunate mistake that will keep most of them from growing in true spirituality. In the midst of all the ugly and horrible stuff, or just the plain shallow stuff, the religious institution, the church, carries within itself also the wisdom, the knowledge, the discipline, the vision needed for true spiritual growth. I love these words from Lev Gillet, a convert to Eastern Orthodoxy, who saw very clearly the limitations of his own church but who also at the same time saw the riches it held(and who also wrote deeply about the Jesus Prayer), and some such words could also apply to the other Christian churches:

O strange Orthodox Church, so poor and weak, with neither the organization nor the culture of the West, staying afloat as if by a miracle in the face of so many trials, tribulations and struggles; a Church of contrasts, both so traditional and so free, so archaic and so alive, so ritualist and so personally involved, a Church where the priceless pearl of the Gospel is assiduously preserved, sometimes under a layer of dust; a Church which in shadows and silence maintains above all the eternal values of purity, poverty, ascetisim, humility and forgiveness; a Church which has often not known how to act, but which can sing of the joy of Pascha like no other.

Now let us turn to get a glimpse of what lies in the depths of this problem of false religion. Already in the oldest strains of the Old Testament this problem is at hand, and it is always called “idolatry.” The condemnation of idolatry is the bedrock of the Ten Commandments, and one might say that the Ten Commandments are the foundation of Western Civ in its social institutions and social life. Now many, many people see this problem of idolatry in a simplistic and crude way: like the fashioning of some idol and worshipping it, like the depiction in the Old Testament of the People of Israel when they fled Egypt and were in the desert and fashioned a golden calf for the purposes of worship. We have to understand these stories without our literalist and fundamentalist myopia. Certainly the mystics penetrated the real meaning of these narratives (and especially the Sufi mystics). They pointed to the images of God we carry in our head and our heart–they range from the crude and awful to the good, the benign and the sublime. But, we need ultimately to be freed of all these images; I repeat ALL these images need to be purged because they form some form of idolatry within us because the Reality of the Mystery of God is so far beyond anything we can imagine. And this we have emphasized over and over in this blog.

Recall that story of Elijah where he is going to encounter the Reality of God(1 Kings 19: 11-13), and he is convinced that this will happen in some great and awesome manifestation like a great wind or a great earthquake; but it happens rather in what can only be described as an unusual silence. So even a great prophet has to be divested of his internal images connected with God that lead to certain expectations because this Reality is beyond all images and all conceptions and all expectations.

So the first level of idolatry has to do with these images we have of that Reality which we call God. They can be crude, awful, and distorted, and then the consequences can be horrific, both at a personal and a social level. We won’t discuss this because in many ways the problem is obvious. However this inner image-making process can be quite sublime and benign and seemingly religious, and if we succumb to this and mistakenly equate God with our images, concepts and words, then our spiritual life will be seriously impaired by what is in fact a form of idolatry, benign and inevitable though it may seem but leading to “false religion.”   This is a special problem of theistic religion because God is conceived for all practical purposes as this “object,” personal though it be, as something “out there” to whom we relate in various ways. In a sense this is inevitable because of the way we function as human beings. But once a serious spiritual life is born and once we live a serious prayer life that takes us into our own depths, then begins a kind of purging process. The surrender to this purging process is extremely critical for authentic Christian mysticism. The Christian mystics have all written about this in various terms, and the scary thing for many people is that at the end of this purging there seems to be nothing left. You just seem to drop into this Black Hole. This is the critical point in real mysticism, this surrender to what seems like Nothing. The ones who cling to the “last image” that has comforted them over the years are in fact caught in a kind of subtle idolatry–they prefer the image to the Reality, but of course it never is put in those terms; rather the image is named “God” and so there you have the idolatry. Now think of a few interesting examples: Thomas Aquinas and Mother Teresa. In the last year of his life Aquinas seems to have had some mystical experience of the Reality of God. He calls all his great theological work “dung” (in polite medieval terms it was called “straw”), and he stops writing altogether. The Reality is so much beyond all his words and concepts that it leaves him silent–he became Chuang Tzu’s “the man who forgot words!” Then there is the example of Mother Teresa who spent several of her last years in total inner darkness. We know from her own spiritual diary that she felt like there was nothing out there, that her faith was collapsing, that there was no God. This is a classic and profound moment in one’s spiritual growth, the rooting out of every trace of false religion from the depths of her heart, but the astonishing thing is that she did not have adequate spiritual guidance to help her, so she suffered from depression in her last days.

