Lotus and Lily Field Notes

Since I’ve had angels on my mind lately: here’s wishing you a Happy Michaelmas! You can take it seriously, or seriously, but it’s worth celebrating in whatever way you see fit.

In the alternate history what-if-Buddhism-took-Europe-by-storm scenario I keep fantasizing about, Michael would make a most excellent bodhisattva, kind of like Manjushri:

After all, illusion-cutting is illusion-cutting, wherever you are.

When I was a kid we used to have “sword drills” in Sunday School, a competition to see which of us could look up Bible verses more quickly. See Ephesians 6:17: “…the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God…” And now I am learning about the Buddhist “sword of the Spirit”, which, in the vajrayana tradition, is very much about the slice-slice-slice of dissecting illusions. Break apart cause and effect, sensation and perception and concept; break apart the ego; break apart the chains of karma.
I think when you look deeply into Christian scripture you find that it is doing the same things, through much more subtle means. Look at Abraham, or Isaiah, or Jesus, or Paul. There is within their teachings a potential for emptiness and indeterminacy. We’re back to Mahayana Mark territory here…

So may your Michaelmas, or the few hours that are left of it, bring you the courage to cut through your delusive self-clinging, and thereby lead you to freedom from illusion–whether your implement is a Christian sword or a Buddhist vajra-cleaver.

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What makes a great community?  This is a question we are pondering at Lotus & Lily as we continue to explore what it means for us to exist, to grow, to thrive and be healthy.

Maybe above all is a clear purpose.  And that makes the question of why we are here especially important.  The list of reasons I mentioned a couple of days ago might constitute a set of synergistic perspectives; it might represent diverging needs that represent differences that are too great to truly overcome.  I very much appreciate Donna’s comment that L&L gives her a safe place to cultivate her unique identity: I think that is in a way the bottom line for all of us.

A few years ago when I participated in one of my first big interfaith events, I remember looking around the large cathedral filled with hundreds of people from many different traditions and thinking, “I feel so much safer here than I do in church on Sunday morning.”  And maybe that’s a key to what our group has to offer.

There’s a lovely quote from the world of theater (I can’t track down the source) that describes the theater as “a safe place to do the unsafe things that must be done.”  Maybe at the root of it, that’s what we’re after…

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In a couple of weeks some of the members of the Lotus & Lily group will be meeting to discuss our present identity and future directions. This is stirring up a few questions about what it means to be a “Buddhist-Christian Study & Practice” group.  For starters: why are we here?  These are some of the reasons I’ve heard from group members over the last couple of years:

• I identify myself as both a Buddhist and a Christian–and both feel absolutely essential to my being.
• I am considering shifting my identity from Christian to Buddhist, and need support while I do so.
• I consider myself a Buddhist, but want to make peace with and better understand my Christian upbringing.
• I consider myself a Christian and am curious about Buddhism, and am looking for a familiar, safe and comfortable place to explore it.
• I am a Buddhist, or a Christian, or neither, and am looking for a warm, friendly community to be a part of.
• I don’t identify myself as Buddhist or Christian, but have an interest in and appreciation for both.

And here’s one reason I have not heard, but could imagine:

• I am a Buddhist and want to better understand my Christian friends/colleagues/relatives/clients.

If you’re a Lotus & Lily member and are reading this, what additional reasons have you heard?

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Continuing my exploration of angels, I started working last night with Encyclopedia of Angels by Rosemary Guiley. In my wicked skeptical heart I have assumed that this volume would be full of new-agey, clap-trap, but it’s a remarkably solid and thorough piece of scholarship, assembling information about angels from a wide range of angles.

(Irrelevant side note: see the song “Of Angels and Angles” by The Decemberists, one of my favorite bands of late.)

From Guiley I learned about the Opus Sanctorum Angelorum, a remarkable international organization of devout Catholics who “aspire to a conscious collaboration with the holy Angels for the glory of God, the salvation of souls and the sanctification of the entire creation.” It’s entirely orthodox and passionate, and moving despite my doctrinal distance. Quite interesting and impressive.

It’s just a little scary to wade through their website, with its insistence on penance and discipline and subsuming oneself to a larger mission, and see there a lot of the values that are present in the Tibetan Buddhist teaching I have been lapping up like a dog in the desert.  Empty it out and it’s really not that different.  Just various attempts to take advantage of human psychology to address human neurosis.

