Lotus and Lily Field Notes

As we get ready for the Center for Sacred Art’s first-ever Day of Gregorian Chant tomorrow I am still reflecting deeply on my “new monasticism” teaching experience on Thursday.

There are many threads of thought drifting about: a recognition in the “new monastics” some of my own evangelical passion as a young person–only really lived out, not just fantasized about and ultimately given up on; the deep sorrow I have been feeling lately as my work project moves every more deeply into the corporate-machine mentality, made more poignant by the determination with which these visionaries seek to build new structures, new ideas, new ways of being in the world;  a wonderment at generations and getting older and the steady tug of “reality” on “what could be”.  Somewhere in there, also, is a reflection on the Buddhist path, its place in the unfolding of new possibilities in our world: namely, offering a depth of wisdom about the roots of suffering and the sources of genuine compassion in response to it, while, perhaps, more reluctant to engage in activism because of its scepticism about pure motivation and it insistence on truly wise, rather than simply passionate, action.

Big thick slices of thoughts, I know, and not particularly well organized.  On a purely egocentric note: though somewhat distressed and ambivalent by my teaching experience, I am feeling, at the same time, a very nice feeling of pride and satisfaction about having entered into a largely evangelical environment, stood my ground, and told my story with clarity.  Not the most significant accomplishment, maybe, but a good one for me: a tiny bit of growing up.

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There’s a Cat Stevens song from the 70s that says:

Oh very young
What will you leave us this time?
You’re only dancing on this earth for a short while

I met some of these Very Young (the 20-something variety) today at Church of the Apostles learning party on “the new monasticism”.  Ranging from the very impressive-visionary-creative to the very self-absorbed-arrogant, and many points in between.  Quite breathtaking, actually, and quite enriching, to see these young people and learn about their commitment to living in intentional community from a passionately evangelical perspective.  See especially The Simple Way and Camden House.

My own chant teaching session went reasonably well (though trimmed down, last-minute, from 90 to 45 minutes).  But the people who rushed up to me afterwards, interested in our chant retreat and workshops and so forth, were all, without exception, in the 50-something range (I’d say about a third of the attendees, though none of the presenters, were in this category).  It seems to me that chant is not an easy thing to embrace, and it doesn’t necessarily sit comfortably in eager youthful brains.  I sensed less interest than I expected from this group, with their strong and quite diverse interests in contemporary revivals and reinterpretations of monasticism.  Though I saw some hints of possibility (one young community member said “it feels so liberating to sing chant–we try to sing our own music but we kind of suck at it”), the group felt restless, eager to get back to their in-depth explorations of what they themselves were creating through their own work.

Still, I feel stimulated and invigorated by this encounter.  Pleased that I can be in the presence of so much evangelical energy and maintain my own sense of balance.  Wondering just how–or whether it’s possible–to open chant up to a younger audience, or whether it’s an activity best suited, in the modern world, for those who have mellowed a bit with age.  And, maybe above all, quite impressed by the visions and possibilities that the Very Young are bringing forth into the world in this seemingly cynical and exhausted age.

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As I mentioned a few days ago, this Thursday afternoon I’m leading a chant workshop for a “New Monasticism Learning Party” at Church of the Apostles, doing a 90-minute presentation for 60 or so people, who are attending the day based on this description: “LEARN how traditional mainline and evangelical congregations can GET INVOLVED in or be enriched by insights from the base-flow of this old/new, ancient-future stream of church.” 

Since I wasn’t sure what “base-flow” was (though it sounds cool), I looked it up:  “stream flow coming from subterranean sources in contrast to surface runoff.”  This is encouraging: I look forward to meeting some folks who are seeking a deeper place to be.