Now as we said before we won’t even bother with the crude and awful images of God that people carry and act upon and cause havoc and superstition that masks for religiosity.  That is usually the main problem which religion manifests and a true headache for true religion. Idolatry, whether subtle and sublime or crude and distorted, leads to different kinds of structuring of religion both in our personal lives and in our institutions. And in a sense the purifying of this idolatry is the great work of religion, at least in its foundational aspects–because even in our “good works” and acts of compassion, these can be seriously compromised by whatever degree of idolatry persists in our depths(as I will further note later).

For Christians there is the special problem of the reality of Jesus Christ. On the one hand this person is, theologically speaking, the only true image of God. And in a sense that is the way most Christians worship him and look to him as the center of their lives. That’s ok, but it misses some important nuances that can keep them from growing into a very deep realization of who they are and who God is. This becomes what has sometimes been termed as “Jesusology,” or “Jesusolatry.” Hard to say for a Christian but it is true that there can be a kind of wrong focus on Jesus that leaves one on a kind of pious shallow surface of spirituality. I fault Church people for letting so many drift there in this shallow piety instead of saying to them, “Friend, go up higher.” Instead Jesus becomes a talisman, a worker of magic for people. So first of all, I would like to suggest that Jesus is the perfect “anti-image” or better “counter-image.” By that I mean that Jesus deconstructs all those images we have of God that range anywhere from inadequate to downright false. That’s why the Pharisees reacted so violently to him; he challenged their religious idolatry of the Law, their conception of God and of the human-divine relationship. They were and are the preeminent exponents of false religion, even though they were pious men of their time and saw themselves as the true upholders of true religion.

Jesus pointed to the really Real, the Reality of God, whom he called “Father.” Of course this creates another image problem because “Father” can be a very problematic term. For some people this turns into a nasty twist that distorts their view of religion. On the one hand, a father can be a brutal tyrant who abuses his children; on the other hand some conceive this father as a “sugar daddy” who is there to please their whims. Pope Francis pointed to this not too long ago when he said that for too many people God is there only to give them the life that they want. You tell God what you want and wait for the stamp of approval of your fantasies, dreams, whims, etc. This is another form of false religion even if it is “church-going” religion.

Returning now again to the “image” quality of Jesus, not many people consider that the cross is a shattering of all images, including the “pious Jesus,” and then with the Resurrection you would think that you transcend all images; but alas our image-making process is so strong that it can even turn these realities into forms of false religion. That’s why Jesus said that it was good and important for him to “go away” (the Mystery of the Ascension), so that we do not seek him amid all the words, concepts, and images out there but in the darkness of the depths of our hearts where we and God are One.

Now one more point in this regard: nothing said above should be interpreted as an argument against religious art. Authentic religious art actually invites us to encounter the Mystery which it suggests. That’s different from superficial or awful religious art which simply feeds our internal image-making process. The great Russian and Greek icons, for example, do not try to feed our imaginations but rather they put our hearts in the Presence of the Mystery they symbolically depict. Recall in Merton’s Asian Journal how he felt when he stood before the religious artwork of the Indian artist Roy, or for that matter how his illumination moment unfolded before those great Buddha statues. Profound and authentic religious art is a gateway to true religion.

Now we turn to another level of idolatry which leads to false religion: the idolatry of self so to speak, and this is actually harder to get a handle on and even more insidious in undermining true religion, if you can believe it. Let’s begin by considering this quote from Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov. (This was one of Dorothy Day’s favorite quotes.) The scene is in Father’s Zossima’s cell, where there are a number of people and a woman has been publicly confessing her failings which amounts to her trying to be and look compassionate in a self-referential kind of way. In other words she wants her “reward,” recognition and approbation, for her “self-sacrifice.” Father Zossima’s acute diagnostic reveals her “false religion” to herself. To read the whole account is very instructive–it can be found in Book 2, Chapter 4. Fr. Zossima is speaking:

“Are you speaking the truth? Well, now, after such a confession, I believe that you are sincere and good at heart. If you do not attain happiness, always remember that you are on the right road, and try not to leave it. Above all, avoid falsehood, every kind of falsehood, especially falseness to yourself. Watch over your own deceitfulness and look into it every hour, every minute. Avoid being scornful, both to others and to yourself. What seems to you bad within you will grow purer from the very fact of your observing it in yourself. Avoid fear, too, though fear is only the consequence of every sort of falsehood. Never be frightened at your own faint-heartedness in attaining love. Don’t be frightened overmuch even at your evil actions. I am sorry I can say nothing more consoling to you, for love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed and in the sight of all. Men will even give their lives if only the ordeal does not last long but is soon over, with all looking on and applauding as though on the stage. But active love is labor and fortitude, and for some people too, perhaps, a complete science. But I predict that just when you see with horror that in spite of all your efforts you are getting further from your goal instead of nearer to it–at that very moment I predict that you will reach it and behold clearly the miraculous power of the Lord who has been all the time loving and mysteriously guiding you.”

