Lotus and Lily Field Notes

Wulfila keeps serving up good stuff, this time a reflection on multiple religious identification as practiced in Latin America.  His reflection is based on Timothy Knab’s War of the Witches, which has to do with contemporary practitioners of Aztec religion in Mexico, right alongside the practice of Catholicism.  Wulfila comments:

…people [in Mexico] operate as orthodox Roman Catholics in one context, and in other contexts rely upon traditional beliefs and customs, but they don’t generally attempt to create a systematic theology that will reconcile both systems of beliefs or decide which one is “really” the true picture of the world – they just move from one language game to another in response to cues in their environment that tell them one heuristic will be more useful than another in diagnosing and curing their particular problem at the time. This may be somewhat unsatisfactory to someone of a more philosophical bent, but it seems like a very effective strategy for moving between radically different conceptual paradigms with minimal cognitive dissonance. In which case, the Midwestern Christian shaman would simply go back and forth between paradigms as needed, making no effort whatsoever to reconcile them.

Buddhism and Christianity certainly are radically different conceptual paradigms.  Perhaps the effort to harmonize them (on which I spend rather too much time) is less useful then cultivating the fluidity and openness to migrate between paradigms with “minimal cognitive dissonance.”
I met a passionate researcher of the occult last year, Alfred Vitale (I have lost track of you, Alfred!  but you can read one of his papers here).   His notion is that occultism is the creative absorption and synthesis and re-expression of  practices, beliefs, rituals, wisdom, from many disparate  spiritual traditions.   This idea stays with me as an evocative vision of the creative possibilities of  spiritual experience (though the term “occult” sets off lots of “kingdom of the cults” alarm bells in my limbic brain).

Those of us out here on the edges, creatively synthesizing, whether we are “occultists” or “dual practitioners” or just playing with cognitive dissonance–maybe we need to get together.  At that dinner I wrote of last night, one of my colleagues and I were scheming the creation of a “Checkered Career Club: the Association for People Who Don’t Belong to Any Associations”.  This was in the context of sitting at table with a lot of library administrators and professors, and noticing that we didn’t have any such tidy professional identity on which we could hang our hat.  But the notion is equally powerful, equally compelling, in the realm of religious identity.  Occultists of the world, unite!

I’ll keep throwing out these manifesto-like phrases: perhaps someday they will coalesce into something substantial.

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Not a good posting week, this week, just too much going on.  And next week won’t be much better, since I will be out of town and pretty much out of contact with my friend the Internet.

Tonight I was at a work-related dinner, and we got into a lively discussion about post-modernism and deconstructionism, with proponents on one side and scoffers on the other, and I found myself giddily ascending a rickety scaffolding of an argument that Buddhism is old-fashioned deconstructionism, only more comprehensive and systematic, but with the same methodology, and then defending the role of compassion in opening up the possibility of an engaged and political Buddhism.

Pretty fancy stuff.  An evangelical fervor surfaced.   I got attention, and worry a bit in retrospect that I was too passionate, but there seemed to be a sympathetic interest too.  Always tricky stuff, trotting this religion-and-spirituality stuff out in such company.

And yet I felt compelled: something worthwhile to share and an audience that seemed interested.  Skillful means?  Ego?
And really, I do like the “Buddhism is old-fashioned deconstruction” meme.  I have not investigated others who have made this connection, though I’m sure it exists.  (Just did a WorldCat search and got this–interesting.  If only I had the patience to wade through deconstructive discourse!)

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I am reading Shantideva’s Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life (the image to the left is for visual effect: my translation is Robert Thurman’s in Essential Tibetan Buddhism).
The snippet below is characteristic of Shantideva’s gentle encouragement to peer deeply into the erroneous logic or our daily thoughts and move to a deeper, if counterintuitive, realization.
Since thus I injure [my enemies]
And thus they benefit me,
Why so perversely, savage mind,
Do you feel anger toward them?

I can remember being similarly inspired by the Sermon on the Mount, once upon a time.  But I say to you, love your enemies, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that despitefully use you.

