Saturday, July 30, 2011

At the crossroads.

Some of you may know that I am engaged in a Chaplain Residency at a large regional hospital…and in addition to visiting patients and families, my fellow residents and interns and I have lots of class-work, reading, paperwork, and group sharing.  The whole thing is a tremendous opportunity to encounter suffering (the suffering of others and one’s own suffering) and to learn about one’s self in the midst of all that.

Anyway, in a recent class discussion on a book we’re all reading called “God & Human Suffering”, I was invited to comment on my experience of the intersection of my Christian practice and my Buddhist practice.  At the time, I was exhausted; I had been on call for 24 hours and hadn’t had any sleep.  I really couldn’t put two sentences together.  But after I was able to go home and get some sleep, I came back the next day and shared this with the group…

What I’ve come to experience in Christianity, at least in its “traditional” expressions, is a spiritual system that primarily keeps its focus on how things “should” be.  Traditional church systems do a good job of teaching people what to believe…about God, about Jesus, about “the kingdom”, about how the world is “supposed” to work.  This traditional expression of Christianity provides us with an “ideology” to believe in and attach to.  And what I’d like to point out is that the root of the word “ideology” is “idea”…that is, what we have been taught as Christians to believe in is just that: a bit of a fantasy, a construct of our imaginations, an IDEA. 

Now, I’m not saying that having ideas or living out a life of “faith” is wrong.  And if I sound critical, I really don’t mean to.  I’m simply pointing out something I observe to be kind of true.  Our invitation as Christians, at least as far as I can remember about what I’ve been taught, is to live out a life of “faith”.  Again, having ideas or “beliefs” isn’t inherently wrong or bad.  It just is what it is.  It's good to have faith and hope, especially if our faith and hope is something that helps us function in the world and put one foot in front of the other.  Where I think we get into trouble, though, is when we become attached to those beliefs and when we confuse our ideas with reality.  Our egos fool us into thinking that because things “should” be a certain way, that they are that way.  And I've encountered some Christians who have been taught that if we have enough "faith" or if we believe in something strongly enough, it will become true...as if God were Jiminy Cricket telling us that if we just did the right things and believed hard enough or had enough faith we could someday turn into "real" boys and girls.  And that is simply not the case. 

But I’ve come to understand that we all do this to some degree, we all create narratives for ourselves about who we are and what we believe; and that we all do it for a similar reason…to protect ourselves from overwhelming emotions like fear, anger or pain; or on a deeper level, clinging to our ideology protects us from facing the biggest fear of all: our own mortality and impermanence.   Living in our ideology provides us with a welcome escape from the unbearable suffering in the world and inside of us and from a world that is constantly changing and finite.  But constantly living in a state of denial about reality, or living in a world entirely composed of our ideas, can bring us into conflict with how the world actually is.  Which sets us up for all kinds of trouble.  I believe the psychological term for this is “psychosis”.  I hate to say it, but a Christianity that is focused solely on adherence to an ideology at the expense of reality creates a kind of psychosis.  Hhhmm…I'd better be careful, I'm one step away from calling Christianity psychotic.  Luckily, this is where my Buddhist practice steps in…

The invitation of the Buddha's teachings, that is the “practice” of Buddhism, is to let go of these fantasies, let go of these ideologies, and awaken to “reality”.  Buddha invites us to simply sit and conduct the experiment of observation and analysis of what is “real” and “not real”...internally as well as externally.  Zen Master Dogen was able to ofer a most profound summary of the entirety of the Buddha's Teaching in just three simple words: "Not Always So".

When I sit on my meditation cushion and focus on my breath and settle into a gentle, focused awareness, things come up: anger, pain, sadness, joy, fear, lust, rejection, attraction, loneliness, inclusion…all kinds of things come up into my consciousness for me to look at, feel, and investigate.  I dialogue with these things and ask them, “where did you come from”?, “where are you going”?, “what are you all about?”, “what are you teaching me”?,  “what do you need from me”?, “what do you have to say about me”?, “what do you have to say about reality”? And as these things come up, fear, anger, pain, joy, etc., I invite myself to remain present with them and not turn away.  I spend time with my fear.  I spend time with my anger.  I spend time with my sadness and my joy, and I allow them to become familiar.  As they become familiar parts of me, I learn that they arise from within me and that they do not come from outside.  And as they become familiar, I see that they lose their power to control me.  I learn to differentiate these conditioned states of emotion and thought from any external reality.  I am liberated from my own ideology and the ideology of others.  I learn that there is a big difference between ideology and reality.  And I learn to live in a world that is constantly changing.  I learn to bravely accept the reality of impermanence without retreating to a fantasy about “eternal life”, because there is no such thing.

And this is where I see the beautiful intersection of these traditions…right in the spot where my hope for a better world meets the reality of the world we have. 

