• It’s a well-known and fairly common observation to note that you cannot see yourself. When you look in a mirror, what you see is an image of yourself. This is of course a very useful spiritual pedagogy and a rich metaphor for a number of topics in spirituality. I will just touch on one item here: “the one thing necessary.” I am borrowing Gospel words, but I will use them in a slightly different sense.

When we begin the spiritual life, when we want to delve into the mystic depths of the religious journey, when we get stuck on some “plateau” and seem to make no “progress,” we look around to see what might be holding us back. In the beginning it is relatively easy to spot that one has to re-prioritize one’s life, what’s important and what’s not important will need some reshuffling. It is also relatively easy to spot the things that we need to “discard,” leave behind, make do without. And here I don’t just mean material things–these may be habits, likes, “staying within our comfort zone,” etc. So far so good. This is traditionally called renunciation and detachment.

But there is a deeper level yet, and here our metaphor comes into play. I don’t think many spiritual people realize that after we have done practically everything we can do we are always left with just “one thing” that holds us back from the Great Realization. There is always THAT “one thing.” And the kicker is that we can never see that “one thing.” We will never see it in the image that we have of ourselves. It is too close to us; practically woven into the very fabric of our being. No exercise, no program, no agenda, no training, no anything that we take up can free us. But along comes a person, an incident, a circumstance, someone or something that will apply the merciful scalpel to what we cannot grasp and so we will be liberated to take the Ultimate Step. But be assured we will never know the “when,” the hour or day when this will take place, so be watchful, be aware in prayer for that ultimate surrender. Have I conflated Gospel eschatology and enlightenment? Why yes of course!

• On August 6^th we remembered Hiroshima and those of us in the liturgical Christian communions celebrated the feast of the Transfiguration. No need to remark on this mysterious convergence—a multitude of homilies I am sure have done that quite well. (And the nightmarish name for the first atom bomb: Trinity—well, that is just too much to tolerate…..) And I am not going to go over that very familiar ground of debate: was that bombing justified? One side says that we saved over a million lives because if we had to invade Japan it would have been bloody awful. The other side says, wait a minute, we dropped the bomb on a civilian population, we killed civilians deliberately, that’s a war crime. This is one of those arguments that is a no-win argument when put in those terms.

Let’s shift scenes to a movie from the late 1990s, The Big Lebowski, a dumb but hilarious movie. Scene: 2 guys who are buddies from their days in Vietnam are in a bowling alley. One of them sees a guy stepping over the line as he delivers the ball down the lane. He yells out: Hey, you can’t do that. This isn’t ‘Nam; THERE ARE RULES IN BOWLING. Indeed. Some soldiers realized that underneath it all there were NO rules in ‘Nam or in any other war. Whether in Vietnam or Iraq or anywhere else we will do whatever killing we deem necessary to win. And cover it up with whatever ideology and slogans it takes to make it look acceptable. To invoke “war crimes” is to deeply miss the point. It is the height of delusion to think that one can fight a war with rules, whatever they be. As Michael Moore wrapped that yellow crime scene tape around the stock exchange, so it should be about every war—it is simply a crime scene.

Does that make me a pacifist? Not exactly but I am much closer to that camp than to the other. I would follow Gandhi, but that means a “full Gandhi”–with all his spirituality–not some watered down political Gandhi who never existed.

Consider this: We fought WWII to “save the world for democracy.” But wait a minute, WWI was fought to “end all wars.” And we could examine every war and there is some reasonable justification always given for that war. Nobody goes to war for no reason. So you have to demystify the reasons given for the war. Example: WWI actually set the stage for WWII, practically made it inevitable. And the Franco-Prussian War was a prelude for WWI. And so it goes through history. Amazing how many wars are so clearly merely a preparation for the next war–and how much money is made that way. So I am not going to waste time by blaming Truman for the Bomb, though he was reprehensible for doing that. No we have to push this back and back and back and we see Cain killing Abel and then we come to Mr. & Mrs. Adam & Eve. It was Aristotle who said that if you want to truly understand something you need to look at its origins.

Another movie: Gandhi. Recall that scene toward the end of the movie, Gandhi has been fasting, almost dead, to stop Moslems and Hindus from killing each other in India. A Hindu man comes in to see the fading Gandhi and begs him to stop fasting. He also tells Gandhi that he had killed a Moslem child out of revenge for Moslems killing his children. He said he doesn’t count anymore; he is going to hell. Gandhi tells him I know a way out of hell. You will adopt a poor Moslem boy, the kind you killed, one who had his parents killed, and you will raise him as your own son AND as a true Moslem. So…..this is our situation. What we did in Hiroshima is only one picture of the hell we are in; the Feast of the Transfiguration offers us a hint of a way out. I leave it to you to connect the dots.

• In writing this blog one of the constant themes I come back to is the Mystery of God. I see it as extremely essential to a deep and true spiritual/mystical life. Unfortunately I encounter too many good and decent people who have a very poor sense of this Ultimate Mystery–and this includes religious people especially! This problem is connected to a problematic sense of self, where the ego-self has become one’s own ultimate reality. Thus the Ultimate Reality either becomes this Grand Sugar-Daddy that is there to meet the needs of this ego-self; or else, due to some miserable parenting, the Ultimate Reality is one nasty parental figure who is there to enforce all the rules and will whack you the moment you step out of line. You might think I am exaggerating but too many people are on that spectrum, very few completely at either end but very many somewhere in between. Thus we will keep coming back to this theme.

