Lotus and Lily Field Notes

Some time ago I read someplace that medieval monks imagined that the angels were singing with them when they chanted the divine office.  Recently reading Bernard of Clairvaux’s sermons on the Song of Songs, I found at least one primary source for this lovely idea, in his seventh sermon:

That the holy angels do condescend to mingle with us when we praise God in psalmody is very clearly stated by the Psalmist: “The princes went before, joined with the singers, in the midst of young damsels playing on timbrels. (Psalm 68:26)  He also said, “I will sing praise to you in the sight of the angels. (Psalm 138:1) … Joined therefore as you are in songs of praise with heaven’s own singers, since you too are citizens like all the saints, and part of God’s household, sing wisely.”

I had a remarkable and wholly unexpected experience of singing with the angels last weekend.  I had made my way to St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Seattle, looking for a meeting of the Contemplative Wisdom Community.  I inadvertently stumbled into the church’s Sunday evening service instead.  It is a contemplative Eucharist service, so it had the right feel to it, but after sitting a few minutes with the 30 or so people gathered there I began to notice that something was quite different.  Many of the participants–certainly more than half of them–were challenged with some sort of developmental disability or other (I regret that I don’t know the correct terms to describe these things–one man shook very badly, others seemed to have mental disabilities or other forms of non-standard behavior or demeanor).  Here I was, expecting to connect with the super-cool, super-high-functioning mystics, and I found myself instead in the presence of a very different kind of energy: very beautiful, as it happened, and devoted, simple and clear.  The service included a segment for hands-on healing–very beautiful.  The music was simple and sung with gusto–very beautiful.  The responsory portions, the Eucharist passed from person to person (sometimes with shaking hands or the assistance of others)–very beautiful indeed.  My heart cracked open with wonder and joy, my habits of resistance and resentment, my deconstruction of the theology of the texts were washed away, almost miraculously.

There were angels there that day, and I felt privileged to be among them.  Doubtless I am romanticizing what was after all a brief encounter, but in the presence of this heartful childlike clarity I felt convicted (old-fashioned religious term, entirely appropriate) of all the addictions to sophistication and cerebral complications I indulge in.  There’s an Orthodox saying, “the road from the head to the heart is the longest journey.”  That evening I made a couple of steps down that path.  May I have the grace to continue walking!

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I’m very happy to point to a new blog in our little Buddhist-Christian community: Son-Christianity.  I mentioned the writer, In-Myoung Won (Don Erickson’s dharma name), a couple of days ago.  Within hours of our exchange he’d launched this blog, and it will be great fun to watch his most fascinating vision for a new community, informed by the Jesus sutras, unfold.

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I got a very nice email today from Don Erickson in Tampa:

Dear Joseph,
Doing some surfing, I found the Lotus and Lily group and was excited to see it. I am a chaplain at Tampa General Hospital and in the ordination process with the United Church of Christ. I am a graduate of Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York (2004). When asked, I often call myself a Buddhist-slanted Christian. I have a vision of building a church – with a brand new ecclesiology and liturgy – using the vehicle of the Jesus Sutras, ancient Chinese Christian texts dating back to the 7th century which are written through the lens of Taoism and Buddhism. The closest thing it seems to such a church is your group in Seattle. I am interested in the operation and structure of your group. I see that you discuss, meditate, and chant, but I wonder if there is any liturgy involved? How much interest is there? In other words, how many come to your meetings?
Anyway, I thank you for your time. I appreciate any feedback you can give me.
Metta,
Don Erickson

I shared with Don some thoughts about Lotus & Lily; since it’s a good update on where we’re at, I thought I’d share it here as well:

Hi Don,

This is very exciting! It’s wonderful to connect with you–I’m so glad you found us. Your idea is fascinating, and I hope you continue to share your work. Maybe you should start a blog–I’m finding that a great way to record the group’s process as well as my own. Plus we need to get more Buddhist-Christian bloggers out there!

Lotus and Lily definitely does have a structure, and it’s been very interesting to watch it evolve. Our sessions currently include both Buddhist and Christian (quasi-Gregorian) chanting, 20 minutes of silent meditation pretty much in the Buddhist style, and “prayers of the people”; following a short break we have a discussion about a text we’re reading and close with a Quaker-style silent circle and a gassho bow.
We are in fact just on the point of a group conversation about what we do and why, as we continue to get more intentional about our practice. Personally I’m very interested in liturgy (I sing Gregorian chant with a local group and we just released our second CD) but we have not incorporated much in the way of “high church” liturgical activities. We’ll see where our most recent conversations go–I think there may be further interest in that sort of thing.

We are pretty small right now, about seven regular members. We’ve lost a number of people recently who left the area for work-related reasons, but part of our plan is to more actively promote what we’re doing in the community. We’re confident that there’s a lot of interest–we just need to get more intentional about our outreach, and that’s what we’re preparing for now.

I’d be delighted to share more with you about what we’re up to, and would also love to hear more about your own plans.

If you don’t mind, I’d like to post your note and my response to my own blog at www.lotuslily.net, just to let people know what you’re up to. Would you mind my doing that?

