There is one thing that I usually do not do and that is recommend any book on Prayer of the Heart. This is not really a “book topic,” though there are some very beautiful texts in the Eastern Orthodox tradition that approach this topic through a consideration of the mantric Jesus Prayer. Nothing wrong with drinking deeply from such sources, but what I would advise and warn against is taking a “methodical” approach to the Prayer of the Heart and ignoring the deeply personal nature and manifestation of it in different people’s lives in very unique circumstances. There is no method, no way, no formula, no path that “leads” to the Prayer of the Heart. Classic Christian sources and even Sufi sources (which also present the Prayer of the Heart) can be misleading because they couch their language precisely in terms of “steps,” “methods,” “stages,” etc. There is a reason for such language but we won’t get into that here. Those who have been exposed to the great Asian traditions also can become enamored with a kind of technical approach to the spiritual life–understandable in certain contexts but could be very misleading in regard to the Prayer of the Heart. In its utter essence the Prayer of the Heart has to do with the unfolding of one’s deepest identity in God and that will always be beyond any formulation or any program, even of a spiritual master or saint. You are you, and there is absolutely no one like you, and finding God in that “youness”(or I should more accurately say “I-ness”) is the essence of Prayer of the Heart.
Having said all this I now want to recommend a little book: Prayer of the Heart in Christian & Sufi Mysticism by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee. It is not a great book; certainly not the “last word” on this topic; but it is a beautiful and charming little book filled with many great insights and introducing one to this great topic from several different directions. I would not agree with everything in this book, but it seems to fill a real need in bringing the notion of Prayer of the Heart to a contemporary audience. The really special quality of this little book is that it discusses Prayer of the Heart from both the Christian perspective and the Sufi perspective. Just my opinion, but I think that the Sufis go deeper into this than we do, and I have learned much from what little I have been exposed to. But just as with us there is this tendency to articulate the “journey” into a kind of methodical “cookbook” approach. This is not the essence of what they teach but it is important for the Sufi follower and we need to respect their language. In this little book the author, Vaughan-Lee, a Sufi member but also knowledgeable in Christian mysticism, spends a considerable time using Teresa of Avila as a source for his presentation. Teresa is not one of my favorites, but she is truly a master of Christian mysticism. I never could quite connect with her language about “mansions” and “stages of prayer” and all that kind of stuff, but it turns out that Sufis are quite at home there! So be it.
The book begins with a marvelous Sufi word:
“God Most High hath brought forth creation and said,
​‘Entrust Me with your secrets.
If you do not do this, then look toward Me.
If you do not do this, then listen to Me.
If you do not do this, then wait at My door.
​If you do none of this,
​tell Me of your needs.’”

Indeed! What a deep sense here of what we call “petitionary prayer.” For too many of us In the theistic traditions prayer is often simply an attempt to persuade God to do something for us. Prayer is asking God for this or that. The author of this treatise thoroughly understands that, but in trying to lead us to the “deeper stuff,” contemplative prayer, he is wise in not just ignoring or throwing out or minimizing the role of petitionary prayer in the lives of most people. Actually this kind of simple prayer is a good starting point for Prayer of the Heart. God takes us and loves us and is with us exactly where we are. So never pooh-pooh a simple person’s simple prayer. That prayer in which we tell God of our needs is not for the sake of persuading God to help us(or someone we care about) but to simply abide in the Presence, and so it becomes a gateway to the true Prayer of the Heart. And true Prayer of the Heart is perhaps best understood as the Christian/Sufi experience of advaita, true non-dualism–expressed this way, however, itsounds like just another abstract idea or notion. Our author expresses it in a much more beautiful and profound way:
“In the silent niche of the heart the lover experiences the truth that there is only one prayer that underlies all of creation–the prayer in which the Beloved is present, not as a personal God or Creator, but as something both inexpressible and intimate. In this innermost recognition of the heart the lover recognizes the Beloved as something inseparable from himself. And in these moments of absorption only the Beloved exists. This primal awareness of the heart is the foundation of all prayer and all praise. In the words of Rumi: ‘Become silent and go by way of silence toward nonexistence, and when you become nonexistent you will be all praise and laud.’ Through the prayer of the heart the lover inwardly opens to the silence of the soul where the Beloved is always present. Here the lover and the Beloved meet, and the lover surrenders into the emptiness. In the formlessness of love we are absorbed deeper and deeper until we are so lost that there is only the ecstasy of unknowing. The anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing describes this as the ‘highest part of contemplation’ which ‘hangeth all wholly in this darkness and in this cloud of unknowing; with a loving striving and a blind beholding unto the naked being of God Himself only.’”

Let us now leave the ambience of this marvelous little book and move in a different direction. Earlier I mentioned that I am not in favor of a language that inclines toward a methodical, step-by-step approach to Prayer of the Heart. There’s a reason for that, and here I would like to invoke some Gospel language and imagery, specifically Luke 23: 39-43, very appropriate considering we are in the season of the remembrance of the death and resurrection of Christ. Let me quote:
“One of the criminals who were hanged railed at Jesus, saying, ‘Are you not the Christ? Save yourself and us.’ But the other rebuked him, saying, ‘Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed justly; for we are receiving the due reward of our deeds; but this man has done nothing wrong.’ And he said, ‘Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.’ And he said to him, ‘Truly I say to you today you will be with me in Paradise.’”
First of all note the radical change taking place as the text proceeds. We begin in a world we know quite well–the world of rewards and punishments, of man-made law and order, of strict measure and intense self-regard. Where we end up is way beyond all this, in a transcendent place of “unspeakable delineation.” Two criminals are executed, each on a cross, alongside Jesus. In a sense they are getting “what they deserve”–according to man-made law. These guys were “bad to the bone” because even then execution was not usually done for petty crimes. But no matter the nature of their criminality; the Gospel does not focus on their “badness.” It merely points at this label that they were given then–for indeed we are prone to live by labels, like also “goodness,” “holiness,” etc. For Jesus himself said that ONLY God is good, only God is holy.
It appears that both criminals are somehow aware of the charges against Jesus: that he claims he is “the Christ” and the “Son of God” and that he has some kind of kingdom that cannot be touched by the Jewish and Roman authorities. One criminal urges him with words that echo and remind one of the Devil’s temptation of Jesus in the desert: “Save yourself (and us)” –earlier in Luke the Devil tells Jesus that if he is the Son of God to throw himself off the heights and he won’t be hurt–meaning his divine nature will save him from all harm (Lk4: 9-13). That criminal is making that kind of statement to Jesus and including himself in it. Very clever. It is that continual and perennial offer of a false identity to all of us; it is the distortion of our own divine nature.
The other criminal acknowledges the “rules of the game”–he and his cohort are “guilty”–as we all are and as Kafka and the existentialists have pointed out. But even according to the “rules” of this game, Jesus is “innocent,” so something is really wrong here. The thing is that here we are in this world of “guilty” and “innocent” labels, and these can be manipulated in all kinds of ways. But this criminal somehow manages to step out of this world with one heart-rending expression: “Remember me when you come into your kingdom”–whatever that kingdom is, it surely must be better that this! Here let us recall that Sufi invitation to Prayer at the beginning of this reflection: “…if you do none of this, then tell Me of your needs.” This criminal has uttered the quintessential prayer of petition! And this is the real and true gateway to the Prayer of the Heart. And when we stand with this criminal and utter from our own depths this kind of prayer of petition than we are on the way to this Prayer.
Now note the response of Jesus. There is an immediacy here that is breath-taking–“Today”, not an evaluation of the merits of the man, not an invitation to be “polished” and “prepared” in some afterlife purgatory that later theological and spiritual reflection seemed to need for “purification” purposes–I never could understand that. That person on the cross is not in a position to proceed toward God step-by-step in a well-organized spiritual life following all the religious rules of his day. No, with that cry he is more like catapulted into the Divine Reality, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that his heart and his awareness are suddenly opened up to who he really is. That’s why I think that this figure of Good Friday, Jesus on the Cross, is the most radical and deepest koan of all–the one that shatters our self-constructed walls and puts us in Paradise.
So, Jesus tells him: “Today you will be with me in Paradise.” The word “paradise” is extremely complex and rich in meaning. Avoiding the silly, the superficial, the cliché, the narrow readings of this word, what it refers to is that unspeakable intimacy with God. “Paradise” is where we are one with God; we “walk with Him as with a friend”–as Genesis refers to it in its mythic presentation of human origins. This is the Christian (and Judaic and Islamic ) meaning also in its mystical traditions, and also one could claim that this Is the Western equivalent of the Advaita of the Upanishads and Shankara and Kashmir Saivism. But be that as it may, truly it is the proper Scriptural symbol for what it means to be in continual Prayer of the Heart. And this is not some kind of “mystical option” but what it truly means to be a Christian and even simply a human being. Dostoyevsky’s archetypal Russian monk, Father Zosima said that if we had the eyes to see it, we would see that indeed “Today we are in Paradise.”

Lent is only a few weeks away. If you live in a Christian monastic community, then your “spiritual adrenalin” begins to go up as Lent approaches. This is “monk’s season” to be sure! Even for your basic Catholic parishioner Lent takes on a special tone–beginning with an initiation into the season with ashes on that unusual feast of Ash Wednesday; then the Liturgy speaks in a very different tone; and finally there is the age-old call to “give up” something for Lent, to renounce something, or to do something special spiritually/religiously for Lent. This is inculcated in you from childhood in the Catholic setting. Sometimes all this is presented as a kind of preparation for Easter Sunday. True, but way too vague and doesn’t really reveal the deepest meaning of Lent and its attraction to those of us on a spiritual path. Nobody ever explained to me exactly how all these little acts of sacrifice or what have you actually “prepares” you for Easter. Unfortunately also all this “giving up” or “doing something special” stuff gets presented as isolated acts that are kind of like spiritual “weightlifting”–you get “stronger” by doing these things. With that we are pretty far from the real meaning of Lent, but alas too often that is what happens in Catholic formation. In so many other Christian communities Lent is often so ignored or downplayed that that becomes another kind of problem which I won’t discuss at this point.

