March 12, 2007
Love and Being
Inspired by Cynthia Bourgeault’s reference to it when I met her a few weeks ago (OK, and a couple of bouts of insomnia), I have at long last started digging into Meditations on the Tarot, which I’ve owned for years but never read. I’m on the second letter, which explores the notion of Love as the ultimate objective of the spiritual quest. The writer contrasts this Western (Jewish/Christian/Muslim) aim with the Eastern aim of unity with Being. Relationship/twoness on one side, being/oneness on the other.
I know this is a bit like that old saw: “There are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide the world into two kinds of people, and those who don’t.”
Nevertheless I think this is an important, maybe a fundamental, distinction between the spiritual journeys of west and east. And yet: in conversation with my Nalanda West mentor today, we talked about these as two poles of a wonderfully unstable dynamic compound: “not one, not two”. It’s all one…and yet we continue to exist and be in relationship.
The Meditations author speaks most compellingly of the power of preserving personality on the Christian path. I think he sells Buddhism short, surely, and misses some of the nuances of Buddha-nature. But when he says things like “those on the path of unity no longer have the ability to shed tears” there’s something valid there.
After working through a number of books that play softball with the distinctions between West and East, it’s utterly refreshing to hear this potent articulation of what’s *unique* about the Christian journey, not in a triumphalist sense, but in a deeply reflective, careful, and respectful way. What a treasure!