So this idolatry of the self and its structuring of “false religion” will infect even our so-called “good works,” which we then use to prop up our own self-image and fortify it even more. Some of the radical sayings of Jesus in the Gospels have to do with a kind of deconstruction of this self. And the Christian mystics over the centuries have often developed their own language to deal with this problem. But I am afraid that the average Christian hardly is aware that his/her own religiosity may be intertwined with a bundle of falseness that amounts to a kind of self-worship. A spirituality that masks that self-referential dynamism churning away within us becomes the lifeblood of false religion.

Thomas Merton’s spiritual diagnostic spoke often of the “true self” and the “false self.” It’s not as if you were in some spiritual schizophrenia with a split personality, one true and one false. No, rather that you have this built-in tendency to form an image of yourself and act off that image and see the world off that image in a self-referential way. This is a totally illusory state of affairs, but it feels and tastes and sounds and seems like your self. This façade of reality, this construction of unreality, is no more than a wisp of smoke in its insubstantiality–ah, but how hard we try to make it “solid” and enduring. But any kind of “wind” (the Holy Spirit?) can come and blow it away, and then we are left with No-self, our true self. But let us listen to Merton in a more explicit Christian vocabulary, and here very much echoing the words of Father Zossima:

“The Christ we find in ourselves is not identified with what we vainly seek to admire and idolize in ourselves—on the contrary, he has identified himself with what we resent in ourselves, for he has taken upon himself our wretchedness and our misery, our poverty and our sins…. We will never find peace if we listen to the voice of our own fatuous self-deception that tells us the conflict has ceased to exist. We will find peace when we can listen to the ‘death dance’ in our blood, not only with equanimity but with exultation because we hear within it the echoes of the victory of the Risen Savior.”

But Merton also learned to go much deeper into his Christianity from his deep penetration of the insights of Buddhism. His language changes, and one is not sure exactly how he was going to go with his new language, and how he might reinterpret Christian spirituality and mysticism after his return from Asia–as he was hinting he would do. In any case, borrowing from a quote that I used in a previous blog posting, here is Merton talking of authentic Buddhists who happen to convert to Christianity: “When Buddhists become Christian, they’re not just caught up into a rudimentary idea of the soul being saved by Christ. They find the Church an elaboration of Buddhism. It is not a deepening of their own Buddhism they come to, but a rethinking of it in personal terms. They retain their pure kind of consciousness; they don’t develop an ego to be saved. They remain stripped of this. And it’s within this deep emptiness that they see a personal relationship to God.”

And Abhishiktananda echoing the words both of Fr. Zossima and Merton and in his own context has this contribution: “For example, in my personal experience of God as ‘other’ or of myself as sinner, has my ego, my ‘I,’really been purified of its self-centeredness, its ahamkara, as Indian tradition calls it? To set God in front of me, and myself as creature and sinner over against him, could well be–at least sometimes–only a more subtle means of self-expression, of confirming my ahamkara and of asserting my ‘I’ despite all, although this experience ought to be one of complete surrender and self-abasement before the majesty of the Lord. In such cases it is all the easier to be deceived, because the subject matter is sacred and religious, and very few would be ready to suspect the presence of what psycho-analysis would call ‘substitution’ or ‘transference.’”

Whether you prefer the more traditional language or perhaps you see the potential deepening of insight in this kind of encounter with the great Asian religions, the point is that we are all invited out of the bondage of “false religion” into the exhilarating freedom of “true religion.”

We have had several significant events in recent days: the Pope’s visit to the U.S., the Oregon shooting, and the bombing of the hospital in Afghanistan. There is an interesting and important connection. When the Pope gave his talk to the U.S. Congress, he mentioned 4 people he considered exemplary Americans. Two of them were good but standard fare for the most part: Abe Lincoln and Martin Luther King (both victims of violence by the way). But the other two came like a jolt from far left field: Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day. Not exactly two icons of the conservative Catholic scene in the U.S. But they are also largely unknown to the larger population. Minutes after his talk Google was hit by thousands of searches by people who were wondering who these two were.

