Preliminary Remarks:  We will begin a long series of reflections on what could be termed as the “foundations and fundamentals” of the spiritual life.  These will be spread out over a series of postings during several years—there will certainly be other postings of other material interspersed throughout, so things will not proceed in a rigorous sequence, but I will number the parts as we go along.  Furthermore, once a posting has been made and some “Part” has been established, it doesn’t mean that we can’t return to that Part and posting to add some more material as we go along.

 

Some cautions:  My commitment and orientation is to the Christian mystical tradition, but I have learned much and have benefited greatly from my exposure to all the other great religious traditions, and it will be readily apparent that my approach to “foundations & fundamentals” has been thoroughly influenced by Sufism, Buddhism, Taoism, and even certain forms of Hinduism.  I do not believe that it is any longer possible for anyone to truly and deeply understand his/her spiritual tradition in isolation from all the others.  This I take as one of the major “signs of the times,” of where we are as a human family right now and which sets us apart a bit from our ancestors–maybe.   Furthermore, I believe that the one I call God is revealed and is accessible in and through every authentic spiritual tradition.  As a methodological principle all this certainly can be debated, but that is a question for another time and another posting!

 

These postings will be nothing more than reflections, notes, pointers, indicators, “road signs,” etc.  They are definitely not meant as a “recipe,” formula, program, map, agenda, a “to-do” list, etc. Nor a final definitive statement.  There ain’t no such animal in the zoo–as far as the spiritual life goes!!  Nor are these reflections meant to be just more words to add to all the other words that already are in your mind.  Hopefully they may help in the unveiling of a deeper significance to what you already know in your heart.

 

Another point:  there seem to be real differences in spiritual experiences.  Not too many spiritual writers acknowledge that fact.  The usual thing is to say that all differences are in “words,” “language,” “ways,” etc., but the core experience of the core reality is the same.  So they say, but I don’t think it’s that simple.  And here I am referring to not only the spiritual paths of the great world traditions, but actually even within one and the same tradition, there can be people with quite different spiritual experiences.  Thus even within Christian mysticism we can find some very different looking “mysticisms.”  Our “foundations & fundamentals” is not meant as a kind of reduction to “one flavor” for all, nor is it meant as a kind of evaluation of a particular approach to mysticism as being “higher” or “lower.”  There is an irreducible uniqueness to each person’s life with God, but we may find some common notions that may be helpful to those who feel the call to go beyond just living a “good life.”

 

Final Prelim:  Mostly in the spiritual life we get lost, and what is important is what we do with that lostness.  When someone hands you a flashlight on a dark moonless night, that may be helpful but it doesn’t mean “we have made it home.”  Merton is one of those “flashlights”– let us conclude this section by listening to him a bit:

 

“One of the most important things in the spiritual life and in the life of prayer is to let a great deal go on without knowing quite what is going on, and without messing with it, without interfering with it.

“You can’t be helped in the best parts of the spiritual life.  If you could be helped it wouldn’t be worth it.  There is a great deal of the spiritual life where God alone helps you, and you don’t know that He’s helping you and you can’t tell that He’s helping you…but you have to believe this.  Learning to trust when you don’t see what’s happening.

“You make a breakthrough, and what you do is you break through into a deeper level of yourself…. You find a deeper truth that’s really there, in you, but it’s not yours, it’s God’s, and it’s not something that you have accounted for, it’s something that He has accounted for.”

So let us begin:

Part I   The Real

“Lead me from the unreal to the Real….”  So runs a prayer in the Upanishads.  This is a prayer that anyone in any of the great spiritual traditions of the world would be able to pray.  This may be the most fundamental prayer that anyone can make.  For those of us in the theistic traditions, there may be a surprising connection with some other equally ancient and fundamental words:  the so-called 1^st Commandment.  Let us recall its several wordings:

 

from Exodus 20:  “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.  You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.  You shall not bow down to them or worship them….”

 

from Deuteronomy 5:  “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.”

 

from Deuteronomy 6:  “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.”

 

And then there is the restatement in the New Testament.

 

from Mark 12:  “Jesus answered, ‘The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart….”

 

And from the Quran we have this critical clue to the meaning of all of the above.  These are the most important words in Islam and actually they hold for us also if rightly understood:

 

“La ilaha illa’Llah”   There is no god but God

 

This is the most fundamental affirmation a Moslem and a Sufi can make, and there is a second part to this to which we shall soon come.  As with almost all religious truths, we can understand all of the above, including the line from the Upanishads, in a kind of surface, superficial way or maybe in a very literal sense, or yet again in the true deeper sense that reveals a whole new world of meaning.  This would hold for the rishis of the Upanishads, the Sufis of Islam and the Christian mystics.  What we shall do now is quote extensively concerning that fundamental Islamic statement of faith which will then illuminate the profound connection between Christian mysticism and that wonderful prayer from the Upanishads.  Our quotes will be from a lecture by Thomas Merton to his fellow monks and novices, and from an essay by a Sufi scholar by the name of Reza Shah-Kazemi.

 

Let us begin with Merton:  “The whole religion of Islam is extremely simple.  And it is all contained in one or two basic formulas, real basic formulas.  And the most basic one is a thing called the shahadah–La ilaha illa ‘Llah–Muhammadan Rasulu ‘Llah–which is the famous statement, There is no god but God,   (there is no god but Allah) and (Muhammad is the one who is really sent), Muhammad is His Prophet.’  The way this is usually translated is ‘There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is His Prophet.’  Now, of course the way that is usually interpreted is in terms of a kind of orthodoxy, but that’s not the way the Sufis look at it…. It is not confined to that…if that was all they were saying, they wouldn’t have got very far….  Actually, what you’ve got in the two parts of the shahadah, you’ve got tanzih and tashbih.  The first part is tanzih and the second part is tashbih.  The first part…begins, as some of these Sufi commentators say, with a denial.  The first part says, ‘There is no god.’  It starts with that, ‘There is no god,’ and then it says, ‘but there is, and He is Allah.’  So what this statement is, then, is a negative and then an assertion.  That there is no god and it also means there is no reality, so what this is saying is nothing is real…except Allah.  He alone is Real.  And then, and this is your tanzih statement, there is this infinite hidden reality, and this is The Reality, but then comes up the question, What about everything else?  Well, it’s real too insofar as it comes from Him….  How do you get that out of ‘Muhammad is His Prophet’?  Well, as the Sufis interpret this, the first part is about God, the second part is about the world.  And the world is that which has come forth from God…and into which He has sent the prophets, and especially Muhammad….  Muhammad doesn’t just simply mean this one particular prophet.  He stands in a certain sense for man, insofar as he is considered by Muslims the perfect man.  Muhammad was the one who ‘made it.’  Everybody else should seek to some extent to approach the knowedge of God which Muhammad had.  Everybody should try to be to some  extent a kind of prophet…and what man ought to be is a person who knows that Allah is the One Reality and that everything else is a manifestation of God.”

 

And now from the Sufi scholar Reza Shah-Kazemi:  “What is meant by the phrase ‘metaphysics of oneness’ is the metaphysical interpretation given by the Sufis to the fundamental message of the Quran, the principle of tawhid, expressed in the credal formula: La ilaha illa’Llah—no god but God.  Whereas theologically the statement is a relatively straightforward affirmation of the uniqueness of the Divinity and the negation of other ‘gods’, metaphysically  the formula is read as an affirmation of the true nature of being: no reality but the one Reality.  Kashani comments as follows on one of the many verses affirming the central principle of tawhid, namely, 20:8: ‘Allah, there is no god but Him’: ‘His unique essence does not become multiple, and the reality of His identity derives therefrom, and does not become manifold; so He is He in endless eternity as He was in beginningless eternity.  There is no He but Him, and no existent apart from Him.’  We have here not only an affirmation of the oneness of God to the exclusion of other gods, but also, and more fundamentally, the affirmation of a unique reality which is exclusive of all otherness, or rather in relation to which all otherness is unreal….

“The shift from ‘theological’ tawhid to ‘ontological’ tawhid is one of the hallmarks of another great representative of the school of Ibn Arabi, Sayyid Haydar Amoli, in whose works one observes a remarkable synthesis between Shi’ite gnosis and Sufi metaphysics.  He refers to the ‘folk of the exterior’ who pronounce the formula La ilaha…. in the sense conveyed by the following Quranic verse, an exclamation by the polytheists of the strangeness of the idea of affirming one deity: ‘Does he make the gods one God? This is a strange thing.’  This monotheistic affirmation is, for Amoli, the essence of the tawhid professed by the folk of the exterior, and is called ‘theological’ tawhid.  In contrast, the ‘folk of the interior’ negate the multiplicity of existences, and affirm the sole reality of divine being; their formula is: ‘There is nothing in existence apart from God’….

“…in the Quranic perspective, every single thing, by dint of its very existence, ‘praises’ and ‘glorifies’ its Creator; its existence constitutes its praise.  Every created thing bears witness to, and thus ‘praises’, its Creator; the existence of every existent ‘glorifies’ the bestower of existence.  But, more fundamentally, the existence of every existing thing is not its own; this existence ‘belongs’ exclusively to that reality for which it serves as a locus of theophany; there is no ‘sharing’, ‘partnership’, or ‘association’ in being…. Thus we return to the metaphysics of oneness; nothing is real but God.  Each thing in existence has two incommensurable dimensions: in and of itself a pure nothingness; but in respect of that which is manifested to it, through it, by means of it–it is real.”

 

So, these two lenghty quotes point us in the right direction concerning the first principle of the spiritual life.  Both the fundamental Islamic creedal affirmation and the 1^st Commandment of the Judaeo-Christian Scriptures admonish us against idolatry.  But both with the Christian mystics and with the Sufis we are to understand this in a much deeper way than simply making an image of some critter and worshipping it.  Idolatry means making some existent into an independent reality existing “alongside” God as it were.  This has enormous implications.  For example, popular piety might hold that there you are and here I am and then there is God.  It is as if God were the “third” element in a series of existing things.  But that is to misunderstand grossly the reality of God and our own reality.  This not only puts God somewhere “out there” but it also makes my reality and your reality kind of independent self-existing realities.  It also creates this illusion of a distance between oneself and the one we call God, THE REAL.  This is truly the beginning of idolatry.

 

First of all, every single thing exists only because God calls it into existence and His call is also His very presence.  In other words, every single entity is connected to and related to God or else it does not have existence. Reality is from God; reality manifests God. Whatever “realness” any entity has, comes directly and depends directly on the Reality of God—apart from that there is nothing.  Look into the eyes of your pet and you will see the Presence–the “catness” of the cat, the “dogness” of the dog are on fire with the reality of God, manifesting the One Reality.  Every blade of grass, every little ant, every galaxy, every human being, every single thing is the Burning Bush filled with the Presence of God or else it doesn’t exist.  That’s why everything is truly “holy ground.”  Apart from God, everything, absolutely everything is pure nothingness.  But precisely so, it is impossible “to be” and “to be apart from God.”  To view things this way is to enter a state of delusion.  However, our state of blindness or delusion can be so serious that we can actually consider ourselves and our world independent of the reality of God.  This was the view, for example, of the 18^th Century deists in the West—God as the Great Clockmaker, creation as a great clock which God winds up and puts down and it runs on its own.  This was never the view of the mystics.  If we look at the world that way, we will be entering idolatry–attributing being to things that have no being of their own– and affirming that nothingness as a something.  The roots of nihilism and despair and delusion.