The notion of swimming upstream against our own unconscious propensities is both exciting and daunting.  Last night I saw the premiere episode of TLC’s The Monastery, in which five seekers sign up for a 40-day stint at New Mexico’s Christ in the Desert Monastery.  I expected cheesy, but the first episode was thrilling: just seeing the dynamics of the spiritual journey expounded so explicitly on primetime TV was quite stunning.  The participants all have their warts, and I do wonder if a traditional Benedictine monastery is the best place for all of them to get the support they need; nevertheless, it’s amazing to be given such an intimate view of their journeys.  A former alcoholic, a wounded Iraq war vet, an earnest bearded religious seeker, an ex-con youth worker, a burned-out emergency aid worker (to give them the most egregious shorthand idendities), all with wildly various attitudes about and relationships with religious tradition.  Kind of weird, in a way: I am so fussy and over-thoughtful about what I do, religiously, and when and how I do it.  And these guys just seem to have kind of wandered in to the sublimely rich traditional monastic environment without  really much clue about what it’s for and what it means.  But clearly each of them is on a journey of *formation*, of reshaping their humanity in fundamnetal ways.  And whatever the flaws of the environment and whatever the flaws they bring with them, it is supremely heartening to see them making the effort–especially on primetime TV!

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At the Lotus & Lily group meeting tonight something familiar happened: I walked in with my chin dragging the ground and my soul in a state of near-collapse, and walked out with a song in my heart and a spring in my step.  Little sanghas, however humble, do seem to have that magical ability to keep one’s spirits up.

I wonder just how many hundreds or thousands of little dual- or multiple-practice groups there are.  And what would happen if all the Buddhist-Christian Hindu-Sufi Jewish-Christian Pagan-Taoist Tribal-Unitarian groups started to identify ourselves as doing the same thing (though of course, each in our weirdly appropriate and singular ways)?  Maybe we should start an online community, like Zaadz only with a bit more focus on the integration of traditional practices?

Also, I just learned that there actually is a “lotus lily”, nelumbo nucifera.  Apparently it’s the national flower of India.  Although a maybe more reliable source says it’s common name is the Blue Lotus or Bean of India.

Still, the name “lotus lily” has a nice integrative feel to it.  Leave it to Mother India to give a Big Hug to both my Lotus half and my Lily half and merge them into one.

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From my friend Donna (a good hugger in her own right): you have to watch this Free Hugs Campaign video.  A beautiful 3 minute piece that brings tears of relief and joy, and also of sadness at how estranged from our humanity we have become.   If the essential teaching of the Buddha and Jesus is our fundamental oneness, expressed as love or compassion or wisdom or enlightenment or the kingdom of  God–then this is a pretty good parable.

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Maybe this isn’t quite enough reason to start a “famous Buddhist-Christians” list, but this little news tidbit from the New York Post is quite wonderful:

TIGER SAVES AWKWARD MOMENT

TIGER Woods got ambushed by an evangelical guest of Nike on Oct. 9 during an exclusive golf outing for top business and entertainment executives. According to our spy, 30 people – including Clear Channel Radio CEO Mark Mays, Louis Vuitton North America chief Daniel LaLonde and Details magazine editor Daniel Peres – gathered at the Trump golf course in Los Angeles for the 2006 “Tee It Up With Tiger Woods” event, which included a private golf session and lunch with the living legend. “During the lunch, there was a Q&A session with Woods, and most people were asking about their swings or golf questions,” our source said. “Until some guy – a guest of Nike – stood up and said, ‘Have you accepted Jesus as your Lord and Savior? And if not, prayfully, would you?’ ” The source added, “You could have heard a pin drop. People were mortified. But Tiger was as unflappable as he is on the golf course and responded, ‘My father was a Christian – of course Christianity was part of my life – but my mother is Asian and Buddhism was also part of my childhood, so I practice both faiths respectfully.’ “

Thanks John Malcomson, probably the most stalwart Buddhist-Christian I know, for passing this along.

There must be an awful lot of people who grew up in Buddhist-Christian families just like Tiger’s. I know nothing about that phenomenon, but would sure like to learn. I’m sure the experience is radically different for them than for those of us who grew up with one and sought the other as a sort of antidote or healing balm.