I’ve been a Christian all of my life, and I’ve been thoroughly steeped in its mythology and its ideology.  But by sitting on my cushion and cultivating a brave but gentle practice of really examining the nature of myself and reality, I have been able to discover a beautiful, meaningful practice of Christianity based not on fantasy and ideology, but on reality.  I’ve slowly been able to extricate Christ from Christianity.  What I mean is, by trying to understand this Jesus dude outside of the ideology and mythology of things like the immaculate conception, royal Davidic lineage, walking on water, “miracles” and even the resurrection, and letting go of those things that for most people define their Christianity, I’ve discovered something I feel is truer, more authentic,  more healing and more empowering (for me, anyway).    I’ve tried to look beyond the ideology and the mythology and look directly at the life and teachings of this man called Jesus.  What I see is a man with a deep understanding and appreciation for the transcendent divine.  I see a guy who understood both the spiritual and religious life of his people and the role that spirituality and religion played in their lives.  But I think he also understood the reality of a brutal life in first century Palestine.  He understood the crushing poverty, brutality and oppression of life under Roman occupation.  He understood the corrupt, inhumane governance of Herrodian rule.  And he understood the hypocrisy and impotence of strict religious life under the Pharisees.  And he was pissed off about it!  He taught empowering lessons of a different, compassionate spiritual life in relationship with a loving compassionate God and lived out a life of selfless care of the poor, the sick, the homeless and the oppressed.  He never really required people to “believe” in him, he asked people to “follow” him and to love.  Jesus, as a true spiritual master, gave us his own summary of the spiritual laws of his own time and culture: "Love God, Love your Neighbor as Yourself".  But I think more importantly, Jesus gave us an example…an example of how to practice loving God and loving our neighbors as ourselves.  He gave us something more powerful than ideology and more powerful that beliefs, He gave us a practice.  Siddhārtha Gautama Buddha saw the same things in his world and gave us the same thing: a practice of seeing reality and generating compassion for and in that reality.

I can hope for a better world.  I can believe that things should be different.  But hope doesn’t change anything.  My hope doesn’t change the reality of a suffering world.  I still have to do something about it.  If I want a better world, I have to make it happen.  If I want the “kingdom of heaven”, I have to make it here and now.  My hope doesn’t absolve me of my responsibility to love and to do the work required of loving.  In the world of suffering, at the intersection of Christianity and Buddhism I discover a powerful practice...a practice of compassion in the midst of a reality of suffering and of joy.

And so this is where I try to abide and work and discover the kingdom, at the intersection of hope and reality...at the crossroads of "Love Your Neighbor" and "Not Always So".

Scott+

Thursday, June 30, 2011

Imagine

In June of this year, I began a year-long residency as a Chaplain at a regional hospital. My peer group of fellow residents, chaplain interns, as well as my supervisors, is composed of “Christians”…specifically “Baptist” Christians. In some ways, I am the “token Buddhist”…I have experienced so far that I can be both a novel curiosity and a threat to my peers. And in an effort to respond to a recent Facebook note I posted about my confusion about what it means to be “Baptist”, I hope, as one of my learning objectives, to figure that out. “What is a Baptist”? But that is another blog post for another day…




But today’s question is a little broader:  What is a CHRISTIAN?

Well…I don’t really know. I know I’ve been told what a Christian is, what a Christian does. And I’ve mostly been told that being a Christian means that I’ve accepted a set of “beliefs” about God, about this Jesus fella. And I know that a lot, if not most of that meaning of Christianity has been handed to us for centuries by the “church” and its authorities…as part of our “tradition”. I also know that most of that tradition is founded on the writings of Paul and the narratives of the gospel writers…our “scripture”. But my experience is that what we have inherited, as both tradition and scripture, is just that… “narratives” – narratives of other people in a specific historical geo-political context, narratives with specific political and theological agendas to advance, narratives to be understood by those people in those times. But why do those narratives have to be MY narrative(s)? 

It’s clear that belief in the Resurrection was important to Paul; but does it have to be just as important to me? It’s clear in the first chapter of Matthew that establishing Jesus’ Davidic lineage was important to the author(s) of that gospel…he(?) was writing a persuasive story to a mostly Jewish audience. But does Jesus’ Davidic lineage have to be important to me? The author of Mark emphasizes Jesus’ role as prophet as a fulfillment and continuation of Jewish Midrashic narratives. John seeks to establish Jesus’ divinity. But these are the narratives of and for a specific community authored by specific individuals with their own specific personal narratives. Why do they have to be MY narratives? Can I not have the freedom to experience my own narrative?  I hope you get my point. 