Ok, let’s try looking at Lent like this: as a refocused, intensified “reading” of our lives, our very selves in relation to God, and a “reading” of God Him/Her self. In a sense we are doing this all the time, but Lent is a kind of renewal, an intensification, a refocusing, a clarifying of this “reading” that goes on all the time. In that sense it is similar to a Zen sesshin where Zen practitioners sit in intensive sessions to push their meditation to newer depths–a kind of Buddhist version of this “reading” of our personhood and identity. So, yes, Lent may involve all kinds of little and big sacrifices, renewed acts of piety, a true spiritual refocusing, etc., but all these acts are for the sake of this: we read Life, we read our own life, we read our own personhood, and ultimately we read God. And we do this “reading” continually, on automatic pilot if you will, but in Lent we become more deliberate, more focused perhaps, refocusing and perhaps relearning how to do this reading–because we are all too easily prone to “misread” it all! And this “misreading” is also, alas, always with us. And when you “misread” God you are bound to make some serious mistakes.

The Bible: In the Christian setting the Bible’s main role is to help us and guide us in this “transcendental reading.” To read the Bible with intelligence and with a heart filled with Prayer will open one’s eyes to new depths in this “reading” of God and one’s identity in God. The text is filled with stories, myths, histories, oracles, rules, injunctions, wise advice, prayers, even grief and desolation, etc. Almost nothing of human experience is left out. However, things are not as simple as all that! The Bible itself is very vulnerable to being misread and even manipulated and distorted. And if your misreading of the Bible is serious enough, you will end up in a very serious darkness. Jesus spoke of the darkness that inhabits the eyes of the Pharisees and those other religious leaders. Here I won’t get into an extended discussion of all the facets of this misreading of the Bible, but I would like to touch a couple of important issues that could help one to avoid some pitfalls and maybe adjust one’s approach to the Bible which could become a true instrument of “deep reading” at the heart level.

The primary issue is this thing of inspiration: the Bible as “inspired by God.” This is a very vague term and can mean all kinds of things and has in fact taken on various shades of meaning over the centuries. Conservative, evangelical, and fundamentalist Christians take this term in its strongest and most literal sense and build their house on this foundation. They admit that there is a human author of sorts–the Bible itself names some–but this human author is like a robot, simply doing what it is commanded, or a secretary simply copying down “divine dictation.” This then leads to the notion of the “inerrancy of the Bible”–after all God cannot make mistakes! Well, this then leads to all kinds of problems. What are we to make of all the killings and massacres and rapes and pillaging supposedly sanctioned by God. Does God really call for the stoning of people? Is God simply ISIS writ large! Slavery? The Bible is ok with it. The Bible was used by Southerners to justify slavery–one awful consequence of misreading the Bible, and you see how this leads to misreading our relationship to God and our fellow human beings. I mean this is just a small list of these kinds of problems. Hard really, also, to reconcile some aspects of the New Testament with the Old Testament yet it supposedly is “inspired” by the same God. Conservative Christians either ignore these problems or “sweep them under the rug” or what’s worse is that it shapes their image of God–and this is a real disaster. What’s odd or interesting about all this is how very liberal or anti-Christian people get it all wrong also when they accept this theory of inspiration. Theirs is an anti-Bible stance based on these kinds of points of evidence: the utter brutality within the Bible, the absurdity of some of its claims, etc. I saw an article recently on Alternet that claimed the Bible justified torture and so the implication is that we are fools for “reading God” there. I could see what the author was getting at; I could even agree with many of her claims about the horrors within the text; but her presupposition is this “fundamentalist inspiration theory.” And that I don’t think we need to subscribe to. And if we are not misled by that theory the Presence of God in the Bible becomes much more subtle and more complicated.

The Catholic Tradition has its own adherents of this conservative, fundamentalist reading, but the main approach of the Church is more nuanced and relying more on human intelligence and rationality. It places much more emphasis on the human authorship of the Bible with divine inspiration being a more subtle and hidden factor. The human author is taken very seriously and the text studied with the scientific precision provided by linguistic, literary, and historical scholarship–granted that has been true for only the last hundred years or so–a sign of changing attitudes and positions in the Church. This very human element of the Bible is a relief (at least to some of us) from that “magical inerrancy” that others seem to find there. However, in Catholic contemplative communities the scientific analysis of the text is not all that welcome because it seems to really eviscerate a prayerful reading of the text, the text as meditation material. ( I can vouch for that experience after all my scripture classes!!) Monks have used Lectio Devina, this is what it was called, since the beginnings of Christian monasticism, and the Psalms were always used in prayerful chant, which created an ambience for going deep into the heart and living attentively with the Transcendent Presence which is the Ground of all and which we call God. What did the monks do with the “bad passages,” the problematical texts? There were two approaches: first, they did what a lot of conservative Christians do–ignore the bad stuff; but secondly, they did a nifty “sleight of hand” thing–these all became symbolic, metaphorical. So, you were not really smashing skulls and committing genocide but rather overcoming evil within your own heart. Thus the reading of the Bible continued to be a vehicle of a prayerful reading of one’s life and identity in relation to God. What’s important here is that for the most part these monks did not let the awful texts shape their image of God–as a kind of Super Transcendent Ego, which gets angry and smashes people when they are “bad.” The monks had an experience of God that they brought to the text, and this truly varied but generally guided their reading. Much more could be said about all this but we need to move on.

If the Bible is going to be a true help in “reading God,” “reading our life,” etc., then we need to more fully confront this human element in it. Yes, we can take beautiful passages from it and employ it for our Lectio Devina and contemplative prayer, but that is not a full, total, complete reading. We are either engaged in a terrible distortion of the Transcendent Reality or we are practicing avoidance, which is “misreading lite.” The fact is that the Bible is a human work, a human artifact, which tries to communicate the human-divine encounter–thus called “inspired”– within the Semitic-Hellenistic world, limited by its language, its culture, its hang-ups. (Abhishiktananda railed against this limitation time and again in India as he tried to reinterpret the language of Scripture into the Indian matrix.) But precisely because of this totally human nature of the text it is a record not only what these people “read right” concerning the Transcendent Reality, but also what they got wrong. And this is very very important. Years ago there was a remarkable book by a Protestant Scripture scholar, Phyllis Trible, called Texts of Terror. It detailed the really horrible, almost unbearable passages in the Bible that we somehow ignore to our detriment. I would not follow her in her conclusions because the text as a whole can be termed “inspired” and a true guide in “reading God,” etc. as long as we recognize this totally human baggage there. The blindness, the monstrous distortions, the wrong turns, the desolation, all this is part of the record. Our religious ancestors had many instances of misreading God and their own identity in God, and this is all part of the record as a kind of therapy for our own proclivity to misread God. To put it in a way our fundamentalist friends would say it, God is not afraid to show that we can make terrible mistakes in His Name, that we can deeply misread His Presence in history. God is not afraid to have His Name associated with these horrible mistakes because there is something else in the text also. And here we must add something that our fundamentalist friends would not be comfortable with: this implies that God wants us to use our intelligence and our rationality(after all they are God-given also and reveal God in their own right) to sort all this out, and it is God who calls to us from the text to read Him right!

We bring our lives and our experience of God to the text and then there is this marvelous exchange. We see where our spiritual ancestors “misread” God and this warns us and guides us away from our own “misreadings.” But we also encounter the places where our religious ancestors experienced God with an intensity that opens our own hearts in a new way and so we can journey on. We shape the reading of the text, and then the text shapes our reading of God and Life.

To conclude, for this Lent I hope to touch base with and discuss 2 books of the Old Testament that almost nobody ever reads today: Lamentations and Ecclesiastes. Two works that are a serious challenge to our contemporary mindset, and two works which are not easy reading! But, hey, this is Lent!!

“I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying Him, and holding fast to Him; for that means life to you and length of days….” Dt. 30:19

Normally I don’t like to comment on current events–mostly that is a trivial exercise in futility. However, I have on occasion felt like saying something about this or that in the news. Recently, with the tragic events of massacres before our eyes, I feel a need to put some thoughts in writing even if just to clarify my own thinking. Needless to say I cannot depend on the mass media to help me in this clarification–it is more a vehicle of distortion, illusion, manipulation and propaganda to the nth degree. But here and there I find voices that articulate a vision and a more truthful analysis that is helpful in understanding at least something of what happened. And understanding is very important lest we react in a way that simply exacerbates the evil and enhances the darkness of these events. Avoid the simplistic and misleading language of the mass media and most political leaders at this time–don’t be fooled by those clever, manipulative phrases: “war on terror,” “attack on Western freedom of speech,”etc. Let me begin with a quote from my favorite commentator, Chris Hedges:

“The terrorist attack in France that took place at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo was not about free speech. It was not about radical Islam. It did not illustrate the fictitious clash of civilizations. It was a harbinger of an emerging dystopia where the wretched of the earth, deprived of resources to survive, devoid of hope, brutally controlled, belittled and mocked by the privileged who live in the splendor and indolence of the industrial West, lash out in nihilistic fury.”

(As I write this a report came out, from Oxfam I believe, that the top 1% in the world own 50% of the wealth of the world. That leaves the other 99% with the other half.)