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Since the first Center for Sacred Art Gregorian chant retreat in July 2003 we have been singing for two weekends a year about various aspects of the Virgin Mary.  This has been profound and satisfying for all who have attended, but it has seemed important to carry our exploration into other territories, at least for a while.  The chant repertoire is vast and multifaceted, and I feel a  certain obligation, both to my students and to the form itself, to honor that.

So a year ago at our retreat I suggested that it would be interesting to have a series of retreats on “the saints I’d most like to have dinner with”.  The ones I named at that point were: St. Michael the Archangel, John the Baptist, Mary Magdalene and John the Evangelist.  Though these plans do evolve over time, we are on track to do the St. Michael retreat in January.

To prepare for this I have started reading a fascinating collection of medieval writings on Angelic Spirituality edited by Steven Chase.  I’m in the introduction right now–it’s knocking my socks off.  What Chase is presenting is a form of spiritual formation and practice that involves engaging with the energies and possibilities of the angelic realm, as a way to connect to the divine, actualize compassion within oneself, and experience community more deeply.  The texts, from Dionysius the Areopagite and Gregory the Great and Richard of St. Victor and others, explicate this spiritual path in some detail.  What I love about Chase’s approach is that he identifies this arcane world of the celestial hierarchy with a very concrete and practical spiritual journey.

It reminds me very much of Tibetan Buddhism in the precision and detail of the schemas, its intention to connect both to the non-physical and physical worlds simultaneously (makes me think of the Buddhist teaching on relataive and absolute truth as the two wings of liberation–wings!  And at once I am awash in wonder at the cross-connections and synergies and possibilities.)  Angels, as Chase describes them, are quite literally an interface between the divine and human realm, participating in both, drawing the human to the divine without leaving the human behind.  And, as the Fathers knew in their often politically incorrect but nevertheless deeply wise understandings, that interface is a model for our own development and formation into spiritual beings: apparently the term “angelization” was not unknown to them.
There’s more to the front story, but as is typical I find myself going instead to the back story.  Ever since I read Rembert Herbert’s brilliant explication of the patristic underpinnings to the spirituality of chant in Entrances: Gregorian Chant in Everyday Life, I have been fascinated with the spiritual possibilities of the great medieval thinkers–Herbert focuses on Origen, Cassian, Gregory the Great, Benedict, and Bernard of Clairvaux.  Chase helped me out by referring to this patristic domain of thought and contemplation as the “sapiential tradition”.  It’s exceedingly hard to engage with this stuff: texts aren’t much available in English, and the explication of them tends to be dry and scholarly and/or so thoroughly laced with dogmatic Christian conviction that I can’t quite get to this essence of wisdom that I suspect is there.

For the accessibility and openness of the Buddhist communities I’ve encountered, which are very actively keeping the Asian versions of this sensibility very alive and real in the present moment–I am incredibly grateful.  And though I am drawn philosophically to the  core of those teachings, and may indeeed draw closer yet, soon enough, I think I’m aware that IF such wisdom was alive and well in the West Christian world, I might never have seen a reason to leave.

And even so, I can’t escape this longing, which crops up every single time I touch the depth of the patristic genius, to drink more deeply of that sweet wine.  Elusive, maddening, always just out of reach, hidden from me by my own limitations and neuroses but also by the limitations and neuroses of the historical stream that has swept this wisdom from the life of the West and made it almost irrecoverable.  Where do you go, today, to sit at the feet of a master and imbibe the secrets of the ways of the angels, as Dionysius and John Scotus Eriugena understood them?

[ok, here comes the tantric empty-it-all-out phase of the reflection] Of course, angels are simply symbols of the possibilities of the interior life.  Those possibilities are always there shining, without condition, in every moment.  I don’t need to retroject myself back to St. Gregory’s Rome or Cassian’s Marseilles to experience that.  It’s all right here, even here in Seattle, Washington, USA, in the sixth year of the second Bush presidency.  And it’s all right.  So I just notice those longings, let them be what they are, keep up my study and preparation.  And maybe listen a bit more closely than I did yesterday for the beating of wings.