I have put together a “Vespers for Eastertide” with a nice chunk of interesting and fairly straightforward chants (many “Alleluia”s), and plan to lead the group in as much singing, and exploration of singing as spiritual practice, as we reasonably can during the time we have.  Along the way there are a few points I want to make:

1. Chant and monastic spirituality: the roots of chant in the renunciation of the desert.  The virtues of humility/listening, charity/offering, and discipline/attentiveness as embodied in the practice of chant.  The flow between effort and grace.  The potency of the community.  The central role of beauty.

2. Chant and silence: what happens when the beat gets turned off.  What happens when even the singing itself is turned off.  The point is not to create a dualism between silence/good and sound/bad, but to recognize the particular gifts that silence offers.  It’s like a very nourishing, very unusual kind of food.  Healthy and delicious.

3. Chant and the power of the ancient: the shape of sacred language and the form of the divine office: morphic resonance and how intention is captured within the sounds and structures of tradition.  The use of play–”free movement within limits”–to continue to enliven the tradition, to find its growing edge while continuing to be nourished by its roots.

I am curious to see what happens with this new and different audience.  As I understand it the people there will be younger than those I usually teach.  My last experience in this domain was rather difficult: a little over a year ago I was invited to be a guest speaker at an Evergreen State College course.  That group included a number of students that were quite hostile to Christianity and its artifacts.  While I can certainly sympathize, I found myself spending most of the session on the defensive.  Though I think things came out OK, it was a difficult experience.  I’m sure Thursday’s session will be different–obviously these folks are pretty committed to the Christian tradition.  That in itself is, however, a bit of a departure from the people I normally teach, who are generally, like me, somewhere liminally in between Christian tradition and something else (whether Buddhism, or Sufism, or a private spiritual journey of some kind).  I feel a bit more nervous than I usually do going into a teaching gig, which I think is a sign of the potential for rich learning all around.  I’m grateful for this opportunity!

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At Nalandabodhi class tonight, talking about the practicalities of compassionate action.  Which, at least from tonight’s discussion, I would sum up this way: you wade in with the best (or worst) of intentions, and then just pay attention to what happens when you get stymied: when your ego gets squished, or your expectations are thwarted, or your nice gooey ball of do-good ego candy gets smooshed ungraciously right back in your face.  And then: then the real work begins.  Empty it all out, right there in the middle of the mess.  Pay attention.  See where your ego is screaming for vengeance, or escape, or something easy.  And let it go, and go forward–and then maybe, if you’re real lucky, something will open up, a “gap in consciousness” that will allow genuine compassion to pour through.  Not the smarmy egotistical condescending garden-variety compassion, but non-referential compassion, ultimate compassion: what Trungpa called “radiation without a radiator”.

I find compassion very, very tough.  But there was something liberating about this insight tonight, this notion that to find your way to compassion you have to start somewhere, mess it up, and then pay attention where to go next.

This study of Lojong (“seven points mind training”) practice is just getting under way.  We’ve covered 5 of about 50 “slogans”.   But so far, so very, very good.

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Tonight at Lotus & Lily we continued our investigation of Keenan’s “Mahayana Mark”.  Our conversation about Jesus and John the Baptist was diverted, most fruitfully, into a reflection on our own experiences of baptism.  Everyone there tonight (I think pretty much everyone in the group) grew up in one flavor or another of Christianity (Lutheran, Presbyterian, Nazarene, Catholic, Baptist), and it was fun to hear the many different stories of our “encounters with water”.

But most memorable to me about tonight’s session was to hear one of our members talk about his experience being baptized as a teenager, and his understanding of that act as a committment to serve God, and how when years later he came across the Bodhisattva vow he recognized it as simply a continuation, or maybe a clarification, of that vow he had already made at baptism.

That is very beautiful, and very inspiring.  My own experience of baptism (also as a teenager) was a last-ditch and somewhat desperate attempt to find peace and reconciliation with a community I was to leave behind not so many years later.  My encounter with Buddhism often (not always, but often) feels like a warm sandy beach I have been thrown up on after a long stretch in the tempestuous ocean. It is hard for me to look back, especially back that far into my teenage years, with anything other than a sincere hope that it will stay behind me in my past where it belongs.  