We have to be very clear in our words: this murderous act was evil; it can never be justified by any circumstance; the murder of anyone is not to be tolerated, condoned or brushed off as “inevitable” or “necessary.” We also need to acknowledge that ISIS and Boko Haram are as bad as it gets. But once that is said, we need to reflect on the unimaginable darkness, turmoil, pain and delusion that roils within a heart that resorts to such acts. Calling them “terrorists” does absolutely no good except giving us an excuse for killing them…and if you think that solves the problem you are as deluded as our leaders…. But here we need to see this situation and these people with the eyes of Santideva, the great Buddhist teacher of compassion centuries ago. With Santideva we need to seek the healing and liberation of all human beings (indeed of all sentient beings) from the darkness and suffering within them. If we are with Santideva, we will seek this more than our own well-being. (In this regard Santideva fulfills the teachings of Jesus more than most Christians.) If we are to do this truly and realistically, then we have to understand the context and history that created the ground of this madness and nihilism. For this we turn again to Chris Hedges for a full survey of what led up to these murders and the obscurantism of the Western press and Western leaders who seem to have no inkling of a true and real way out of this situation except by more killing:

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/a_message_from_the_dispossessed_20150111

And for an added voice in harmony with Hedges, there is Mark LeVine, a professor of Middle East History at UC Irvine:

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2015/01/charlie-hebdo-islam-cartoon-terr-20151106726681265.html

And for a more acerbic analysis of Western reporting and analysis in the Western media, a truly powerful and biting look at what was said about this event, look at Noam Chomsky’s write-up that appeared on the CNN website (a miracle in itself!):
http://edition.cnn.com/2015/01/19/opinion/charlie-hebdo-noam-chomsky/

Among the things these men are pointing at is our utter hypocrisy. If you want to get a good close-up look at a terrorist, Mr. Westerner, just take a look in the mirror. We in the West have been perpetrating terror on other populations quite extensively over the centuries. We practiced terrorism and genocide against Native Americans, just as the British have against the Aboriginal peoples of Australia, and the French have against all kinds of Islamic people but especially against the Algerians in Algeria where thousands were tortured and killed. One has to wonder, what made us do all that? What kind of madness has been driving OUR society? Killing civilians? Heck, we’re experts at it. The British and Americans fire bombed Dresden during World War II and hundreds of thousands of civilians died horrific deaths–an act that was meant to terrorize the German people into surrender. Heck, I won’t even mention Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Never mind the more recent, less dramatic, killing of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. Never mind that we torture people now as a matter of state policy of sorts. (Incidentally, the two brothers who killed all those cartoonists gave indications that what really pushed them were the photos of Americans torturing and humiliating Iraqi men in prison–the photos that were released and made the world papers.)

But here I would like to touch an aspect of this murderous event that has become a very hot topic of contention: the “freedom of speech” that a magazine like Charlie Hebdo has. For many in the West this was the key issue; for liberal and conservative intellectuals, media people and politicians, what was being attacked here was the right to make fun of someone’s religion, in this case it was Islam, and there are all those “radical Islamists” who can’t deal with Western freedom of speech. (And for some of the even more misinformed, it is all Islam that can’t stand freedom of speech.) Well I am all for freedom of speech, but things here are not as simple as all that. A number of Islamic writers have pointed out the hypocrisy here too of Western people.

First of all, there is no such thing as an “absolute freedom of speech.” You cannot jokingly yell “Fire!” in a crowded theatre for example because the consequences could be very bad for all. You cannot joke with an airline stewardess about a possible bomb in your suitcase; you won’t end up at your destination I assure you! So there are limits and boundaries to free speech, but where to draw those boundaries is a constant struggle that engages us all, as a people and as individuals. It is probably true that governments should draw as few boundaries and as few limits as possible to free speech, but as individuals maybe we should exercise some discretion in our self-expression (even if we are “politically free” to say something) and ask ourselves what is really behind what we are saying and expressing, what is our real intention and goal, whether we are choosing Life with our words or death. It is that serious sometimes.
When I took a look at some of the stuff Charlie Hebdo was publishing, I began to wonder. There is such a relentless anti-Islam feel to so much of what they presened. From the time of the Arab Spring when Egypt was irrupting with revolution and many Egyptians gave their lives in hope of a change, there is a cartoon of an Egyptian Moslem full of bullit holes, bleeding, and his words are: “The Koran is shit. It can’t stop bullets.” Or how about when they present one of the French government officials, a dark-skinned Moslem woman, when they portray her as a monkey. There’s a feeling here of more than satire but of racism and hatred. And really it is one thing to poke fun at living leaders, politicians, current events, pop figures, etc. mostly they deserve it and it serves a common good to see their foibles exposed. But it seems one should be more sensitive with the key religious symbols of a group of people. So you wonder about that constant relentless barrage of presenting Mohammed in very degrading ways, as if he were responsible for ISIS and Boko Haram. Wittingly or unwittingly they were “pouring gasoline” on a fire, the fire of degradation, poverty, oppression, subjugation, exploitation, etc. Yes, they had “freedom of speech” but really is that all that is to be looked at when you open your mouth to say something? Lots more to be said here, but here are two Moslem commentators saying it much better than me:

http://www.newstatesman.com/mehdi-hasan/2015/01/muslim-i-m-fed-hypocrisy-free-speech-fundamentalists:

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/hypocrisy_abounds_free_speech_as_cover_for_islamophobia_20150115

I will conclude by giving Brother David Steindl-Rast the last word. He is a very well-known figure in Catholic monasticism and a true voice for peace and nonviolence in the Gandhian tradition. First of all recall from the movie Gandhi a scene late in the movie where he is fasting and almost dying during the great religious strife between Hindus and Moslems in India. Massacres were taking place regularly, hideous murders, unspeakable acts of outrage all around in the name of religion. Gandhi’s only weapon was to fast. At one point where he is almost dying from the fast, a Hindu comes in to see him trying to persuade to stop his fast. He confesses to Gandhi that he has killed a Moslem child by bashing its head in because Moslems had killed his child. He admits to Gandhi that he is “going to hell” for this act. In one of the truly great moments, Gandhi tells him, “I know a way out of hell……” If you have seen the movie you will recall this amazing scene. If you haven’t seen this movie, no description of mine can do justice to what is communicated there….you have to see the movie! In any case, we too faced with the horrors of our time have to find “the way out of hell” for all concerned. We have to find the right language, the right things to say and what not to say, to choose life for ourselves AND for our brothers and sisters everywhere and not to choose death over and over again. So now let us conclude with some wise words from Brother David:

“Accusations achieve nothing unless they go along with sober self-assessment. Our task would be: to face the decadence of our society, to acknowledge it, and to commit ourselves to restoring among us the essential human values we have lost. These three steps are a pre-condition for dialogue with Islamic culture. And only through dialogue, never through polemics or repression, may we hope to prevent terrorism and achieve a peaceful future.”

We all have “special people” in our lives, people we look towards because their lives carry some critical significance for us. Now, of course, I am using the word “special” in a very special way! Certainly not in the terms of our pop culture. You will recall that famous quip by Andy Warhol decades ago, “In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.” Truly a prophet of our consumer culture where absolutely everything, even nature, becomes a commodity for our exploitation and “consumption” and self-enhancement. For this pop culture “fame” is the main constitutive ingredient of “specialness,” and it is truly insane how this shallow fame is so worshipped and is so much a part of our social existence.

Another kind of “specialness” is one that people acquire by some extraordinary activity or accomplishment. This is not unconnected to the above shallowness because “fame” is still the “name of the game.” No matter the accomplishments, they are merely adornments for that insubstantial façade known as the ego self. It is amazing how much effort and energy (and also talent) can get expended in pursuit of this kind of “specialness.”

Now the “special people” I am referring to are the ones who manifest the Divine Reality in one way or another. You might say that actually every person is “special” in this sense, and of course you would be right. But occasionally you run into someone whose life speaks of that divine reality with extraordinary clarity or very urgently or in a very mysterious way. And this “specialness” is truly noteworthy when it is unselfconscious, when the person himself/herself is not aware how the Divine Presence radiates from their being. It is not the person who says “mirror, mirror on the wall, how holy will I be when I do such-and-such….”–no, it is not such a one who becomes “special” in this sense. That’s why most of my favorite “special people” are hardly religious folk in religious orders. With a few important exceptions most are either on the fringe of the religious/monastic path or people who even do not recognize the reality of religion in its formal, social sense at all. For a lot of folk “specialness” is manifest when they affix the word “saint” to your name, and I grant there’s a few of those that are very special. But mostly, for me personally, like I said most of my “special people” with a few exceptions will not be found “in church.” Even if they become “well-known” what makes them special in this sense is something often concealed in pain and suffering, confusion and chaos, bewilderment and frustration, failure and darkness,—as Merton was fond of pointing out about that famous icon of a bedraggled desert hermit, “Kissed By God”—are you sure you want to be “kissed by God”?! This is the true hidden life!

Over the years of doing this blog I have written about my “special people” at one time or another–or at least some of them: from Han-shan to Abhishiktananda. I think I have four more possible candidates to join the list. To say they are “different” is quite an understatement, and I don’t expect anyone else to agree, but I see what I see….

A. First Candidate: Alexander Grothendieck (1928-2014)

Grothendieck, who died just a few months ago, was probably the greatest mathematician of our time and one of the greatest of all time. His achievements in the field of mathematics are almost beyond description except to those who inhabit the realms of the highest and most sublime areas of mathematics. What Einstein was to physics, Grothendieck was to math; but he is a total unknown except to high level mathematicians working in this field. A decent obituary can be found at this link to the New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/25/science/the-lives-of-alexander-grothendieck-a-mathematical-visionary.html?module=Search&mabReward=relbias%3Aw%2C%7B%222%22%3A%22RI%3A18%22%7D&_r=0

But this is not at all what is important or significant about him for our purposes. He was a man who had a passion not only for mathematics but also for justice and truth and someone who could not tolerate the “social lie” in which we all live and participate in. Long before it was fashionable he worked to found a radical environmental group to bring European attention to the trashing of our natural world. He opposed the war in Vietnam and in protest went to Hanoi to teach mathematics to North Vietnamese students while American bombs rained down on Hanoi. He refused to receive a medal and cash award from the Soviet Mathematical Society in protest what the Soviet government was doing to dissidents. But all this was only the beginning. Around 1970 he discovered that the French institute in which he was teaching was receiving funding from the French Ministry of Defense, from the military basically. (This is standard fare in the United States where the Pentagon, the CIA and the National Security Agency fund and support all kinds of scientific research and if it has any kind of military applicability it is immediately appropriated. Thus even the so-called “pure sciences” are part of the war machine.) Grothendieck walked out of the Institute (In which he was the preeminent figure), and he was hoping his colleagues would join him in protest. But absolutely not one joined him in the boycott–after all they have to pay for their nice homes and cars and support the nice lives of their families…. So, to the astonishment of all, at the height of his mathematical powers, at age 42, Grothendieck dropped out! Dropped out of the academic world, and then dropped out of the whole social world, living a reclusive life in a small village in the Pyrenees.