• The other day I got a chance to get out into the wilderness for just 48 hours. So I went way up and camped. About 10,000 ft up in the Sierras. Cold, silent, clear, almost above tree line. Had no tent, I slept only with a pad and a sleeping bag under the stars. Heard Mr. Coyote about a 100 feet away. Flashed my headlamp to let him know I am here, don’t bother me. Looking up at the stars of the dark clear sky….what a wonder.   I was looking at light that had traveled for thousands of years, in some cases for millions of years, at a speed of 189,000miles a second. You are literally looking into the past when you look at the heavens. The light you see has been travelling for thousands or millions or even billions of years. The Andromeda Galaxy is a fuzzy patch in the sky, but it is over 3 million light years away. So when I look at it I am seeing light that has been travelling longer than human beings have been on this planet.

When I was a little boy my mother bought me a small telescope, and that really nurtured my contemplative side. Imagine pondering the beauty and mystery of the universe in its awesome size when you are only 10 years old! I will never forget those days, and when I look up at those stars again I still marvel at the home in which we live–how impossible it is to “think small” once you get a sense of that! That’s why I find it hard to understand why some hikers carry headsets listening to their favorite music and others actually play with their smartphones. I guess I am getting to be a grumpy old man!

• Recently there were two stories from China that were worth noting. The first one was truly sad; the second one truly uplifting and encouraging. The first one is about the great and ancient Chinese monastery of Shaolin, the one noted for its kung fu mastery. It appears its abbot is somewhat of a scoundrel and a conniver. Here is the link to that story:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/06/world/asia/shi-yongxin-shaolin-ceo-monk-accused-of-swindling-and-philandering.html?_r=0

And from a Buddhist source:

http://www.lionsroar.com/shaolin-abbots-controversy-and-contributions-come-under-chinese-media-scrutiny/

It just shows you that these kinds of problems can arise anywhere in any tradition and no one is immune from them. People sometimes wonder how something like this can develop in a supposed spiritual setting. The thing is that it actually is very, very hard to discern what is fraud and fake from the real thing in the beginnings of the spiritual journey. So a person is very vulnerable in being fooled by superficial “window-dressing” that passes for spirituality.

A more uplifting story is this one, also from China:

http://viewofchina.com/modern-chinese-hermits/

You have to read the whole thing, it is so good. It is a joy to see the Chinese rediscovering their great hermit tradition. Bill Porter(Red Pine), the man who made us aware of Han-shan and even did a movie about him, also was instrumental in making the Chinese aware of their own tradition being fully alive even after all those years of a completely hostile environment. The people who came to this mountain to become hermits simply came here with no fanfare. There was no “drum-beat” for the contemplative life, no advertising, no promoting it. They were not trying to start something new; yet in true Taoist fashion by “not doing” that, that is precisely what they were doing. I think there’s a lesson in all this for all our “new monasticism” folk right here. Sometimes there is too much concern for labels, titles, all kinds of identity markers, publicity, putting themselves on the religious map, etc. No, just go out and “do it”–never mind anything else….just like the early Desert Fathers and like these Chinese hermits.

My favorite among those mentioned in this article is the woman hermit who said this: “I have made a vow not to come down from the mountain until I find out who I am.” That’s a person who knows exactly what it’s all about. Amen.

Once more I am in the High Country of the Sierra, spending most of my time along the Tuolumne River. Days of solitude and silence; days of encountering interesting people. But mostly it is the River…and the wilderness…that speaks to me in a language that I am only now beginning to hear.

There is the wind blowing in the tall trees, and the river flowing over rocks and boulders. One takes the plunge…literally. Immersed in the Tuolumne at 9000 ft…cold, pure water…coming up out of the water like some sannyasi in the Ganges, baptized into Muir’s wilderness, Muir’s vision…. In the Catholic Church the person being baptized is asked : “Do you renounce Satan and all his works and all his pomps?” Yes! Yes! Yes, absolutely, I do renounce all the lures of modern life that obstruct this hearing and seeing! But recall that moment in the Gospel when the Devil tempts Jesus in the wilderness: “Again the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor, and he said to him, ‘All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me’”(Mt. 4: 8-9).  I knew a Jesuit scripture scholar who shuddered at this passage, saying that we missed its full implications. In the wilderness of our hearts we are lured and tempted by the “glitter gold” that civilizations provide and distract us from our true identity. So, yes, I do renounce all that and seek detachment from all these lures, BUT I still carry my map and compass. An explanation is called for!

