“Jesus said…Split a piece of wood. I am there.
Lift up the stone and you will find me there.”—from logion 77 of the Gospel of
Thomas1
There’s a tradition in Buddhism as it’s practiced in North America
called the circle talk. It’s a ceremony
of closure at the end of a meditation retreat, at least in the Zen and
Vipassana traditions in which I’ve practiced. For those unfamiliar with them,
retreats generally consist of multiple
days spent sitting motionless on a meditation cushion mentally following one’s
breath or concentrating on some confounding question like, “What is my face
before my parents were born?” This punctuated only by short periods of walking,
meals, work, and sleep during which an
attempt is made to maintain the same quality of attention. The circle talk occurs at the end of the
final period of “sitting” on the last day.
Meditation cushions are drawn around into a circular formation, everyone
takes a seat, and, going around the circle one by one, each retreatant is given
a chance to say a few words. Because the idea of verbalizing the experience
feels counterintuitive to me, and I’d usually prefer to say nothing at all, I’m
amazed at the volume of words that gush forth from my co-retreatants. I take
the impulse to “share the experience” in this way to be a particularly American
phenomenon. I suspect they don’t do
circle talks in Asia.
What most often gets expressed in the circle talk,
appropriately, is gratitude, for the
teacher, for the opportunity for spiritual practice, for the support of fellow
retreatants, and such. And then often gratitude for the Buddhist
teachings themselves. What surprises me is how often I've heard expressed in
these speeches gratitude for the buddhadharma as a kind of refuge from the
religion the speaker was raised in, usually Christianity. It’s not uncommon to
hear the speaker express a sense of relief for no longer to having to believe
in God or to have such a figure breathing down his neck. One sometimes gets the feeling that the
person no longer believes in God but is really
angry at him, just the same. The
God-concept, having been found to be inadequate, is still, oddly, clung to
rather than let go of, with as much suffering found in rejecting it as was
found in embracing it.
Being confronted with “God” in this way, in the
more-or-less atheistic Buddhist context, inspired me to try to articulate for
myself and friends as well as I can some of what I myself came to mean when I
say “God,” how that relates to the experience I call the life in Christ, and
the implications of that experience for me in the past, the present, and the
future.
1. Past
I was fascinated by religion by from the time I can remember, I think
because my family, with the exception of one grandmother, had checked out of it
a couple generations back, but none of the fascination I had for churches and
their mysterious trappings prepared me for the first encounter with Christ. It
came through a little book I found among my great-grandmother’s things when we
packed up her house to move her into nursing care. It's interesting that I can't recall the
title or much specifically about the contents now. I remember only that the cover
bore an illustration of Jesus addressing a group of children. It was probably
some sort of Sunday school material.
I can’t underestimate
the impact of the emotions that came over me from contact with that little
book. Something of the charge still lingers even as I recall it at the age of fifty-six.
But I think that even back then I understood that the emotions were only a
reaction to a perception of some truth that was above or beyond the emotions generated by it. I might not
have been able to articulate much about Jesus or his relationship to God back
then, but I saw something there of pure love and compassion (for lack of better
words, and I can't really think of any better words) that struck me with a shock of reality. It
was primal, universal. Any human attempt at kindness I'd experienced previously
was a small expression of it, though they all shared in it. This compassion was
a fundamental truth of the universe. It
was indestructible, more real than real. And this first perception of it—even with
all the sentiment attached—was a shock of knowledge.
It was a kind of transmittal by Grace (for I'd not been seeking it or striving
for it) of something deeply true. The sentimental picture of Jesus on the cover
of the little book belied the power of the experience.
Jesus was soon
conceptualized on my behalf by the Baptist church my grandmother belonged to
(she alone of the entire large extended family), where I got “saved” and
baptized sometime after the experience described above and in response to
it. The education about God that followed
came through Sunday school, and through the Bible as filtered through the
Evangelical lens, and through the hymns.
I willingly embraced the notion of Jesus as God incarnate because
something of that puzzling idea resonated with the profundity of that first
encounter, even if the details of how it worked were confusing to a
twelve-year-old. Ultimately, most of the concepts I got sold by the Baptists
didn't ring true for me, and not much of their teaching (as it manifested in
Central California in the 1960s)
survived my own unfiltered reading of the Gospels.