One has to stop a moment and think to realize how staggering a gesture this was. We are not talking about someone doing a “career change,” or a young person who hasn’t done much but “drop out.” Grothendieck was at the height of his powers and at the top of his profession–even other great mathematicians stood in awe of him. This is a man who if he had come to the U. S. would have gotten some endowed chair in some prestigious university paying him a million dollars a year and who would have been solicited by every major corporation and the Defense Establishment with rewards and perks that boggle the mind. He would have been “SOMEBODY!” But no, Grothendieck became a nobody so to speak. He apparently still filled thousands of pages with mathematical work–it was after all in his blood to do math–but he published nothing in the usual manner. Like the Desert Father who burned the baskets he wove, Grothendieck on his deathbed asked that all his papers be burned. Fortunately that was not done!

So Grothendieck refused to participate in the “social lie”(or the “noble lie” as Plato might have put it), and he was willing to pay the price. He was willing to give all up–it is amusing to think how really very little the rest of us “give up” when we enter monastic/religious life. Needless to say this was not warmly received by the rest of the intellectual establishment. There’s a lot of nasty things about him on the internet–that he went mad, etc. Living in a hut in that village in the mountains, he refused to see people who came to visit him–his only contacts were with a very few of his close former students and some former associates by mail. One of them, a German mathematician, Winfried Scharlau, has written a biography of him and it is being translated into English. She says, “Don’t believe most of the things you read on the internet about him!” Some want to make his actions look like the work of a madman. The fact that he slept on a wooden floor, ate only vegetables, studied Buddhism, searched his dreams for a proof of God’s existence, thought that the whole scientific world was totally corrupt…..I guess that seems like sheer madness to some….. No matter. I have no difficulty believing that in fact he might have been mentally affected toward the end of his life….like a number of saints and holy people…. Someone with as sensitive a heart as his, with a mind as keen as his, is bound to experience some kind of “inner rupture” from the pain of living within the “social lie.” He is certainly not the classic “saint” or “holy man” but then those are not always my favorite kind of people; the “church approved” people are not necessarily the ones most truly manifesting the Divine Reality. In any case here’s a few more elaborate links about him:

http://www.grothendieckcircle.org/
http://www.ams.org/notices/200808/tx080800930p.pdf
http://inference-review.com/article/a-country-known-only-by-name

B. William Rivers Pitt
This one is a lot less dramatic! William Rivers Pitt is a writer about whom I know very little. But there is a special quality about his cogent observations pertaining to that strange concoction of distorted religiosity and perverse national ideology, producing a most toxic brew–but this poison is covered over with all kinds of sweet stuff and promises of all kinds of secular paradises and heavenly rewards. Again, only a person with a truly sensitive heart can see what he sees. He has been writing against these distortions all along over the years, like some Old Testament prophet, railing against our sick patriotism and our fake religiosity. And like with the words of those Old Testament prophets, there is a Presence behind their words that demands we hear them… Here was Mr. Pitt’s Christmas message:

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/28200-merry-iconoclastic-christmas

C. Rory Fanning
Another very unusual person. Rory was an Army Ranger, a top-notch soldier who served two tours of duty in Afghanistan. He came back finally as a conscientious objector and a war-resister. He experienced war; he saw war with a clarity few soldiers seem to have. There are many soldiers who experience the horrors of war but they internalize the horror and it eats them up psychologically. Most soldiers seem incapable of admitting the wrongness of what they are involved in. They are not capable of saying simply: This is wrong. I was lied to. Our policy, our country is wrong. I was wrong. I was manipulated into this nightmare. I was fooled into doing horrible things. Etc. That kind of vision is actually quite rare. So there is a special quality about Mr. Fanning’s war resistance and his words about that whole experience. They come from a deep place.

Rory wrote a book detailing his conversion to a wholly different view of life, but the book is also about a trek he took across the country, on foot, on behalf of a dead friend, a fellow-soldier in Afghanistan, Pat Tillman–that’s quite a story in itself. Here is a good review of his book in the Chicago Tribune:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/books/ct-prj-worth-fighting-for-rory-fanning-20141113-story.html#page=1

D. Vyacheslav Korotki
This one is my favorite. A truly haunting figure. Vyacheslav spent over three decades in a solitude that would make a Carthusian monk seem like a “party animal”(hey, they do have a recreational walk every week). Vyacheslav was sent by the Russian government to a remote Artic post where his job was to monitor weather conditions and report them via radio. He has been there for decades, all alone except for periodic trips “to town”-about a 100 miles away- –for supplies. Not too long ago a Russian journalist and photographer went out to visit him thinking there is an interesting story there. You can tell that what she found was beyond her words but she managed to capture some of it in her photographs. Here is a link to her original presentation:

http://www.newyorker.com/project/portfolio/weather-man

I love her concluding words:
“I came with the idea of a lonely hermit who ran away from the world because of some heavy drama, but it wasn’t true. He doesn’t get lonely at all. He kind of disappears into tundra, into the snowstorms. He doesn’t have a sense of self the way most people do. It’s as if he were the wind, or the weather itself.”

This sounds to me that he’s more like a Chinese Taoist hermit rather than your classic Christian hermit, but no matter, I like what I see! Speaking of which, the photographs on the above link did not load for me properly for some reason, so here is another site with the same photos, and they are truly haunting in a way that is impossible to formulate:

http://artnaz.com/weather-man/

A few weeks ago the movie “Wild” came out. It tells the true story of a young woman, Cheryl Strayed (played by Reese Witherspoon), who hiked alone a good portion of the famous Pacific Crest Trail (the PCT). It is based on a book account of this adventure with the same title: Wild. From a New York Times article about the movie: “In 1995 Ms. Strayed, then 26 years old, set out on a 1,100-mile hike along the Pacific Crest Trail, a 2,650-mile ribbon of dirt and rock that runs from Mexico to Canada through California, Oregon and Washington. She had never hiked before but believed the hardships of a relatively simple idea — a walk in the woods from A to B — would help her find her way out of the “sick mire” her life had become. A few years earlier her mother had died rapidly of cancer at age 45. Her marriage had collapsed under her own adulterous ways. She’d fallen into a world of scuzzy mattresses and heroin use.”

Here is a link to an actual review of the movie in the New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/03/movies/wild-stars-reese-witherspoon.html?_r=0

I am not recommending the movie; I am not saying anything bad about the movie either. Each viewer can decide. I admire the person in the story who undertook this journey in a desperate attempt to salvage her life. I have some questions about the movie and the account. Having met and talked to a number of long-range hikers, I have written about the PCT and other trails and the “traildogs” who populate them, so I was interested in Ms. Strayed’s experience and account primarily for that reason. She is not a typical hiker on these long trails; nor is she radically atypical. There is always the person on the trail trying to resolve some personal issue by taking “the journey.” I remember talking to a young Native American who had lost a close brother in Iraq and who was immersed in deep grief and the Trail was there to absorb that grief. Then there was an actual Iraq veteran who had seen too much of death and mayhem and was seeking healing on the Trail as it was not to be found in society. Then there is a significant group of hikers who are quite at home on the trail, in fact more at home there than anywhere else–they kind of realize the “sacrament of the wilderness” in their journey(a la John Muir). Then there also are the other types who simply try to do the Trail to prove something to themselves and to others,etc. Whatever be the case, the Trail beckons all of us in one way or another.

A few minor observations about the movie and the story:

1. Sad to say most of the movie was not shot on the Pacific Crest Trail. So you do see some scenic wilderness but it’s not on the PCT and that majestic route and that’s a shame.

2. Another somewhat disappointing fact is that Ms. Strayed actually did not do even half of the PCT. She did over 1100 miles which is remarkable in itself and quite commendable–especially considering she had no experience in hiking–but one still is left wondering what effect doing the whole trail would have had on her. She missed almost all of the Sierra Nevada, Muir’s Range of Light, arguably the most beautiful and awesome part of the Trail, and she missed almost the whole segment in Washington State. One wonders about these “absences”….

But what I want to focus on here is an image I see of our heroine, or rather of Reese Witherspoon who portrays her–the lone woman hiking with this huge backpack(look at the photos in the NYTimes)–solitude, wilderness, the human soul searching for something, and then this huge backpack! Yes, there are quite a few hikers on the PCT with these huge backpacks which weigh in at 40, 50 and even 60 pounds. Imagine carrying that on your back each day for 2000 miles! During her long hike Ms. Strayed learns to lighten her load a bit from the other hikers she meets, but she is still carrying quite a bit at the end. A very different approach to hiking emerged about 30 years ago and has grown very rapidly in recent years called “ultralight backpacking.” Ultralight hikers get their packs down under 20 pounds, and I have seen PCT hikers with packs down even to 12 pounds.

A most remarkable thing considering that often on the trail you are days away from any contact with civilization and its comforts. All in all it’s not just a numerical thing–less stuff, etc–it’s not just ingenuity and skill in getting the lightest equipment–it’s not just an ascetic thing if you will–making do with less–no, it is an approach, a philosophy even, indeed a whole vision of who you are and your being in the world. “Ultralight” is or should be a whole way of life. But most of us carry way too much baggage! Including internal baggage. To trim that “backpack” down that we all carry is one of the keys to a healthy spiritual life.

Switching now to another book–but staying on theme: Journeys of Simplicity, by Philip Harnden, a Quaker writer. A good little book, but not especially noteworthy. It is the author’s collection of favorite figures in history who have expressed “the journey” in their lives in this “ultralight” fashion. A few of my favorites from his book:

Layman Pang–he was called “Layman” because he was a married man, not a monk: “Twelve hundred years ago in China a middle-aged man named P’ang Yun loaded everything he owned onto a boat and sank it all in the Tung-r’ing Lake. After that, we are told, ‘he lived like a single leaf.’”