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Another blog I’ve been enjoying recently is The Lonely Goth’s Guide to Independent Catholicism, which recently included this post on imagining the best of all possible religious worlds:

In general, the approach would be characterized by free and easy syncretism. It could accomplish this through a number of devices – by permitting mutliple mythological colorations to exist within a more abstract conceptual frame, through referring to different religious systems as “upayas” (skilful means) or by utilizing the concept of “svadharma” (that is, the idea that different people have different responsibilities and must believe/do different things as part of their own particular nature), through emphasizing epistemological perspectivalism (e.g. Jain logic, in which at least six possible truth values obtain for any single proposition), or through a “hierarchy of the schools” approach in which you accord ultimate value to one particular religious system while admitting the provisional value and permissibility of others.

That’s just a brief excerpt from a good post: go and read the whole thing.  There’s a sentence toward the end I couldn’t figure out, but wulfila, the blog author, assures me he’ll clarify that.

But the notion of “free and easy syncretism” sounds like heaven on earth to me.  I never really understood why that practice, which is simply the creative assembly of the best of diverse elements, has got such a bad reputation.  We do it all the time in our lives, and in fact I don’t see how we could function in coherent ways without it.

Thinking about “possible religious worlds” puts me in mind of Ursula LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (part of my informal Remedial Reading in Speculative Fiction project)–not so much because this world envisions that particular kind of creative synthesis, but simply because I love the idea of imagining things being different.  Because there is no way they can be different if we don’t imagine them.

A Lonely Goth Independent Catholic would seem to have all the ingredients for restorative and reconstructive imagination.  Inspiring.  Thoughtful.  I think my world is a little bigger than it was yesterday.

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After quite a long time blogging in relatively blissful isolation, I am beginning to discover some really excellent blogs about Buddhism and Christianity.  I’ve started listing them here on the site.

For examples, here’s a potent and lucid post about the issue of violence in sacred texts from ThinkBuddha.org, focusing particularly on the Kalachakra Tantra, which concludes:

…might it not be time to explore the possibility that the source of goodness, peace and ethics might lie not in ancient and bloodthirsty texts of spurious derivation, but rather in our own attempts, here and, now, to make sense of the world, and of the manifest sufferings that surround us?

This subject is dear to my heart: thank you, Will Buckingham, for exploring it with such erudition and passion!

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I have been known to get a little goopy about gospel.  And this evening, as I finished and then discarded (for the second time) a boring confessional deadend post, and so turned to iTunes to pick me up a bit, I hit upon the magnificent Gospel at Colonus: the Sophocles play Oedipus at Colonus in a musical version performed by topnotch gospel artists.  I first came across this amazing work in the early 80s, and it just knocked me flat.  It may well be the moment when my brain was first cracked open by the power of interfaith encounter.  To this day I am profoundly grateful to the creative energy and artistry that so fully embraces two such wildly different and yet magically complimentary forms: the world-weary, utterly honest and gorgeous poetry of ancient Greek tragedy and the immediacy and passion of African-American gospel composition and performance.

Years ago in San Francisco I saw a Noh theater production of Sophocles’ Antigone.  Equally powerful, and of course totally different.  In the presence of such moments it’s clear: the penetrating and integrating power of art may be the royal road to insight–it’s so much more direct than the convoluted intellectual and conceptual frameworks of analysis and thought we might bring to bear on the vexing questions of difference and connection.  In Tibetan Buddhism they call them “pointing-out instructions”.  Just cutting right to the chase.

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I chant Psalms, and teach the chanting of Psalms, because I believe in the power of intention. As you sing them you enter into a stream of sacred intention. For 2500 years or more, these texts have been on the lips of practitioners, Jewish, Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant…

…but entering into that stream can be complicated. What exactly is the intention behind words like these?

137:8 O Daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction,
happy is he who repays you
for what you have done to us-

137:9 he who seizes your infants
and dashes them against the rocks.

And what does one open oneself to, chanting words like these? Frequently communities choose to expunge these difficult passages. And while I understand this practice, even do it myself with regularity for my students–still, somewhere in the practice, the energy lingers.

The gift of Tantric Buddhism is the insight that energy of any kind is the practitioner’s friend. But what level of consciousness would it take to utter the Psalmist’s words with a crystalline clarity of intention–an intention aimed only at liberation?

What force is so powerful as to transmute not only the violence of the text, but perhaps still more challenging, the violent intentions of the generations who uttered them? Such transmutation, for oneself, for others, for all beings, would require not only the intention for liberation, but also the skillful application of penetrating insight: both wisdom and compassion.

