In the beginning

Isaiah 61:10-62:3
Galatians 3:23-25;4:4-7
John 1:1-18
Psalm 147:13-21 

The Christmas stories we know best sound like history.  Maybe not history as we understand the term, as something academic, or scientific, but history nonetheless.  Luke tells how Jesus was born in this place, to these parents, at the time of that imperial decree, when so-and-so was governor of Syria.  Or if you prefer Matthew’s version, sages from Persia, observing unusual astronomical phenomena, came to Jerusalem looking for the newborn king of the Jews.  This aroused the malice of the usurper Herod, and so Jesus’ family fled to Egypt for safety.   

The mythical or supernatural elements in these stories, the angels and prophecies and dreams, tell us that they are sacred history.  These are events in which God is afoot.  But the backdrop against which they take place is the natural lives of people and the history of nations.  The principal actors are human persons.  When God intervenes, it is by sending messengers to those persons, or by filling them with the Holy Spirit, so they become bearers of the message.  But God remains offstage, invisible, unknowable, on the other side of the curtain that separates earth from heaven.

The Gospel of John, on the other hand, begins the story of Jesus on God’s side of the curtain.  The principal actor in John’s Christmas story is not a character in history.  The backdrop is not the places and events of the human world.  Instead it is a story that begins with the beginnings of the universe.  The principal actor is God, and the backdrop is God.  For John the story of Jesus Christ begins with the no-beginning that makes all beginnings possible, in the no-time that precedes every moment of time.  The miraculous birth that John begins with is the primordial mystery of existence itself, the mere fact that there is anything at all.

One of the first experiences of my childhood that could be called “religious” concerned just this mystery.  I was eight or nine years old, and my Grandma Lenore, was undergoing her first round with cancer.  I was lying in my bed at night and for the first time that I can recall it really hit me that I was going to die.  And my parents and my brothers, and everybody I knew—all of them were also going to die.  If felt as if a great abyss of dread and meaninglessness was opening up beneath me and was going to swallow me up.   And then, suddenly, a light went on.  Another thought came to me, that brought me comfort and hope and filled me with gratitude.  It was the thought of how completely gratuitous, how unnecessary, even arbitrary, and utterly not-to-be-taken-for-granted it is, that there should be anything at all.

That anything and everything comes into existence at all is a gift.  It is grace.  That the world exists, in spite of the improbabilities, in defiance of entropy, notwithstanding its tendency to instability and metamorphosis, is the one undeniable and irreducible truth.  The created universe, and everything in it, is not simply there, at random, out of nowhere and to no purpose.  It exists because there was in God, from the beginningless beginning, the impulse to create.  And if that, then also the desire to be created.  To be light, shining in the darkness.  To be word, spoken in the silence.  There is nothing in the universe that does not owe its existence to that love by which God becomes an other to herself, pure potentiality moving into act, absolute freedom taking form and pattern, perfect being becoming becoming.

John’s gospel begins with this beginning to tell us how radical is the grace that comes through Jesus Christ.  John wants us to understand that Christ’s coming transforms everything we thought we knew about our relationship to God and our place in creation.  He wants us to perceive that the very stuff of our consciousness is the word of God.  We reflect, like an image in a mirror, that intrinsic act of standing apart from oneself by which the one becomes two, and the uncreated creates.  We participate, not just instinctively, but consciously, freely, and artfully, in the bodying-forth of God that unfolds of the universe as.  

But the irony is that this god-likeness also gives us the capacity to imagine a godless universe.  The intrinsic stepping apart from ourselves by which know ourselves as knowers, also makes us prone to believe the lie that we are separate.   We can fall into the delusion that the light of our minds is the only light.  We can think that the words we use to name, to classify, to make distinctions and count quantities and rationalize the world are the only truth there is.  We can use our freedom to act upon the other creatures in the universe as if we and they were disconnected things.  And we can grasp that freedom as power, power without relatedness.  We can fight and kill for power.  We can worship it, and in worshipping it become its slave. 

This is the precarious freedom into which Christ is born. To talk about it as I have done can seem abstract, disconnected from our every day human life.  It is no surprise that we’d prefer a history.  We can make sense of a baby in a manger, and shepherds, wise men bearing gifts, and a star.  For all of their legendary quality, we can connect these stories to our own stories, and infuse them with our feelings and our memories.  We can feel like we know what the story means for us.  And it can also leave us out of it. 