 

The story is told that one day a very devout Sufi came to the great Rabia, a Sufi woman mystic in Iraq, and said to her, “I have never sinned before God.”  And she answered him, “Your very existence is the greatest sin there is.”  And of course she is cutting through the crap of this piety by getting to the root problem, which is not really pride or hypocrisy or some other words like that–a superficial way of approaching the problem which Jesus noted also.  The fact is that underneath all our so-called “sins” lies that fundamental idolatry of self, that view of ourselves as something substantial and not dependent, something  more than nothingness and independent of God, possessors of our own being, our own reality and then negotiating with God, pleasing God, placating God, etc. as if we could stand independently “outside” God.

 

In the Gospel, in Luke 18, it says:  “A certain ruler asked him, ‘Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?’  Jesus said to him, ‘Why do you call me good?  No one is good but God alone.'”  Here Jesus addresses the same problem as Rabia, but from a slightly different angle.  Yes, there are commandments to carry out and virtues to practice but none of this “goodness” has any reality apart from THE REALITY—they simply manifest this Reality.  However, if we look on these as something  WE “achieve,” “accomplish,” “do,” etc., as if this “goodness” had its own independent reality, which we then bring before God for “reward,” and “approbation,” then we are slipping into idolatry and making the nothingness into something–even with our piety– and in effect “consorting with Satan”–recall, “Get behind me, Satan! to Peter’s proposal, and to the tempter in the desert a firm rebuke as Jesus is offered a seeming reality(a seeming good) that is independent of God, apart from God.  And that was Eve’s problem in the Garden also…etc.

 

Another look at this:  Recall this parable from Luke 18 also:  “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax-collector.  The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax-collector.  I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.’  But the tax-collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me a sinner.”  We know what Jesus said, and we can guess what Rabia would have said, but another thing here is that the tax-collector is the paradigmatic figure for the Jesus Prayer tradition.  And if we get at the root meaning of the word “sin” as “separation from God,” then we meet this paradox.  The one who is proclaiming and admitting that he has been acting and living his daily life as if he were separate from God, as if his being had its own reality, this one is “justified” because he can only acknowledge that fact if he already recognizes his own nothingness and the “Allness” of God–in other words, that very acknowledgment, when it is sincere and true, is only possible when someone recognizes his own nothingness and God’s Presence in all that is.  On the other hand, the guy who brings forward “his own virtuous life” is doomed to delusion and idolatry, the land of the unreal,  because “only God is good” and he does not recognize the real meaning of a “good deed.”

 

Somewhere in his diary Abhishiktananda writes:  “Perhaps there is only God!”  One can almost see the twinkle in his eyes as one reads these words!  They are sentiments that usually upset the orthodox devout, make others nervous, and leave some purzzled.  To say that only God is Real and that we and all else have even less substantiality than a wisp of fog, a trace of morning dew seems outlandish, even heretical, etc.  Accusations of pantheism will arise; accusations that one is importing alien non-Christian ideas, etc.  A lot of this is a problem in language and as long as this is presented in an abstract academic fashion as it were, then serious misunderstandings can take place.  However, the moment one begins to “taste” God(as the Sufis would say), with even just a glimmer of the reality of the Divine, then one begins to easily proclaim one’s nothingness.  Such has been the unbroken witness of countless Christian mystics also.  Too often their language has been taken as being “negative,” “morose,” “self-rejecting,” or just plain metaphorical, a manner of speaking, etc.  But the deeper the experience of God a person has, the more zealous he/she is about proclaiming their “nothingness.”  For the reality of God is such that all else truly fades into emptiness and there is only the Divine Fullness.  And so with the rishis of the Upanishads we can pray:   Lead me from the unreal to the Real….  More and more so.  Deeper and deeper.  Beyond and still beyond….  To the Furthest Shore….    With the great Sufi mystic, Mansur al-Hallaj, we will then say:

 

“I saw my Lord with the eyes of my heart;

I asked Him, Who art Thou?  He said, Thou.”

 

Amen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

These are the reported last words of Steve Jobs.  His sister said that he repeated this phrase three times while staring into space just before he closed his eyes and stopped breathing.  Oh wow, oh wow, oh wow.  I repeat this phrase not out of sarcasm or irony, though I was no fan of Jobs as my oblique reference to him in the last posting shows–but now quite the opposite, I am not sure any mystic could have done any better, except for an improved vocabulary maybe!  To be frank, we of course cannot know for sure what his meaning was, but the moment seems to lean in this direction:  he was beginning to recognize the infinite and absolute Love that was surrounding and filling his life and him and all those who had gathered in his room.  The pop vocabulary of this pop icon is almost touching.  But the gist of this is definitely not “pop”.

 

Oh wow, some people said, when they first saw the now-classic MacIntosh computer almost 2 decades ago.  Oh wow, others said, when they saw Apple outsource its production force to China and all that implied.  Oh wow, still others said about the man’s 9-figure fortune by the time he was 30 years old.  He could have gotten a much greater “oh wow” if he had given away most of that money and alleviated the misery of at least some people.  It seems the Gospel calls for that.  I mean, really, I don’t see how you can ever justify a great fortune with the Gospel—and those of you from other traditions can use your own yardsticks—it simply calls for a divesting, no excuses, compromises, “ifs,” “buts,” “ands,” “ors,” etc., etc.  But where Steve Jobs was at in that moment it was too late for all that, and the infinite absolute Love, which is a totally unimaginable and incomprehensible mystery to us in our samsaric existence, took Steve by the hand and took him “through the eye of the needle”.  We sometimes call it “death”!  And Steve had to let go of Apple, of the 9-figure fortune, of even his identity as Steve Jobs, genius.  As he realized that, there was only one response, “oh, wow.”  Not bad.

Abhishiktananda (Henri Le Saux) is one of the most important and most interesting religious figures of our time and maybe the most profound Christian mystic since Eckhart and John of the Cross.  I say this fully aware that there may be some serious questions about some of his spiritual/theological proposals and claims, and at a later date I hope to go over in some detail the essentials of his spiritual/mystical teaching with all its “wrinkles.”  But here we will just look at the humanity of this great mystic—something which ought to be done with all our other historical holy figures who tend to become “unreal icons” of an unreal perfection.  When we lose sight of their humanity, we also begin to see their teachings at a further distance from ourselves than needs be.  Also, when we see the mystic in his true humanity we then begin to interpret his teaching in a truer, deeper way and avoid the pitfalls of becoming a “groupie” or a “fan club member” who simply does not question anything the mystic says.  As that bumper sticker proposes:  “Question All Authority”—even the mystic’s!

 

The first thing that hit me about Abhishiktananda is a comparison of him with Thomas Merton.  And here we have to add that one of the truly sad things, indeed even tragic things, is that the two never met. Merton does mention in his Asian Journal Diary that he had an intention of trying to find Abhishiktananda and visit him if he had the time, but then he tragically died.  But even with that, most mysterious is that both of them, being such incredible correspondents with so many contacts and tons of letters written all over the place, never communicated with each other via letter.  Something to ponder.

 

Both monks were filled “to the gills” with engaging contradictions that would endear them to their friends.  And both men were to a large extent self-aware of these contradictions and could poke fun at themselves.  For example, both rhapsodized about solitude and silence yet they both had a “gift for gab” and immensely enjoyed conversation with like-minded souls and both had a real need for human contacts and human affirmation.  One cannot picture either of these men sitting in a cave somewhere alone for years on end in total silence–yet they both idealized such folk. One of the key characteristics of Merton’s writings is that he could seemingly contradict himself so readily.  I mean if you consulted his published works, his journals, his letters and his class notes, you could pretty much quote Merton “against Merton.”  That is also the case with Abhishiktananda, though not to the same extent or the same degree.  But recall Emerson’s famous remark concerning contradictions in Thoreau:  “Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”  (Here we need to add that the contradictions spoken of here are not the same kind as in the case of Heidegger, for example, who had such profound intuitions about human reality and yet consorted for years with the Nazis; or consider even the recent case of Steve Jobs who just died and was lionized for being a “deep Zen practioner”—however, Apple under his leadership outsourced thousands of jobs to China and then allowed his Chinese producers and sources to pollute the environment and run practically slave-like work conditions.  One of the factories where Apple computers were made had so many worker suicides that people there were forced to sign “no-suicide oaths”—very bizarre, I mean what could they do to you if you broke the oath!!!?  But we are getting too far afield!  In any case, these are contradictions that open an enormous moral chasm that cannot be affirmed.  These are not just personal quirks or the desire to hold on to “both ends” of a paradox as one wrestles with a mystery.)

 

 

Take a look at this picture of Abhishiktananda:

It is cold in winter where he has his hermit’s hut in Northern India.  So he has a large overcoat and a sweater on top of his sannyasi garb. (Kind of symbolic I thought!)  At a certain point he has a stove, and an electric immersion heater to make hot chocolate and hot tea.  He is surrounded by books, papers, a typewriter.  Now this is not your typical sadhu!  And he often good-humoredly (and sometimes sadly) points that out.  He knows his physical limitations and humbly accepts them.

Another thing:  he owns the land on which he sits!!  Actually Panikkar bought it for him and put it in both their names.  Very untypical for a sadhu!!  The plot of land was large enough for a garden.  And at one point he puts up barbed wire around the garden to preserve his vegetables.  Now that’s a picture that has to make one smile–a sadhu stringing barbed wire around HIS property!!  He also has a small endowment of money given to him by a donor, which allows him to roam freely until that money runs out, and then he shows some real signs of insecurity when he has to live only on the royalties from his few published items.  Then another rich donor steps forward—again, very unusual for a sadhu!!  He is very endearing when he confesses that he feels  totally unable to go from door to door begging for his food(he only does that a few times during his time in India–not easy to do for a European from an upper middle class family or an American for that matter!

 

Actually he never stays for too long in his hermit’s hut—never more than a few months at a time, and then he is on the road again.  At first he had to shuttle back and forth between Shantivanam, the original ashram, and his hermit’s lair in the foothills of the Himalayas.  Quite a journey and quite taxing.  Eventually he develops friendships and contacts all over India, and his reputation as a teacher and spiritual resource pulls him here and there all over India.  He writes to one of his sisters who is a cloistered nun that his enclosure is all of India!!

 

He is a man of great humor–his friends say he is full of jokes, telling “even wicked jokes”–more often his humor is aimed at himself but he is not afraid to tweek even his close friends.  But the humor is never for its own sake, but it is always for the sake of that awakening toward which he always focused.  In writing to his closest disciple, Marc, when the latter first proposed that he wanted to take sannyasa, Abhishiktananda good-naturedly takes him to task:  “You need sannyasa in order to be recognized.  And why do you want to be recognized, except with a view to being accepted when you do something?  It is not the ten years of silence which are calling for the diksha, but the time afterwards when you feel that something awaits you; a need for an apostolate under a different name!  I am not blaming you, but I am the witness who smiles….  A small damper for you and for me, who are at times living a little too much in a dream….  I smile when I see you now so interested in giving a form to the formless.  That is just what cults, myths, theologies have been doing from the beginning…  You need a sign in order to possess your freedom!  Oh, the infinitely free man, who needs a sign that he is beyond signs!  Get away with you—you are still steeped in your University Seminary, and deserve to go back to it!”  Of course, at a later date, Marc does become a sannyasi in a beautifully documented ceremony.  But this shows Abhishiktananda as teacher, not afraid to tweek even his closest associate.