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Last weekend I attended a truly marvellous event: the dedication of a new Japanese Buddhist temple in Fall City, near Issaquah, WA.  Here’s the web site (though it’s all in Japanese).

There were four or five priests and eight or ten monks from Japan in attendance, and they did the service up right, with lots of yummy shomyo chant, ringing of bells, processions, and some excellent shakuhachi music.  Definitely a hometown crowd, though: everything was in Japanese and it was clearly an event for the Japanese community.  I saw a couple of marginal-looking Caucasion husbands, a photographer, and the wonderful flutist Gary Stroutos, who provided a lovely but too-brief bit of Native American flute during the recessional.

So naturally I felt like a fish out of water, and was led to muse once again on the powerful role religion has as a confirmer and upholder of cultural identity.  I know underneath all that is the most beautiful wise teaching about interdependence and liberation–my encounter with Shingon Buddhism a little more than a year ago was what finally led me to enter into formal Buddhist study, Tibetan-style.  But there is, on the surface, a very powerful, maybe necessary, but to my mind problematic function of creating a comfortable zone of conventional experience to hang out in, to avoid the questions, and to validate all the assumptions that bind us in illusion in the first place.

Man, have I been on this rant for a long time: I would have said just about exactly the same thing about my home church when I was 17.  Thirty years ago.

I love religion: it is so beautiful and is the gateway to so many amazing possibilities.  And I hate religion: it is the land of the safe and the home of the smug.

And yet: there truly is no way out.  Most of the forms I truly care about are tied up in it: the chant, the symbolism, the philosophy, the rhythms of ritual.  And when I step away from those forms, I get even *more* crazy, even *more* hungry, even *more* restless.

It’s neurosis like this that leads one to be a Buddhist-Christian: not completely in anything, not completely out either.  Standing on the threshhold–camping out there even–and knowing that’s OK and not OK at the same time.

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This weekend I participated, if only rather briefly (a couple of hours) at a practice intensive at Nalanda West.  As I play around with next steps after the completion of my Buddhism class there, this seemed like a useful thing to do.  I was pleased to be able to sit still in a rather unstructured environment for two hours, without freaking out, without making up too many unseemly stories about cults or brainwashing or selling out.

Years ago as an undergrad, feeling upset by approaching graduation, I was wisely counselled by a friend that I was experiencing that moment of dis-ease when one comes out of a narrow ravine and encounters a wide-open plain.  Completing my Monday night class has some of that feel to it.  There’s a where-do-I-go-from here quality to this moment, both delicious and terrifying.  It makes me feel young–not necessarily in a good way.
Maybe as part of this feeling of adolescent uncertainty, I’m reading a terrific juvenile novel for the first time: A Wizard of Earthsea (in part because it’s mentioned in the book The Dharma of Dragons and Demons as a prime exemplar of Buddhist philosophy in fantasy fiction).  I was struck by this passage:

“And so the truth is that as a man’s real power grows and his knowledge widens, even the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do….”

That has a ring of truth about it, and there’s the paradox of my experience: I turn it one way, and all seems inevitable and destined and obvious–there really is no other choice–and I turn it the other way and I feel foolish and helpless and utterly confused, having nothing but choice and consequently paralyzed.

So I tell myself this story: I am part Buddhist and part Christian, but maybe mostly Coyote, opportunistically looking for the way to wiggle through, out of the current scrape and into the next one.  And yet even that picaresque adventure has, it may be, an inevitability about it.

I take comfort in that identity, one that bundles up the chaos of my journey into coherence.  Though Buddhism makes it clear that these bundles of identity are really the whole problem, at times like these, with Fall falling fast and me feeling up to my eyebrows in complications and uncertainty, a perceptible sense of barely hanging on–at times like these a good myth is warm comfort.

As I understand it, the Buddhist teaching of the two truths means that one can climb the  mountain of relative understanding in order to get a glimpse of the valley of ultimate unconditioned nonduality.  So I embrace my coyote, embrace my earthsea wizard, just for now, just to get over that next hill there.  Where, I promise you, I will let it all go.

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I saw this film again tonight, after being completely charmed by it when I was on a plane flight a couple of years ago.  Gospel music is something completely other: an expression so confident and warm and unconditionally uplifting that, if I may say so, it scarcely seems to be a part of Christianity, but some alternate reality vision of religion that is wise and human and balanced.  An outsiders’ view to be sure, induced by the mesmerizing influence of beautiful and utterly compelling music.