But something about the warm-hearted and magnanimous embrace of both traditions I felt in Baptist-bodhisattva story tonight gave me a tingle.  I’m not sure I will get there, exactly.  But I like the idea of examining the sincere intention behind a teenager’s aspiration, and looking there for some genuine seeds of bodhicitta.

It could be that we all took our first steps on the Buddhist-Christian path in that initial encounter with the waters of compassion there in the baptismal font.  Maybe we’re just looking for a way to truly fulfill the aspiration established at that time (by ourselves, or by our sincerely aspiring parents). 

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I have been working hard today on several chant projects, including my Church of the Apostles ”new monasticism learning party” gig this Thursday, the Center for Sacred Art Day of Gregorian Chant next Saturday, and a workshop at the Priory Spirituality Center the following Saturday.

Getting into these forms so deeply, I continue to reflect on a notion that’s been rattling around in my brain for a few weeks: the “flickering” between form and formlessness that is an explicit part of Buddhist practice but is less visible within the concrete solidity of Christian theology.  John Keenan points to this in his exploration of Jesus’ movement between desert and town, between journeys into absolute reality (“Abba”) and immersion in the causes and conditions of everyday life.  Neither experience by itself suffices.

In my work with chant I have had many experiences of utter transport, bliss, the dissolution of boundaries–especially when Peregrine has hit the heights of delicious unisons and well-crafted interpretations.  But I am learning to be wary of such profound moments.  In a conversation with Jan Chozen Bayes of Great Vow Zen Monastery last summer she told me that her community had explored some beautiful polyphonic chants as part of their Zen practice–and gave it up.  It was, she said, too distracting and caused them to lose focus.

I know what she means.  Beware of rapture–it will take you away from being awake in the here and now.  And I find myself approaching chant with a little less of that sense of aura and wonder about it.  That’s a good thing, I believe.

At the same time, though, there’s a hint of the puritanical in that attitude–a tendency I certainly have myself, with my good Protestant upbringing.  The desert–the unconditioned–is still what it is, it still feeds us, it still points us to what is really true.  And in my experience, anyway, good chant moments open up into that empty luminosity, pure being, that mystics and masters everywhere point to.

How to balance these two realities?  One answer might be this experience of “flickering”–embracing both these polar opposites, with a huge wink to oneself the whole time: neither this nor that is ultimate–I just pretend that they are.  I engage fully in the moments when I am taken beyond the mundane (as in Jesus’ experience of baptism and transfiguration); I engage fully in the moments when I am deeply immersed in the mundane.

In a way, working on a chant project is like that: there are lots of details to take care of, lots of practical considerations.  But then you start singing, and something happens, and you find yourself once again in that place beyond names and forms.  How exactly does that happen?  It’s a neat trick…

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Due to a technical glitch I lost the last week of posts, including a few “Mahayana Mark” reflections on Jesus and John the Baptist, along with some forgettable whimpering about Easter and my neurosis about the line “He is risen” (the worst part is that I also lost a very nice comment from my friend Donna, who helped me to see that there’s a fine line between religious sensitivity and plain old whining).

This has been a rich week of exploration, both in Keenan’s book and in reading Chogyam Trungpa’s “Training the Mind and Cultivating Loving-Kindness”.  One of my (lost) reflections was raising the question, “What is the ‘practice of the middle way’ that Keenan sees in the Gospel of Mark?”  Trungpa’s book is all about a very concrete form of Mahayana practice, very clear and precise.  Though I think such precision exists in Christian monasticism to some degree, I don’t find it in the gospels, even in Keenan’s presentation.  Doubtless against the background of Temple religion and emerging synagogue practice, Mark’s Jesus can be seen as resisting a too-defined religious path.  And yet…for each of us individually, and for us together in community, there are choices to be made, an individual “rule of life” (as in “rule of St. Benedict”) to guide us.  What would a Buddhist-Christian rule of life look like?