From the book: “Traveling light–imagine this meaning: unencumbered journeying, a graceful way of traveling through life like a single leaf. Now imagine another: the light by which we journey, the light that shows the way. Our traveling light. What would it mean to live like a single leaf? What would it mean to make one’s life a journey of simplicity? A journey unencumbered, uncluttered, without distraction–a journey of focus and intention? A journey of lightness and light?”

Emma “Grandma” Gatewood (1888-1973): “She hiked the entire two-thousand-mile Appalachian Trail when she was sixty-seven years old. Then she hiked it again. Then she hiked it again. Always alone. Never with a sleeping bag, tent, backpack, map, or hiking boots–she preferred sneakers…. Grandma Gatewood had already raised eleven children when she read a magazine article about the Appalachian Trail. She resolved to be the first to traverse it alone. She stood five-foot-two and on her first trip lost thirty pounds and wore out five pairs of sneakers. Later at age 72, she walked the Oregon Trail to celebrate its centennial.”

The Hermit of Tailaoshan: “In 1989 Bill Porter traveled to China to look for mountain hermits. Although officials in Taiwan insisted that the Communists had eradicated them all, Porter found otherwise. One day on a mountain trail, a Buddhist layman led him to the cave of an eighty-five-year old monk. The monk had moved to his cave-hermitage in 1939 after having a dream in which the spirits of the mountain asked him to become its protector…. He had not come off the mountain for fifty years. After some conversation, the hermit asked Porter, ‘Who is this Chairman Mao you keep mentioning?’”

Kamo no Chomei (1153-1216): “At age sixty, Kamo no Chomei retreated to a mountain called Toyama and built himself a little hut ‘for the last leaves of my years.’ There, alone, he reflected on the many calamities, both natural and political, that had ravaged Japanese society at the end of the twelfth century. He covered himself with clothes woven of wisteria fibers and quilts of hempen cloth. He foraged the fields for food and occasionally went begging in the capital city. ‘My body is like a drifting cloud,’ he wrote in his hut in 1212. ‘I ask for nothing. I want nothing. My greatest joy is a quiet nap; my only desire for this life is to see the beauties of the seasons.’”

Peace Pilgrim (1908-1981): “She was born Mildred Lisette Norman but gave up that name in 1953 when, as Peace Pilgrim, she embarked on the first of her seven cross-country pilgrimages for world peace…. For the next 28 years, Peace Pilgrim walked ‘as a prayer’ through every state, every Canadian province, and parts of Mexico. With a gentle persuasiveness, she urged upon anyone who would listen an unadorned message of nonviolence and disarmament…. Peace Pilgrim neither carried nor accepted money and owned only what few things fit in the pockets of her tunic. ‘I walk until given shelter, fast until given food,’ she said.”

And the final word is from George Washington Sears, who paddled the lakes and rivers of the Adirondacks as he was entering his sixties and dying from tuberculosis: “The temptation to buy this or that bit of indispensable camp-kit has been too strong, and we have gone to the blessed woods, handicapped with a load fit for a pack-mule. This is not how to do it. Go light; the lighter the better.”

And for an example of the “anti-ultralight,” what lies at the other side of “ultralight,” whatever you might want to call it, I won’t pick on the most obvious example of all these “fat cat” billionaires romping through our world caring for nothing but more acquisition, but, alas, I want to point to the institutions of our monks and nuns and in this case especially the friars, who especially carry the “badge of ultralight,” who proclaim its value to the world, but, wait, there’s something very wrong here…. Here is a link to a very sad story:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/19/order-of-friars-minior-fraud_n_6355532.html

For St. Francis “poverty” was a very important value and almost the key symbol of what he was trying to point to. His followers, the Franciscans, almost lost the essence of this value right from the beginning. Of course this is a value that was suppose to be essential for the “old fashioned” monks also, but Francis was rebelling against the big institutions of his day which were basically the monasteries and which were not “poor” in any sense of the word. Individual monks, maybe, but then they lived off the benefits of being members of these very well financed institutions. Francis wanted a religious community that would be “ultralight.” The word “poverty” has taken on some very bad connotations in our time—what with millions of people on the planet chained to a miserable poverty that dehumanizes them–nothing blessed about that. So maybe translating the old value “poverty” into “traveling ultralight” is not a bad idea. In any case, sad to say the folks in this story are even a better example for me of the anti-ultralight than the greedy millionaires. From those to whom more has been given, more is expected!

It is the Christmas Season and our pop culture and consumer society lives in a total unreality, a fog of warm, fuzzy feelings around snowmen, Santa Clauses, gifts, good cheer, caroling, etc. while the U. S. Senate issues a report detailing that we have become torturers of other human beings. In the bureaucratic government jargon this activity was called “enhanced interrogation.” (Apparently this was exactly the same term used by the Gestapo for what they did to prisoners.) This is even a more egregious form of unreality. Like calling burning at the stake, “heat treatment.” This specter of torture reveals the depths of our social unreality, and this is not something that anyone really wants to hear.
And why talk about this during this “joyous and holy season”? But if we have any sense of what Christmas means for us Christians, never mind the “secular Christmas” of consumerism, then we have a sense of the human-divine reality that is the core of our being and that means we see and treat other human beings in a very different way. The “necessity” of torture or the “evil” of torture, then, cannot be and will not be simply a result of some calculation of a rational ethics that says torture is “not acceptable” or if the calculation goes another way, torture is “necessary” in this case. No, from the heart of the Gospel, from Bethlehem to Golgotha, torture simply cannot be allowed–it opens the door to a darkness that completely obliterates our divine-human heart.
This blog is dedicated to reflecting on the mystical/contemplative/monastic aspects of the religious journey, so you may also be wondering if this reflection isn’t “off topic.” But I would like you to consider the following words from John Lennon from long ago: “Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I’m liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That’s what’s insane about it.” The fact is that this view was shared by the 4th and 5th Century Desert Fathers, the great figures who founded Christian monasticism. They saw their social order as thoroughly problematic and sought “escape.” They also knew that this “escape” would not be met with approval, even by their fellow churchmen. One the great Desert Fathers said, “A time will come when men will say you are mad because you are not like us.” Ezra Pound once said, “A person with a sensitive nose, living in a sewer, is bound to say something.” It was always part of the “monastic thing” to note the madness and unreality of the world that the monks lived in (as with Thomas Merton) and to support those who were confronting this darkness in a head on battle. But of course the monks would never stop at this negative critique but push forward toward the Light and the Reality that is always there.
A lot of people have commented on this torture report from a lot of angles. I have not seen any deep, profound reflection coming from any religious source, but there is this one reflection that in my opinion stands above all the others I have read and it is from a secular source. Here is the link to it:
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/27939-the-rank-reeking-horror-of-torturing-some-folks
I got the Lennon quote from it. This little reflective piece on the web is so good that I do not want to add any more words to it. If you really want to take that journey from “unreality to reality,” in the words of the Upanishads, then you need to understand what this author is getting at. If you want a more complete analysis and implications of this torture report, you can find it here:
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/28020-the-implications-of-the-torture-report
From Pascal: “All the problems of humanity begin when a man is not able to sit in silence alone in a room.” For your homework, please connect the dots!

Striking how the word “no” plays such a prominent role on the spiritual journey. Did you know that the critical step in any serious spirituality is to “be nobody”? Yup, that’s a fact! But it’s not to be confused with the “no” of popular religiosity or pop social living. You know, the Lent sort of thing, “no candy,” “no sex,” “no talking,” ”no this,” “no that,” etc. Some of these “no’s” are important for healthy living, some are not, and many are just a kind of “traffic control.” But the fundamental “no” of the spiritual journey has a vastly different resonance. This one has to do with our fundamental identity, and despite its negative appearance and similarity with negation it is in fact the most positive affirmation we can make.

Recall that old move from the ‘50s, “On the Waterfront,” with Marlon Brando. At one point in the story the Brando character, a boxer, is angrily lamenting to his brother, who betrayed him and induced him to throw a fight, “I could’ve been a contender. I could’ve been somebody.” In a sense this is the universal human anguish, “to be somebody.” We all have this built-in tendency to grasp at this “somebody” in our dreams and desires and realities around us. We are utterly afraid of having no name, no title, no credentials of any kind–like undocumented immigrants: “no papers”! Consumerism is another dynamic in this attempt to be “somebody”–I consume/shop; therefore I am! Even religious people, and maybe especially religious people, have a tendency to get lost in this quagmire of unreality and images and shadows because when there is a “religious name” on this “somebody” it seems to be more real, more substantial, etc.  Ah, the importance of having a certain name or designation!

Recently I came across a book with the engaging title, Be Nobody, written by someone I never heard of before, Lama Marut. It is a kind of “New Age” spirituality thing and mostly I stay away from that stuff, but this book actually has a lot of solid and helpful insights and overall a good reminder of what I am mentioning above. The author mystifies me–grew up as a conservative Baptist, became a professor of comparative religions, specializing in Hinduism, then dropped that and became a Tibetan Buddhist monk, now he no longer is a monk but writes and teaches “spirituality.” It puzzles me why he keeps that name, Lama Marut, and I only mention it because he seems to illustrate the very problem he writes about: that need to be “somebody.” If he were still deeply connected to Tibetan Buddhism and had gotten that title through an authentic transmission, well, then that would be understandable. But now it would seem that his book could have been written by “Joe Blow” and it would be more truthful in a sense to have some kind of “plain name.” No matter; the book has some good things to say, and in the spirit of Jesus, wherever we find goodness and truth we should acknowledge it and learn from it.