A part of the checkerboard of good-and-bad, I guess.  But what a lovely square to hang out in.  I’m ready to run out and join a gospel choir.

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Slowly I find myself pivoting around to a new orientation.  I don’t really trust the little micro-shifts in my psyche: I suspect myself of histrionics (if you know me, you might know why).  But I think I have gained enough patience–or maybe it’s just the natural slowing-down that comes with growing older–to be able to pause in a somewhat objective manner and see that things really are shifting.

Of course the stories I make up from time to time to describe these movements maybe completely bogus.  But by noting them down I find myself able to examine what’s happening with a little greater clarity.  Labels and identities are the trickiest of business.  But it may be that in the exploration of labels some deeper truth can be shaken loose and allowed to percolate in consciousness.
So this shift I’m noticing is related to the post I made a couple of days ago about my dawning recognition that Buddhism is decisive for me.  Dawning for some months, or maybe years now, and confirmed quite profoundly by the last 15 months of study and meditation at Nalanda West.  That doesn’t have to imply anything, I suppose.  But as with marriage or buying a house or any other decisive event, there can be a value in marking the occasion somehow.  I’m thinking about doing that.

Five years ago I was confirmed in the Episcopal Church, a major milestone in my subterranean journey of discovery.  Something I needed to do to put some old demons to rest, to open up a new chapter.  And now I am feeling this gleam of possibility that a next step may be for me to “take refuge”, the Buddhist equivalent of baptism, or at least a somewhat parallel statement of identity.

And as I lay out the cards of my life,shuffling and rearranging them the way I used to shuffle and rearrange a very cool set of vintage football cards my cousin once gave me, this notion of adopting in some formal way a Buddhist identity may have some sort of ripple effect across the rest of my spiritual ecosystem.   It’s fascinating and energizing to think about that!
Though I am loath to employ this blog as a confessional, this shift seems momentous enough, enough a part of the ongoing reflection on the connections between Buddhism and Christianity in my thought and practice that is the focus and purpose of my writing here, that it seems necessary to reveal this little piece of personal insight.
And of course, whatever terms get applied to this or that particular bit of experience, it all comes down to this: I journey a little further, and watch and listen, and then take a few more steps.  There’s nothing for it but to watch and wait and proceed with eyes open.

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The Lotus & Lily group has been reading through the book Buddhists talk about Jesus, Christians talk about the Buddha, and I was struck by this passage, in an essay by Marcus Borg:

The classic Christian affirmation about Jesus is twofold: as “true God” and “true human,” we see in him most clearly what God is like and what a life full of God is like.”  He is the decisive disclosure (or revelation) of both.”

Borg goes on to say “Decisive does not mean ‘only’”, (which is the thrust of his argument that claims to Jesus’ exclusivity are not warranted by the tradition), and then says this: “Christians are people who see the decisive revelation of the sacred in Jesus, just as Muslims see it in the Koran, Jews see it in the Torah, and so forth.”

And when I read that, my response is: what has proven to be decisive for me, not so much in the revelation of the sacred but (what feels more real and important) in the revelation of the nature of experience, is the Buddhadharma.  Decisive.

That is why my work as a Buddhist-Christian (Christian-Buddhist) is to bring the light of the dharma to the Christian tradition, shining it in all the dark recesses of my psyche where the Bible verses and stories and theological constructs reside, and not the other way around.  That much, anyway, seems to be getting clearer.  Whether and how that will be helpful to others remains to be seen.  Although as my Nalandabodhi mentor just wrote to me, in response to my comment “I’m scratching my head a bit about how to proceed”: “I hear you, especially since they say there is nowhere to go.”

So with nowhere to go–I go where I go, reading my Bible every day, perhaps see a bit more clearly from time to time where those texts ring with the clarity of the dharma, or provide breathtaking and profound counterpoint to it.  Obadiah this week (Obadiah?) which speaks most usefully about the problematic nature of gloating over the downfall of one’s enemies (who in the charged political landscape is not guilty of this sin?).  And look for the ways the dharma, acting decisively within me, allows the inner wisdom of this text to fly free.