The Gospel of John asks us to find Christmas at a deeper level of experience, in the very heart of reality.  John asks us to see the Christ child in the manger and know that there we are.  Paul says something similar in the letter to the Galatians.  To really understand what the birth of Christ means, to really receive the gift of his grace, we need to be like children in relation to God.  We need to experience the word of God as a child might, in utter simplicity, as light, as life, as bread, as the cry in our hearts for love and protection, as consciousness itself.  This is the experience of Christmas that is sometimes called contemplation, or mystical illumination, or even gnosis, and even the church has not taken it very seriously.  Or we have treated it something dangerous and exotic, reserved for a select few, rather than the universal birth-right of every human being. 

And it is dangerous.   It is dangerous to the powers-that-be who worship their own alienation.  It is dangerous to theological systems and ideological orthodoxies, to false piety and self-serving cynicism.  It is dangerous because it finds a God who comes from completely outside our existing frame of reference.  We want to know where he comes from, because we feel the irresistible draw of our true home.   But if we are going to come alive in the way that he is alive, we have to be willing to become other than ourselves.  We need to let God take away from us everything we thought we knew we were—our tribal and religious identities, our ideas of morality and virtue, our understandings of human nature and the historical situation, our fantasies about how to improve our lives or make the world a better place.  We have to let it all go and let God speak.  We have to allow God to begin again with us at the beginning, where nothing is taken for granted, and to tell us again who we really are.                                                                                

Trinity Sunday

For Trinity Sunday here's a quote from page 72 of Why Go to Church: The Drama of the Eucharist by Timothy Radcliffe:

I do assent to various propositions, such as that God exists, even if I do not understand what it means for God to exist...But that is not enough. Aquinas points out that even the Devil accepts the truth of these propositions. Friendship with God changes how I see everything. The persons of the Trinity are not three 'imaginary friends', in the words of [Richard] Dawkins, three people with whom I can have fantasy conversations. Rather friendship with the Triune God reshapes my perception of the world. Believing in the Father, the creator of heaven and earth, I see everything with gratitude. Believing in the Son, I delight in its intelligibility and seek understanding. Believing in the Holy Spirit, I am thrown beyond myself in love. The doctrine of the Trinity, therefore, should not make me a bigot, intolerant of those whose faith is different or non-existent. It should fill me with gratitude for their existence, open my mind to them and help me to see them lovingly. Dogma matters. Orthodoxy liberates one from prejudice and petty-mindedness, and unlocks our hearts and minds.

Another way to come at the same understanding is to own that Trinitarian Orthodoxy is the outcome of a great adventure into the truth of existence, a quest at once passionately and exigently personal and at the same time communal. It is the crystallization of the most profound religious experience, wedding contemplative discernment of the highest order and the progressive development of revelation. And the frontier of this adventure is the nature of reality itself.

On the Ways

My profile for this blog identifies me as having made, at one point in my life, a commitment to the Buddha way, and tacitly (and correctly) implies that I have not repudiated that commitment. So I was interested, and uncomfortable, to hear one of my sisters in Christ suggesting last month that the recent nomination of a “lay-ordained” practitioner of Zen meditation to be Bishop of Northern Michigan in the Episcopal Church is a sign of the death of the church. I didn’t get a chance to follow up with her and find out more about what she meant—indeed, lacking any knowledge of the circumstances of the case, I just kept my mouth shut. When I got home I did an internet search and learned a little more about the controversy, which turns not to be a simple question of the fitness of a Buddhist meditator to occupy the seat of a Christian bishop, but also involves canonical issues about the manner of his nomination and election. Nevertheless, it is the Buddhist connection that raises the emotional temperature and makes for the eye-grabbing headlines, and the outcry (such as it is—so often these ecclesiastical fracases arouse passions in the few that one wishes were spent on causes of actual importance, and justified indifference in the many) has put me suddenly on the defensive, if only in my own mind.

Nobody has asked me for my opinion about this affair, but then again, why should they? Besides my overall obscurity as a junior clergyman in an out-of-the-way place, I don’t make a big show of my Buddhist credentials. Indeed, I don’t really consider myself a Buddhist anymore, if I ever really was. And because I was baptized some years after my initiation into the Bodhisattva way, my story could, one might assume, fit quite neatly into a narrative like: “I was wandering lost in the wasteland of false religion (Buddhism) until Jesus found me, and then I came home to a true and living faith (Christianity).” And, indeed, if you told my story that way you might not really be that far from the truth. But there are some crucial variables that determine whether you’d be right or not.

The first one is, what exactly was false religion about Buddhism for me? Was it that the Buddha and his successors have taught erroneous doctrines? Well, no, actually I don’t think so. Was it that Buddhist ethics, philosophy, psychology, ritual and discipline are incapable of producing wholesome transformations in persons and communities and leading toward the realization of the human spiritual destiny? No, not that either. I can’t speak for any one else in the world here, but Buddhism was false religion for me because I had unfinished business with Jesus, with God, with the Bible, with Judeo-Christian civilization and the Euro-American heritage that is my cultural, psychological, and religious blueprint. And in avoiding that business, there was a quality of play-acting about my spiritual intention and practice.