In the mass media a kind of sanitized version of these two figures was presented: the pious monk and the little old lady who helped the poor. The real Merton and the real Day hardly made any appearance except that sometimes they were deemed “radical Catholics.” To get a sense of what is at stake, consider this profound quote from Merton:

“The real focus of American violence is not in esoteric groups but in the very culture itself, its mass media, its extreme individualism and competitiveness, its inflated myths of virility and toughness, and its overwhelming preoccupation with the power of nuclear, chemical, bacteriological, and psychological overkill. If we live in what is essentially a culture of overkill, how can we be surprised at finding violence in it? Can we get to the root of the trouble? In my opinion, the best way to do it would have been the classic way of religious humanism and non-violence exemplified by Gandhi. That way seems now to have been closed. I do not find the future reassuring.”

That was written about 50 years ago and I think we are the future that is not reassuring! One of the Black leaders of the 1960s Black Power movement had said in a more metaphorical way: Violence is as American as apple pie. One of the great things (and certainly not the only thing) about these two figures was their uncompromising stand against the deeply ingrained violence in our society. We actually create our enemies, like ISIS and the Taliban, and then we have someone else to destroy. The “War on Terror” makes a lot of money for a lot of people.

Both Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton WERE radical Catholics and radical Christians. The Pope’s citing them and commending them should be a sign that simply putting on our good clothes and going to Church on Sundays is not enough. The Church as a whole, bishops, religious, lay people, should all stand up against this deeply ingrained violence and challenge all our institutions if need be.   Gun laws are needed but they hardly touch the surface; we need a whole new way of looking at ourselves, at others, and a whole new spirit. Two articles for anyone to read on this topic can be found here:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/thomas-merton-pope-francis_560af93be4b0af3706de5881

http://billmoyers.com/2015/10/05/pope-francis-embraced-the-most-subversive-voices-in-modern-american-catholicism/

There is that old plaintive Willie Nelson ballad, “My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys.” Well, me and the Pope have different heroes: Merton, Day, and a host of so many others like them all over the world. May both the Pope and I live up to their call and their example.

So now we turn to another version of the “new monasticism.” It is Catholic-rooted though it ranges far and wide. In fact the phenomenon is so varied and has so many angles that I will reflect on simply one variant–what I call the Panikkar/Teasdale line as so vigorously promoted by Adam Bucko and Rory McEntee and others. But first a few words about some more traditional “new monks.”

In Part I I mentioned Jacques Winandy, who was so instrumental in bringing back the hermit life to Catholicism. About 1960 or so the monasteries were overflowing with people, but no one seemed to know or care about the hermit life. With Merton’s help, with Winandy and a few sympathetic bishops, a movement came about that resulted in the Vatican II Church officially accepting and approving the hermit life. So this was a spark of new monastic life decades ago, and this was a “newness” that was in sync with the monastic charism. Now there are numerous “diocesan hermits” around the world, meaning these are hermits who live in a traditional relationship to the Church. Moreover, various traditional groups like the Trappists, the Carmelites, the Franciscans, all opened up to the possibility of hermit life. Merton himself was kind of looking for some such arrangement at the end of his life. If you want to see what Merton was proposing in terms of a “new monasticism” take a look at his little collection called “Monastic Journey” and the part about a proposal for a new hermitage or skete. He was willing to support all kinds of experiments in monastic living, but for himself his choices reflected a rather rigorous traditional set-up. This was his idea of what was needed.   As it turned out, most of these experiments and so many others in the 60’s fizzled out. Which is ok because who is to say that a monastic venture is supposed to last a thousand years!

Now let’s turn to this thing: the numbers game. The proponents of our present “new monasticism” use words like, “many young people,” “many people,” meeting the needs of many in the new generation, etc. In our consumer culture the “numbers game” is very important–the more people “join in” the better. So the capitalist economy(the more buying and selling, the better); so Facebook; so the viewers of a movie or a TV program. Obviously if your goal is to sell widgets the more people interested in buying them, the better. But then this infects all our thinking and vision. It colonizes our hearts with an insidious illusion. There is something wrong or not worth paying any attention to if only a few people subscribe to it. Or conversely, if “many people” subscribe to this, then it must be true, valid, authentic, real. Now when this is applied to monastic life things get really distorted and confused–the monastic path is simply not to be measured in this way. The value, the truth, the authenticity of monastic life will never be visible in some such numbers. Monastic life will never be “trending” to use the current lingo of the media. But it has often been pointed out by “new monasticism” people that the diminishing numbers of monks in the old orders points to a death-spiral of relevance, that their low numbers these days means their way is “out of touch” and something new is needed, especially for the “young people.” Not so fast, folks! It’s simply not the “monk’s way” to play the “numbers game.” The monk’s path may be trodden by a crowd, or it may be trodden by a lone hiker.