 

Abhishiktananda is a man who exudes humor, liveliness, warmth through every pore of his body and spirit, but he is also very capable of being gruff, abrasive and cold to those who seem to him to be wasting his time or misleading people or are pompous.  Although he had extensive communal living in France, here in India he seems to show a certain inability to live in close quarters with other people.  Mainly because he is set and determined by a certain vision and experience and he simply does not have time for anything else.  Although he had great fondness for Monchanin, Bede Griffiths and Father Francis–the other 3 important figures in India’s Catholicism at that time–and although he respected and valued each of their talents, for all practical purposes he could not live with any of them in any community setting.  They all in fact had a very different vision of what their role in India was, and there were moments of friction(at one time Abhishiktananda called Fr. Bede, “the fog of the Thames”!)   Abhishiktananda also had very strong and sensitive feelings, and in one gathering of Christian religious figures in the early 60s someone whom he respected not only disagreed with some of his ideas but personally called into question his integrity.  This really hurt Abhishiktananda and he practically never got over it.  For a long time he avoided this particular group of theological scholars, and one wonders if some of his harsh statements about theology in his later life does not stem from that wound.  Anyway, it is interesting that this man who spoke so much about “going beyond” the peripheral ego to the great I Am, still felt the hurt that ego experienced and more importantly still was not free of it.  In light of this one can see how some of those Desert Father stories take on an enormous importance and how they also in a very, very quiet way point to that Beyond in a very existential way without any “lofty mystical language.” More about that in a later posting.

 

Abhishiktananda’s vision of the monastic journey, so profoundly influenced by Hindu sannyasa, seems at times to “leave this earth.”  The word is “acosmic.”  At times the vision he articulates of sannyasa and the monastic charism leaves one seemingly outside all human concerns and human history—the sufferings, injustices, travails that so many people undergo.  It’s as if the mystical life and the pursuit of justice are two paths with almost nothing in common.  Now Merton was much more into a unified vision of the two and so today he still is the more useful spiritual guide for many people.  However, Abhishiktananda, in his real life showed a great sensitivity and a truly compassionate heart to those who suffered.  Something like Dostoyevsky’s Father Zosima he intuited that it is very “cheap and easy” to love humanity in the abstract, but very, very difficult to truly love concrete persons with all their shortcomings. That will take real sacrifice, and if you do it in a way that nobody sees it, so much the better.  Early on in his life in India he practically adopted this wretchedly poor Tamil family and regularly sent them money, a share of whatever he got, even when he was almost penniless at some times in his life.  He never forgot them.  His heart was in the right place, but somehow he could never articulate a truly “unified vision” of spirituality and mysticism and the pursuit of justice.  In a letter to his sister, this is about as good as he could get:  “The Church  is a life conformed to the Gospel.  Christians are those who love their brothers and seek to transform a civilization based on profit and egoism, which therefore is contrary to the Gospel.  Priests and religious are those who take seriously the instructions given by Jesus to the seventy-two disciples when sending them out on mission.  That is how the Church ought to appear.” (And there are other similar quotes from him.)

 

In light of the above, it is important to point out that Abhishiktananda never did show any grasp of the “Brahmin bias” of his advaita spirituality—advaita was upper caste spirituality in India, and although Abhishiktananda himself related to all kinds of people with the same openness, he somehow never showed any self-critical awareness in this regard(of which self-criticism he showed much in other regards!).  He fixed an almost laser-beam focus on advaita and never let go, even as there were so many other religious paths in India.  In his defense, one could say that he saw advaita as liberated from the limitations even of Indian culture.  More about this in a later posting.

 

 

Abhishiktananda had some interesting preferences in regard to Catholic religious life–most of his friends there were either Carmelites or Jesuits.  He seems not to have cared a hoot for either Trappists or Carthusians(too regimented, too organized, too external oriented), and he had little hope for his own Benedictines–he himself saw them as providing “cover” for him in India, but that was about it.  Jesuits he had a lot of dealings with because it was they who would shape the ethos of the Indian Church.  The Carmelites he really loved because they were simply and totally oriented to contemplative prayer, nothing else, not even the liturgy.  He thought the nuns’ grill was ridiculous but he found the Carmelite nuns the most receptive to his spiritual teachings.

 

Food wise he ate as far as he could what the poorest in India ate.  However, he recognized many times that he badly needed some “European food.”  At one point he says that after 60 you almost cannot survive in India without some “European food.”  Here again he shows discretion, common sense, and a humble acceptance of his limitations.  Speaking of which, “common sense” is very evident in a lot of his spiritual direction and guidance in letters to various people. Here he is in the great tradition of the Elders of Optina in Russia during the 19^th Century: spiritual direction characterized by a lot of common sense. To a housewife in Bombay who wrote to him with some questions, he responds to her real situation, her real vocation from God, not some dream or fantasy of some unrealizable situation:  “I would not know how to give a good answer to the question whether Christ is necessary for Hindus.  I only know that plenty of people who do not know his person have access to his ‘mystery'(not to his ‘concept’) in their inner deepening and also in transcending themselves in the love of their brothers.  The mystery of the Heart of Christ is present in the mystery of every human heart.  You have found fulfilment through music, through painting.  Art is also a way of access to the mystery, and perhaps–in poety, painting, music–it reveals him better than any technical formula.  And in the end it is this mystery–at once of oneself and of each person, of Christ and of God–that alone counts.  The Awakening of the Resurrection is the awakening to this mystery!…Joy to you, to your husband, to your children.  May it shed its rays on all!  And don’t worry about those who love the esoteric, who run around to ashrams and ‘saints’.  The discovery of the mystery is so much simpler than that.  It is right beside you in the opening of a flower, the song of a bird, the smile of a child.”  This is a TRUE spiritual master speaking, but, alas, poor Abhishiktananda does seem to get a bit lost with his close disciple, Marc!   (Recently I listened to a talk by a Sufi teacher, and he also stressed the importance of common sense in spiritual guidance. )

 

Prayer and meditation:  at some gathering on the theme of prayer and meditation various participants got into a discussion of  “how much” time to give to such “practices.”  Very often the various individuals pointed out how much time they were able to allot to this each day.  Abhishiktananda was greatly amused to relate that he spent less time on “such periods” than any of them.  The point is that he did not believe in cutting up the day into “spiritual practics” and then the “other stuff.”  He saw this as making that fatal mistake of superimposing spirituality on the rest of life–it was kind of another layer that you put on your life.  Rather,  even as periods of silent prayer are good and important but what is really important is that pervasive and constant silent attentiveness to the Presence in all you do and in all that happens.  Here we are getting much closer to what the old Hesychast Fathers meant by “continual prayer,” “pure prayer,” “prayer of the Heart,” etc.

 

 

Finally, we have to confront the dark, swirling rumors around the possibility of a homoerotic relationship between Abhishiktananda and his closest disciple Marc.  Of course no one really knows, and it is very easy to mistakenly evaluate certain language. (It is alarming and very disappointing that Marc apparently recopied the last years of Abhishiktananda’s diary and threw away the originals—so we really can’t be too sure how much of Abhishiktananda’s own thoughts we have in that diary for about the last 5 years.  And then Marc’s own diary became totally inaccessible to all, even scholars–a close friend of Abhishiktananda’s kept this diary locked up, but she recently died, so maybe this might become available, but I doubt it.  And then, Marc’s mysterious disappearance—was he killed by some fanatic fundamentalist Hindus; did he just disappear in some cave in the mountains and die there or is he still there!; or did he commit suicide in the Ganges, like this Hindu guru did whom he had admired deeply.  Looking at it from outside one can say that there is not too many “good vibes” there!) There is an emotional flavor to their discourse in that last  year of his life that is much more than just the usual guru-disciple relationship.  However, like I said above, Abhishiktananda  was a very affective and sensitive person and he would respond with much feeling when he was connecting with someone.  It is possible that Marc was the one person who most alleviated him of a great loneliness in not being able to share his deepest and most profound insights/intuitions/teachings/understandings, etc.  He often mentions how little people seem to understand him.  However be the case, I frankly don’t care even if he did have a homoerotic relationship with Marc.  In a sense it may have been very innocent–like Merton’s experience of human love with the student-nurse, and he may have gone beyond it like Merton did if  he had lived longer.   No matter,the ultimate thing is that there was power in his words and behind his words, power to open up the depths of people’s heart to the Ultimate and Absolute Mystery.   But he is also still, “the witness who smiles” at all our foibles and preoccupations.  Amen!

 

Our culture proclaims that it values the individual, individuality, and uniqueness.  However, like so much else about us, this is totally illusory.  What it really promotes is a kind of atomized individualism and a frenzied kind of self-centeredness, self-assertiveness.   It believes that by crying out “I am different,” that you establish your own individuality–or like that old pop song by Frank Sinatra, “I Did It My Way.”  However, true uniqueness is a deeply spiritual reality and cannot be had or found by simply asserting one’s own illusory ego identity in contrast to all other such assertions, etc.  It will inevitably require a “death” of that ego-centeredness—like the Gospel tells us: “Unless a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it will remain alone, but if it dies it will bear much fruit….”  And one of those fruits will be one’s true uniqueness and individuality.  The spiritual life is totally marked by paradox at every step of the way, and this is one such instance–one has to transcend one’s ego identity in order to find one’s true uniqueness.  And the still deeper paradox will be that this “individuality” will also be a communion with all others so that you will know their pain and their joy as your own.

 

 

In Jewish mysticism, among the Hasidim, there is the story of a very holy rabbi by the name of Zusya.  There are several variants of the story, but basically it goes something like this:  Zusya has a dream in which he has died and finds himself waiting near the throne of God for his final interrogation as it were.  He is really sweating it out as he worries that God will ask him why he was not Abraham or Moses or Joshua, doing the great and holy things they did.    He tries to prepare an answer, but God surprises him with the question:  “Why were you not Zusya?”  Indeed!  That may be THE only important question we need to consider!  But to be truly “Zusya,” to be truly “me,” means that I cannot live by any superficial social identity or even take on a copy-identity of a holy person.  You have to plunge into the gift of your own uniquness which is nothing what society or culture or even Church  tells you it is.   One of the problems even a spiritual seeker may have is thinking that God is more present somewhere else, in someone else’s life, in some other “better” conditions for a spiritual life, wishing that he were in Abhishiktanada’s shoes or Merton’s for example(!).  But it is you, in your totally and infinitely unique, irrepalaceable, non-interchangeable reality in which God has placed Himself.  No matter how many twists and turns your life has taken, no matter how many mistakes, your Heart is truly Paradise, the Abode of the Absolute, and there you walk with God as with a Friend.  He calls you by a name that you alone have from Him–no one else, and your spiritual task is to recognize that name and respond to it—because only you can do that—no one else will be able to respond to that name.  And furthermore, God has planted His secret name in your heart that you alone have and by which He wants you to call Him, and by which no one else can call him.  And the amazing thing is that these two names may very well be the same.  This is the true source of your uniqueness and the uniqueness of every man, woman and child that exists.  Your life is the field spoken of in the Gospel in which a treasure is buried and a man buys that field with all he has and claims the treasure.

 

Consider three very unique holy men from three very different spiritual traditions:

 

A. Benedict Joseph LaBre.  1748-1783.  Born into a well-to-do family in France before the Revolution.  He grows up during a period of great decadence and the peak of the enlightenment.  Right from his youth he shows a strong proclivity to prayer and living a life oriented totally to God.  He attempts to join both the Trappists and the Carthusians, but both groups reject him.  He strikes them as an “oddball” and perhaps a “mental case.”  Catholic religiosity at this time is very rigid, very formulaic, very external oriented, very institutional, very progam oriented, by the book kind of thing.  So you would think he was finished with that kind of rejection by those kind of folk!  Not in the least.  Benedict takes up a life hardly ever seen in modern Western Christianity:  the wandering beggar.  He lives a life of total poverty and total pilgrimage.  Officially he is nobody.  He spends his time mostly in silence and in continual prayer and in wandering from one church and one holy place to another.  He begs for his food, and he has only the clothes on his back.  In Eastern Christianity they would recognize him as a “fool for Christ”; among Hindus he might be considered as a kind of sannyasi, but where he was, there was no one like him!  Eventually he ends up in Rome where he sleeps in the ruins of the Colosseum and spends his days in the Churches.  He dies in Rome, and about a 100 years later he is canonized by Pope Leo.