Muir wrote about the wilderness mostly as a naturalist who also saw the deeper implications of our relationship to wild nature. Faulkner, on the other hand, wrote some stories about human beings in the context of a vanishing wilderness. He looked at it in terms of the spiritual significance it symbolized and enacted. (For more on this, please see Merton’s marvelous literary essays on Faulkner.) In one of his key stories, “The Bear,” Faulkner tells of this annual ritual hunt for a bear that has by now taken on mythic proportions. No one ever finds this bear or sees him, ever. All they have are some indirect evidences of an incredible bear, like footprints. The gist of the story is a kind of initiation into the wilderness of a young man who goes on his first hunt and he gets separated from the group, alone, lost, without a map or compass,THEN and THERE he meets the Bear. Now he has knowledge of the Bear that the others do not have. They “know of” the Bear by stories handed down; he has seen the Bear. So it is. Of course the Bear symbolizes the One whom we call God. And it may well be that only when we are “lost in the wilderness,” “without map or compass,” that we get to KNOW the Bear and not just stories about him. It takes a lot more than just a dip in the river, or joining a monastery, or even being a member of a church or a religion–it takes a kind of initiation “into the wilderness” where we no longer have “map or compass” and are truly lost. Then we meet the One our hearts have been seeking–not just stories about Him. Granted, this cannot be a “way” or a proposal for everyone; for many all this will seem like gibberish. But I assure you, a time will come in everyone’s life when this “initiation” takes place, when we discover our way has no map or compass and we are lost in an unspeakable wilderness. This is called Death. “Do not be afraid, my friend,” I hear the River say.

Among the ancient Greek philosophers, among the pre-Socratics, the name of Heraclitus (and Parmenides) is preeminent. He was among the last to use rationality and myth and intuition to get some understanding and insight into the underlying principles of what we call empirical reality. For Heraclitus, the most fundamental principle was change/flux/motion/ transformation. “All is change.” His most famous metaphor for this was the river. It constantly flows; slowly or swiftly it is ever in movement. His most famous saying: “You never step into the same river twice.” Change is eternal and constant. Heraclitus is not talking about superficial change or appearances, like what we experience in contrast to our constant sense of self which we find in a kind of continuity from day to day, so that we seem to be the same person psychologically speaking and so we might think that disproves Heraclitus. No, he is pointing us to something much deeper. And the river is a key metaphor for that reality (and fire also by the way). That solid sense of ego self that we have (and which Buddhism deconstructs in a flash!) is ultimately a “fast flowing river”; or, better. part of a Grand River flowing on and on, cascading over boulders and tumbling down waterfalls, meandering tranquilly through awesome canyons and gorges. At first insight it might seem that we are like Mark Twain’s Huck Finn and Jim, floating on a raft down the Mississippi, but this is merely a preliminary intuition. When the light flashes in our hearts like the lightning bolt of the Upanishads, we realize we ARE this River; and the Divine Reality is both Source and End of this Flowing, and the flowing is eternal.

The hikers; ah, the hikers. Yup, it’s true; the big-trail hikers–the Pacific Coast Trail (PCT)–have increased in number suddenly–perhaps due to the influence of that movie, “Wild.” The Tuolumne Meadows Postmaster told me the volume of packages that come in to re-supply the long-trail hikers has tripled this year. And it’s almost “crowded” at the Tuolumne Meadows store/grill each day as a new batch of hikers arrives for rest and re-supply. And with these numbers people watching becomes fun–like sitting in a Parisian or Roman outdoor café!

1^st Observation: What may surprise you is the relative transparency of these hikers in their motivations and goals for the hike. Not hard to see the differences among them. The wilderness does not tolerate too much of “masking.”

2^nd Observation: Given the large number of hikers, some tend to glom into little groups of 3 to 6 hikers who then hike together–at least for some distance. Yes, there is safety and security in doing it this way, but then you are at the mercy of other people’s pace, and all the chatter. In some ways the group becomes a kind of insulation between you and the wilderness. Some of the hikers go in pairs: a hiker and a friend, or a hiker and his spouse or girlfriend. These tend to be more quiet. They also tend to avoid the larger socializing going on at places like the Tuolumne Meadows store and keep to themselves. But the ones I find most intriguing are the lone hikers. And on the trail they are very alone! Even with all the increase in numbers attempting the PCT, once you are on the trail, very quickly you enter into the solitude of the wilderness. What astonishes me is all the women who are lone hikers, from young girls just out of their teens to women who seem to be in their 40s or even 50s. More power to them!

3^rd Observation: Overheard conversation–ranger talking to hiker: “So what kind of drugs can you get on the trail?” Wow! Even here. Our drug infatuated culture spills over everywhere. Lots of money to be made there. Lots of people feeling the need for some kind of drug. So there are people selling drugs at these various rest & resupply points on the PCT, and I think there are even people carrying drugs to sell on the trail itself. Absolutely incredible to me. Why even go on this hike if the only way you can feel alive is by doing the very opposite of “aliveness”? I wonder if any of these people SEE the wilderness.

4^th Observation: The big overweight backpacks still dominate even though an ultralight movement is underfoot. Just from the sample I witnessed I would say that about 70% are the traditional heavy packs, weighing over 30lbs, some even over 40 or 50! About 20% could be considered in the “light” category, say 20 to 30 lbs; and about 10%, or 1 out of every 10 are “ultralight,” under 20lbs. (Though of course the ultralight masters don’t consider you in unless you get down to something like 12lbs!!) So what weighs these packs down? Very often it’s stuff we simply feel we cannot be without, whether it’s clothing, books, or “toys.” Ah, the toys! I saw people carrying, attached to their packs, solar-powered rechargers for their phones, pads, etc. Just can’t leave the toys at home! I asked a couple of young ladies why they were carrying so much (each was carrying at least a 40 lb. pack). They said they needed everything in the pack. I said, “You know when John Muir rambled through this wilderness, he carried only a bag of dry bread and a blanket to wrap himself with at night.” They looked at me like I was some daffy old guy. No sense of humor, these kids! And by the way, so many of them are in such a hurry. They bring the fast pace of modern life into the wilderness. So many want to finish the Big Trail as soon as possible, so they can go home and say they have done it. In that case I would say they have not “done” the Trail; they have done something else. Something that did require endurance and energy and effort, yes, but they did not meet the wilderness in their heart. That’s what the Trail is really all about–not just speeding through it, like some mall or theme park.