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Jesus is sleeping just now, as it’s Holy Saturday.  So I’ll try to type some quiet reflections on my own rather curious Holy Week, while he goes about a business far more significant than mine:

A few days ago I stepped away a bit from the “Christian practice” part of my “Buddhist view, Christian practice” tag line, letting my daily Psalmody go into eclipse as I wrestled with difficulties at work, a home data catastrophe, and the end of a beloved commuting vehicle.  It didn’t occur to me at the time that I had chosen the thick of the drama of Holy Week to make this change.

In a sense, the whole idea of Holy Week is rather foreign to my native soil.  Growing up, I had only a vague idea of what “Lent” was, because of my Catholic friends.  At my church we didn’t do much until Palm Sunday, which then fast-forwarded quickly to Easter Sunday.  Our ministers were always quick to point out that, in our church, “the cross is empty”, meaning that Jesus himself is Risen Indeed, 24/7/365, and there’s no particular need to tarry over lugubrious details.

But more recently, from college days, in Israel (and I was in Jerusalem on Good Friday, twenty-some years ago) and on into my own Episcopal confirmation five years ago, I have had more than a few pretty important experiences journeying with Jesus on the Via Dolorosa.

So it did seem odd to me this week when I found myself turning to Buddhist comfort rather than Christian in the midst of my own little mini-Passion.  The liturgical cycle is both strange and wonderful: strange in the ways it seeks to bring our emotions up and down independent of our own natural course, wonderful in the ways it opens up new and revealing aspects of experience through its grand and poetic reverberations.  I think this week for me it has felt inconvenient: somehow that story, the passion narrative and the Tenebrae and Good Friday and all that, demands all of one’s psychic attention–sort of like going to Wagner’s Ring Cycle on four successive evenings.  I found that, this time around, I just didn’t have much space for it.

And yet somehow, the story has kept intruding in interesting ways.  The whole pain-and-suffering thing of our circumstantial difficulties is one thread.  The other day I happened to put on the Jesus Christ Superstar soundtrack and was brought back to the story again.  This afternoon, helping my sister-in-law paint theatrical sets at the parochial school where she works, the place was abuzz with pre-Easter-vigil activity, and there it was again.  And I did find myself, yesterday and today, reading from Lamentations, especially powerful this morning (and I know the words because we used to sing them in Sunday school: “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end.  They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness O Lord.”  However my heart may be yearning toward a Buddhist atheism, those words are so beautiful, and so comforting.

So sleep, Jesus: you’ve got a big day tomorrow.  However fatigued, or distracted, or inspired by other stories I might be, you always surprise me with the ways you wake up again into my life.

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After wading through a couple of days of samsaric muck (did I mention that my beloved 1986 Nissan Stanza Wagon, my “dad drives to work and the dump” car, just gave up the ghost?), it was so lovely to be back with Peregrine this evening, singing beautiful Gregorian chants for Apostles and just thoroughly enjoying the gorgeous and subtle aesthetics spawned by the depths of the Christian tradition.  Yesterday Victoria and I made a brief escape to Seattle’s Asian Art Museum where we thrilled to a wonderful 1000-armed Guan Yin statue.  The perfect embodiment of practice, as her eleven heads gradually transitioned from crowned bodhisattvas (not yet fully enlightened) to uncrowned and perfected Buddhas.  It made sense in terms of my Mahayana Path studies: I guess I really am drinking the Koolaid.

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Yesterday I mentioned hilarity, and in their own distinctive ways both Buddhism and Chrisianity can be deeply comic.  Here’s a chunk of a wonderful poem, a comic-but-not-hilarious poem by Eugene Warren, that I first came across back in my Simpson College evangelical days, nearly 30 years ago now.  I loved it then and love it now:

Christ came juggling from the tomb,
flipping and bouncing death’s stone pages,
tossing those narrow letters high
against the roots of dawn spread in cloud.