I called the work “New Age spirituality”–it’s not as weird or flakey or superficial as a lot of that stuff is, but it shares one very important characteristic of the New Age movement: it is spirituality disconnected from any tradition or religion. Yes, it borrows and uses elements from a lot of different traditions but there is no fundamental commitment to any one tradition.  In fact Lama Marut makes a big point about that, about a need for a spirituality abstracted from all religions but drawing on them all. From the Preface: “The point is not to be a Buddhist but to learn how to become a Buddha; not just to identify with the label ‘Christian’ but to live a Christlike life; not simply to join a religion as a way to strengthen one’s sense of self but to actually live a good life, a life characterized by egoless concern for others.” One can see what he is getting at and largely agree with it as far as it goes, but the actual situation is a bit more complex. It may be that being committed to a tradition, belonging to a Church, etc., will keep one on a serious path and avoid simply dabbling in spirituality. It is this which must be avoided by all means and without that anchor and the wisdom passed down through countless wise holy people in each tradition, you wonder if a person might not get lost in a lot of superficial stuff. Also at a certain point one has to “give up one’s life” if one is serious on a path, and I am not sure that a self-constructed spirituality will help you through that tunnel! But, on the other hand, I am very sympathetic to spiritual seekers who are “traditionless,” “churchless,” even “religionless”–I think there are situations and people for whom that is the only viable path. Here is another quote from that book–here he is quoting Swami Satchidananda, who became a favorite guru of many New Agers: “People often ask me, ‘What religion are you? You talk about the Bible, Koran, Torah. Are you a Hindu?’ I say, ‘I am not a Catholic, a Buddhist, or a Hindu, but an Undo. My religion is Undoism. We have done enough damage. We have to stop doing any more and simply undo the damage we have already done.’” I can fully sympathize with that position, even applaud it, but I think one may be able to “undo” a lot more by staying within one’s tradition.

Enough about all this and let’s get back to our main topic and here this little book has some good contributions:

1. The book has a good handle on one of the most important questions of the spiritual journey: who am I? The problem of identity. The call to be “Nobody” is not a negative thing but an affirmation of an identity much deeper than any social/psychological construction. From the book: “’Nobody,’ as we use the term here, refers to our deepest nature, our ‘true self,’ which is ever-present and in no need of improvement. It is our highest source of joy and strength, the eternal reservoir of peace and contentment to which we repair in order to silence the persistent demands and complaints of the insatiable ego. Letting go of our preoccupation with being important and significant will not be easy. Laboring at being somebody for so long digs deep ruts of habit, and some ingrained part of us will surely resist the required ‘ego-ectomy.’ But there’s a great relief in dropping the ego’s restrictive inhibitions and demands for affirmation and magnification…. With the rise and vapidity of social networking and ‘reality’ television, the veneration of the ego, celebrity, and instant fame, and the closed-minded arrogance of religious fundamentalism…the questions revolving around the nexus of spirituality and identity have never been more pressing….”
2. The book does a good job of presenting a summary of the social background and cultural critique that was emerging in recent decades around the issue of our sense of self. Journalist Tom Wolfe called the early ‘70s the “Me Decade,” and in 1979 Christopher Lasch wrote The Culture of Narcissism, a scathing critique of the narcissistic preoccupation with the self at the cultural/social level. Today we live in the “iERA”(as in iPad!).
3. The book does a good job at distinguishing this “Nobody” we seek from the kind of psychological afflictions people experience: poor self-image, feelings of worthlessness, self-hatred and self-rejection.
4. A number of excellent quotes in the book, but the key one for us is this one from Merton: “There is an irreducible opposition between the deep transcendent self that awakens only in contemplation and the superficial, external self that we commonly identify with the first person singular. We must remember that this superficial ‘I’ is not our real self. It is our ‘individuality’ and our ‘empirical self,’ but it is not truly the hidden and mysterious person in whom we subsist before the eyes of God. The ‘I’ that works in the world, thinks about itself, observes its own reactions, and talks about itself is not the true ‘I’ that has been united to God in Christ.”
5. I liked this insight and this shows Lama Marut’s Buddhist training: “…the interminable pursuit of being somebody can become a heavy load to carry. If, for example, we believe that our “specialness” derives from what we have achieved rather than from who we really are, we will be forever striving to be important enough, famous enough, rich enough, loved enough, accomplished enough…. If we fully buy into an accomplishment-based understanding of selfhood, we’ll be perpetually trying, and endlessly failing, to be somebody enough. When we wholly identify with one or another of the roles we play in the ongoing drama that is life, we may begin to suspect that no matter how successful we are–no matter how many promotions we win, how much money we accumulate, how much praise we receive –it will never be sufficient.”

This is called “dukkha” in Buddhism, often translated as “suffering.”

Think of the Christian Desert Fathers, the founders of Christian monasticism, they knew this kind of thing in their own language if you can translate it into our modern terms–over the years Catholic religious discourse and even Orthodox spiritual writers have overlaid a kind of masochistic piety on the stories and language of these giants of the Desert. In fact the Desert Fathers (and Mothers) had one word that perfectly summed up the whole enterprise of discovering your true self as Nobody: humility–the most important word and value in the Desert.   That word was so cheapened and eviscerated over the years that its profundity and scope got lost in a maze of superficial “spiritual” attitudes.

But think also of the New Testament. Here Lama Marut quotes C. S. Lewis (hardly a New Age figure!): “The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing is to hand over your whole self–all your wishes and precautions–to Christ. But it is far easier than what we are all trying to do instead. For what we are trying to do is to remain what we call ‘ourselves’….” And consider this from the Gospel (Mt. 11: 28-30): “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” Consider now the Greek myth of Sisyphus, where Sisyphus is condemned to Greek hell where he has the task of rolling this stone up a steep hill and the stone gets heavier and heavier as he gets toward the top until it becomes too heavy for him and it rolls down to the bottom and he has to start all over. Alas, that is the iconic picture of the heavy burden of our ego self and all our efforts at building it up, enhancing it, satisfying its insatiable needs, etc. The heaviest burden we have to carry is precisely our ego self, and the amazing thing is that this seems “normal,” “the accepted thing,” “the way things are,”…. All the major spiritual/mystic traditions of the world have a way of “unburdening” us and in a sense they all generally point in the same direction. But in Christianity we express it through this reality of our oneness with Christ and in Christ. We “put on the mind of Christ,” we become Christlike, we live now, “not I, but Christ lives in me,” and so on. This Nobody we truly are is our real self in a nondual union with Christ and lost in God. To live from that sense of identity is to live literally without any burden in pure bliss and total freedom and unlimited compassion.

1. One last idea from the book: “The lower, individual self is an idea of the self, but our self- conception is constantly in flux. This self, we could say, is a process, not a thing. To invoke a very common and ancient simile, the self is like a river–let’s say the Mississippi. What we call ‘the Mississippi River’ is not an entity or a thing; it is only a name we give to a particular flow of water–to a process….. We mistake changing things for unchanging things. We assume because we have a name or concept for ‘the Mississippi River,’ the word and the idea must refer to some thing, when all it really designates is a flowing current, a movement, an activity. Well, our sense of personal identity is just like a river. Every part of what we include in our idea of ‘me’–every physical and mental component of the self–is changing, moment by moment. The kind of idea I have about ‘me’ deceives me. I think my concept of ‘me’ refers to a unitary, independent, and unchanging entity, when all it denominates is a flow.”

Very interesting and very Buddhist. I don’t know how this would work in a Christian mystical theology or metaphysics, but it does seem to me that one of the obstacles to a deep Christian mystical view of reality and our selfhood is the view of ourselves as these static fixed solid entities–like marbles in a jar, just rubbing against each other, and in a sense just rubbing against the reality of God.

So leaving behind this intriguing book, we now ask ourselves some more questions about this Nobody that we are. Who am I really? And why do we call this deep self “Nobody”? Because we can never “get hold” of our true deep self (but a zen master once grabbed a monk by his nose and shouted that he had found that monk’s true self) by counting it, numbering it, examining it–we will never see it in a mirror–never create a resume for it, never put it on exhibit, never put a label on it, a title, a name–it is truly nameless, etc., etc. It is not there as another object in the world of objects. And yet that true deep self is also not some exotic, special self, accessible only in special spiritual states. No it is always there when we wash the dishes, chop wood, offer a glass of water to someone, etc. Zen is very good at grasping this, but the Christian vision maybe has a sense of this to its very depths lost in the Mystery of God. I have often asserted in this blog how important it is to have a sense of the Absolute Mystery of God if we are going to have a serious spiritual life and have any inkling of our own identity. We are one with Christ in the depths of our being and so lost in that very Mystery. It is a great assertion of Catholic (and Orthodox) mystical theology that we “know” God best through a great and profound “unknowing”–that God is that fundamental and absolute Mystery. And so our very being in being lost in the depths of God through Christ enters into that same apophatic condition of “unknowability.” The “cloud of unknowing” surrounds not only God but the core of our being, our heart, our identity. There is no language that can express our “oneness with God,” and it is precisely that which is our identity. Thus, Nobody!

From a poem by Merton (“In Silence”):

Be still

Listen to the stones of the wall.

Be silent, they try

To speak your

Name.

Listen

To the living walls.

Who are you?

Who

Are you? Whose

Silence are you?

Who (be quiet)

Are you (as these stones

Are quiet). Do not

Think of what you are

Still less of

What you may one day be.

Rather

Be what you are (but what?) be

The unthinkable one

You do not know.

And, trust me, the PATH to that may best be described as No-way because that deep self is not there for any techniques or methods or practices to “discover”–not even meditation and prayer. There is no formula, no “puzzle” to solve, no “map,” no “how” to find this deep self–yet in the very next breath, there it is!