A fantasy: if just one practitioner could utter the words of the Psalms, even Psalms like these, with perfect intention, how much negative energy could be dispelled? How much more could the work of liberation move forward in the world?

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One of my fun Sunday afternoon hobbies is hunting through the CD bins at the mighty Seattle Public Library.  Today I found this treasure.  In addition to the sublime music, there’s that extraordinary image on the box, as pure and clear an image of devotion as one could hope to find.  Giving yourself up totally, pouring all of yourself into that which is beyond you.  The relinquishing is not easy.  But the result is beauty, a beauty that is not from you and not even about you.
How is this not prayer?

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Thanks to my sister Margaret Marcuson for passing along this article by Sallie Tisdale in Tricycle magazine about a Zen Buddhist-evangelical Christian dialogue. Given the splintered American religious landscape, the courage and willingness to acknowledge differences embodied by both parties in this relationship is truly remarkable and inspiring.

One of the challenges of following a dual-practice path is the difficulty in participating in the various forms of religion-to-religion dialogue. Most of these events have “a this, a that, and a t’other”–usually in the persons of the local rabbi/imam/minister/priest. The discussion typically doesn’t have a lot of room for “a-this-and-a-that-with-a-dollop-of-t’other” types. One gets farther in the interfaith world by making a dramatic, and somewhat glamorous, declaration for another tradition than by striving for a less-than-tidy integration.
In the context of the article above, it’s probably less challenging to the evangelical frame of reference to be confronted with the robes and shaved head of a Zen Buddhist practitioner (even a Western one) than to be confronted with a befuddled son like myself who doesn’t quite leave and doesn’t quite stay and acts more like a coyote than anything identifiable as friend or foe.

Perhaps I use my presumptions as an excuse to avoid re-engaging with the evangelical community I came from. Or it may be that an inability to participate in faith-to-faith dialogue is just one of the consequences of a life lived in-between.

Interesting work, trying to position the place of the dual-practitioner in the religious landscape. Since our identity seems to be about resting in uncertainty, it’s not surprising that this place is difficult to locate.

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On Saturday, November 4, Victoria and I will be offering a workshop called “Entering Sacred Time” at the Priory in Lacey (read more about it here). The image to the left is something V recently dug up in her ongoing research into late medieval books of hours. This is a 15th century prayerbook. You open it up and as you do so you open your heart.

I have studied and loved the middle ages for years, but this image embodies so much of why it compels me. Thought not always in the most politically correct ways, there is a willingness to be passionate embedded in medieval culture. That continues to delight and inspire me. And that makes reviving our “Entering Sacred Time” program a joy.

On the Buddhist side of the ledger, I have started poking into Sangharakshita’s Ritual and Devotion in Buddhism. In his first chapter he talks about the energy of emotion and its vital role in propelling one along the spiritual path. I have encountered similar ideas in my own studies of Buddhism: faith is central, commitment is central, cultivating passion and dedication and emotional depth is central. There’s a general impression that Buddhism is cold and detached and lacking in these qualities, but I don’t think that’s right. The journey toward liberation takes, well, just about everything. I know I wouldn’t want to set out on such a journey without my backpack stuffed full of all my emotionalresources. Sounds like fun!

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Last night I went to a session on “Leadership Training in Spiritual Formation” hosted by the Contemplative Wisdom Community at Seattle’s St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, and led by Lynn Bauman of Praxis.  Since the work I do with chant and the Buddhist-Christian path can feel a little isolated, it was a great joy to gather with 22 other people who are deeply committed to the inner dimensions of the spiritual journey.  This was my first encounter with this work, and I’m most intrigued.

The approach is deeply interior, open to other traditions, organic and trusting the inner wisdom of the divine spark.  What could be better?

What I found most impressive was that this session was about leadership.  Lynn invited those present to consider what it would mean to take responsibility for being leaders of this emerging wisdom spirituality movement within the Christian tradition.  In my experience, the connection between “mysticism” and “leadership” is not made often enough.  But if teaching is to happen, and communities are to form, and the world is to be transformed, then leaders are needed.

I have reflected many times, here and elsewhere, about the presence of a genuine transmission of wisdom teaching within the Buddhist tradition, and lamented on the absence of this transmission in Christianity.  And here, in a small, humble, but most intelligent and intentional way, something very much like that seems to be happening.  Stay tuned.