You can find the whole thing here.  It’s arguable that during Holy Week such a celebration is just a tad premature, but if you can’t juggle on your way up Golgotha how can you do it out on your way out of the Holy Sepulchre?

This has actually been a rather Golgotha-esque day: a major data loss in our household is going to result in hours of rework, and there’s still some precious information that just can’t be recovered.  It’s been pretty grim, actually.  Putting this together with an ongoing unsettled feeling I have about my place of work and its current dynamics (also rather dark and heavy and grim), I’m going to do a bit of juggling myself: namely, for a period of time here I’m going to let go of my daily Christian practice of chanting Psalms and reading Scripture, and focus on the medicine I feel will be most efficacious right now: Buddhist meditation and visualizations of compassion. 

Does that mean that Christianity isn’t as important to me as Buddhism?   I don’t know.  Maybe it means that a dual practice assumes a certain amount of psychic space (which I don’t feel I have right now).  Or maybe this is just a phase of the journey.  I do hope to find my ground and recover my ability to continue my ongoing meditation on the texts and teachings of the tradition of my childhood, but that’s not where I’m at right now.  Feels like it’s time to get some real help, and to me that means spending my time with the brisk air of liberation from suffering, and the healing power of compassion and equanimity, as opposed to one more round of wrestling with Yahweh.

I must say, deciding that makes me feel a bit lighter.  And this little bit of clarity, this little bit of letting go of that particular struggle, does feel like “juggling from the tomb.”

It’s not my preference to get quite so close to the bone in this blog, and I do so with a certain amount of trepidation that I’ll come back here tomorrow and say, “Man, chanting those Psalms is key–I need to keep doing that.”  But it seems worth recording where my mind and heart seem to be turning when they are under duress.  Such moments do offer their insights…

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My sister called yesterday to ask me if she could quote from this blog for a presentation she’s giving on “Spiritual Practice and Emotional Maturity”.  It’s something of a milestone for my sister to regard me as mature on any topic at all.  I have played my little-brother role to the hilt for decades now; having an older sister always give one the excuse to feel young again, simply by acting a little bratty now and then.  I did check with her to see if she was looking to me to provide some counter-examples, but no, apparently she thinks I’ve grown up a bit. 

Sometimes I think this blog is just a little bit too mature.  I have a separate sideline writing parody lyrics (some of them unobtrusively posted here), and I keep thinking that maybe some of that amusement will find eventually its way onto these pages.  It feels like this work of weaving together dharma and gospel is a bit heavy sometimes (you think, huh?).  For example, I don’t know a single Buddhist-Christian joke.  What would Jesus and Buddha say after they walked into a bar?  [OK, I know half of a joke, one of my faves: Jesus walks into a hotel, slaps three nails down on the counter and says to the clerk, "Can you put me up for the night?"].  Perhaps it will be a sign of the (im)maturity of our little movement that some good B-C humor will emerge.  But it might take a while.

In the meantime, I will do my best to continue to serve as a beacon of emotional maturity, both to support my sister’s good work and to make the whole notion of Buddhist-Christian practice appear as respectable as possible.  How else can we expect to be invited to the best parties?

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I Just got back from Lotus & Lily’s first discussion session on The Gospel of Mark: A Mahayana Reading.  It was a rich conversation, and I am feeling particularly grateful for the good thinking and above all the good intentions and committment to the process displayed by all.  A few days ago I told a friend of mine about our upcoming discussion, and he said “How fortunate you are to have a group of friends that can get together and talk about things you really care about.”  Yes indeed–what a great group, and an excellent discussion.