Thoreau: “Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.”

5^th Observation: Met a nice young man who is doing the PCT with a 10 lb. pack and a small American flag sticking out of the pack. Commended him for his light way of going. Asked him about the meaning of the flag, and he said he loved his country. I nodded my head and said nothing. It was neither the time nor the place for questioning that “love.” In fact, I think mostly that kind of dynamic is something that unfolds by itself when a certain maturity of vision is born. Met another older man, a Black man, a former Marine, a vet of Iraq, one leg amputated and a prosthetic leg attached. He was planning to do a short hike. I said to him, “Thank you for your service, sir, but I wish you hadn’t gone.” He just looked at me with no expression.

Bumper sticker: Go Outside. Remain.

A perfectly succinct summary of Traildog Philosophy. I get what it says and means, but I would change the wording a bit:

Go Inside. Remain.

Phos Hilarion: It is evening. The glow of the sun low behind the trees. Darkening shadows of the forest. At many monasteries now they are praying vespers, evening prayer at the close of day. Most monks are not even aware of the significance of Vespers. In some of these monasteries they will use this hymn from ancient Eastern Christianity: Phons Hilarion(in Greek), O Gladsome Light. Here is a translation of some of the lyrics:

“O Gladsome Light of the holy glory of the Immortal Father,

the Heavenly, the Holy, the Blessed, O Jesus Christ,

having come upon the setting of the sun, having seen the light of the evening,

we praise the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit: God.

Worthy it is at all times to praise Thee in joyful voices,

O Son of God, Giver of Life, for which the world glorifies Thee.”

There is a Light within the fading light; a Light within all things and persons who are always and essentially “fading.” It is that Light which makes this fading light even possible. And believe me all other lights are fading lights, including those of the beauties of nature and those of the mystery of our own life. In the Easter Vigil, that most solemn moment, we light the Great Easter Candle in the darkness surrounding us and within us. This is the unending Light that is within all that is fading. And we are fading into the evening of non-being–or so it seems. But what seems darkness and emptiness finally is really our first discernment of this Light which blinds us at first, so brilliant and so beyond anything we can know or sense. We are flowing into this Light in our frail and ephemeral self; no, we are tumbling, falling like a gushing waterfall into this Light Eternal and Infinite. We have witnessed (glimpsed) the Presence and meaning of this Light in the person of Jesus Christ. But the ancient seers of the Upanishads, living in the forests of northern India (and many others) also glimpsed that Light truly. The Light abides within every man, woman, and child; every animal, every rock, etc. And so, as Merton once put it, if we could truly see it, we would all be blinded by the brilliance, the luminosity of reality; we would fall down and worship each other! No matter who we are; no matter the “wrinkles” of personality, the distortions of the frail body and the dysfunctions of the even more frail mind; no matter the mistakes made, the “sins” committed, the horrible deeds, the accountings of morality; no matter anything human, and mortal. This Light is so Beyond all that, but all we need do is “turn” toward that Light in the midst of the very fading of our own light, to turn toward it like the river which ever flows from, in, and toward the Light. But in SF and LA and Chicago and NY and Washington they prefer their meager, little, fading lights of buying and selling, of satisfying every craving of the ego. Nothing “gladsome” in all that!

Void and Fullness, Part IIn 1999 there was a gathering in Varanasi, India of scholars and spiritual seekers coming from Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism. It was a small group, less than 24 members, and each person was both intellectually engaged in his/her tradition and at the same time serious spiritual seekers within their respective traditions. This made the gathering a bit special. Usually such gatherings are with monastic people who engage in dialogue about some aspect of spiritual practice within their tradition; or such gatherings are sometimes simply a scholarly exercise by people dialoguing about various conceptual structures within their traditions. But in this case, the encounter was moving on both rails as it were.

The gathering had a very clear focus; a topic of intriguing interest on many levels: void and fullness, the words sunya in Buddhism, purna in Hinduism, and pleroma in Christianity. Six years after this conference a book appeared presenting what looks like all the major papers given at the conference, but lacking in much of the dialoguing that went on between the papers. The title is obvious: Void and Fullness in the Buddhist, Hindu and Christian Traditions: Sunya–Purna–Pleroma. Very interesting stuff, full of insights and illustrating some of the strong points of interreligious dialogue and some of its weaker aspects. During the next few blog postings I will be discussing some of the content in this book (though no doubt interrupted by other kinds of postings also).

Within the book the distribution of essays was as follows: 4 had distinctly Christian themes; 4 were Buddhist; and 5 were very much drawing on Hinduism (or some aspects/versions of it—I should simply say the Sanatana Dharma!). There were also two essays that were much harder to categorize. One on Nietzsche’s encounter with Buddhism; and another by the Catholic Indian theologian, Antony Kalliath: “Purna—Sunya—Pleroma as Communion of Beings.” This latter essay was the only serious attempt in this gathering as far as I could tell in crossing over the boundaries and exploring the connections in these three words among such diverse traditions. Even though the result may not be satisfactory, the effort was truly praiseworthy and it’s this kind of thing that needs to be pushed further. The other essays were of various depths but all interesting in that they opened up some of the riches within these diverse traditions. One could say that at the beginning of any dialogue one should get acquainted with what exactly the other person is saying! In that regard it was all a worthwhile effort.  