 

B. Kabir  1440-1518  One of the greatest poets in Hindi and a mystic revered by Sikhs, Sufis, and Hindus.  Born in India near Varanasi, born into the lowest caste, he never learns Sanskrit, so all his poetry is in Hindi.  He is left parentless as a little child, and though coming from a Hindu family, he is adopted and raised by a family of Muslims.  He is another one of these people who is totally intoxicated with the reality of God.  You would think that such a one would take up being a sadhu, taking sannyasa, having a guru, etc.  However, he never goes beyond being a householder, marries, and is a weaver by trade.  His religious/mystical poetry is marked by intense experience, and even though he grew up in Moslem home his poetry   is replete with Hindu spiritual concepts, especially within the bhakti vein.  But he also spurned the Hindu caste system, and Sufi ideas can be found in all his poetry.  Considering how violent the Hindu-Islam encounter has been from time to time, Kabir is that unique expression of another way.  Legend has it when he died that Hindus and Moslems were arguing about how to properly deal with his body.  When they lifted the covering, there were only rose petals there.  So the Hindus cremated part of the petals as they are accustomed and the Moslems entombed another part of the rose petals according to their custom.  So today you will find both shrines to Kabir.

 

C. Han-shan  Chinese hermit. Taoist, Buddhist, Zen figure.  Lived during the great Tang period, around 650 AD.  He was a contemporary of China’s greatest poet, Tu Fu.  Not much is known about him, but he did leave behind a bunch of scribbled poems.  He also was not an “official monk” but more like a hobo.  A contemporary official who had heard of him from some early Zen master sought Han-shan out.  He discovered him living in a place called Cold Mountain, which is also the meaning of the name, “Han-shan.”  There was a major temple in a nearby town where Han-shan would come down to often.  He befriended the kitchen master who was also something of a spiritual adept.  Anyway Han-shan would get food leftovers from his friend and together they would often sing and laugh and joke around.  When the official first found him, Han-shan was with his friend in the kitchen, and the official came in and bowed to them.  Han-shan laughed and shouted, “Why has a big official bowed to a pair of clowns?”  The town people called him a “mountain mad man”—he was always singing, laughing, talking to himself, but the official commented that “everything he said had a feeling of the Tao.”  After Han-shan’s death several hundred of his short poems were gathered together, and very quickly he became one of the great legendary figures of early Chinese Zen.  In an earlier posting I had quoted from this poetry, and here is another sample–and it would be good to point out that “Cold Mountain”  refers simultaneously to his place of residence, to himself, and to his state of mind: (Gary Snyder’s translation)

 

Borrowers don’t bother me

In the cold I build a little fire

When I’m hungry I boil up some greens.

I’ve got no use for the kulak

With his big barn and pasture–

He just sets up a prison for himself.

Once in he can’t get out.

Think it over–

You know it might happen to you.

 

 

In a tangle of cliffs I chose a place–

Bird–paths, but no trails for men.

What’s beyond the yard?

White clouds clinging to vague rocks.

Now I’ve lived here–how many years–

Again and again, spring and winter pass.

Go tell families with silverware and cars

‘What’s the use of all that noise and money?’

 

 

Men ask the way to Cold Mountain

Cold Mountain: there’s no through trail.

In summer, ice doesn’t melt

The rising sun blurs in swirling fog.

How did I make it?

My heart’s not the same as yours.

If your heart was like mine

You’d get it and be right here.

 

 

When men see Han-shan

They all say he’s crazy

And not much to look at

Dressed in rags and hides.

They don’t get what I say

& I don’t talk their language.

All I can say to those I meet:

‘Try and make it to Cold Mountain.’

 

 

 

 

A. The anniversary of 9/11 is upon us.  Ten years ago, yet who can forget that horrifying and tragic day?  The sadness and darkness of that day is not only in all the lives that were lost in that attack, but actually even more in the truly tragic and insane response it provoked from us.  Right after the attack, the next day, most of the  world was actually with us in sympathy and in solidarity.  There were actually huge demonstrations, for example, in Tehran in support of the U.S.  There was a moment, an opportunity when we could have transcended the usual “eye for an eye” approach to policy and foeign relations, and we could have called the world together and said, “Ok, what can we do, what should we do to make sure this doesn’t happen again?”   Trust the goodness of people, of all people, to help us find a way to bring reparation, restoral, healing  and peace.  Instead we began to bomb.  Incidentally, we call ourselves a “Christian nation,” or some people do, but after 9/11 the spirit of  revenge and retaliation was stalking through the land—NOT the Spirit of Christ.  Consider this:  Jesus was tortured and murdered, but on the cross he seeks forgiveness for his killers.  More importantly, in the Resurrection, his first words are, “Peace be with you, MY peace…..”  The Risen Christ does not speak the language of revenge, retaliation, “pay back,” etc.  Who can sanely claim that we are a “Christian nation”?  On September 12, 2001, the Gospel for the day was Jesus’s command to “love your enemy”!

 

But there was also another deep wound inflicted that day—a deep wounding of Muslim/non-Muslim relations, in particular Western Christian/Muslim relations, understanding, respect for one another, and even a nourishing of each other.  Not that there was great mutual understanding or interest in each other before 9/11, but now  the  distinterest on  the part of  so many Western Christians has a tinge of hostility or at least suspicion of everything Muslim.  Ignorance, irresponsible mass media, and even more irresponsible politicians and leaders have all contributed to this.

 

Fifty years ago Thomas Merton wrote to a Pakistani Sufi friend of his:  “It seems to me that mutual comprehension between Christianity and Moslems is something of very real importance today, and unfortunately it is rare and uncertain, or else subjected to the vagaries of politics.”  Alas, that statement is even more true today.  But if we look at the deep past there are some flickers of hope. St. Francis with the Sultan–a well-known story.  Then, in the 14^th Century, before the fall of Constantinople, the great Orthodox spiritual theologian St. Gregory Palamas was captured by the Turks and held prisoner for quite a while.  During that time Palamas had many discussions with the Emir and his son.  The Emir had a great respect for this Christian theologian and mystic, and Palamas himself  became good friends with the Emir’s son.  Later when he was released, he wrote a letter to the Emir’s son and said that he hoped that “a day will soon come when we shall be able to understand each other.”  Indeed.  Then, the anonymous Christian classic, The Way of a Pilgrim, is quite explicit in teaching that in the absence of a starets or spiritual father, the Christian seeker may receive spiritual instruction “even from a Saracen.”  The reverse relationship can be found in  the spiritual friendship of the Sufi Ibrahim ibn Adham and the Orthodox monk Symeon.  All this points us in the right direction.  Finally there is this iconic image: the oldest continuously existing Christian monastery in the world, St. Catherine’s on Mt. Sinai, contains a mosque within its precincts.  This was built by the monks for their workers who are Muslim Bedouins.  This should remind us if we have a dominant role in a given society to give our minority brethren the freedom and ability to worship as they feel called.

 

B. Merton wrote this about one of the great Sufi holy men of our time,            Shaikh  Ahmad al-‘Alawi of Morocco:  “With Shaikh Ahmad, I speak the

same language and indeed have a great deal more in common than I do with the majority of my contemporaries in this country.  In listening to him I seem to be hearing a familiar voice from my ‘own country’ so to speak.  I regret that the Muslim world is so distant from where I am, and wish I had more contact with people who think along these lines.”

 

C. Speaking of Sufis, their connection to the events going on in Libya are not well known.  It appears that the rebels have overthrown Gaddafi, and this is another one of those events that is percolating in the Arab world.  No one knows for sure the outcome of this revolution or the exact make-up of these rebels, but something very interesting about them:  they are fighting under the old Libyan flag, the flag of  the pre-Gaddafi state of King Idris who was Libya’s king from 1951, when Libya gained its independence from colonial rule, until 1969 when he was overthrown by Gaddafi.  What is especially interesting is that King Idris was a Sufi, in fact he was head of the Senussi Sufi Order—he was in fact a “Sufi king,” like Plato’s “philosopher king.”  He governed a constitutional state that was  aligned with the West.  He built a modern Western-style university in Libya.  There was also a very good religious university run by the Senussi Sufis which Gaddafi closed in 1984.  Gaddafi rose to power in the 1960s when it was very “in” and popular in the Third World to be anti-Western, and so he was against the Sufis who were able to get along with Westerners who would not exploit their country.

 

Libya had been a hotbed of Sufi life for centuries, as in fact a lot of North Africa.  King Idris’s  grandfather was a founder of the Senussi Sufi Order as a branch of the Idrisi Sufis founded by the Moroccan Sufi Ahmad ibn Idris(1760-1837).  This religious leader was noted for his reforming concepts.  He called for the abandonment of the traditional sharia schools of Islamic law, and he was a critic of the ultra-fundamentalist Wahhibi movement(from which Al-Qaeda and the 9/11 terrorists spring and whose roots are actually in Saudi Arabia, from where we get so much oil and with whom we are such good friends!)  What is not generally known is that while Sufis are very peaceful they are not pacifists in the strict sense—they will fight against someone who invades their home.  Thus Libyan Sufis were prominent in the fight against the colonialism of France and Italy.  Many were executed by Mussolini.  Let us see if the present Libyan freedom fighters live up to the high standards of their distinguished ancestors.  For more information about these Sufis in Lbya here are a few websites:

http://www.islamicpluralism.eu/WP/?tag=senussi-sufi-order

 

http://sufinews.blogspot.com/2011/05/people-of-heart.html

 

http://fiercereason.com/2011/08/stephen-schwartz-the-sufi-foundation-of-libyas-revolution/

 

D. India.  What can you say?  There are so many different Indias!  Let us consider some examples.  First there is the India which has been in the international news lately because of a hunger strike conducted by a Gandhi-like figure, Anna Hazare, against widespread government corruption.  Sounds pretty straightforward, and how could you not support that!  But things are never simple in India(or here either!).  Consider this op-ed piece in a major Indian newspaer by Arundhati Roy:

   http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/article2379704.ece?homepage=true

Roy is a major novelist, a social activist, and what we would call a “progressive.”  Reading her piece as an outsider, it is almost impossible to follow in its myriad details, but you get a sense of the complexity and enormity of India’s social problems.  But there is another India, the India of sannyasis and sadhus, the India of our Abhishiktananda.  Here is an amazing story illustrating the fact that this India is still there—barely maybe—but still there:

http://indrus.in/articles/2011/02/27/russian_hermit_to_be_expelled_after_15_years_in_india_12207.html

Now in what other country could this story have unfolded?  I think only in India.  However modernity is eating away at India’s body and soul and heart, and what of this India will survive remains to be seen.  It is really ironic that Catholic Indian monasteries and ashrams used to want to “do it in an Indian way” when now young Indians want to live like this:

http://www.vgnprojects.com/Brixton.aspx

Just a sample of tons of such housing developments going up in India all over the place.  With “six lane highways” close by!!    It looks just like here!  Exactly.    That’s one of the effects of modernity:  homogenization

 

And a final note on this:  a real physical symbol of what is taking place in India—the greatest and most holy river in India, the River Ganga, is dying.  Not only from the human corpses which have been dumped there for ages, but more from the sewage and industrial effluents going into the river now in unprecedented amounts.  Around Karpur over 200 tanneries discharge chromium-rich effluents and 80% of the city’s sewage is dumped untreated into the river.  Around Kolkata some 150 factories pour untreated waste into the brown water of the Hugli, a tributary of the Ganga.  Fish die and river water laced with toxins irrigates farmland, eventually seeping into food and village borewells to cause untold diseases.  Once the only liquid thought fit for an orthodox Brahmin, now is undrinkable.  But a radical “solution” of sorts is in store.  The Gangotri Glacier, which feeds the Ganga is melting and retreating at a pace of about 600-700 meters per year.  Eventually the Ganga will be waterless.  Will India be thoroughly modern then?