One last reflection. For those in the Christian tradition, the Gospels point at this deep hidden self in so many different ways, but the language and images and symbols get deflected into superficial directions. Consider a deeper, contemplative approach, like Merton’s little meditation on Luke’s Christmas narrative–you will find it in his little book of poems and reflections called Rain and the Rhinoceros–I forget the exact title of the meditation but I think it is taken right from Luke, “There was no room for them in the Inn.” Merton meditates on the Nativity narrative (starting at Luke 2:1): “In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered….” This is NOT a warm, fuzzy romantic scene with Santa and reindeer not far off and Christmas carols and eggnog. The Empire wants you numbered, counted, fixed with an identity that the Empire can recognize. The Empire is filled with this vast social movement where crowds are on the move. And “important people” are busy doing “important things”: “…while Quirinius was governor of Syria.” Mary and Joseph (and the child-to-be-born) do not stand “outside” this world; they are not ethereal beings; they too are to be counted and numbered; but as Mary is about to give birth to Jesus, they end up in a kind of cave–the word “manger” doesn’t really do justice to the setting–because “there was no room for them in the inn.” They get pushed around by the Empire for its own purposes, but their place is no-place; certainly not with the crowds that simply go along with the Empire in its “registering” everybody. When it’s time for the birth of the one who will reveal to us our own oneness with God and an identity that the Empire has no inkling of, the setting is one of being “outside” this vast commotion of the Empire. Luke really emphasizes that point in the next paragraph.

“There were shepherds living in the fields…” These are the consummate “outsiders”–like monks, or like monks should be. The shepherds are not part of the commotion and agitation of the Empire. They do not draw their identity from the Empire and so they “count for nothing.” To be sure they are “Nobodys”. They dwell in the night outside, not in the crowded inn or the crowded cities, but in the lonely fields, in the darkness, in silence, keeping watch…. They are the poor ones, the simple ones,… These are the only ones “qualified,” these are the only ones capable of bearing witness to the Mystery of God and the human being. They recognize the call to that No-place where that Divine Mystery emerges into Light; they respond. And this whole narrative is filled with a quiet joy which is certainly not the “exhilaration” of ego fulfillment. Rather it is the blessed joy of abiding always within this mystery.

A Blessed Christmas to all from this No-monk!

1.   So the elections are over and the dust has settled, and there is not much to say–not anything positive at any rate. There will be pain. To be sure. But I am not so confident that we would be “pain free” if the Dems had won. Only seems that way because we have this traditional expectation that the Dems are for the “little guy” and “for” the environment, etc. But if you examine the real record you will see that this is more of an image than a reality. Those of us who are Leftists or Left-leaning or “Liberal” naturally turn toward the Dems because the other side is so obviously a disaster, but the Dems keep disappointing us over and over again and in the end it turns out that the Dems have been pulling this country rightward over the last few decades.   They simply provide an “anesthetic” to the pain by providing some crumbs for the poor and the middleclass. The actual situation is of course more complex than this, but really the country has now only a Right Wing politics and a Right-of-Center politics. A few points:

2.  You may be wondering what does a spiritual/religious blog have to do with politics. Well, a whole lot if you understand spirituality and religion truly. Yes, politics can be just as much a distraction and diversion as wealth and sex and anything else, but when you see how public policy can affect the poor, “your neighbor,” or the environment, “God’s creation,” then you see that deep spiritual realization entails a vision that means making certain choices and politics is one of them. Politics, when viewed through an authentic religious optic, is simply another opportunity for us to express our deeply religious nature, our intrinsic orientation to a transcendent reality. But, alas, politics in its usual manifestation is more a manifestation of our delusions, obsessions and our deep inner incoherence.

 3.  A bit of history. From FDR to McGovern in 1972, the Dems were a reasonable home for Progressives and Leftists. Ok, there were some bad moments–starting the Vietnam war and in 1968, but then Robert Kennedy was killed and that was the beginning of the end for a real progressive vision for this country. In any case, we could realistically hope for some progressive politics to emerge from the Dem Platform …until…beginning with the Carter years and the “Reagan Revolution” and culminating in the Clinton years, the Dems gradually drifted toward a kind of mythic center. The “Reagan Revolution” so traumatized the Dems that they still haven’t recovered. They were shocked that one of the key elements of their base, blue-collar labor, voted massively for Reagan. Incidentally, most of these people were lower-middle class Catholics, and that illustrates the failure of the Church to teach Catholic Social Teaching, to make it really the “bread and butter” of its social message. Instead the Church totally focused on abortion and sex so much that people lost track that there was a lot more here that needed attention. With Clinton, the Dems were thoroughly locked in on that mythic center so that they began to sound like they stood for nothing. Even worse, they allied themselves with large business interests in the hope of raising money. Here is Robert Reich giving us a bit of post-election analysis of what went wrong in light of that history:

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/robert-reich-real-reason-democrats-lost-big-election-day

4.  I ripped this off a progressive blog: a call to arms for progressives on Truthdig by Alan Minsky:

“The moderate, pro-corporate, Democratic Leadership Council wing that has dominated the Democratic Party since 1992 is reeling, unable to compete with a well-funded and reactionary GOP. Without a charismatic frontman or -woman, this Democratic Party cannot mobilize its middle- and working-class base for the simple reason that it doesn’t represent their interests. Only leftist progressives stand for the welfare of average Americans, and they have to stand up, make this distinction and stake their claim before all focus turns to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. 

Second: The country and the world are a mess. The economy, the justice system, the environment, education, immigration and foreign policy are all out of whack. Obama, Hillary and the centrist Democrats aren’t going to set these right; as for the GOP, God forbid. If leftist progressives really believe that their program for America is the best possible program, which they do, the state of the world demands that they get to it right away.”

5.  If you read the Democratic Platform, it actually reads reasonably well–a lot of good things there. But the sad fact is that it’s mostly window dressing, political advertising, and we all know what that’s worth! Also, and this seems like a specialty of the Obama Administration , with one hand they offer you one good thing and then with the other hand they pull something awful on you. Latest example: the Administration came out for net neutrality, which is very good, but little noticed is the fact that they are pushing for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which a number of progressive analysts are calling really, really bad. Here is a link that explains that:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dean-baker/election-results-indicate_b_6136660.html

6.  The connection of the American Left with the Democratic Party went out the window during the Clinton years, as already noted. But what replaced that historically important alliance is the Democratic Party’s new partner: WALL STREET!! So what was the Republicans’ traditional “backyard” is now also where you will see many Democrat connections. Ralph Nader was right(he was blasted for saying this years ago): there is no REAL difference between these two parties. We have a mirage of choices. Here are two links that illustrates the Dem coziness with Wall Street:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-kuttner/the-cure-for-the-democrat_b_6130066.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-brenner/democrats-political-suicide_b_6133762.html

The Dems are no longer the “helping hand” that helps the Joad Family in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath—especially see the movie version of the story.

Update: Since the writing of these blogs, the Dems have elected a new head of the DCCC, and it’s not the awful choice from Wall Street. So one can be glad for that. But it was not the best progressive choice. Steve Israel, the former head of the DCCC still has a leadership position with the Dems and the new guy, Ben Ray Lujan, a congressman from New Mexico, remains to be tested. The Sierra Club approves of him, but these days that doesn’t mean much–they are only a shadow of what they used to be also.

7.  There are two items that Democrats generally support that seem very progressive: abortion rights and legalization of pot. Here also, however, appearances are deceiving. I already have written about this abortion thing in that it’s a “no-win” argument for either side of the issue as long as it is framed within a “rights” debate. Whose rights prevail? The child’s? Of course the pro-abortion crowd won’t use that word, “child,” but rather the more amorphous and non-human term, “fetus.” But that doesn’t get away from the fact that there is a kind of killing. It’s not like cutting out a cancer tumor! The anti-abortion folk, on the other hand, hardly have any regard for the mother or the situation that she finds herself in. The only way to see this argument through is to situate it within a profound vision of sex and not just this “pleasure machine” that our society seems to see, that it’s not something just for individual “use” to enhance one’s life but that it is a sacred and transcendent reality, a sacrament of the Divine, a manifestation of Ultimate Reality, and there is this intrinsic connection with the creation of another human being.  When we as a culture see sexuality differently we will know how to address the abortion issue because in fact it would fade into a minor problem. Right now there are too many “unwanted babies” being created by people acting out their sexuality in various superficial ways and society does not want to claim the resultant babies who are seen as an accidental product–nor does society insure the care of the mother and the child, etc. So what is the mother to do…..? In any case a truly progressive view would move along this line, but you can count on this not happening!!

Now with the legalization of pot there is another kind of problem. Here again the way we view this problem makes it a no-win situation. If we are “against” pot, then corporate America makes money on the expansion of the policing of America (snooping, gear, and especially the expansion of prisons–a real big money maker that few people notice–it is just like that other rat-hole, the military-industrial complex, into which so much money pours). Not to mention the money made by drug dealers. If we are “for” the legalization of pot, then corporate America will make a good load of money on its sales-in a sense the drug dealers will be working for legit American corporations–rumors abound about a number of US companies owning a ton of land ready to go into pot agriculture once it becomes “normal.” But much more importantly corporate America thrives on having a drugged out American citizenry–so more drugs=better conditions for corporate America. Our citizenry is already not only dumbed-down and manipulated through the media but it is also drugged by mass entertainment, big-time spectacle sports, mindless intoxication in games, sex, celebrities, consumption, and, oh yes, alcohol, pills, meth, coke, heroin, MDMA, etc. Corporate America needs this up to a certain point in order to keep us in this passive numb “cloud of political and social unknowing.” Of course it can’t afford to let it all go so it is for certain controls, to make it look like we are “ok”–just a little problem here or there. In any case, you see that it really isn’t a “progressive” issue, the legalization of pot–in fact here also I can’t see any way forward as long as we are locked into this kind of choice. You really have to think outside the box in order to see a better way of addressing the problem.