I would like to begin with the Prologue written by one of the contributors to the seminar and an editor of the book: Bettina Baumer. In this Prologue she does us the service of reminding us of that very early interreligious encounter that took place at a very high level (or maybe one should say at a very deep level) of spiritual encounter: the dialogue between Daisetz Suzuki and Thomas Merton. So let us do a bit of recalling. This took place around 1960 when there was very little interreligious dialogue going on. Yes, there was the World Council of Churches and occasional global gatherings with sundry folks. But as for Christianity, neither the Protestant scene and certainly not the Catholic one had interreligious dialogue as a prominent focus. For Catholics they still had to learn and open up to talking to their fellow Christians much less people from other religions! But it was not just the Catholic scene that suffered this kind of intellectual and spiritual claustrophobia—the Buddhists also! Here is a quote from one of the contributors, the Ven. Samdhong Rinpoche: “In 1960 I began to attend international religious conferences. The first large conference I attended was the eighth general conference of the World Fellowship of Buddhists around 1964-65. In that conference it was almost impossible to have dialogues between Theravada and Mahayana Buddhists. The Theravada monks refused to sit with Mahayana monks even for meals and prayers, not to mention for dialogue and discussion.”

So you can see how remarkable that Suzuki-Merton encounter was, given that context. And even more, consider this: Merton was embedded in one of the most traditional of traditional Catholic monastic groups: the Trappists. We all know his zeal and his far-ranging interests, but this encounter was the beginnings of something quite more than just “interest.” He had a spiritual hunger and a profound spiritual intuition that led him to explore these other traditions and to suddenly find himself traveling along their paths. Merton was surely a spiritually mature monk by 1960 but it took a lot more to take him “Beyond.” In many ways he is a different monk by 1968 than he was in 1960 because of the journey he started taking with this kind of encounter. By the time he was undertaking his physical journey in 1968 he was no longer seeking to understand the terms of these various traditions but to actually experience what they experience. Thus, for example, he did not just want a book-knowledge of dzogchen but a true experiential knowledge with a true and authentic guide. So it is an enormous tragedy and an unspeakable loss that he never made it to Japan and meet the few authentic Zen masters, or that he did not make it to Tehran(as planned) and meet some authentic Sufi teachers; or that he never met Abhishiktananda. I am sure if he had lived he would have come back and landed on his feet back as a Trappist monk in some setting here, but he would have been a Trappist monk which none of us has ever seen!! Perhaps we were not ready for such a manifestation; perhaps not even today. In my opinion the interreligious dialogue is still in its “childhood” stage, barely learning to “walk,” certainly not yet an adolescent, and adulthood is way over the horizon.  

Ok, back to Bettina’s Prologue and Suzuki-Merton! Even though Merton was intellectually very sharp and had a profound spiritual intuition, he was quite capable of making mistakes and letting his enthusiasm for seeing “oneness” lead him into missing the serious differences. But the thing with Merton was that he was quick to adjust his thinking once he saw what he had misread. As an example, let us consider the unfolding of this encounter and dialogue. In 1959 Merton collected and translated his own collection of Desert Father stories and sayings. He had already begun a study of Zen, so he sent his collection to Suzuki hoping to begin a dialogue on the basis of similarities between the Desert Fathers and the ancient Zen masters. Suzuki responded warmly, eager to engage such a deep Christian thinker. but he also saw that he had to steer Merton’s thinking in another direction, at least if he wanted to get a deeper connection to Zen. Merton originally made some oversimplified equations–and distinctions–listen to this: “John Cassian, in his reports of the ‘conferences’ he heard among the Desert Fathers, lays down the fundamental rule of desert spirituality. What is the purpose and end of the monastic life? Such is the subject of the first conference. The answer is that the monastic life has a twofold purpose. It must lead the monk first to an intermediate end, and then to an ultimate and final state of completion. The intermediate end, or scopos, is what we have been discussing as purity of heart, roughly corresponding to Dr. Suzuki’s term ‘emptiness.’ That heart is pure which is ‘perfectum ac mundissimum’(perfect and most pure), that is to say completely free of alien thoughts and desires….. It is the quies, or rest, of contemplation–the state of being free from all images and concepts which disturb and occupy the soul. It is the favorable climate for theologia, the highest contemplation, which excludes even the purest and most spiritual of ideas and admits no concepts whatever. It knows God not by concepts or visions, but only by ‘unknowing.’… Cassian himself…gives a characteristically Christian affective balance to the concept of purity of heart, and insists that it is to be defined simply as ‘perfect charity’ or a love of God unmixed with any return upon self. This qualification might conceivably constitute a significant difference between Christian ‘purity of heart’ and the ‘emptiness’ of Zen…. Purity of heart, says Cassian, is the intermediate end of the spiritual life. But the ultimate end is the Kingdom of God. This is a dimension which does not enter into the realm of Zen.” (One cannot imagine Abhishiktananda being so cautious, even in 1960. And Merton himself, eight years later, in 1968, was writing that Zen was “beyond” both Buddhism and Christianity as cultural structures.)