Consider the following. The Abbey of Gethsemani, Merton’s home, had almost 300 monks around 1960. An incredible number. Today there may be only about 60 monks or so, only 20% of that original crowd. And most of them are past 60 years old. Does this mean Gethsemani is doing something fundamentally wrong and is doomed? I don’t think so. Truly they may have some real problems, very serious problems, like so many other old monasteries have, but their expression of the monastic charism is valid, serious and strong. (Where I think a lot of these traditional monastic communities tend to ossify is in putting too much weight on being Trappist/Cistercian or Benedictine or whatever, rather than simply on being monks in the Eastern Church manner and stressing that more than some institutional identity…because that what it really is regardless of any religious language and appeal to tradition.) It would not be my choice of monastic life, but it is very real and something I very much respect. Now let’s play the numbers game in our own way: what if that number of 300 was the “bad” number representing a true problem, maybe an illusory perception of monastic life, maybe an artificial inflation. And maybe the 60 number is the real number. The point is that the “realness” of the life is not to be simply determined by the “numbers.” There were numerous experimental communities of all kinds in the 60s and 70s and most of them vanished even as they tried very hard to be anything but “old school.” There were also a lot of fraudulent and ersatz religious communes and movements that also attracted tons of people but eventually fizzled out.

Yes, there do seem to be quite a few people these days with real spiritual yearnings for something greater than our materialistic consumer culture. But just because their hunger is real and their intentions sincere does not mean that what they eventually land in is true and authentic spirituality. There is so much around today that is fraudulent spirituality, or just plain spiritual hucksterism, or just shallow, or just plain false without even intending to be false, or misleading and confusing people even as the thing is partly true and good. Sometimes this is obvious; at other times you might need some theological training and religious experience to discern the deeper problems. The folks who are trying to “re-invent” monasticism are actually people who have very little real monastic experience, and so I question their discernment about what is essential to monasticism and what can be “creatively transformed. The result can be very misleading even as it may contain all kinds of good elements.

Consider also this: the very essence of monasticism may be such that only a few will ever feel fully “at home” on that path. Now it is not hard to point out some striking exceptions to this claim: Tibetan culture, ancient Syria, Russia at certain points in its history, Tang Dynasty China, and India. You might think that I forgot ancient Egypt with the Desert Fathers, but that whole movement was very complex and involved a lot of social dynamics, like escaping Roman taxation, like contentious village life, etc. (In the 1980s the Coptic monasteries in modern Egypt filled up with young people, and it was more than just a coincidence that they were all jobless even as college graduates because the Moslem culture rejected them.) As a matter of fact there were a lot of sexual problems out in the desert with a lot of these people and a heavy dose of fakery and sickness. Recall that it was a “monastic crowd” that brutally murdered the beautiful pagan woman philosopher, Hypatia. In any case, the Desert Fathers were a small minority really in this vast social movement, and I think if you looked closely you would find that it’s not so different even in these so-called “monastic cultures.”   The real, the authentic, the deep is always going to be a minority in any setting. Getting back to our own time and culture, it is my opinion that we are living through a very, very unmonastic period. The monastic flame will be kept alive, as I mentioned in my last posting, by a few people who live out that monastic charism fully and truthfully and uncompromisingly and deeply, whether that person be a hermit in a little skete, or a monk living in a large community who is following the monastic path in his heart a bit more fully than some of his brethren, or someone like one of the Little Brothers or Little Sisters of Jesus who do not use the designation “monastic” but who have more than a slight flavor of the monastic charism–solitude, silence and prayer play a critical role in the candidate’s development and in their continuing life among the destitute and needy. By the way, strangely enough very few people are attracted to this “branch” of the monastic charism, and I suspect because it is a truly demanding life. Never mind the circumstances; the important thing will always be what is in the heart and not how many others are on the path.