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A friend recently asked: “In Christianity we are taught to ‘turn it over to God’”. (or as the verse [I Peter 5:7] reads: “Cast all your care upon Him, for He careth for you.”) “So, in Buddhism” she asked, “to whom do I turn it over?  The Buddha?  Or am I left to try to handle things on my own?”

In the Buddhist tradition there are figures of compassion and aid to whom one can turn:  Amida Buddha, Quan Yin, even the Buddha himself as Buddhism is practiced in Southeast Asia.

Another answer might be this: turning one’s problems over to the Buddha/Amida/Quan Yin (or God/Jesus/Mary for that matter) is a relative solution–skillful means to help us attain the stability necessary to turn back to one’s own work of self-liberation. Take all the help and comfort you need, where you find it, for today.  And in turn, let tomorrow’s letting go be what it needs to be.  That might be letting go of the comfort, it might be letting go of the pain, it might be letting go of the compulsion to let go, or even the compulsion to find liberation.

But another answer would be “I take refuge in the Buddha, I take refuge in the dharma, I take refuge in the sangha.”  Taking refuge is not quite the same thing as “turning it over” (if it’s comfort, it’s quite a bit colder, it seems to me).  But it does have much the same flavor of letting go, surrendering control, recognizing that one cannot function by one’s own (individual, confused, ego-saturated) lights.

I think on this point Christianity and Buddhism are pretty closely aligned.

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Last Sunday’s sermon by Catherine Fransson of Seattle First Baptist Church was called “Jesus through the Eyes of Thich Nhat Hanh.”  It’s great that the minister at SFBC, the host of the Lotus & Lily group, is delivering a sermon on this topic–nice synergy.

And this excerpt really caught my attention:
“Interfaith gatherings don’t frighten me as much [as American Baptist conferences]. The faithful who take the time to venture outside their boundaries know all of us will not look and act the same.”

I think it’s true that being together with people from a variety of traditions brings a certain freedom with it, an inevitable sense stepping beyond the self–”venturing outside the boundaries.”  And I very much relate to the feeling of being unsafe that comes with being in a monoreligious environment.  Hysteria.  Groupthink.  Smugness (yuck: smugness really pushes all my buttons).
So although there is a Comfort in the Crowd, there is maybe a more profound comfort in having the crowd be diverse, unanimous in purpose but not in point of view.

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Our Buddhist-Christian dual practice group Lotus & Lily has been reading this book for the last few weeks.  It’s a bit of an uneven ride, but one in a while a phrase sticks out that is truly impactful.  Recently I wrote about Marcus Borg’s use of the term “decisive” and how that has proven to be decisive for me, in a rather unexpected way.  And last night we talked about the essay by Donald Swearer, in which he uses the phrase “my dialogic faith” to describe his own personal relationship with the Buddhist and Christian traditions.

Since I’m always casting about for new formulations to capture the nature of our identity as Buddhist-Christian/Christian-Buddhists, I was delighted to come across this phrase.  Perhaps a synthesis of multiple traditions within oneself is a possibility, but it’s reassuring to think that maybe it’s a conversation, among the various aspects of oneself and among the various traditiions that speak to those aspects in different ways.

Not that I think we should end up like spiritual Sybils–random and dis-integrated bits of religiosity warring with one another.  But maybe it’s more honest, and more useful, to acknowledge that there are different energies at work–Jesus and Buddha, as their pictures on the book cover indicate, do have their own unique qualities and gifts to offer.  Maybe it’s best to just carry forward a conversation with them, than to try to merge them into one.

Dialogue is also in the service of maintaining an openness, and a receptivity, and a welcoming of the other, that is wholly healthy and nourishing–it keeps one free of religous sclerosis.

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Yesterday I chatted with a student at a chant workshop I was giving: the conversation worked out so that I was able to share with her some of what I am learning on my Buddhist-Christian journey, and I think for her, as a somewhat restless member of a Catholic parish, it was a relief and a comfort to think that it might be possible to operate of a more expansive and fluid frame of reference.  My sense was that the mere existence of someone with my path opened up possibilities for her path.
Sometimes this dual-practice journey is lonely and awkward; but out of conversations like this one comes a conviction that its inherent “not-this, not-that” nature can be profoundly helpful.