Now Suzuki responds in several ways. First he simply points out that the language of Cassian and the Desert Fathers does not go far enough from the viewpoint of Zen: “Father Merton’s emptiness, when he uses this term, does not go far and deep enough, I am afraid…. Father Merton’s emptiness is still on the level of God as Creator and does not go up to the Godhead. So is John Cassian’s. The latter has, according to Father Merton, ‘God’s own ‘suchness’ for the ultimate end of a monkish life. In my view, this way of interpreting ‘suchness’ is the emptiness of God as Creator, and not of the Godhead. Zen emptiness is not the emptiness of nothingness, but the emptiness of fullness in which there is ‘no gain, no loss, no increase, no decrease,’ in which this equation takes place: zero=infinity. The Godhead is no other than this equation.”

Secondly, Suzuki shifts Merton’s attention to Christian spiritual writers who ARE closer to Zen (Eckhart and Ruysbroeck) and here we will take Suzuki right out of Bettina’s Prologue: “The metaphysical concept of emptiness is convertible in economic terms into poverty, being poor, having nothing, ‘Blessed are those who are poor in spirit.’ Eckhart defines: ‘He is a poor man who wants nothing, knows nothing and has nothing .’ This is possible when a man is empty of self and all things, when the mind is thoroughly purified of Knowledge or Ignorance, which we have after the loss of innocence. In other words, to gain Innocence again is to be poor. What strikes one as somewhat strange is Eckhart presenting the poor man as ‘knowing nothing.’ This is a very significant statement. The beginning of Knowledge is when the mind is filled with all kinds of defiled thought, among which the worst is ‘self.’ For all evils and defilements start from our attachment to it. As Buddhists would say, the realization of emptiness is no more, no less than seeing into the nonexistence of a finite ego-substance. This is the greatest stumbling block in our spiritual discipline, which, in actuality consists not in getting rid of the self, but in realizing the fact that there is no such existence from the first. The realization means, being ‘poor’ in spirit…. Nothing to gain, nothing to lose, nothing to give, nothing to take; to be just so, and yet to be rich in inexhaustible possibilities—this is to be poor in its most proper and characteristic sense of the word. This is what all religious experiences tell us. To be absolutely nothing is to be everything.”

Merton learned from this encounter, changed, deepened. Eventually his grasp of Zen was much, much deeper than at this point. By 1968 he was no longer seeking “equivalent terms” between the traditions or trying to “translate” one tradition into the terms of another tradition. By 1968 he was ready to admit that Zen was somehow “beyond” Christianity. Bettina has this quote from Merton: “ We begin to divine that Zen is not only beyond the formulations of Buddhism, but it is also in a certain way ‘beyond’ (and even pointed to by) the revealed message of Christianity.” He holds on to the language of his own tradition; he appreciates its distinct vision; but he is also at the same time able to “cross over” and “become” a Zen person. As Bettina points out Abhishiktananda was also engaged in this kind of encounter and dialogue–from the “inside” as it were, not just as “outsiders” seeking conceptual understanding–and in a very real sense Abhishiktananda went much further than Merton. (One might say that Louis Massignon was similarly engaged with Islam.)  

So we need to distinguish various kinds of interreligious dialogue and encounter. There is the moment of learning what the “other” is saying (good, important and necessary); and then there is the moment of “crossing over” and trying to understand the other tradition from the “inside.” This will require a real “poverty of spirit” with regard to our own positions and our own understandings, being willing to make profound changes as our awareness grows, even as it may put us in tension with our own tradition. I must say at this point that I don’t see too much of this kind of dynamic from Buddhists or Hindus but mostly from a few Christians. Buddhists and Hindus generally don’t seem to feel a great need to understand Christianity at a deep level. That may be because most of their exposure is usually with a very superficial Christianity that hardly deserves much attention. It may be that they don’t feel that Christianity has anything to say to their experience–this was Abhishiktananda’s great anxiety. However, I would definitely agree with Gandhi: “Because I am a good Hindu, I am also a good Christian, and a good Muslim.” But Bettina puts it this way: “More and more people are no longer satisfied with the practice of their own religion, either because they have experienced its limitations, or because they have discovered spiritual treasures outside their own tradition.” Again, I am not so sure this is all that true of Buddhists and Hindus to a large extent but I may be wrong here. And one more concluding quote from Bettina’s Prologue: “…our dialogue is not a spiritual luxury, but if we can really break the artificial boundaries of our respective concepts and reach a deeper level of understanding, we are contributing…to a greater harmony among the various religious groups and traditions.” I would put the emphasis on “breaking the artificial boundaries”!! Our book is very interesting and very informative, and for that we should be thankful, but, alas, it does little by way of “crossing over” and “breaking the artificial boundaries” as exemplified by the Suzuki-Merton encounter.

So we shall return to this book in some future postings and take a look at the various contributions from Christian and Buddhist and Hindu perspectives on the notion of “void and fullness.”

Recently there was an interesting article in the Washington Post by Rachel Held Evans with the title: “Want millennials back in the pews? Stop trying to make church ‘cool.’”  Here is the link to it:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/jesus-doesnt-tweet/2015/04/30/fb07ef1a-ed01-11e4-8666-a1d756d0218e_story.html

So she is addressing the church problem of her generation, the so-called “Millennials,” people who came of age around 2000 or born in the early 1980s–when I was in the seminary!!  They came after Gen X and of course my big generation, the Baby Boomers.  Am I missing a generation here somewhere?!  Anyway, I find myself in what she writes about–but it was from experiences in the early 1970s and in seminary in the 1980s!  So the problem is not just with what the millennials are discovering; and neither is it with just the Evangelical Protestant churches–I experienced something similar in the “Catholic pew.”