 

E.   One more note about 9/11.  The New York firemen who were the first responders to the attacked buildings had a Catholic chaplain.  His name:  Fr. Mychal Judge.  He was a Franciscan priest of many years.  He went into the buildings with his firemen to minister to anyone in need and to be “with his parishioners.”  He died with them when the buildings collapsed.  One more thing about Fr. Mychal: he was a gay priest.  He was a gay Franciscan priest who lived faithful to his vows and his calling.  Many New York firemen were later surprised to find out that their chaplain had been gay.

 

Father Francis Tiso has written a very interesting and thought-provoking essay in Dilatato Corde:  “Raimundo Panikkar on the Monk as Archetype.'”

The essay actually covers three different topics, which kind of converge within his own personal experience:  a. Panikkar’s ideas; b.  interreligious dialogue; c. the emergence of so-called “new monks.”  The emphasis is on the interreligious dialogue, but underlying all this is the question of monastic identity in our time.  What I would like to do is throw out some thoughts,  some varied reflections bouncing off his ideas but heading in a different direction, and some divergent opinions and evaluations of the current monastic phenomenon.

1. Right off the bat I should say that I do not hold the same positive view of Panikkar’s ideas in this regard that Fr. Tiso does.  I respect Panikkar for what he was trying to do–and that is actually more important than the results he achieves–but I do not think that his notions about monasticism are convincing–in fact they may be misleading.  The so-called “monastic archetype” is an intellectual construct which helps one, more or less, to deal with what is and has always been a “messy reality”–an attempt to find some kind of unity within very diverse examples of monkhood and to push the boundaries of our understanding of monastic identity.  Good enough.  But it is a construct; there “ain’t no such animal in the zoo.”

And a “zoo” it is with all kinds of “animals” in it, exotic and ordinary, large and small, attractive and very unattractive, dominant and very shy, etc., etc.  If you want to “extract” some archetype from this bewildering array, ok, but really there is no need of that intellectual exercise and it can be very, very misleading.  What is slightly more pertinent is to observe the amazing variety of monks, the remarkable diversity of life-styles of monks over the ages—simply as an empirical phenomenon.  From that standpoint we can see that always there were “new monks.”  And always there was tension, even hostility, between the so-called established monks of the large orders and the perennial so-called new monks who lived on some fringe or other.  This also always lead to a preoccupation about monastic identity:  who is a monk, what makes one a monk, what does it mean to be a monk, etc.  A big mistake, but alas, inevitable.  Because what is really needed, especially now, is the affirmation of the human being as mystic, as  someone with a fundamental orientation to/participation in the reality of God or however one wants to name that Absolute Reality–and a very strong focus on that.   Every person that you see at the supermarket is really a mystic at heart if we understand this term properly–yet they are thoroughly and completely distracted and diverted from this reality. Strangely enough, paradoxically enough, a preoccupation with monastic identity can also distract us from that most fundamental reality.  Fr. Tiso points out that for Panikkar, in the last stages of his thought, “the archetype of the mystic converges with that of the monk”–the mystic is constitutive of the human. Again Fr. Tiso on Panikkar:  “…it is clear that the real ‘universal archetype’ towards which his thought progressed is that of the mystic, conceived as a human person engaged in a deep inquiry with reality as a whole.”  This is a much more welcome line of thought.  Also, Fr. Tiso refers to the monastic archetype as “grounded and experienced as an opening to the ineffable divine milieu.”  I think I see what he is getting at, but what I want to avoid in an emphatic way is any conflation, confusion, or convergence between the two terms: “monk” and “mystic.”    The emphasis always has to be on “being a mystic” rather than on some monastic identity or vague unifying concept like “archetype”(and I unashamedly use the word “mystic” trying to rescue it from the claptrap of pop new ageism!).  When you grow up don’t you want to be a mystic?!  Ok, if that term grates on your ears, try this phrase by Abhishiktananda:  “the absolute surrender of the peripheral ego to the Inner Mystery.”  So maybe you’re a monk; maybe you’re not—does it really matter in light of THAT?

1b.  Panikkar defines monk: “By monk, monachos, I understand that person who aspires to reach the ultimate goal of life with all his being by renouncing all that is not necessary to it, i.e., by concentrating on this one single and unique goal.  Precisely this single-mindedness (ekagrata), or rather the exclusivity of the goal that shuns all subordinate though legitimate goals, distinguishes the monastic way from other spiritual endeavors toward perfection or salvation…. If, in a certain sense, everybody is suppose to strive for the ultimate goal of life, the monk is radical and exclusive in this quest.”

Not bad, but a close analysis would bring out a number of problems.  Just one example:  “all that is not necessary to it”—who or what determines what is or is not necessary to reach the ultimate goal?  If it is a monk or monastic tradition, they will give one answer; if it is a non-monk, they might give a slightly different answer.  And from what perspective do we determine this “not necessary”?  And even what does the word “necessary” mean anyway?  Many, too many, there are in monasteries who, strange to say, get lost in their monasticism–and there are so many “not necessary” things even there, in their practices and observances, chant, liturgy, etc.,  in their “seeking of an identity.”  They are good, decent, devout, religious people, and they are official monks but, depending on how you interpret Panikkar’s words,  they may fail to fit his definition.  Jesus tells Martha: “Only one thing is necessary.”  Indeed.  And this pericope has been used as a kind of monastic/contemplative paradigm.  However, paradoxically enough, it is the monk who can get just as easily lost in the multiplicity of his “monastic stuff”–while at the same time believing that he/she is focused on the “one thing necessary.”  One can see that the hermit may have a great advantage here in this regard—less “monastic stuff”!!

More Panikkar:  “The thesis I am defending is that the monk is the expression of an archetype which is a constitutive dimension of human life….”

So there is a “monk” within each person?  Again, sounds attractive, but there are a lot of problems with that.  Official monks like this schematization(and his definition above) because it inevitably puts them on top of a pyramid.   Some lay people accept that and become “monastic groupies”—hanging out on the fringes of monastic life, providing the needed affirmation for the official monks that they are “special” while the lay people are a kind of “watered down” version of monastic life, a partial realization of that archetype of which they are a “full realization.”  Obviously no one puts it that way, but I have seen it with my own eyes.   This is not what Panikkar means, but it is where that leads to.  Others simply walk away from this scheme.

1c.  Consider the Sufis.  They may be the best model of what I am talking about and what we may badly need.  First of all, there is no organized monastic tradition in Islam.  And neither do they easily fit any of Panikkar’s definitions or criteria concerning monastic life/the monastic archetype.  Much simpler just to look at their empirical reality–they come in such an amazing variety, all kinds of “sizes and shapes and colors”!  Some live in solitude, some live in various kinds of brotherhoods, some are wanderers, some are married, some are celibate, some are scholars, some are artists, some are businessmen, some are lowly workers, etc., etc., etc.  What makes them Sufis is that total orientation toward the Divine Reality within the parameters of Islam.  To call them “inner monks” or “hidden monks” or something like that, to say that they are actualizing the monastic archetype is simply importing and overlaying an unneeded category.  The Sufi is the human being as actualized mystic par excellance(though there are Sufis who would object to the use of the term “mystic”)!   If you want to say that the Sufi is also some kind of actualization of the monastic archetype, then in fact you have converged and conflated the terms “mystic” and “monk” and in my opinion that leads to a serious confusion.  Anyway, the evolution (shrinking!!) of Christian monastic life may yet lead us in the direction of the Sufis.  I can forsee a time when we will have “Christian Sufis”(with apologies to our Islamic friends for borrowing their word!), living an incredible diversity of lifestyles, but all with one focus to be “on the Straight Path,” toward “the total surrender of the peripheral ego to the Inner Mystery.”  All else, everything, absolutely everything else is negotiable except the Glory of God.

2. Let us recall that famous saying of Karl Rahner(long before Panikkar):  The Christian of the future will be a mystic or he will not be.

Indeed.  The monk of the future will be a mystic or he/she will not be.  The human being of the future will be a mystic or he/she will not be.  I think we are heading(if not already there) where the stakes are that high, and the outlook is not positive.

3. Between 1887 and 1890 Vincent Van Gogh painted 30 self-portraits before his suicide, almost one per month for each of the last 3 years of his life.  This was a very troubled person who was desperately seeking to get some kind of handle on his own self.  I fear that Catholic religious, including monastics, have been doing something like this since Vatican II.  Who are we?  What makes us, “us”?  “Back to the charism of the founder.”  Etc.  Ok, the sclerosis of Tridentine religious life had to be broken up, but unfortunately so many seem to have become fixated on that identity.  And when that happens, lines/boundaries begin to be drawn where there is no need of drawing such things.

4. Let us recall a famous Desert Father saying:  “It was revealed to Abba Anthony in his desert that there was one who was his equal in the city.  He was a doctor by profession and whatever he had beyond his needs he gave to the poor, and everyday he sang the Sanctus with the angels.”

What a remarkable account!  Every single word is of utmost importance in understanding what this is saying. First of all, this is something “revealed” to Anthony–not something that he figured out, or just a kind, benevolent sentiment.  No, this has the “authority of heaven” behind it.  Furthermore, it is revealed TO Anthony, the father of Christian monasticism.  So this account also has the authority of Anthony attached to it—a double dose of authority; I should say that it’s making a very serious point!  Now we come to the most important word: “equal”.  What does this mean?  The doctor is “equal” to Anthony in what sense?  Following Panikkar, is it the case that the doctor and Anthony are manifesting the monastic archetype each in his own way?  A possible interpretation, but I don’t think so.  Is this doctor the first “new monk”?!  Perhaps! Is he the first “Christian Sufi”?!  Probably. Note something very interesting: none of the major monastic “observances” or practices are attributed to this doctor.  He is not even a particularly intense ascetic—it says he took care of his basic needs, then what was left over he gave to the poor.  Granted some of the desert monks did something like that, but this is certainly not one of their signature works.  There are so many other stories and sayings that emphasize what are the distinguishing marks of the desert monks and the doctor is not given any of them.  Now the story brings us to the conclusion and the key insight—this doctor “sang the Sanctus with the angels.”  In other words, he lives in the living Presence of the Divine, he is in communion with God.  He and Anthony are both “equal” in the sense that both are mystics in the Rahnerian sense of the word.  How the doctor got “there” we are not told because it really does not matter.  There is no program for this kind of thing!  Not even monasticism!  Official monks are not privileged people with regard to religious experience.