What worries me is that “belief” in these narratives (or adoption of these narratives as one’s own), has reduced Christianity to a meaningless, lifeless, rote repetition of creeds and doctrines. I feel that people who have chosen to live out a Christianity based solely on “beliefs” have abdicated their courage and responsibly to live authentic spiritual lives in exchange for the leisureliness of going to church on Sunday, going through some liturgical motions, and leaving it at that. I am ashamed that the simple recitation of a “belief” in Jesus has supplanted the PRACTICE of Christianity as the valid definition of what it means to be a Christian. To me, such a reduction is offensive; it is weak, fraudulent, cowardly, vapid and lifeless. Reducing Christianity to nothing more than a formulary of doctrinal “beliefs” renders it impotent. Such a lifeless Christianity is a slap in the face to what I feel Jesus was trying to teach and do. Bishop John Shelby Spong has written: “Why Christianity Must Change or Die”. Let me be the first (although I doubt that I am), to pronounce that Christianity is, in deed, dead. That is, so long as it requires nothing more than a simple profession of “faith” and belief in a bunch of other people’s narratives.

What I want to ask is this: Is it possible to re-define Christianity as a PRACTICE, rather than a “faith”? Is there such a thing as a “faithless” Christian? (The German theologian Deitrich Bonhoeffer has invited us to share his idea of a “religion-less Christianity”; maybe this is like that). Can I still call myself a Christian if I’ve let go of the narratives that seem to define it for other people? 
Well, it better be possible, ‘cause that’s what I am determined to do.
 
What inspired this blog (wandering diatribe), is this little poem that was shared by a fellow chaplain in our morning group/devotional: 
 
“What does your Master teach”? asked a visitor.
“Nothing”, said the disciple.
“Then why does he give discourses”?
“He only points the way, he teaches nothing”.
The visitor couldn’t make sense of this, so the disciple made it clearer…
“If the Master were to teach, we would make beliefs out of his teachings. The Master is not concerned with what we believe, only with what we see.”
 

 
So what I want others to stop and consider is this…What if we took this little dialogue/exchange and applied it to Christianity? What would happen if we stopped “believing” everything the bible says, or the church says, or the tradition says, and just tried to practice what this dude Jesus asked us to practice: “Love God; Love your Neighbor as yourself”. Isn’t that the essence of what He was trying to teach in the first place...That despite what the Pharisees and the Temple/Church authorities try to tell us to do or do "to us",  or no matter what they tell us to "believe", that it’s more important to love and serve than to follow the script or believe the “right” thing?  Isn't LOVE and the PRACTICE of LOVE the most important thing?  Isn't LOVE and the PRACTICE of LOVE more important than "orthodoxy"?

I want to try and see what happens!
Now let’s hold hands and sing a song… 
 
Imagine there's no Heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world

You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one
 
John Lennon



A little context and introduction



At the urgings of a few individuals very close to me, I have finally put up this blog.  In this blog, I will attempt to explore what it means to be a human being in the context of practicing some kind of meaningful Christianity and some kind of Engaged Buddhism…



Briefly, so that you may have some context in which to appreciate my spiritual efforts, I will share that I was raised in the Episcopal Church and first felt a call to the Priesthood at the age of 8.  My childhood was violent, chaotic and unstable, and the Sacraments of Baptism and Holy Eucharist (Communion) were extremely important to me in maintaining my sanity and experiencing at least one stable, unconditional source of love.  These Sacraments remain just as important to me today.  I came to the practice of Buddhism first through my own readings and exploration of Zen Buddhist writings as a teen-ager and later, as a young adult, through an invitation from a friend to experience a retreat with his Tibetan Buddhist teachers 1995.  I took refuge in the Buddhist practice on that retreat and maintained my study and practice of Tibetan Buddhism for 12 years.  But in 2007 I encountered the teaching and practice of Zen Buddhism through the writings of Claude AnShin Thomas and his book: At Hell’s Gate: A Soldier’s Story from War to Peace, and The Eight Gates of Zen: A Program of Zen Training by John Daido Loori Roshi.  My encounters with Claude AnShin and my resonance with Daido Roshi’s Eight Gates returned me to a sincere and committed engagement with Zen Buddhist Practice.  And lastly, in my years of processing, healing and growth, I have had the tremendous fortune to become a professed member of a New-Monastic Community that encourages and strengthens my ongoing practice of Christianity and Buddhism…the Lindisfarne Community, a Celtic-inspired community of deeply spiritual individuals journeying together and exploring a modern-day expression of monasticism.  I was ordained to the Priesthood by the Lindisfarne Community in 2008.  For this community’s witness and encouragement and inclusion, I am deeply and forever grateful.  In this community, I am free to be both a practicing Zen Buddhist and a Christian Priest…and to explore this Priesthood “Ontologically”, that is: through my total being.   

And this blog is meant to be part of that exploration.   

So here we go…