A few observations:

1. Re Keenan’s line: “In Luke, if one knocks on the door, it will be opened.  In Mark, one knocks at a closed door that, remaining closed, rivets attention to the mystery it hides.”  We had a good conversation about that one, with one person asserting that eventually the door will be opened to a personally meaningful connection with the divine, while another said they found the closed door “invigorating”.  Though there was much talk about patterns of consciousness and dependent co-origination and the meaning of emptiness, I was really glad that we were able to tie the concepts to life experiences and life questions.  Hoping for much more of that in the sessions to come…
2. One of our members raised an excellent set of questions about Keenan’s apparent disregard for the historical background of Mark.  This came in the context of a conversation about the disciples in Mark, who “just don’t get it”, unlike the many others Jesus encounters in healing and exorcism episodes, who apparently do get it and abruptly leave the narrative.  The point was made that from a historical perspective the reason the disciples don’t get it is that the Pauline church was seeking to demonstrate that one didn’t need to be Jewish to be on the inside.  I have my questions about that theory (am looking forward to getting more information from the person who raised the point). But his comment that “Keenan tries to have it both ways–saying that he will read Mark any way he wants to while claiming to represent Mark’s actual intentions in his writing” is worth consideration.  I would agree that Keenan isn’t as careful as he should be about emphasizing the “a Mahayana Reading” part of his title, and confuses assertions about original intent based on historical context with how Mark *can be* read using a Buddhist filter.  On the other hand, Keenan quotes Frank Kermode (page 21–for those who were there, this is the infamous “crossed-out section”):  ”whatever we may find to say about the community for which it was originally written (and the evidence will come largely from the gospel itself, in defeating circularity), it is far beyond us to reproduce the tacit understandings that existed between this dead writer and his dead audience.  Those accords are lost.”  Keenan concludes, “To paraphrase Pogo, we have found the Sitz im Leben (historical context) for Mark, and it is us.”  Fair enough, but at many points during the analysis this is less clear than it could be.  Furthermore, for many in the group this position seems to feel a bit too much like the “I’m going to read the text any way I want to” approach.  It is in fact a pretty radically literary (rather than historical) approach.  We’ll see if that gets any more comfortable as we move into the commentary itself.
3. One final point: we spent a fair bit of time discussing the “three patterns of consciousness” (other-dependent, imaginary, perfected) and the two truths (relative and absolute).  In addition to being part of the standard Buddhist obsessions with the two-thises and three-thats, we discovered that it’s fairly important to recognize that these disparate classifications don’t exactly line up easily.  I’ve discovered from my Buddhist studies that this kind of stuff happens *all the time* in teachings.  It takes some getting used to–but it’s certainly true that Keenan’s lack of precision in this area doesn’t help.  Again we will see how much of a problem this poses as we move into the commentary.  However, it was great to see that the fundamental challenge posed by Keenan, to look at the figure and teaching of Jesus in Mark as an invitation to enter into the middle path, the pathless path between absolute reality and worldly conventions, came across clearly and was the subject of some good conversation.

To me point 1 above is a very hopeful sign that this can be a meaningful experience for folks in the group.  2 and 3 are items for us to watch.  One group member commented afterward, “To me, this kind of discussion, people sharing ideas and experiences–this is real worship!”

That is very nice to hear–and I for one will be glad if we can continue to make this tunneling through material (even if it’s difficult) a part of our community life.

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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 perched on the seventh floor of the fabulous Embassy Suites Hotel, here in Dublin, Ohio, a nice Midwestern community and home of my day-job employer, OCLC.  Dublin has some lovely tranquil areas, but this hotel is not in one of them: it’s part of a large complex of generic modern American office-park-trash, a maze of highways, hotels, and brand names of every description.

After a restless night spent under polyester sheets and blankets, I woke up early this morning, feeling anxious about these business meetings I’m attending, the future of my project and its funding, and other concerns vague and not-so-vague.  I spent the extra early-morning time doing a meditation on the Four Immeasurables (equanimity, love, compassion, joy), and found in that practice the perspective, and the willingness to embrace What Is So, that helped me get through my day and into this evening with enough oomph to actually write a blog post.  Once in a while, interconnectedness just seems so effortless and valuable, separation so useless and ineffective, that I wonder why I could ever possibly try any other approach.