As Monty Python would say, And now for something completely different, or rather from a different tradition—Jack Kornfield writing:  “Dipama Barua of Calcutta, one of my teachers and a revered Buddhist elder, exemplified this spirit for me.  She was both a meditation master at the highest level and a loving grandmother.  When I visited her apartment she would teach in a practical and modest way.  Around her was a palpable sense of stillness and profound well-being.  It was not the well-being of outer security–she lived in a tiny apartment in one of Calcutta’s poor neighborhoods.  Nor was it the well-being of rank and position—she was mostly uncelebrated and unknown.  Though she was a remarkably skilled teacher, her selflessness bloomed in her smile, in her care for others, in her openness to whatever was needed .  She was both empty and radiantly present.  Dipama’s heart seemed to pervade her whole body, the whole room, all who came into her orbit.  Her presence had a big impact on others.  Those who lived nearby said the whole apartment block became harmonious after she moved in.  One day a student complained that ordinarily his mind was filled with thoughts and plans, judgments and regrets.  He wondered what it was like to live more selflessly.  So he asked Dipama  directly about the alternative, ‘What is in your mind.?’  She smiled and said, ‘In my mind   are only three things: loving-kindness, concentration, and peace.’  These are the fruits of selflessness.  With selflessness there is less of us and yet presence, connectedness and freedom come alive.  Selflessness is not a pathological detached state, disconnected from the world.  Nor is it a state where we are caught in a new spiritual identity, ‘See how selfless I am.’  Selflessness is always here.  In any moment we can let go and experience life without calling it ‘me’ or ‘mine.'”

What would be most interesting would be the interreligious dialogue between Anthony’s doctor and Dipama—but now we are dreaming…..

5. Let us follow up with another Desert Father story, one of the greatest of them all:  “Abba Lot went to see Abba Joseph and said to him, ‘Abba, as far as I can I say my little office, I fast a little, I pray and meditate, I live in peace and as far as I can, I purify my thoughts.  What else can I do?’  Then the old man stood up and stretched out his hands towards heaven.  His fingers became like ten lamps of fire, and he said to him, ‘If you will, you can become all fire.'”

Lot has his monastic observances, his practices, his monastic lifestyle, his sadhana, but he is fortunate in that he has not settled into that as a “comfort zone” and anchor for a kind of identity:  “I am a monk, and I do this and that.”  Rather, he feels that marvelous “gravitational pull” toward the divine mystery that confronted Moses in the Burning Bush:  “I am who am.”  Abba Joseph invites him to participate in that ineffable divine identity which has no boundary.

5b. Speaking of the Desert Fathers, we have this from Merton:  “If we were to seek their like in twentieth-century America, we would have to look in strange out of the way places.  Such beings are tragically rare….  With the Desert Fathers, you have the characteristic of a clean break with a conventional, accepted social context in order to swim for one’s life into an apparently irrational void.  Though I might be expected to claim that men like this could be found in some of our monasteries of contemplatives, I will not be so bold.  With us it is often rather a case of men leaving the society of the ‘world’ in order to fit themselves into another kind of society, that of the religious family which they enter.  They exchange the values, concepts and rites of the one for those of the other….  The social ‘norms’ of a monastic family are also apt to be conventional, and to live by them does not involve a leap into the void–only a radical change of customs and standards.”

6. Father Paisios of Mt. Athos, one of the great Orthodox spiritual fathers of our time, gave this piece of advice to Western monks:  “Disorganize!”

This reminds me of one of Will Rogers’ quips:  “I don’t belong to any organized political party.  I am a Democrat!”  I think we can steal that one from Rogers:  I don’t belong to any organized religious life.  I am a monk!

If you want a monastic identity statement, well, that’s one.  Did anyone ever think that organization is actually bad for the real monastic charism?  Merton seems to have given some such hints, but gosh….  The relative flourishing of the hermit life in our time points in this direction.

7. Historical examples of people who proved “problematical” in terms of “official” monastic identity:

Ramana Maharshi in Hinduism—never had a guru, never took sannyasa, never a part of any monastic group, etc—yet one of the great Advaita mystics of our time.

Milarepa, Tibetan Buddhism, yes, a hermit, but never part of any official monastery or monastic group.  It is very clear that some monks of his time felt hostility to him.  And the tradition later tries to tame him into an “official figure.”  Marpa, his teacher, was a married layman.

Hui-neng, one of the greatest of Chinese Zen Buddhists, was a lay worker in a granary associated with a monastery and not allowed to mix with the monks–until he is discovered as a Master, and has to flee for his life because there are monks who would kill him!

Francis of Assisi–yes he can be called a monk!  He was adamant about not being a Benedictine, the dominant group of his time,  because it meant being pinned down in a cultural form that went against his spiritual vision.  So he went his own way; later we have the Franciscans, about which he was not so approving either.  Francis has to be liberated from the Franciscan image of him!

And there are so many others.

8. Official Catholic monastic life is shrinking, slowly but surely.  There is an interesting analogy with global warming.  There are “deniers” in both camps.  But the glaciers are melting, and monasteries have smaller numbers of people.  Yes, people can point to huge snowfalls here or there, and ultraconservative groups drawing large numbers of candidates, but the overall pattern points in one direction.  Just as the snowfall in some areas has increased precisely because of the overall warming, so have these ultraconservative groups flourished because of a very critical change in the cultural and intellectual atmosphere that is not good.

People, and in some cases it looks like “lots of people,” come to monasteries and tell the monks how good and important they are and what a great place the monastery is.  That’s ok—hospitality is an important aspect of monastic life.  But if monks take that as some sign that a spiritual renewal is right around the corner, they are greatly mistaken.  Just playing the numbers game:  more people come into one average Walmart SuperCenter in one 24 hr period than come to all the Trappist retreathouses in the US during an entire year.

We live in very perilous times, and I don’t mean physically(though that too in some cases).  We live immersed in a culture of narcissism.  We live in an era of enormous electronic communication, yet our capacity to communicate about life in depth seems diminishing. (Just as an exercise read the letters of people during the American Civil War and you might be astonished how even very ordinary people could express themselves with such eloquence and depth.) All signifiers now partake of the mode of advertising and marketing–Merton saw this coming in the 60s.  For homo consumerus only that which is bought and sold can be called real.  It is not a climate which is going to be hospitable to monastic values or monastic presence.  On top of it all, the deep incoherence, the genuine insanity, and the rampant greed concealed within our social and economic matrix is finally bubbling to the surface in many ways, and we are in for quite a ride in the near future.  To say that the monk/monasticism is an unambiguous “sign” “pointing” to the “transcendent” is untenable.  Even spirituality and “contemplation” have become commodified, religious hucksterism is rampant, and what’s most important, “the sign,” “the signifier” only points to itself or to another sign.  Recall that old Chinese curse: May you live in an interesting age!  Well, this is an interesting age and it is going to get even more interesting, but maybe we can amend that curse:  May you live in an age of hermits!  The hermit is the “refusenik” par excellance to this kind of degradation of human life.  Maybe only the hermit will flourish in this coming age.

9. Within his essay Fr. Tiso refers to Merton’s final talk in Asia.  He mentions in passing Merton’s comment where he positively evaluates what some young revolutionaries said to him:  “We are the true monks.”  Fr. Tiso mentions that the participants, mostly senior monks, monastic leaders, reacted negatively to Merton’s positivity.  That I am not surprised about, but I am surprised that maybe Fr. Tiso misunderstood what Merton was getting at.  He does not naively accept what they say—he simply says he accepts their challenge because it points in an important direction: every monk is or should be in a dialectical/critical relationship to the culture in which his monkhood evolves.  According to Merton this is an important credential for being a monk, and these young people put their finger on it.  This is not something peripheral or tangential to monastic identity but an essential ingredient, though it may be expressed in very different terms in different eras and cultures.  Unfortunately too many monastics are in a compromised position with the “dark side” of their society no matter how “rigorous” their spiritual practices are.  Wealth, power corrupt, surprise, surprise—sometime it’s not even that, just a comfy life with a bit of adulation!

10.Suggestions: (more or less whimsical)

1. Try a kind of “apophatic” approach to monastic identity.  Lay off definitions and trying to get at the essence of it.  You know it when you meet it–wherever that may be.  In some special cases you might find yourself in a kind of spiritual Catch-22 situation:  you will need to be already “enlightened” in order to see this monk in order to learn from him/her.  In fact this person may not even recognize themselves as a monk!  He/she is like one of the ‘hidden zaddikim” of Hasidic legend.  When God conceals you, you are REALLY CONCEALED!
2. Put a moratorium on all conferences, gatherings, lectures, etc.  Let everyone go back to their caves or wherever and for 10 years chop wood, carry water and sit facing a wall.   Nothing but silence.  Not even Twitter or Facebook.  Then we all get together at an appointed spot and the first person to say “archetype” gets whacked by a stick-wielding zen monk.  Then we all laugh.
3. To borrow from Chuang Tzu:  what we need now more than ever is “the true monk with no title.”  The No-monk monk.  You might find this person almost anywhere, even in a large organized monastery with lots of initials after his name!
4. For the next 10 years drop all titles of “guru,” “spiritual father,” “teacher,” “master,” etc.  All spiritual guidance or advice is for free from “a friend.”  See where that takes us.  This is specifically an antidote to the religious hucksterism of our time.

11.  From Merton:

“The contemplative is one who is, like the servant of Yahweh, ‘acquainted with infirmity,’ not only with his own sin, but with the sin of the whole world, which he takes upon himself because he is a man among men and cannot dissociate himself from the works of other men.  The contemplative life in our time is therefore necessarily modified by the sins of our age.  They bring down upon us a cloud of darkness far more terrible than the innocent night of unknowing.  It is the dark night of the soul which has descended on the whole world.  Contemplation in the age of Auschwitz and Dachau, Solovky and Karaganda is something darker and more fearsome than contemplation in the age of the Church Fathers.  For that very reason, the urge to seek a path of spiritual light can be a subtle temptation to sin.  It certainly is sin if it means a frank rejection of the burden of our age, an escape into unreallity and spiritual illusion, so as not to share the misery of other men.  The contemplative life today must be a life of deep sorrow and contrition, but a pure sorrow, a healing and life-giving repentance such as we find in some of the characters of Dostoyevsky.”

Merton wrote this about 1960, and there has been much speculation how he would have revised that after he came back from Asia.  Whatever be the case, and however it may reflect the mindset of the early 60s, we are still very much in the same boat.  The mystic of our time will be a person marked with infirmity, perhaps having struggled with addiction, with failed relationships, with loneliness, with great economic stress, etc. etc.  A person like that may not even recognize themselves as being on the very doorstep of a profound mysticism.  Perhaps they need just a little nudge!

12. And the final word is from Ryokan:   “What is this life of mine?

…………………………

Neither layman, nor monk.”

Recently the pop rock artist, Amy Winehouse, died from perhaps a drug overdose.  Regardless of the actual cause, she had already given many indications of drug abuse, so whether it was accidental or deliberate or even if it was just the heart giving out after years of abuse, that is not the critical issue here.  She was the bearer of a great pain that cried out for numbing.  A sad fact for any human being, but she also was an extraordinary talent within her own field of endeavor.  What is peculiar is how many of these great young talents have done themselves in precisely at age 27:  Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain, Jim Morrison, and so many others, and now Amy Winehouse.  Someone may be saying to himself, Well, that is too bad, but these people trashed the gift of life in trivial pursuits and there are more important things to ponder at this point.  Indeed, perhaps true.  But I want to come back to that pain I mentioned.  It is the most fundamental pain a person can experience–you might say that it is the pain of being a human being.  Concretely and existentially this pain may have all kinds of manifestations or apparent causes, like failed relationships, betrayal, a troubled career, economic stress, loneliness, emotional chaos, etc, etc.  But underneath this potpourri of negative human dynamics, there is one foundational pain that pervades one’s heart but has so, so many names.