For all of us practitioners that live on the edges, exploring the boundaries, shape-shifting in ways that aren’t widely recognized or appreciated: there are those moments out there.  And in them, there is more nourishment for our work than you might imagine.

Continuing with The Sparrow, which is full of the most profound reflections on purpose and calling and what that process puts is through.  It is a jewel of a book, and I am deeply appreciative of it.  And at the same time, there’s a temptation present: much of the book has to do with the relationship between a main character, who is a Jesuit, and his superiors within the order.  Though much of that relationship is highly problematic, I do come away from my reading sessions with a longing for that sort of orderly formation and guidance.  Necessary for the human person, I know, but not easy to find.  Joining a nice religious order sort of solves that problem–or maybe just stirs up a whole set of new ones.  For now I just want to name that longing and then let it go and get back to my work.

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This must be my season for books.  My novelistic read these days is The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell.  I am a bit hesitant to make big statements based on where I am so far, since it’s blessed with an intricate and unconventional plot that makes it hard to know where it will all end up.  But the premise itself is fascinating: in the not-distant future, a group of Jesuits (and their friends) travel to Alpha Centauri to make contact with a newly discovered humanoid life form.  The journey is very much a Jesuit journey ad maioram gloriam Dei, but that’s not presented as condescending or imperial but a sort of humble act of worship and awe; but somehow (at least at this point, about a third of the way through) there is for me a thrilling sense of “mission” about the adventure.
I grew up around evangelical missionaries (you can’t belong to a denomination called the Christian and Missionary Alliance without that), which in a sense inoculated me against the notion that there was an “out there” to go and do good works, bring them in, save lost sheep, etc. etc.  But the passing decades seem to make me more humble myself, maybe more open to the mysterious unfoldings of things, also more aware of the profound discomfort and dis-ease that seems to cry out for help.

Also my encounter with the Buddhadharma has done much to help me approach the question of compassionate action in the world with greater subtlety and less susceptability to the ego-traps such endeavors might lead to.  Not to mention giving me a “cause” (the Buddhadharma itself, that is) that increasingly seems worth going to bat for.
All this to say, the boundary between myself and a sense of mission seems to be getting dangerously thin.  That is somewhat frightening; also exhilarating.

Whatever else may be going on, teaching chant is a pretty secure part of my mission; tomorrow I go to The Priory in Lacey WA to ply that particular trade once again.  It’s not quite Alpha Centauri, but who knows what adventures that particular rocket ship will take me on.

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More on Secret of the Vajra World: there’s an excellent discussion of the development of tantric Buddhism in both India and Tibet, which took place in large part outside of the monastic environment where Mahayana Buddhism was developed and refined.  Wild men!  And women!  In the woods!  Experiencing direct realization of infinite luminosity and perfection!

Here’s Tilopa, one of those wild men and in many ways the founder of it all.  He was born a brahmin, but cast it all away in order to seek the truth in less derivative and constrained forms.  A nut case, in other words.

And I find myself perpetually pulled between the monastic ideal (order, simplicity, quiet, emptiness) and wild man (chaos, freedom, creativity, spontaneity, luminosity).  I guess I just lick to be pulled in two directions: it’s becoming a way of life.  But I supposed for a budding devotee of the middle way, it’s to be expected.

‘Way back at Simpson Bible College in the last 70s, one of my favorite teachers, Paul Kress (one of at least three giants of my spiritual formation at that tiny, benighted, airless littls school) used to describe the Christian journey as a “healthy tension.”  Right Paul–the middle path.  And hallelujah, I’m still on it.

Dipping my toe into this vajrayana stream, via Reginald Ray, is bracing and exciting.  I have been so deeply touched and moved and satisfied by scholastic Buddhism–but the “call of the wild” is part of the story for me, too.  Good antidote for complacency, stuckness, and just generally having things too under control.

I know it’s a strange brew, hard liquor, mind-blowing drugs.  So a note of caution: I think any further serious exploration of this has to lie on the other side of refuge and vows and some of that good ol’ guru protection (centuries of practitioners can’t be wrong).  But this little window is opening up.  Not sure a window to what, or what it’s letting in, but worthy of note.

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