Rachel hits us with a lot of numbers–church attendance and affiliation by millennials is dropping as badly as the water table in California!  A lot of the Christian churches are responding by dressing up their religious services with “youth culture,” “pop culture,” “consumer culture.”  Make it a seamless experience, your everyday consumer culture life and your worship life, yes even your whole religious experience.  Guess what?  The young people by and large reject that approach.  Many of them are not going to join any slick and shallow expressions of religion.  The marketing of Jesus ain’t gonna work!  But as I was reading all this and nodding my head in agreement at everything she was pointing out, I realized that I had had similar experiences as a Catholic way back when!  I remember very well right after Vatican II how all of us youngsters were supposedly enticed into church with new, “relevant” liturgies.  The old formalisms were dropped, Latin was dropped, the old symbols eviscerated–recall that most emblematic icon of modern liberal Catholic sensibility in the late 1960s: the Eucharist celebrated with twinkies and coke!  

Speaking of Latin, I recall the jarring sounds of English at the first Liturgy in that language.  Having learned Latin at an early age, I of course had the advantage of being very familiar with the language; it was not a mysterious opaque curtain to what was being said.  So, yes, bringing the liturgy into the vernacular was important and needed for many people, but it was done in such a superficial way, as if a language were merely like a bookcover, take one off, put on another.  Thomas Merton wrote how much he missed the Latin also, and to his dying day he prayed his priestly breviary in Latin.  The language had a beauty and flow and peacefulness about it in spirituality that was not easy to replace.  Think of the comparison of Gregorian chant and a lot of modern hymnody.  Of course there was a certain element in the church which latched on to Latin and used it for purposes to conceal their true agenda which had to do with power in the church and with a kind of fossilization of doctrine, but that’s another story to tell. In any case, trying to make the church relevant is perhaps an older experience than Rachel realizes.

And if you think this was done only by poorly informed religious people, you would be mistaken.  When I went to the seminary to study for the priesthood, I was sent to the Catholic complex of seminaries in Berkeley, California.  The two dominant houses there were the Jesuits and the Franciscans, and they “put on the Liturgy” there every Sunday.  And I use the words advisedly because that seemed exactly what they were doing every Sunday.  These theologically well- trained people would put on a show, literally speaking, every Sunday, that was supposedly a Catholic Eucharist.  I am sure it was, but it was very painful to experience that after you have been in monastic life for a few years.  And the whole rationale for that was a kind of espousal of creativity and contemporary culture.  Repeating the same words and symbols of the Eucharist was a big no-no there!  The goal was to make liturgy relevant for the modern American.  I’ll never forget my very first Sunday there–it was a “Rocky Liturgy.”  Yup, you got it….recall that movie from 1980 or so, “Rocky,” well, the liturgy was built on the storyline of that movie.  

But enough grousing about the good old days!  Getting back to what Rachel was writing, it is quite evident that this kind of approach is doomed to failure–and it was even way back then.  Any real changes to religious expression has to come from deep religious experience, not just an espousal of the going culture, much less a culture that even if not rotten to the core is very, very problematic.  The political underpinnings of a lot of these cultural tie-ins with religion are also very alarming–the radical right has co-opted some of the religious language, religious sentiments and anxieties and are exploiting them to the full.  And not just young people are willing to question the whole thing.  Rachel sticks to her own experience, but there is plenty of evidence that all the Christian churches in the U.S. are experiencing a remarkable shrinkage in all demographic groups.  She ends on a positive, upbeat note; but the statistics that have been coming out in recent years show all the churches shrinking in the U.S.  As an example, consider this little piece:

http://www.religionnews.com/2015/02/20/losing-religion-women-join-unspiritual-set/

Two remarkable things here: 1. It is women who are leaving–these used to be the stalwart upholders of religion and church even when men began to leave.  2. They are not only leaving church, but religion and in some cases even spirituality as well.  Now, that is amazing.  There have been all kinds of studies in recent years tracking the disengagement of people from the institutional churches but also their connection to various forms of spirituality.  This new study shows a more radical trend.  This is not just people escaping rigid, fundamentalist, sect-like groups, but thoughtful, educated women making do without any religious affiliation.  

Let’s get to the nitty-gritty of it all: nothing that exudes an infantile religion, a superficial religion, a hypocritical religion, an authoritarian religion is going to work in the long run.  It may fool some of the people some of the time, but it will crumble eventually.  And Karl Rahner said so a long time ago–in the ‘60s I believe–when he said that the only Christianity that will survive in the future will be a mystic Christianity.  The meaning and significance of this grows daily for me.  In her article Rachel points toward a more serious and deeper Christianity that she and her fellow believers yearn for, but it is not yet the “mystic Christianity” that is really needed.   Nor are the few gatherings of contemplative Christians gaining any traction; it is not only that the numbers are actually extremely small–just one of the Protestant mega-churches has more members in it than all the contemplative groups in the country put together—but also so many of these groups develop their own institutional images and problems and become “marketers” of spirituality or really of themselves.  For a long time now I have been pondering this “silence of God” in our culture, if you will, when all words about God become suspect.   I think it is a silence that is meant to cleanse us of our false images and idols, our delusions and illusions, our infatuations with our own creations–a Silence that is not easy to abide with because it can be scary, but a Silence that is like a cleansing fire.  We are living within this “Silence” surrounded by a lot of chatter about God, about religion, about spirituality even….but so much of it is empty, dust and ashes.  We live in Andy Warhol’s world, where everyone wants to be famous for 15 minutes, where religion and spirituality become commodities with the soup can and Marilyn Monroe and Lady Gaga.  But if you stay with this “Silence” and not panic and not introduce “false gods” to supplement that Nothingness, you may begin to hear in your heart something that is beyond all words and all this noise, religious or secular.  And then, and only then, will we be able to speak truly about God.