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Back from the first Lotus & Lily session we’ve been able to attend for a month: how sweet the fellowship can be!

A key question, raised by one of our members: can you really build a community of spiritual practitioners without the strong focus of a single tradition to hold us together?

Such a wonderful, excellent question: maybe *the* question for me and certainly one of the biggest for our group.  My answer is “I certainly hope so!”  Can we find a way to hold deity and non-deity, salvation and enlightenment, Jesus and Buddha, dharma and gospel, together in one space?  I certainly hope so!  Does the inherent instability of our formulation open up doors to discovery and joy and possibility that can be made attractive to others?  I certainly hope so!   Can we find a way to share that, and build that, and make it stronger, without compromising our integrity?  I certainly hope so!

This evening I certainly am feeling grateful to have companions on the journey, however unstable we may be (collectively or individually!).  Most, most precious indeed.

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I’m still chewing on my recent reading in Walking the Bible.  Still feeling a bit grumbly, I guess, about the physical attachment to particular places that so much Judeo-Christian-Muslim religion seems to inculcate.  Into this world of profound and profoundly problematic attachments, the radicalism of both Jesus and the Buddha, and indeed of the Jewish and Muslim mystics too, is vitally important.

Rumi: “Out beyond our ideas of right and wrong doing there is a field.  I’ll meet you there.”  I don’t think that field exists in any “holy land” of any description.

Of course, I don’t have to look very far in my own experience to find little “holy lands” of attachment and addiction.  So perhaps this yearninig for the solidity of the eternal Jerusalem is just one small and specific example of a propensity of the human experience.

And, as so often when I am confronted with the Judeo-Christian canon, I have to wonder: how does facing this specific problematic set of karmic difficulties help further me down the path toward wisdom and compassion?

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Just starting the initial musings on the Center for Sacred Art winter retreat, next January.  We’re going to be focusing on chants for feasts of the archangel Michael.  After three straight years of retreats working with Mary, this is an interesting change of pace.  It’s becoming more and more clear to me that the chants we do at the retreats take us into a very particular type of sacred space, quite distinct each time.  And though I know there are lots of other variables–retreat participants, the season, the particular mood or circumstance V and I find ourselves in–still there’s a persistent sense that each set of chants has its own characteristic energy.

While I don’t claim to be an expert on just what those energies might be, I am an eager and curious student, and will continue to notice what happens.  Angels are certainly a rich subject–they have been the object of very specific evocations in all three of the Abrahamic traditions, from kabbalah to alchemy and into all sorts of fascinating latter-day deployments.  I have a book called Angelic Spirituality that I am expecting to dip into during this preparatory period.  Should be good fun, and rich, and exciting, and multidimensional.  At this stage of the journey it’s very difficult to predict how things will go, but I am looking forward to exploring a new segment of the path.

At the same time Peregrine is preparing to record material from a performance of music for All Saints we did a couple of years ago.  So with the angels and saints all around it feels like I’m in good company.  I have been wondering, just a bit, about the Buddhist analogs to these helpful beings–of course there are many many varied examples of these kinds of energies in that tradition.  For the most part I have to this point steered clear of Buddhist mythology in favor of dry and boring philosophy and practice.  As my class has come to a close I am at a bit of a crossroads and am not sure exactly how I will proceed.  Tantric practice, with its elaborate ritual and many invocations, is a possibility, and is possibly a way to get closer to the saints-and-angels kind of experience on the Buddhist side.

But Buddhism has been and continues to be very much a means to find grounding and sanity, not so much a fun research project in comparative religions.  So I might just keep things simple there, and let my imaginative exercise take place in the bountifully rich realm of medieval Christian spirituality.

A side note: I got a very nice email from a music thanatology student in Japan who wants to use my arrangement of the chants for the rite of extreme unction as part of a presentation.  Following that Nalanda West death ritual event a couple of weeks ago my energy and enthusiasm have been a bit low; seeing some new seeds being sowed half a world away is certainly an inspiration.

And one more note: I have been very hesitant to speculate much or reflect at any length on the form and nature of this here blog-thing; I’ve been at it for nearly 7 months, though, and inevitable questions start popping up.  I may subject my loyal readers to a few meanderings on this topic.  My sense is that my writing could use more focus and purpose and direction than it’s had.  In the initial phase I mostly wanted to test myself to see if I was up to writing periodically and at least reasonably usefully in this medium.  Maybe it’s time to get just a bit more intentional than that…we shall see.