But that doesn’t mean I didn’t profit immensely from my seven years of concerted effort in the realm of the Buddha, and I still profit from it. It doesn’t mean that it was a waste of time or that I reject either what I learned from it, or the people who I learned it with, many of whom continue laboring in that vineyard. I know that there is profound and liberating truth to be found there because I tasted it, and that taste is what converted me, by the grace of God, to taking Christ seriously. It was the purification of intention, the studious application of the mind and body to the truth of each moment, the solid grounding in the rhythms of communal spiritual discipline that I found in the Buddhist monastery that broke through the hard covering cutting me off from God. The conviction that the way of Jesus had to be just as liberating and profound, and more so, because it is engages more of the totality of who I am, was my lodestar for many years. Because, truth to tell, that wasn’t always apparent to me from my experience. While I recognized immediately in my first forays back into church that I was returning home, it was a home I had never lived in, full of strangers. I held onto my intuition of the richness and meaningfulness of the Christian life by analogy with my Buddhist religious experience, and that kept me going until I began to recognize the distinctive gifts of the Holy Spirit in my life, and found my way to follow Jesus.

Which brings me to the second critical variable that confirms or invalidates the classic version of my “conversion” story—the part about a true and living faith. The way I see it, anyone can make an idol out of tenets of belief and fence them around with high walls of exclusivity, fortified with self-righteousness and a pitiless need for certainty. But that is different from a true and living faith, which is always a dialogue between the Truth as it is revealed and transmitted through the community of tradition, and the persons-in-community who are trying to live it and work it and pray it every day right now. And that dialogue is something organic and dynamic that thrives on doubt and questioning, on dismantling and rebuilding, on stretching and synthesizing. That was as true for Jesus and Buddha as it is for us. Their genius, from a human point of view, was that they were willing to radically re-think and re-work their religious traditions, so radically, in fact, that rather being seen as reformers of their respective religions, they come down to us as founders of something entirely new.

While I made a conscious decision in 1994 to leave Buddhism behind and apprentice myself to Christians, and I no longer venerate Buddhist icons or read Buddhist scriptures or attend Buddhist retreats, it wasn’t because I repudiated these things, but because I knew that I needed to learn the language of a true and living Christian faith the same way you learn any new language—by immersion. So I am still learning to pray the Psalms, to study and meditate on the Bible, to celebrate the Holy Eucharist and to proclaim by word and example the good news of Jesus Christ. At this point I feel at home here and know with excitement that this journey is taking me farther than I could have imagined when I started. Yet I have deep and abiding respect for the way I have come, and know that there could have been no shortcuts. My Buddhist years are a crucial, indispensible part of my spiritual autobiography, and not merely because they’re over. They continue to bless my life every day with their own particular gifts, and I would be a poorer person, and a worse Christian, without them.

So I think I’ll keep it in my blogger profile, that part about the being the lay Zen initiate, if only because it says something about the kind of Episcopal priest I am. Some would say “liberal”, even “unorthodox” because in their minds my refusal to repudiate that part of my past is a sign of a “watered-down” faith. But for me it speaks of a mystery, a divine mystery at that. The theologians and teachers of the Church have yet to really do justice to this mystery, and this may be because I’m not sure abstract doctrinal definitions and systematic categories can do much to explicate it. It is a mystery centered on the third person of the Holy Trinity, the Holy Spirit, and the Church (especially in the “West”) has never done a good job with Her. Our theology, forged in the fires of controversy and tested by erroneous doctrine, has tended to create a fortress/prison of positive absolutes, but the Holy Spirit blows where she will, and her work is hidden, only discernible in the who and what that happens, in the living, breathing dialogue of faith.

The mystery I speak of is the Wisdom and Providence of God in offering salvation to humankind in more than one way. Actually, that in itself is not a mystery—it is very easy to understand. The mystery is that God could send “His” only-begotten Son, the unique Incarnate God-man, Jesus Christ, the “only name under heaven given to mortals by which we must be saved” and that this could be completely true, and at the same time, there could be a path of salvation in the Buddha way, in the way of the Vedas and Upanishads, in the way of Islam, and yes, even in the path of the Torah. It will require more blog posts to entertain this question more fully, but I firmly believe that as Christians the most we can claim is that Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and that no one comes to Father except through Him, and that in this truth we have found saving grace and the forgiveness of our sins. We cannot claim on that basis that those who follow other paths are damned, or liars, or ignorant, because we have not followed those paths. To do so would be to twist the words of Jesus into a weapon he never intended to wield.