To understand this better, let us approach it from another angle.  Somewhere Abhishiktananda relates that the essence of Hinduism (and really all religion) can be summed up as follows:  “the total surrender of the peripheral ego to the Inner Mystery.”  Very well put (but I am sure a person could find something inadequate about that statement).  Now imagine if someone knew nothing of that “Inner Mystery,” had no sense of it, had no access to it, etc.  That one’s whole sense of reality, of one’s being, of one’s identity consisted in that “peripheral ego.”  That is more than scary; it is terrifying.  Why?  Because that peripheral ego is almost a nonentity, practically a “nothing,” a totally insubstantial, feeble reality, a construct that is equivalent to a “house of cards,” or a toothpick construction that comes tumbling down with the slightest breeze.  “Dust you are, and to dust you shall return.”  All the major religions point to this in their own terms, but they also point to something else, which in the theistic traditions we can call the “Inner Mystery.”  But imagine if that is nowhere on the horizon of your awareness…..  The cold, hollow wind of nothingness blowing through your heart….no matter what clothes you throw on that peripheral ego!     Finally death is the last word that declares it to be nothing–and ends the pain.

But that is precisely the condition of modern human beings.  All our social values, our economy, our structures, are organized around a kind of numbing of the impact of the emptiness of the peripheral ego.  Certainly it is not about helping or encouraging or facilitating the discovery of the Inner Mystery of each human being—that might make them less of a consumer and we know where that leads to….  Entertainment, games, the voyeurism of celebrity, econonic success, etc, etc., all this to push back against that feeling of nothingness which is the essence of the peripheral ego. Indeed, fame and celebrity itself is a kind of cry of “I am, I am,” but this “I am” is built on a foundation of sand  in the words of the Gospel, really a foundation of nothingness and emptiness in the true existential sense.  The real “I am” is grounded in the I AM of Absolute Reality, of God.

Now the artist, of whatever kind, has a more sensitive heart, so he/she will feel the impact of this even more so.  That pain will not be abated by art, more likely enhanced by it.  Art does not provide an anesthetic, or a “medication of forgetfulness” concerning our nothingness—more likely it puts it under a magnifying glass! (The role of art can be quite ambiguous in this regard.)  I am reminded of that great Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, who also drank himself to death, but at one point he wrote a poem for his dying father with lines that repeated over and over this theme:

“Dear father, do not go gentle into that night,

But rage, rage against the failing of the  light.”

Ultimately this “rage” leads ironically enough to self-destruction because it is totally futile.  Consider finally another artist, Ernest Hemingway, who committed suicide in his old age by shooting himself.  Here is a poem by Merton about that moment:

“Now for the first time on the night of your death your name is

mentioned in convents, ne cadas in obscurum.

Now with a true bell your story becomes final.  Now men in

monasteries, men of requiems, familiar with the dead, include you

in their offices.

You stand anonymous among thousands, waiting in the dark, at

great stations on the edge of countries known to prayer alone,

where fires are not meciless, we hope, and not without end.

You pass briefly through our midst.  Your books and writings have

not been consulted.  Our prayers are pro defuncto N.

Yet some look up, as though among a crowd of prisoners or displaced

persons, they recognized a friend once known in a far country.

For these the sun also rose after a forgotten war upon an idiom

you made great.  They have not forgotten you.  In their silence you

are still famous, no ritual shade.

How slowly this bell tolls in a monastery tower for a whole age,

and for the quick death of an unseemly dynasty, and for that brave

illusion:  the adventurous self!

For with one shot the whole hunt is ended!”

Hemingway was a master of modern English narrative, but in so much of his writing and in his life he promoted this image of the he-man,  a certain kind of masculinity and ideal humanity that was embodied best in the image of the “great hunter,” the “great adventurer,”  among some other images.  This was the clothing Hemingway threw on his peripheral ego, and when in the feebleness of old age this image could no longer be sustained, well, the pain could only be ended in one way…..

Merton also translated and adapted from Sufi material, and here is piece of advice for a Sufi novice:

“Be a son of this instant!

It is a messenger of Allah

And the best of messengers

Is one  who announces your indigence,

Your nothingness.

Be a son of this instant

Thanking Allah

For a mouthful of ashes.”

Hemingway could not “welcome” that messenger that announced his own nothingness in the feebleness of his old age, in his failed relationships, in his inability to write anymore.   As great an artist as he was, he had no inkling of the abiding Inner Mystery in his own self.

And approaching this from another angle, here is another 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 who?) be

The unthinkable one

You do not know.

O be still, while

You are still alive,

And all things live around you

Speaking (I do not hear)

To your own being,

Speaking by the Unknown

That is in you and in themselves.

“I will try, like them

To be my own silence:

And this is difficult.  The whole

World is secretly on fire.  The stones

Burn, even the stones

They burn me.  How can a man be still or

Listen to all things burning? How can he dare

To sit with them when

All their silence

Is on fire?”

And lest there be any confusion, we need to include religious life itself as a possible locus of fixation upon the peripheral ego.  Taking up religious practices can simply be another set of clothes for the peripheral ego.  Here again is Merton adapting from translations of Sufi material–again from Advice to a Sufi Novice:

“He who seeks Allah will be made clean in tribulation,

His heart will be more pure,

His conscience more sensitive in tribulation

Than in prayer and fasting.

Prayer and fasting may perhaps

Be nothing but self-love, self-gratification,

The expression of hidden sin

Ruining the value of these works.

But tribulation

Strikes at the root.”

This brings us back to Abhishiktananda’s “the total surrender of the peripheral ego to the Inner Mystery.”  The Sufis are very concrete and thorough!  Incidentally, the above material is taken from the writings of one of the greatest of Sufi figures:  Ibn Abbad, who lived in Spain and in North Africa during the Medieval Period, and some say he may have been a secret influence on John of the Cross.  We shall conclude with another excerpt, related to our theme, this time from Ibn Al Arabi, an even earlier Sufi figure who was a contemporary of Averroes, the greatest of Arabic philosophers:

“When the body of Averroes was brought once more to Spain, and

when the people of Cordova were gathered to watch its return

to the city of burial,

The coffin containing his remains was mounted on one side of a

beast of burden.  And on the other side, for counterweight, what

did they hang but all the books Averroes had written!

I too was watching, in the company of the scholar Benchobair, and

of my disciple, Benazzarach, the copyist.

Tuirning to us, the young one said, ‘Do you not observe what it is

that hangs as counterweight to the Master Averroes as he rides

by?  On one side goes the Master, and on the other side his

works, that is to say the books which he composed?’

Then Benchobair explained: ‘No need to point it out, my son, for

it is clearly evident!  Blessed be thy tongue that has spoken it!’

I took careful note of this word of my disciple, and I set it apart for

future meditation, as a reminder of this event.

For this was the word that held the secret of the occasion, the seed

of truth, shown to the disciple, at the burial of Averroes.

I planted the seed within myself thus, in two verses:

On one side the Master rides: on the other side, his books.

Tell me:  his desires, were they at last fulfilled?”

Amy, requiescat in pace.

Let’s face it–living in a real community is a very difficult thing to do.  Building a community is even more difficult!  Yet this is what some have proposed as the only solution to our dire times.  Most recently Chris Hedges, in a short essay detailing how bad things look to him, proposed that our only hope lies in a kind of resistance movement emanating from what he calls small “monastic communities.”

 

According to him there is no political solution to our dilemmas and our deeply incoherent ideologies and our pervasive corruption.  Resistance and a new vision has to come from elsewhere, and he locates it in small monastic communities.  It is interesting that he appends that qualifier “monastic.”  Not sure exactly what he means, but I think I get his sense.

 

To be sure, this is nothing new.  Just in the U.S. alone there have been all kinds of communal experiments over the years, stretchting back to the beginnings of this country.  And if you look at Christian monasticism as a whole, St. Benedict’s founding of his community, for example,  was in the wake of the collapse of the Roman Empire.  Now getting back to our own time, there were certainly many community experiments in the 1960s and most of them died almost overnight.  Some lasted longer than others, and there is no reason to say that any given community can only be considered a “success” if it lasts “forever” or a very long time—like a Benedictine monastery.  But the phenomenon is still marked by so much deterioration, failure of leadership, loss of focus, slipping into a cultish mode, becoming authoritarian, etc. etc.  that it’s hard to call it a successful phenomenon.  In a sense if you look just at this period from 1960 on, the impact on the larger society has been almost zero.  That doesn’t mean the experiments were not worth trying, or that certain individuals from these communities did not benefit in some way by being members, but for the overall thing there is not much to show.  So what is the problem.  Actually the problems are numerous, and there are very, very few communities even of the small number that survive more than a generation that deal with these problems in a way that enables them to grow or just to keep going.

 

This brings us to the point that Hedges is making I believe.  By “monastic” he doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone should become monks–hardly–but that the community should have some kind of religious/transcendent focal point, viewpoint, axis, whatever you want to call it. “Monastic” cannot simply mean any  kind of gathering of people around some idea or issue or value.   A community that is simply being established or built as an “anti-” something will certainly not have a chance of even accomplishing that before it evaporates.  Even being against  all things one should be against—-like pollution, war, consumerism, exploitation, etc, etc.— is not an adequate glue for a community.  But taking it one further step:  it is also not sufficient to build a community around any ideology, even a good one, or around any cause no matter how noble:  peace, sharing, environmentalism, hospitality, etc.  These are all excellent values and may be a very significant part of any community, but, hard to believe, they are not “the” solid foundation that a community needs.  What is really needed is a real religious tradition that guides the development of the community, provides it a focus, and gives it a foundation and resources to deal with the inevitable problems that all human ventures have.  And what Hedges points to, at least implicitly, is that only from these kind of solid communities can we expect to create a resistance movement against all that degrades human life in our society.  Now it should quickly be added that there have been plenty of “monastic” communities, both Catholic, Buddhist, and others, that have also deteriorated into some grotesque caricature of what their religious tradition is all about.  When you look at those examples, you will see that the “monastic” part is more like “window-dressing,” a kind of costume, rather than the substance of a real religious tradition.  Or perhaps in many cases of such failure it was a matter of badly interpreting the tradition or misunderstanding it.

 

 

A model for what Hedges is calling for would be a Gandhian ashram of sorts.  Gandhi, of course, is “the” icon of resistance.”  However, not everyone is fully aware of Gandhi’s deep religious roots, and what role they played in enabling him in his resistance–the movie on his life shows almost nothing of that.  He is known for espousing nonviolent resistance to injustice, but for people who took up nonviolence especially here in the U.S. very often it was simply a social tactic of confrontation to coerce some change that was called for.  For Gandhi, nonviolence was not a tactic but flowed out of a deeper sense of self, indeed, a different sense of self, of who one is.  Once nonviolence was used simply as a tactic it deteriorated into something else, became grossly misunderstood and misapplied–and then devalued by the society at large  By analogy, this often happened in the case of community building.