Many blessings on your work–sounds totally cool!

Joseph

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I’m getting ready for another Nalandabodhi test on Monday.  So I’m in “stuff my head full of ideas” mode, which is not quite the same as “articulate useful insights for self and others” mode.  Lots of “four thises” and “five thats,” of which Buddhism in general and Tibetan Buddhism in particular abounds.  Traditional mnemonic devices, suitable for some times and places but a challenge to my brain.  Nevertheless, I love the material, which explores the stages of the path to enlightenment.  And I love the way all the structure is, to use Robert Thurman’s term, “heuristic”: it doesn’t describe the way things actually are, but describes a provisional, useful, effective, but by definition inaccurate view to help us along the way.  Buddhism is full of these paradoxes.  Maybe I’m getting dazzled or sloppy or something, but it’s all feeling pretty comfortable (in its own, naturally uncomfortable way!) and pretty compelling.

And why not make room for a creator God and his Savior son in that provisional, useful, effective way of viewing things?  Just as long as we empty them out at the end of the day, to make room for the more profound truths to which they point, but which remain elusive, free of the constrictions of concept and language.

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I’m back late from a nice l-o-o-o-n-g walk (2.5 hours) from my house up to Green Lake and around and back, with my good friend Bob Boiko, covering the usual topics of our late-night walks going back 15 years: technology-information-management-Buddhism-youth-age-more-Buddhism-creativity-writing-reading-and I’m not sure what else. 

I have been feeling grateful for my good male friends Bob and Daoud and Henry, not so many but really good ones, and also both grateful and sad for the many many lost ones like Brian and Will and Steve and Fred and Clint and many more. 

Last night at Nalandabodhi, in that terrible wonderful session on bodhisattva vows, our teacher talked about the value of being able to connect with dharma friends to share the successes and failures of the dharma path.  I appreciate that, but for now anyway I feel very happy with my own personal and very informal dharma friends, the ones who have known me before and the ones who know me now.  On walks like the one tonight, I really feel like I am on The Way.

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I’m really loving Ajahn Munindo.  Listen to this: 

Instead of attempting to cover up the empty feeling with food or perfume or extreme sports, the practice of Dhamma encourages us to trust that, if we discipline attention carefully and skilfully, we can turn around and receive that feeling without reacting or shying away from it. How does it actually feel to feel, ‘I want something and I feel this sense of lack, this sense that I’m not all here’? If we really listen to this, what we can find, instead of an increase in our suffering as our perceived enemy takes us over, is a genuine, naturally arising, warm sense of joy.

This image of turning around and receiving our feelings really gets me.  So often I just want to climb out of my skin, make my whole emotional superstructure just go away.  But that is not the way to peace.

There is a strain of Biblical intepretation, kind of fringy but still very powerful, represented by teachers like Emmett Fox and Religious Science, that views the “law” referred to in the Bible as an awakening to what is truly so.  Of course I suppose any orthodox Christian would say that, but in this tradition “what is truly so” is more deeply rooted in our own experience: God’s law is written on our heart.  But I guess that’s pretty orthodox too.  It just seems to be taught, oftentimes, at least within the mainstream context, as though the law is something external, something that has little to do with our own deep inner sense of rightness.  I’m sure in the Buddhist world there are plenty of teachers and adherents with the same attitude. 

 For me the best Buddhist teaching…Christian teaching…any spiritual teaching has to come from that place of a deep trust of what is fundamentally true about us, however covered over by confusion and misunderstanding.  If we can turn around and receive what our own experience is telling us, a truly clear seeing becomes much more available.

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Tonight was the last class in my Nalanda West Mahayana View series, and it was excellent as ever. We have been exploring the two schools of Rantong (“empty of self”) and Shentong (“empty of other”). The latter school focuses on a fundamental luminosity that is beyond emptiness. Rather difficult stuff, but it brings Christian negative theology strongly to mind. I’ve been developing an itch to read “The Cloud of Unknowing” lately, stimulated I think by this line of Buddhist reasoning (or beyond-reasoning) I’ve been encountering.

I must say it is quite breathtaking, after this rigorous and careful deconstruction of concept after concept, and layer after layer of imputed and imaginary reality, to come across, at the end, this assertion of luminosity. It’s as though we’ve been peeling away layer after layer of the onion, but at the center, when we are fully expecting to find…nothing, we find instead…something. Marvellous!

And an excellent discussion as well tonight of the many pitfalls that lie between where-we-are, embedded in luminosity but unaware of it, and where-we-may-yet-be, fully awake to the sacredness of all reality, empty and luminous. It’s easy to get tripped up along the way, because a luminosity that is tinged with *anything* else is not true luminosity (though it might very well feel like luminosity and look like luminosity). An interesting take on “Lucifer” as the angel of light that’s not quite perfectly bright.

Better to avoid such dualistic thoughts, I suppose, but there is something there: even in Buddhism a sort of implied relative dualism between the accurate view of suchness and our dream-like delusions of suffering or bliss.

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