The trajectory of karma is strong, though, so as useful as these serendipitous episodes might be, I don’t expect them to persist without continued effort.  And fortunately here, cut off a bit from both the distractions and the support structures of my day-to-day, there’s plenty of material to work with, new perspectives to be had on what works and on what doesn’t work.  And of course, there is absolutely nothing inherent in this situation that wouldn’t make a complete realization of buddha-mind available, right here in Dublin.

For a moment this morning, I saw miniature representations of the Buddha in the squares of the checker-board pattern on the hotel carpet.  And found myself smiling as I walked out the door to my Ohio rental car and my day of endless meetings in airless rooms.

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Couldn’t resist one last post before heading off to the Heartland for a several days of business meetings.  Tonight’s Nalanda West class was fabulous.  We spent a lot of time talking about the Bodhisattva vow ceremony and the sorts of issues of belonging (Woody Allen: “I wouldn’t want to belong to a club that would have me as a member”), and egotism (“yes, *I* will liberate all sentient beings from suffering–aren’t I cool?”), and getting trapped in the trappings (“God, I just love Asian men in skirts”) that come up around such an idea.

Several other class members had similar reservations to the ones I posted here last week, and it was helpful to put them out and take a closer look at them.  What’s clear is that this ritual, like all other rituals (really in Buddhism and elsewhere), is simply a form of “mind training”, intended to help coax a stubborn and willful ego into taking on tasks that will lead inexorably toward its obliteration.

We talked about the way Buddhist teachers in this tradition will play with rituals, arbitrarily making them more or less complex, sending one disciple off to the store for a certain variety of rice wine because it’s required, telling another not to worry about some important element but rather to “just visualize it”.  Because in the end it’s all play.  The image that came to my mind was a flickering in and out, flickering in to sharp focus with clear intention and attention to ritualistic detail, flickering out again into emptiness, spaciousness, where neither the person doing the ritual nor the ritual itself can be said to be truly existent.

My range of experience doesn’t allow me to say how common this attitude is in Buddhism (fundamentalists can be found everywhere, I’m pretty sure) but it does strike me that this playful, attentive-yet-loose perspective on the specifics of religous practice might be hard to find in Christian circles.  You can find the two poles, the careful attention and the relaxed looseness, but bifurcated into high and low church communities, both of which take themselves very seriously and don’t have much room for a flexible oscillation between them.  That’s because the object of the ritual is too serious, the consequences too permanent, the ultimate aim too everlasting to be dealt with lightly.

What would a Christian ritual look like if at its core was the notion that neither the wafer nor the priest nor the communicant was truly existent?

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I will be travelling on business most of this week, and will only be able to pop in for Buddhist-Christian reflections if the stars line up in unusual combinations.  Plenty of meditation/contemplation fodder for upcoming musings, however!

Most likely back on the blog on Saturday or Sunday, the 8th or 9th.

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This morning was Peregine’s last mass at St. James for Lent, and then I zipped across town to Nalanda West for a lecture and exhibit on Tibetan Buddhist thangka paintings.  Although these quick-change experiences can be a bit taxing, they are invaluable for bringing the two traditions vividly into contact with each other.  Singing this morning was also more vivid than usual because of an extraordinary concert I went to last night at Seattle’s Town Hall, given by Trio Mediaeval.  Exquisite, precise singing by three talented sopranos: medieval music done in a modernist style that was quite breathtaking and inspiring.