It is not easy for non-Native Americans to write intelligently and truthfully about Native American issues. So I am glad to have found this piece of writing that explores a very painful area of the experience of Native Americans living within the US. This is a very sad story but it must be told in “white America,” and here is the link:

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/30375-suicide-on-the-great-sioux-nation

 I would like to comment in several ways.

1.    I have written a number of times about the horrible history of our treatment of Native Americans, so I won’t go into that here. You have to have a certain knowledge of that in order to fully appreciate what this author is saying. However, I would like to add this: “European/white America” has some very good reasons for closing its eyes to the misery of the Native Americans. When I was a little kid in the 1950s I watched a lot of Westerns–they were very popular then. Even as a kid, however, I was less taken by the actions and persons in the stories than by the majestic backdrop of the stories, the deserts and mountains, the wilderness. It all seemed so marvelous! As I grew up and developed a critical mindset, I watched more Westerns because I was still fascinated by them, but this time I recognized the mythological nature of the stories and presentations. The “mythology of America” is almost totally captured in these depictions, whether it be in cheap, almost laughable dramas, or in artistic masterpieces like some of the John Ford movies, or Lonesome Dove, or Peckinpaugh’s Wild Bunch, or Eastwood’s I would venture so far as to say that you really don’t have a grasp of the mythology that imbues the American self-identity until you begin to understand the role these Westerns played in all that.

Now the depiction of Native Americans in all these Westerns, almost without exception, is ludicrous, offensive, demeaning and just plain false in all kinds of details. So often the Native American was portrayed as an enemy to be conquered, or as an “obstacle” to progress, or as some simpleton who needed White Man to take care of him. These kinds of images deeply infected the mindset of all of us non-Native Americans. The result was the Reservation and “life on the Rez” with all its problems.

 2.  The trouble for Native Americans has been compounded by the fact that some tribes and some parts of some tribal leadership has sold out to white culture and white ways of doing things. Thus you have this strange phenomenon of “Indian Casinos”–which are not even run by Native Americans in most cases–simply that the tribe gets some of the money made because the casino is on Indian land. You also have this phenomenon where certain mining companies have been able to extract various minerals from Native American lands with very little regard for true environmental responsibility. They should not even have been allowed on that sacred land, but, alas, pay-offs are made, and so it goes… This kind of sell-out is like a cancerous tumor within the modern Native American culture, and it has had a destructive effect on its spirit, even as yes some have been made economically well-off to a certain degree.

3.  There is an eerie similarity between what happened to the Palestinians and the Native Americans. In both cases you have disposession and subjugation–and at times outright murder, better called “genocide.” I think the author of this piece is quite correct in emphasizing it as “spiritual genocide”–yes, a lot of Native Americans have been brutally killed by “whitey” but the ones that are around now have been mostly the target of what is truly a “spiritual genocide”–a total evisceration of their religious consciousness and self-understanding via their culture and language.

4.  One of the sad things about the Native American situation is that they don’t have spiritual leadership now on the level of say a Gandhi or even a Martin Luther King. They need to unify against the oppressive culture and find resources within themselves and within their culture to overcome that “spiritual subjugation.” It is not simply an economic problem with an economic solution–like jobs on the Rez–no, in fact that leads to some of these other distortions like casinos and mining. What happens with some of these young Native Americans is that they take in a white culture set of values in part without realizing it in some cases(like a poison pill) and then are driven to depression as they cannot fully realize these values. In that regard they have to re-vision their life completely differently and not be afraid to move in a completely different direction. Gandhi tried to break the hold the British power structure had first of all on the minds and souls of the Indians; then came the political freedom. Without profound spiritual leadership (and that means seeing things beyond one’s own tribal concerns), young Native Americans will either sink into a cancerous depression or else completely sell out to white culture and become just like them. In either case, the genocide that started in 1492 will be complete.

5. What is especially sad for me in reading this piece is to see the really horrible kind of Christianity that has been inflicted on these people. Just like centuries ago, this Christianity is a “tool of the oppressor.” It comes from the outside as an intruder into the Native American psyche and cultural values and has no inkling of the language needed to speak to and to LEARN from these people. And, PLEASE, this means a lot more than a priest putting on feathers to celebrate Mass or smoking a peace pipe. The situation is very analogous to the situation Abhishiktananda encountered in India where so many priests and religious, even Indian ones, wanted to be “more Roman and European” than Indian. What this story hints at is the enormous problem that Christianity has when it meets a new culture and a new–but thoroughly valid and profound–religious consciousness.

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!!