 

Now let us consider Person X coming to a community of sorts.  X is bringing a lot of stuff  to this endeavor—and I don’t mean material things.  More like life experiences, tendencies, habits, values, talents, quirks, fears, neurotic behaviors, and most of all and most importantly a false sense of self and a serious inability to see THAT fact or begin to understand it.  (This “falseness” may in fact be covered over with all kinds of religious language, or what’s even more problematic, it may be so deeply associated with one’s sense of identity that only some dramatic moment can begin to dislodge it.)  All the major religious traditions recognize that fact as a given (in their own terms) and have the resources for dealing with that, helping the person move toward a deeper, truer sense of self.  When a person comes to one of these communities, they are, whether they realize it or not at the point of entry, seeking to be a “different person” than what their society has told them they are.  Needless to say they will articulate many things, some incoherent, some obscure, some very lofty and idealistic and profound, but most of it will be a cover for a deep dissatisfaction with the sense of identity that one gets from the larger society.  That’s why these “monastic” communities all have some kind of initiation and testing process—to see if the person is willing and able to move beyond their own words and views, whether they are willing and able to engage in the process that will take them somewhere much deeper than they can see at that moment.  And by doing this they will then effect  a positive change in the world in whatever way that suits their capacities and talents, etc.  Incidentally, recall Thomas Merton’s famous last talk in Asia just before his death, when he at first is talking about Marxism and the attractions that held for a number of very idealistic young people in Europe in the 1960s.   Then  Merton mentions just in passing that Marxism really  only probably works in a monastery.  The gist of this is that one needs a profound inner transformation in order to really live by the values that authentic Marxism seems to be calling for and that these cannot be forced on a person or people from the outside by law or by force.  And the proper “laboratory” for this transformation is the monastic community.

 

 

Consider now a recent piece by Chris Hedges.  In his usual manner he paints a broad picture of our social ills and our predicament:

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_collapse_of_globalization_20110328/

 

But what’s important for our purposes is that he gives a glimpse of what lies underneath these problems: a cult of the self, an idolization of self-interest, a culture of narcissism, a thoroughgoing self-absorption.  This is so strong, so pervasive, the “poison” seems so normal and is so intoxicating (recall in Greek myth how Narcissus falls in love with his own image which he sees on the water’s surface and drowns) that one wonders if there is any hope, any possibility of “liberation” and “resistance.”  Ultimately this is what a “monastic” community should provide and what all the major religious traditions point to, regardless of how well or how poorly any given community applies these resources.  Of course, in the theistic traditions, the person entering will be “seeking God,” but all this is only a jumble of words until the nitty-gritty of life and self are addressed.  That’s why you will often find simple practices like name-changing and common, boring  work for a long time as an initiatory period, as a way of beginning that “liberation” from a false sense of self leading to a real “seeking of God.”  In any case, let us look at Gandhi’s favorite scripture quote, from the Bhagavad Gita, which was often read in prayer at his ashram:

 

“He lives in wisdom

Who sees himself in all and all in him,

Whose love for the Lord of Love has consumed

Every selfish desire and sense-craving

Tormenting the heart.  Not agitated

By grief, nor hankering after pleasure,

He lives free from lust and fear and anger.

Fettered no more by selfish attachments,

He is not elated by good fortune

Nor depressed by bad.  Such is the seer….

 

When you keep thinking about sense-objects

Attachment comes.  Attachment breeds desire,

The lust of possession which, when thwarted,

Burns to anger.  Anger clouds judgment

And robs you of the power to learn from past

Mistakes.  Lost is the discriminative

Faculty, and your life is utter waste.

 

But when you move amidst the world of sense

From both attachment and aversion freed,

There comes the peace  in which all sorrows end,

And you live in the wisdom of the Self.

 

The disunited mind is far from wise;

How can it meditate?  How be at peace?

When you know no peace, how can you know joy?

When you let your mind follow the siren

Call of the senses, they carry away

Your better judgment as a cyclone drives

A boat off the charted course to its doom….

 

He is forever free who has broken

Out of the ego-cage of I and mine

To be united with the Lord of Love.

This is the supreme state.  Attain thou this

And pass from death to immortality.”

 

 

 

These words were the true source of Gandhi’s social revolution, and these words, or its counterparts in the other great traditions, are the true foundation of any real community.  Otherwise you have merely a club, and there is a great difference between the two.

 

 

 

There’s so many religious/spiritual traditions, so much variety, so many ways of taking that journey!  If you are so inclined, it is like the proverbial kid in the candy store—everything looks so inviting.    But most serious spiritual teachers will tell you to get rooted in one particular tradition, to be a serious practitioner of one way.  What you really don’t want is to dabble in several traditions, taste here, taste there, and so on.  Also, what you really don’t want are these “self-constructed” traditions (typically “New Agers”) where you take elements from the different spiritual traditions and lump them together as you see fit, taking of course only those elements which you like.  The results usually range from the superficial to the simply weird.

 

However, when a person is thoroughly rooted in one spiritual tradition, it is not only legitimate but a genuine positive development of growth to explore other spiritual traditions and see what one can learn from them, especially as they enhance the possibilities of your own tradition, or to see these possibilites in your own tradition with fresh eyes.  There are of course also the special vocations that are called to explore very deeply another tradition without losing that “anchor hold” of their own tradition, to live on the boundary as it were between the two.  The obvious two names in this regard are of course Merton and Abhishiktananda, just as a starter.

 

For Christians who are not contemplatives in the general sense of that term, in other words whose Christianity is one of “external discipleship” even as it involves prayer, etc., Zen Buddhism seems a very alien thing.  For those, however, who have ventured onto a contemplative path, Zen can hold some serious attractions and possibilities.  It seems less daunting than the obviously more complex Tibetan Buddhism.  It has a tendency to “clear the ground,” “clean the path.”  Or just like a gust of fresh wind into a stale closed-up room, it suddenly reinvigorates you.

 

The most important thing about approaching Zen is not to begin with metaphysical words or concepts like “God” or “self” or “reality,”etc.  And that goes for any such statement about Zen by any Buddhist or any Christian or anybody!  Look at Zen directly.  First look at what is right in front of your nose.  Then look at who is looking at what is in front of that nose!  That is the right spirit in which to begin to get an insight into Zen.  Look directly at the stories and sayings of Zen.   They contain the “whole thing” and you will sense that as you listen to their words.  And you will be intrigued by this and drawn to a deeper place.  (Or it may mean nothing to you and then you will go on your way in peace!)

 

 

Consider:

 

A monk asked Ts’ui-wei about the meaning of Buddhism.  Ts’ui-wei answered:

“Wait until there is no one around, and I will tell you.”  Some time later the monk

approached Ts’ui-wei again, saying, “There is nobody here now.  Please answer

me.”  Ts’ui-wei led him out into the garden and went over to the bamboo grove,

saying nothing.  Still the monk did not understand, so at last Ts’ui-wei said,

“Here is a tall bamboo; there is a short one!”

 

 

 

 

 

 

Zen saying:  No snowflake ever falls in the wrong place.

 

 

 

 

Zen saying:  No seed ever sees the flower.

 

(Comment:  Can’t resist reminding you what Jesus said about the grain of wheat having to fall into the ground and die, etc.  Christians have a tendency to want to “have their cake and eat it too”!)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wu-Tzu:

 

Talking about Zen all the time is like

looking for fish tracks in a dry riverbed.

 

 

 

Zen Master:

 

My magical power and miraculous gift:

Drawing water and chopping wood.

Before enlightenment, I chopped wood and carried water.

After enlightenment, I chopped wood and carried water.

 

 

 

 

Story about Hakuin, one of the great Zen Masters who lived  in 18^th Century Japan and is credited with being the “Father of Modern Rinzai Zen”:

 

 

In a small hut, Hakuin lived a quiet life devoted to monastic purity.

When the young unmarried daughter of the village grocer

became pregnant, she named Hakuin as the father.  Her outraged

parents went to Hakuin and charged him with the deed.

Hakuin simply said, “Is that so?”

 

When the child was born, once again the parents came to Hakuin.

They handed him the baby and demanded he take responsibility

for raising it.  Hakuin said, “Is that so?” and took the baby in his arms.

Dutifully he began to look after the infant.

 

A year later, the young woman could bear it no longer.  She confessed

that the real father was a young man who worked in the

nearby fishmarket.  The parents went to Hakuin once more,

this time making deep apologies, and asked him to return the child.

Hakuin said only, “Is that so?” and gave the baby back to them.

 

(Comment:  Truly Hakuin was closer to the Kingdom of Heaven than most followers of Jesus!)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some wise observations by a modern American Zen student:

 

” Most people who come to the Zen Center don’t think a Cadillac will do it,

but they think that enlightenment will.  Now they’ve got a new cookie, a new

“if only.”  “If only I could understand what realization is all about, I would

be happy.”  “If only I could have at least a little enlightenment experience,

I would be happy.”  Coming into a practice like Zen, we bring our usual

notions that we are going to get somewhere–become enlightened–and get all

the cookies that have eluded us in the past.

 

Our whole life consists of this little subject looking outside itself for an object.

But if you take something that is limited, like body and mind, and look for

something outside it, that something becomes an object and must be limited too.

So you have something limited looking for something limited and you just end up

with more of the same folly that has made you miserable.”

 

Charlotte Joko Beck

 

(Comment:  Indeed, and this would hold true in many ways for those who come to Christian monastic life also.)

 

 

 

Zen saying: If you want to climb a mountain, begin at the top.

 

 

 

A real Zen flavor to this saying by Thoreau:

 

A gun gives you the body, not the bird.

 

 

 

 

From a history of Zen in the 20^th Century by Heinrich Dumoulin:

 

“Paramount for Zen praxis is the warning, often repeated to pupils, not to seek extraordinary experiences, combined with encouragement of the most intense effort.  This paradoxical combination is rooted in Buddhist tradition.  Since its earliest days, Buddhism has urged prudence in dealing with supersensible mental gifts.  In Zen the serene and patient attitude toward unusual experiences is based on the conviction that enlightenment is not the fruit of one’s own endeavor but the apprehension of the True Self or one’s original nature—in religious terms the Buddha-nature—that reveals itself when the moment has come, the moment of maturation that withdraws itself from the power of the practitioner.  Impatient expectation is a hindrance.  The attitude known as taigo-Zen (Zen that expects enlightenment) is generally rejected in Zen.”

 

 

 

 

From French Jesuit Yves Raguin:

 

“Being a child of the Father, I learned from Christ to be simply attentive to my inner mystery, knowing that I cannot see my face as God’s child, unless the Father enlightens me by his own Spirit.  The practice of Zen meditation taught me to stay in pure attentiveness  before my inner mystery….  In fact it is the practice of Zen which helped me to understand that the final step is not to follow Christ or to imitate him, but to be animated by him because he lives in us.”

 

This is very good, and it can lead us in several fruitful directions, but what I will simply emphasize now is the insufficiency of “discipleship” or “imitation”—they are authentic way-stations as it were, but not an end in themselves, and certainly not the deepest place one is called to.  Unfortunately too many very good Christians get stuck there.  All that Pauline language about Christ “in me”—I live now, not I, but Christ lives in me—kind of slides right on by as if it were only metaphorical or merely words or just some image suggesting some degree of closeness.  No the Risen Christ is our inmost reality, and whatever helps us recognize that and realize that is truly welcome.

 

In light of the above, consider this:

 

” Two monks were washing their bowls in the river when they

noticed a scorpion that was drowning.  One monk immediately

scooped it up and set it upon the bank.  In the process he was

stung.  He went back to washing his bowl and again the scorpion

fell in.  The monk saved the scorpion and was again stung.  The

other monk asked him, “Friend, why do you continue to save the

scorpion when you know its nature is to sting?”

 

“Because,” the monk replied, “to save it is my nature.”

 

 

Here Buddhism and Christianity meet, in silence, at a very, very deep level.

 

 

 

 

Let us conclude with some modern Zen humor:

 

Q:  What does a Zen monk say to

a hot dog stand vendor? (Tofu dogs of course!)

A:  Make me one with everything.

 

Q:  What does the vendor say when the monk

asks for change for his twenty-dollar bill?

A:  Change comes from within.

 

Ok, ok, so they’re not THAT funny!