8. Ok, to end this sad story, I will refer to a very impassioned commentary by another progressive commentator.    He’s writing from a small town in New Hampshire where there was a good turnout for the election. He points to his neighbors as “model citizens.” Ok, I see his point, but as he himself indicates the national Democrat party seems to stand for nothing so why really bother to vote for them, but locally there may be some decent candidates worth voting for. As much as I like his passion and line of thought, I think he misses one radical solution: delegitimize the system by massive non-voting. Doesn’t seem possible; seems scary in a way; but it may be the only way of having a real but peaceful revolution. I think we are far from that point–people will have to feel more pain, more disillusionment, etc., and I wonder if we are even past the possibility of independent thought–thought that isn’t the manipulated product of pop culture. The folks at Ad Busters seem to believe in this possibility. By the way, take the first step this holiday season and don’t shop, don’t consume, eat simply, enjoy the natural beauty of life. Do not cooperate with the system in any way up to the point of breaking any laws. We are not yet ready for that kind of resistance, but the day may not be far off. Meanwhile, here is the link:

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/27300-reaping-the-whirlwind-again

And on this sad note I want to head off to the mountains with my friend, Han-shan:

“The layered bloom of hills and streams

Kingfisher shades beneath rose-colored clouds

Mountain mist soaks my cotton bandana

Dew penetrates my palm-bark coat

On my feet are traveling shoes

My hand holds an old vine staff

Again I gaze beyond the dusty world

What more could I want in that land of dreams”

                                     Trans. By Red Pine

1. In May of 2010 the Dalai Lama gave a series of teachings in New York City. The audience consisted of Buddhist monks, Tibetan and others, and lay people, mostly Westerners who are interested to a certain extent in what Buddhism is all about. There were three days of teachings, and then there was a public talk by the Dalai Lama that was more general and intended for the wider public, not just Buddhists. The whole event was recorded and is available as a DVD packet of 4 separate dvds, one for each day of teaching and the public talk. I recommend it highly. I have watched it now twice and it still holds all kinds of insights, even if you are not “becoming Buddhist.” If you want to understand what Buddhism is really about, and in particular the Tibetan version of it, this is worth the time and effort—the talks are long, at least two hours long on each DVD. For contemplative Christians I think it is especially valuable in helping them get a sense for what the Buddhists are bringing to the table of the interreligious encounter, their depth, their wisdom, their contemplative experience. You probably can get this DVD from a library.

2. One of the striking and fascinating things about the Dalai Lama’s presentation of Buddhism is how “scholastic” it can be (Merton’s term when he met the Dalai Lama back in in 1968). The Dalai Lama’s school of Tibetan Buddhism, Gelugpa, emphasizes study, learning, and philosophical issues, and this really shows. He is very systematic, very thorough, and shows a true mastery of very complex texts. In this presentation, however, he makes the point that what he is pointing to undergirds all of Buddhism in all of its various schools.

3. Another striking and fascinating aspect of his presentation is the careful and precise use of terms. Those of us who are not Buddhists have to be very careful about what meaning we attribute to certain Buddhist language–it may not be at all what they mean. This happened a lot in early Western writings on Buddhism, especially by Christian scholars. Also there are a significant number of Westerners who take on some aspects of Buddhism, pick up some terminology from books, and generally get it wrong. That’s why the Dalai Lama emphasizes serious study to compliment meditation. As an example: a term like “emptiness” or “no-self” has a very definite technical meaning in Buddhism that is not accurately reflected in a kind of “pop spirituality” that abounds today.

4. I certainly can’t say that I always understood what the Dalai Lama was saying. At several points I wish I could have asked him several questions. One dreams of how incredible it would have been if Nagarjuna (an Indian who was one of the greatest Buddhist practitioners and philosophers) had been able to dialogue with Thomas Aquinas. They would have needed some excellent translators!! I don’t think it is enough appreciated how difficult it is to get a grasp of what another religious culture’s language is getting at. One can too easily assume that one understands because it “sounds similar” to something one is familiar with. And this holds for Buddhist views of Christianity–I could tell from what the Dalai Lama said that in certain ways he was familiar with the essence of Christianity but in other ways he was taking some very superficial views as representative of what we hold.

5. This brings us to a very important notion. For Tibetan Buddhism, and I think for the Buddhist world in general, statements, notions and claims are said to be stated on one of two levels: the conventional level or the ultimate level. There is “what is real” on the conventional level, and there is “what is real” on the ultimate level. There is the notion of “self” on the conventional level, and there is the notion of “self” on the ultimate level. Or something like that. In any case, you see the possible difficulties in trying to grasp a Buddhist teaching. In fact you could say there is Buddhism on the conventional level and there is Buddhism on the ultimate level. When we confuse these levels we obfuscate the encounter. Now what is most interesting to me is that this kind of division actually can be applied to the other great religious traditions. Consider my own Christianity. There is the conventional Christianity of the average pious Christian and there is the “ultimate Christianity” of the mystics. Now this seems to be saying that there are the “regular folk” and then there are the “elite folk,” which in fact would be unacceptable in any Christian context. But it is an actual fact that the piety of the average Christian is on that conventional level: belonging to a parish, going to Mass frequently, saying the rosary, doing some novena, praying to Saint So-and-So for a favor, trying to be a good person,etc., and then on top of all this trying to succeed in a secular world of secular activities. God is somewhere “out there” or even if “in here” God is still this Other who is another entity, simply the “bigger and better entity,” and little ole’ me here, in precarious existence but “solid” trying to manipulate the world as best as I can. The words and world of the mystics seems, then, far away for this person–most people are befuddled by the language of Eckhart, for example, and so they take refuge in “authoritative teachings.” It is actually the Church itself which seems to keep people at a “child’s level” in their faith–I don’t say they do this deliberately but that is the actual effect of what they do. So instead of openly and universally teaching forcefully and vigorously that every human being is called to be a “mystic”–in this immediate and incomprehensible communion as a being “one with God,” the Church seems to spend a lot more energy and at a larger decibel level on focusing on morality and church laws and all kinds of feasts and saints and so on. It is actually the Church itself which has raised mysticism to an elite level, seemingly for the very few, like “special forces” in the military, whereas it should be on an everyday level for everyone, but with “ultimate realization.” Rahner was right: every Christian must be a mystic….   In this way he was pointing at an “ultimate level” of Christianity.

6. I wonder if Church doctrine could be seen in this way: there is a conventional level and then there is an ultimate level to the meaning. I think the Church discourages any such interpretation–there is only that one meaning that the Church articulates once and for all. But I think we can still press that issue…. Eckhart, for example, can be seen as pushing the meaning of Christian language toward new, deeper understandings. And in our time I think Abhishiktananda was doing the same.

7. The Dalai Lama is a truly wonderful person, a truly beautiful person, a truly good person, a manifestation of real holiness. There is not a false fiber in his being. He reminded me of one of the Desert Fathers who said, “I am the same inside as I am outside.” In other words you get what you see with him! No deceit; no sales pitch; no “persuasion” needed. Maybe it was just me, but in fact watching and listening to him I felt that’s how some of the great Desert Fathers must have looked and sounded, given of course the difference in the traditions.

8. Given all that, however, I also feel free to disagree with some things he said, and the beauty of that person is that he makes you feel that freedom also. Anyway, somewhere in the beginning he mentions his present home in India and how India should be a model for other nations in its religious pluralism and tolerance where so many different religious traditions coexist peacefully. I can understand why he would feel that to be true, considering how India gave refuge to his Tibetan Buddhist people. But the actual history of India in modern times is not so nice. The Hindu–Moslem conflicts especially have produced some of the most awful religious violence we have ever witnessed—makes Northern Ireland pale by comparison! Certainly gives fuel to the anti-religion crowd among Western intellectuals. And Christians in India, though a very small minority, have been targeted with harsh and threatening rhetoric by the Hindu ultranationalists. These are the kind of people who killed Gandhi, and the sad fact is that they are now in charge! Just a few weeks ago there was a piece in the New York Times by Indian author, Pankaj Mishra, with the title, “Modi’s Idea of India.” Here is the link to it:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/25/opinion/pankaj-mishra-nirandra-modis-idea-of-india.html?module=Search&mabReward=relbias%3As%2C{%222%22%3A%22RI%3A13%22}

The reference of course is to the new prime minister Narendra Modi and the nationalist Hindu movement he is leading. He came into power on an anti-corruption move but he brings a lot more than that to the table. In the 1990s Mr. Modi was connected to several incidents in which mosques were burned down and hundreds of Moslems were massacred. Maybe he has mellowed over time, but his rhetoric is still one of Hindu nationalism, seeking a kind of “pure Hindu India” liberated from various cultural and religious “enslavements.” Mishra underscores the misleading notions of Modi’s rhetoric:

“Mr. Modi doesn’t seem to know that India’s reputation as a “golden bird” flourished during the long centuries when it was allegedly enslaved by Muslims. A range of esteemed scholars — from Sheldon Pollock to Jonardon Ganeri — have demonstrated beyond doubt that this period before British rule witnessed some of the greatest achievements in Indian philosophy, literature, music, painting and architecture. The psychic wounds Mr. Naipaul noticed among semi-Westernized upper-caste Hindus actually date to the Indian elite’s humiliating encounter with the geopolitical and cultural dominance first of Europe and then of America.”

For Western spiritual seekers and for people like the Dalai Lama, India remains an attractive ground of religious encounter, and certainly its deep and broad religious culture can be the home for profound encounters of an interreligious nature. However, we also need to be careful and watchful. But ultimately it is only the Indian people who can decide which version of India they will have.

9. There is turbulence and controversy in the Tibetan Buddhist world also. Recently the Dalai Lama was in New York again, giving some more teachings. Here he emphasized that you must use reason and common sense in reading sacred texts and choosing a teacher. Very good advice. Here is the link to a write-up of that teaching:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-thurman/dalai-lama-protests-_b_6096576.html?utm_hp_ref=religion

But there is a lot more to this moment than just that. There was a crowd demonstrating AGAINST the Dalai Lama. There is a concerted effort on the part of the Chinese Communists to try and discredit him and make him look bad. He is coming under more and more intense attacks, yet he shows his true nature in his peacefulness and nonviolence and in gestures of compassion for all. Robert Thurman, a Tibetan Buddhist scholar, has written about that attack and here is the link:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-thurman/dalai-lama-protests-_b_6096576.html?utm_hp_ref=religion