Now let’s take a closer look at this one variant of the new monasticism–the more “Catholic” version of Adam Bucko and Rory McEntee and a number of others–not in the sense of their being connected to the Catholic Church but in the sense that they drew inspiration from Catholic figures like Keating, Griffiths, and marginally Catholic visionaries like Teasdale and Panikkar. Also, they are definitely more at home with the Catholic mystical tradition than the Protestant New Monasticism. These folks have written extensively and have promoted their vision quite vigorously. There is much good in what they say, but their enterprise does raise quite a few questions. Some tentative comments seem called for and in another treatment of this topic in the near future I will do a close reading of one of their documents. Here is a link to a wide assortment of their writings:

http://www.new-monastics.com/media-resources/

But now for some comments:

• “Monasticism” Are they trying to “re-invent” monasticism? It sure seems so to me. That’s like trying to reinvent the wheel. Sure the wheel on a modern jet liner or the wheel on a modern high performance auto is not the same as the wheel on an ancient Egyptian chariot or a Babylonian cart, but actually the principles are exactly the same. But it seems to me that they are being “very creative” with the basic principles of monasticism. Like I said, they propose a lot of good things–I mean who can disagree with a call to a greater commitment in the fight against injustice, for greater compassion for the poor and suffering, for a transformation of our hearts to selflessness, etc.? But why call this “monasticism?” I thought this is something that EVERYBODY was supposed to be into (but the churches ARE to be faulted in not making this very clear in their language, in their lives, and in their institutional presence). But the monk’s way to all this and his/her role in all this dynamism is very different notwithstanding anything that Bucko or McEntee have to say. One of the reasons for their views is their reliance on Panikkar and Teasdale.

• Panikkar is a brilliant man with enormous intellectual gifts, and the fact that he was one of the very few who supported Abhishiktananda in India is to his credit. However, as far as monasticism goes, he simply does not understand and is viewing it from the “outside.” Let me illustrate with a parallel example: Heinrich Dumoulin, a brilliant German Jesuit and a scholar of Buddhism, wrote a book on the history of Zen. When Merton read the book, he wrote to John Wu, his Chinese scholar friend, “I think Dumoulin is very interesting but that he has a very central weakness: he doesn’t understand Zen!” So it is with Panikkar and the monastic charism–being smart is not enough. In fact, paradoxically, it can be a hindrance! When one is as good with words and ideas as Panikkar, as agile in his thinking, there is always the temptation to become enamored with your own ideas. The words become “slippery” and manipulated with great skill to make it seem like real insight and a real grasp of the reality. Panikkar is not the person whom Chuang Tzu would have wanted to meet: the person who has forgotten words!

Bucko and McEntee rely mostly on Panikkar’s one book on monasticism: Blessed Simplicity. Here Panikkar lays out his thinking on monasticism as a universal reality. There is a monastic archetype, according to him, within each person, and this gets realized in different ways in different times and in different situations. Who knows, there may be some truth in this. So the traditional monk, then, whether in community or a hermit, is no less than a full realization of this universal archetype, while ordinary lay people in society realize this archetype in some “watered-down” fashion, a kind of dilution of the monastic charism. No wonder you might want to be called a monk, because “just” being a lay person makes you seem like a little bit “less” somehow. (So you see the New Monasticism is just another actualization of this universal archetype). Ok, Panikkar never says exactly that but the underlying implications of his train of thought can lead to that kind of conclusion. In any case I am unconvinced there is any such thing as a “universal monastic archetype” from which you can derive all the varieties of monastic experience which we witness in history and in the world. Furthermore, this Panikkar “universalization” is an interesting distortion and turning upside down of what Dostoyevsky’s Fr. Zosima said: monks are only what all people should be. With Panikkar we have all people should become “monks” of sorts as they actualize that archetype, a very different emphasis–not quite what he says but the implications are there. What’s interesting is that sometime later Panikkar seems to modify this view of universal monastic archetype into a universal mystical archetype. Here I think he is more on target. We can easily agree with him that absolutely every human being is oriented toward and in communion with God/Absolute Reality and that in the depths of our being we are One. In contrast to saying that everyone is a monk at heart, we now should say that everyone is a mystic at heart by their very humanity. The actualization of the mystic archetype, then, can take place in any life form, whether monk or married or whatever. Only as our Buddhist friend put it in the previous posting, the monk’s way sure seems “easier” and more focused on pursuing that goal.