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Well, not that long; V and I spent a few nights house-sitting for a friend in lovely Shelter Bay, on Fidalgo Island.  I thought I could blog from there; I couldn’t.  No matter: it was a delightful and restful few days of reading and resting, taking walks, and generally just watching the sun go across the sky.

Among the books I took with me was Bruce Feiler’s Walking the Bible.  Since I started reading a Bible passage every day as part of my practice, around the beginning of this year, my questions about the Good Book continue to grow.  I spend a lot of time in these posts querying my relationship with this material, a relationship that goes back several decades and has many distinct chapters, one of the most important of which was my own journey to Israel in the early 80s, just after I finished college.  Feiler’s book is particularly powerful for me because of that experience.  His intent is to ground an understanding of the Torah in the specific physical places where Biblical events happened (or, at least, where they may have happened).  So he journeys from Mt. Ararat to Mt. Sinai, visiting various points in Israel, Turkey, and Egypt along the way and reflecting on the Biblical stories each place evokes.

It’s a good read, and oddly parallel with another of my vacation reads, Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson.  As part of my somewhat whimsical and bizarre notion to consider Gregorian chant in more imaginative contexts, I’ve been reading more fantasy/sci-fi fiction than usual, and this book is really quite profound.  It’s the last volume of a trilogy–I happened across it at the library.  It’s always a little unsettling to jump into the middle of a massive arc of plot, which in this case involves the settlement of Mars by humans in the 22nd and 23rd centuries.  But, as in Walking the Bible, there is a vivid sense of place.  Among many other virtues Robinson really excels at creating very detailed and specific descriptions of the Martian landscape.  The plot of this third volume really revolves around the conflict among settlers on Mars between the “Reds”–purists who want to preserve the original pristine environment and the “Greens” who are eager to transform Mars into a life-sustaining environment through “terraforming” technology.

What ties these two books together for me is a profound sense of connection to place, the importance of place, the significance of territory, geography, landscape in establishing the terms of our experience.

I had a third and highly complementary experience this afternoon as well; on our way back from Shelter Bay Victoria and I stopped at Earth Sanctuary on the south end of Whidbey Island.  This is a place we’ve visited many times before, but it’s been a while; we walked to the magnificent dolmen (a megalithic structure, a veritable room built of enormous multi-ton stones) and the lovely labyrinth.  Again a vivid and powerful sense of place.

And what I find myself wondering through all this: what is place really but a focal point for consciousness and imagination?  In a sense, to be in one’s place is to be open to the moment, wherever one is–not bound up in the glamour and seduction of a particular locale, but awake to the vibrant reality of what is right here, right now.

I’m not sure where this thread leads, but it seems like an important one: when I chant Psalms every day there is an unmistakeable sense of place about them: this is the land, this is what belongs to us, this is what God promised.  And along come all the concomitant confusions and attachments and violences that are associated with such attitudes.  And whenever I encounter this attitude in scripture I find myself resisting & rebelling: place can’t be that important, or perhaps place shouldn’t be that important–or maybe it’s just problematic for place to be that important.
Is this just Joe the rootless West-Coaster speaking?  Am I blind to these human realities?  Perhaps as a home-loving Cancerian I should know better?

I know that in the Buddhist world there are sacred places, Mount Meru and Bodhgaya and plenty of stupas to go around (I have visited a number of them, here on this continent, and the sense of power and presence is unmistakeable).  And yet the notion of sunyata/emptiness suggests that every such place must be emptied out in the end; the locus of meaning has to go beyond and behind and between and through any specific detail of consciousness, however refined and perfected.

As I continue to grow into my journey as a Buddhist and a Christian, this question seems monumental, profound, necessary.  I’m touching the elephant, but am afraid that at this stage there’s not a lot of insight to go with the intuition.  Something about space and specificity and the wisdom that comes from outside and the wisdom that comes from within.  And the within not being about a particular place or a particular person or any other particular configuration, but just a suchness that arises in each moment right here in my being, and with that nothing else is necessary.  Something like that.

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