As has been reported in the Petaluma Argus-Courier, I once lived for a number of years in a Zen
Buddhist community, and if you spend much time hanging around with Buddhists
you will sooner or later run across the concept of “enlightenment.” Now, I’m not a Buddhist, or a Buddhist
teacher, so I’m not going to try to explain that concept to you, but I did
learn enough about it to realize that “enlightenment,” which is also sometimes
called “awakening,” or “liberation,” is a lot more subtle and complex in
Buddhist thought and practice that than our society’s popular notion about it
might lead you to believe. However
popular notions are powerful things, and so at least part of the attraction
that drew folks to the Zen Center was the hope of attaining enlightenment.
And that popular idea is a little easier to explain than the
authentic traditional teachings. It goes
something like this: that a person might, through strenuous meditative
discipline under the guidance of a master teacher who is him- or herself
enlightened, achieve a direct, intuitive experience of ultimate truth that
would dramatically and permanently alter his or her consciousness—in a good
way. This notion of enlightenment is not
popular only with people who practice Buddhism. All over the world, and
especially in certain places like Northern California, there are people
following all manner of spiritual paths and traditions who have in common the cultivation
of meditative states of consciousness and the desire for enlightenment.
Some of them are even Christians, and I’m of the belief that
if you study the history of Christian spirituality you will see that there is
nothing inherently un-Christian about enlightenment or the pursuit of it. In fact, beginning in January I’ll be leading
a Sunday adult study course on a book that represents Jesus as a wisdom
teacher, skillfully provoking his disciples to a radical transformation of
consciousness. It’s an image that speaks
to an urgent desire that many people feel today to go beneath outward forms of traditional
ritual and religious doctrine, which they find have lost their freshness and
vitality, and to plumb the depths of direct religious experience. So I’m not one of those who preaches fear and
suspicion of this phenomenon, but see it as part of a welcome and much-needed
reawakening of the Spirit.
But I also can’t help noticing that the image of Jesus as a
kind of guru, who teaches the way to spiritual enlightenment, is missing
something very important, maybe the essential thing that makes Christian
religion what it is. It might be hard to
see if you’re sitting on your meditation cushion with your eyes closed,
repeating a Jesus mantra in your heart.
But it is plain as day if you go to where Christians gathering on Sunday
to hear the Word of God in the Holy Scriptures, and to celebrate the Sacraments. It is at the heart of this yearly Church
festival called Christmas, and our scripture lessons for today are all about
it.
It is the news given in the Gospel of John that the true
light, which enlightens everyone, has come into the world. This light is nothing less than the life of
all things, without which not one thing came into being, and now we have seen
his glory, full of grace and truth. This
is not the cryptic language of esoteric instruction, but the plain-spoken,
public announcement of something that is there for all to see. Because the gospel of Jesus Christ does not
begin from the premise that if we just find the right teacher and practice
diligently in the right way we also have the capacity to attain the hard-won
prize of enlightenment. The gospel
begins from the premise that the one who is
light has come into the world, and offers enlightenment to anyone who wants it,
absolutely free.
That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t make an effort to open
our lives to a more whole-hearted acceptance of this gift. But it does mean that our basic religious
attitude is not one of anxious striving or restless seeking, but one of
celebration and thanksgiving, of trust, and wonder, and joy. It is, as the scriptures point out in various
places, the attitude of a child. This is
not just because Jesus himself had that attitude, and taught that it was
fundamental, but because it is the stance that accurately reflects our relationship
with ultimate reality. Jesus’ own name
for that reality was “Abba,” a word sometimes translated as “Father.” But that
translation is not exactly right, because “Abba” is a child’s word—“Papa”, or “Daddy”
would be better.
Every year at Christmas we encounter an image of Jesus, not
as the masterful teacher of enlightenment, but as the tiny child at Mary’s
breast. It’s a powerful image not just
because babies are cute, and people are sentimental. It is powerful because it is an image of a
person who hasn’t accomplished anything except to be born, who doesn’t desire
anything except to be fed and kept dry and warm. He hasn’t had any great mystical experiences,
or said any timeless words of wisdom, or performed miraculous healings or
heroic sacrifices. He spends most of his
time nursing and sleeping. No one could
be more helpless and vulnerable, and yet the scriptures insist that he is
already the light that darkness did not overcome.
I think it is instructive that in the ancient church, “enlightenment”
was just another word for baptism. Recently
I had a meeting with our parish Worship Committee, which is a fairly new group
that has formed to do some in-depth study and theological reflection about what
it is we are actually doing when we gather together on Sunday in this building,
so we can do it with more joy and sense of purpose. We were talking about a book we’d read that
said that when we come together for worship, it is not just the priest who is
doing the work. It is priestly work, but
everyone participates in it, in whatever way they can, in hearing the words of
scripture, and singing the hymns, praying the prayers, passing the peace, and sharing
the bread and wine of the Holy Communion, and so the entire service is an act
of the whole community.
The folks on the Worship Committee had no trouble with that concept
at all, but some of them balked at the part in the book that said that the authority
to share in the priesthood of the Body of Christ comes from our baptism. I could understand where they were coming
from. How can we equate the decisive
breakthrough to a whole new life, a new identity, and purpose, and way of being,
with an experience that few of us can remember, that happened to most of us as infants? When we go to church and see a baby having
some water poured over its head, maybe crying about it, it doesn’t really
square with our idea of what spiritual enlightenment is.
But maybe that’s because we’ve got the wrong end of the
stick. In the Worship Committee meeting
we decided to forget about baptism for the moment and start a list of other
words that might express the idea that all of us are called to be equal
partners in the work of the church’s worship.
We came up with terms like “welcome,” “membership,” “belonging,” “initiation,”
and “covenant.” They were all words that
have to do with community. And,
interestingly enough, they have all long been used to describe baptism, which says
to me that we can’t really understand how baptism is spiritual enlightenment, if
we think about it only from the point of view of the person being baptized.
Maybe what happens at baptism is the enlightenment of the
community that is gathered to do the baptizing.
This would be true in all cases, but especially so when we baptize a child. What we look at Christina and Cason, Tristan
and Vincent, being picked up and washed in the water, maybe we are seeing a
revelation of ourselves, as we really are in Christ: persons whose significance
is not defined by human preconceptions, even our own, but is a word spoken in
secret the full meaning of which is yet to be revealed; persons whose potential
will not come to fruition without the love, guidance, support, and testing that
a family and a community provides; persons participating in a drama we don’t ourselves
fully understand, but in which we are called to play our own conspicuous role
as one of the vulnerable but beloved children of God.
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