The other problem with “Blessed Simplicity” is that in the attempt to universalize the monastic charism Panikkar has to strip away all kinds of characteristics of different forms of real monasticism, and then he is left with this very vague value of “simplicity.” Now there is nothing distinctively monastic about simplicity; figures from Thoreau to Schumacher have called for us to simplify our lives in radical ways. Of course Panikkar pushes this concept to the depths of our being and then this “simplicity” becomes the new “renunciation,” somehow losing the negative tone of the latter. But the “old renunciation” and the “new simplicity” are not exact equivalents and something important gets lost in the new translation. A thorough and complete analysis of Panikkar’s book would take us many pages and would perhaps reveal other problems, but this is not the time for that. In any case, this book is a poor foundation for a recovery of monastic life in some new form.

• Wayne Teasdale is a figure that is almost of immediate inspiration for Bucko and McEntee His vision and his program are their agenda. And I am afraid there is a lot of confusion unfortunately within that vision and that program. Actually I found his book Monk In the City quite moving and compelling and he almost convinced me that he was right! The thing is that no one can say that Teasdale’s path does not have integrity and truth and that he lived it as best he could and followed a truly spiritual/mystical way of life. In a sense one could easily call him a monk because there definitely are “exceptions” to the common pattern, and monastic life can be lived in extraordinarily different kind of contexts. However, when Teasdale makes claims that try to generalize his own singular path into a new vision of monastic life, then I disagree. He is trying to “reinvent the wheel” with some “foreign” features.
• McEntee and Bucko’s The New Monasticism: An Interspiritual Manifesto for Contemplative Life, describes the “Nine Vows of the New Monastic”, which were based on Wayne Teasdale’s “Nine Elements of Spiritual Maturity” and developed by the Rev. Diane Berke.

1. I vow to actualize and live according to my full moral and ethical capacity.
2. I vow to live in solidarity with the cosmos and all living beings.
3. I vow to live in deep nonviolence.
4. I vow to live in humility and to remember the many teachers and guides who assisted me on my spiritual path.
5. I vow to embrace a daily spiritual practice.
6. I vow to cultivate mature self-knowledge.
7. I vow to live a life of simplicity.
8. I vow to live a life of selfless service and compassionate action.
9. I vow to be a prophetic voice as I work for justice, compassion and world transformation.

Now all this is very good–even if each vow is a bit vague and can just lead to more self-delusion. But in any case, if I were helping someone prepare for baptism, I would have them read these vows as an explanation of what their baptismal vows might mean in an existential sense. They express very well the heart of Christian life, the life of the Gospel, etc. But, alas, a good percentage of present-day Catholics would gag on these vows!

But just as in the case of the Protestant monastics, these vows do not specify the real monastic charism–they are rather a map of a potentially deep and full Christian existence. The monk’s path would embrace all these vows but live them out on the “monk’s path.” And what this means would require us to write too much at this point!

• One of the big words for Bucko, McEntee, and Teasdale is “interspiritual.” What this means is that we are not to be satisfied with the mystical teachings of one tradition but draw upon the wisdom of all the others. Sounds good and is good as far as it goes. This very blog has enjoyed the insights, the examples, the power and depth of the various spiritual traditions of the various main religions of the globe. We have also emphatically reiterated that we are at that point in our religious development as Christians and Catholics where some input from the other traditions and some understanding of them are necessary for us to bring back to our own tradition in order to precisely understand it ever deeper and more fully. For most of us the pioneer and exemplar in all this was Merton (and for some of us the radicalization of that encounter was found in Abhishiktananda).

But in Bucko, McEntee, and Teasdale something different is going on–more like a “New Age free-floating” spirituality which borrows elements and ideas and insights from various traditions and puts them together in an uncritical way. This is the now-popular “spirituality without religion” approach which is so prevalent among the New Agers. Religion is institutions, dogmas, structures, etc.–all that “bad” kind of stuff! And spirituality, well, it’s kind of “airy-fairy” stuff–I mean there’s all kind of good, heart-warming language about compassion, justice, etc., but it’s hard to figure out what these really mean in the concrete–and precisely the inner cost of gaining such realities. Merton once said that the nonviolence of the hippies was a failure because it was not the nonviolence of Gandhi.

Speaking of Merton, his example emphasizes one very important point in contrast to these New Monastics: the importance of being rooted in one tradition in order to truly and fully encounter and learn from another tradition. Here we mean something more than an academic grasp of another religion, but rather a deep, personal, and existential penetration of the depths of another’s insights and realizations. This will not happen through workshops or conferences or programs but rather through a deeply going into one’s own spiritual tradition and tasting its depths. Then one will have a chance to realize the true wonders that the other brings to the table of encounter and what that might mean for oneself. Consider this Merton quote(which I will also use in another blog posting for other purposes later):

Here he is talking about deep Buddhists who happen to convert to Christianity: “These converts often have a deeper appreciation for what this relationship to God means, because they go into it more deeply than most of us. We just go halfway…. When Buddhists become Christian, they’re not just caught up into a rudimentary idea of the soul being saved by Christ. They find the church an elaboration of Buddhism. It’s not a deepening of their own Buddhism they come to, but a rethinking of it in personal terms.   They retain their pure kind of consciousness; they don’t develop an ego to be saved. They remain stripped of this. And it’s within this deep emptiness that they see a personal relationship with God.”