After seeing these world-class singers, it was a bit daunting to get up this morning and dash over to the cathedral and hack our way through the chants of the mass–it didn’t result in quite the same level of refinement, but it was rich.  There is this odd dual experience of performance and sacred practice: you’re on stage in a way (there were literally hundreds of people at the mass this morning), and in a way offering your energy to them and in a way offering your craft to them, and in a way being present to the sacredness of the moment as well.  For whatever reason I felt able to go with the Christian-ness of the experience, with the story of Lazarus and the catechumens getting ready for Easter, I think in large part because the music was challenging and I had some solo bits I was responsible for, so I didn’t have a chance to get distracted with philosophy and the petty yammering voices of dissent that are normally with me continually at such events.

I was thinking during the service of my friend Ira Fein who taught me a little Jewish cantorial singing a couple of years ago.  He shared with me the traditional role of the cantor as a spiritual guide, facilitating the energy of the service and in some way helping to create the experience for them.  This morning felt something like that, and it was very fine.

The thangka exhibit was extraordinary in its own way.  We ended up purchasing a beautiful Vajrasattva thangka, exquisitely done, very refined and detailed and glowing with radiant energy and meaning.  As I’ve intimated here, the vibrational pull of this tradition seems to be getting stronger and more focused for me, and though the purchase was at Victoria’s urging (she has an excellent intuitive sense about such things), I am quite happy that we have this image in our space now.

Working with the detailed subtlety of Gregorian chant, and the detailed subtlety of Tibetan images: not a bad way to spend a Sunday.

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I was on the phone with my parents this afternoon, and my dad proudly told me a story: he and my mom were at the mall when they saw a woman talking with some Jehovah’s Witnesses at a table they had set up.  She walked away from them and past my parents, and my dad said to her, “Did you know that’s a cult?”  And they continued talking with her and told her about their church, and the next Sunday she was there and, as my mom said, “everyone there was so wonderfully nice and friendly to her” and sure enough, she came back again the next week!

In my parents’ religious world, the one I grew up in, “cult” has a very specific meaning: a weird, wrong, and dangerous religious sect that was after your money, your soul, and just maybe some ritual abuse of some unspecified kind.  I grew up on strong warnings about Hare Krishnas and Mormons, Transcendental Meditation and Satanists.  When I went to live with my parents for a bit after graduating from college, and had taken up yoga practice, dad said to me, “Did you know yoga was a cult?”

So this JWs-at-the-mall story had a very familiar ring.  Just to be clear, Dad told the story with genuine pleasure.  He wasn’t gloating, I don’t think, and I don’t think (though I’m not sure) that he was telling the story to tweak me.  Well, maybe a little.  Anyway, what surprised me wast that it was actually rather wonderful to hear how happy he was about it.

Of course for me, with my habitual reactivity, when I hear stories like that lots of judgments pop up, as in “and what makes the JW’s more ‘cultish’ than your church, with its enticing, toe-tapping music, friendly happy people, complete answer to every life problem, etc., etc.?”  What was new for me today, perhaps, was just that tiniest bit of perspective, of a willingness to feel my dad’s happiness at his doing what he experiences as good work, rather than merely reacting instinctively with judgmental thoughts like the above.  And at least a bit of thinking, “whatever is going to help this woman toward the greatest good, that’s what’s best–whether it’s this church, or some other, or no church at all.”

In the end my habitual negative reaction to stories like that (stories of Christian triumphalism and the everyone-else-is-a-cult-but-we’re-not mentality) is equally entrapped in the same game that leads to the story in the first place: a no-win game of good and bad.

It’s as though my dad and I are playing on a checkerboard with black and white squares.  However he moves his pieces, if I move my pieces in response we are part of the same game.  So what I’m trying to learn to do is to get off the checkerboard altogether.  In my mind, anyway, I’m trying a different approach: embracing and loving and celebrating him, regardless of whether he’s right or wrong, regardless of whether the Jehovah’s Witnesses or my dad’s fellow church-members or this woman who is on her own journey of discovery are right or wrong–just embrace ‘em all, and embrace the aspiration for their highest good, whatever that might be.

I dunno, I guess I must be part of some mind-destroying Buddhist cult, or something….

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