Now there’s an awful lot in this quote but here I just want to emphasize what underlies Merton’s assertion: an indepth and authentic Buddhism can not only enhance your understanding of Christianity but actually open up new vistas and new depths. So this is an example of something truly new in our time. But the point is that one does not get “unhinged” from Christianity and simply “free floats” and picks up bits and pieces of Buddhism (and anything else that sounds “spiritual”).

Another example: In the last days of his Asian trip, right before his death, Merton puts down in his diary that when he gets back to the States he will reread and reinterpret the Cistercian Fathers (very institutional figures!) in the light of what he has learned from the Tibetan lamas. In other words he is always trying to learn and bring back to his “home base” that which will illumine and deepen it. But he is also aware that there are serious doctrinal differences that cannot be reconciled merely by wishful thinking and that we have to respect that but not be handcuffed by it in our encounters. And the final point is that Merton would never have separated “spirituality” from “religion,” but this is a topic that we will consider at some future date.

• Activist Spirit. Bucko’s and McEntee’s New Monasticism has a definite activist spirit. In fact they make a big point about the New Monasticism combining both contemplation and action. Now that claim has been made over the centuries by various groups, including the Dominicans and the Jesuits. So that’s nothing new. Granted that their activism is more nitty-gritty so to say, like the now defunct Occupy Movement, like Bucko’s admirable work in rescuing runaway teens from street predators, etc. So there is nothing wrong in being activist; in fact it is good, commendable, necessary, and called for by the Gospels. But, again, this is not the main heart and spirit of monasticism. Yes, exceptions are possible; in the Eastern Orthodox church, for example, there were monks who ran soup kitchens or even acted as doctors (like Anthony Bloom), but the norm was always Mt. Athos or the sketes of the Russian forests. In any case, there’s a bit of glibness on New Monasticism’s part in talking of combining action and contemplation–much easier said than done. And this shows that they don’t understand the “interior cost” or the discipline required. Bloom, while acting as a doctor, spent hours each night in prayer; and would these folks have the inner discipline to suspend a movement for a decade, like Gandhi did, because the time was “not ripe”?
• In my opinion, a different kind of spirit, a different kind of vision, a different emphasis on some different values is needed if there is going to be any renewal or reawakening of the monastic charism. In fact, I would say with Chuang Tzu and the great Taoists that paradoxically the more you will try to rekindle or remake monasticism, the less you will get the result you wanted. Monasticism springs up from the soil and from the heart “when the time is ripe,” “when the conditions are right.” Consider those Chinese hermits I wrote about in a previous posting. From a certain standpoint the conditions for monastic life could not be worse, yet there they are without any publicity, without any need of promotion. I loved that one woman hermit who said: “I made a vow not to come down from the mountain until I found out who I am.” Marvelous! An incredible expression of the real monastic charism that is age old and never old. The New Monastics are into teaching monasticism through workshops and conferences and even an online course. Sorry, guys, but that’s not how monasticism is “learned.” Rather you find yourself a real monk and live with him/her and see where that takes you. That’s how the monastic thing is passed on. The real spirit of monasticism is summed up in poverty, humility, obedience, chastity, and always, always solitude and silence and pure and continual prayer.

Having said all this, I am still willing to give these folk the benefit of the doubt, and simply say let’s wait 10, 20, 30 years to see what all this amounts to, what their endeavors lead to. May I borrow something Chinese again. When the Chinese Communist leader Zhou Enlai was asked his opinion of the historical impact of the French Revolution, he quipped, “It’s too early to tell.” That’s why I love the Chinese and why they make such good monks–even the communists have the “big picture,” the “big view” in mind, not just what’s in front of their noses. So it’s too early to tell what will be the results of the whole New Monasticism phenomenon. I wish them well. And for myself, and for them, and for all monastics and hermits, and for all No-monks everywhere, may these words of the great Macarius, one of the giants of the Desert, be truly ours: “I have not yet become a monk, but I have seen monks.”