I abandoned the Baptists with relief in my
later teens, but as my affiliation with organized religion ended, my interest
in it, through reading and through observing the lives of those affected by it,
only increased. I think what happened
was that the early images and concepts about God I'd gotten from the Baptists
were revealed to be inadequate, but there was an intuition of the truth of my
original experience that I couldn't in
honesty abandon. The concepts I'd gotten weren't adequate, but neither did I
take them to be completely untrue.
My retreat from
religion was reversed, in my twenties, by my encounter with the Orthodox
Church. The impression of holiness (again, for lack of a better word) that I
got there resonated with my early encounter with Jesus via the Sunday school
book in that it seemed to be something other than an intellectual perception.
It was an experience that, by that point, I already understood words would
betray. Yet, the Orthodox Church was
replete with words, concepts, and images, and they were full of beauty. Without
completely understanding why at first, I seemed to be able to embrace them
wholeheartedly. It went against the grain of my early (and continuing) Zen-like proclivity toward the apophatic
way. But something about the
conceptualization of God in Orthodoxy
just “worked” for me in a profound way.
Why was that so? In making an effort now to analyze the
experience with 20/20 hindsight, I'd say it was because there was a basic
understanding that the concepts weren't understood as ends in themselves. Expressions of the God-event/experience
somehow began with the understanding
that any particular word or image is inadequate: If you think “God” is expressible in words,
your words are instantly false; but if
you think words fail in the face of that experience, you can actually begin to
talk about God in truthful ways. Inadequate words like God and Christ and salvation vibrate with truth as soon as
you understand they can't contain it. You can even then use words to make
theological definitions when that becomes necessary.
I saw an
understanding of this in the best of the Church's hymnography, theology, and
art. I take the great beauty of much Orthodox iconography to be be a result of
this understanding: no picture could describe the ultimate reality had burst
upon the world in intelligible form (even if it was said that people for a few
years in a very particular place and time could walk with him, talk to him, eat
with him, listen to what he said, and observe his actions). The image bore
visual testimony to that reality without containing it, without exhausting it.
To the extent that the truth expressed in the image compelled you to look past, it, to transcend it. In doing so you
did not leave the truth of the image behind as something to be cast off, but
recognized it as something to be appreciated, treasured. Veneration made
perfect sense.
Was this
characteristic of deep-down truthfulness peculiar to Orthodoxy? It seemed so to
me at the time, though I was young and inexperienced, and I’d probably just
missed it elsewhere. I think anyone with an inclination to understand what's
true (ultimately, all of us) eventually gets to that place of understanding,
though their own transcended concepts may be expressed other than by the words God and Christ, as was the case with my Buddhist friends. But I can say truthfully that I have always
understood the Orthodox Church to have especially preserved this understanding
of the utter transcendence of God in this way that, paradoxically, leads to the intimate knowledge of God.
The implications of
this kind of experience of truth
are threatening to anyone who's bought
into the concepts themselves. There's a fear that transcendence will surpass or
negate the concept, when the opposite is in fact true. Transcending it reveals
its truth unmistakably (or its untruth, if necessary). Many people are
threatened by the idea God isn't containable in any concept or image—including
the true and good theological definitions that the Fathers of the Church were
compelled by circumstances to come up with in order to describe the
Christ-event and say some things about
what it meant.
I'd go so far as to
say that even the Incarnation isn't containable in that millennia-distant event
so powerfully preserved in the experience of the Church and expressed
in her theology. I'm unable to believe
that Christ is limited to that
revelation of the God-man who is said to have walked on earth two millennia
ago. St. Paul saw Christ in the rock that flowed with water for the Israelites
in Egypt,2 and I don't take him to mean that the rock was “just” a
symbol (in the sense that symbolic isn't real). Christ is every bit as much here as I drink
my coffee and type these words into my laptop. Once you've gotten the hint that
God reveals himself within creation, Christ becomes unavoidable. And the words from the Gospel of Thomas above
are revealed to be deep-down true: “Split
a piece of wood. I am there. Lift up the stone and you will find me
there.” The glorious and saving
Incarnation is revealed to be an event in time that isn't to be clung to against all other moments in
time.
Meister Eckhart says, in the opening lines of
his famous sermon on the Nativity:
Here in time we make holiday because the eternal birth which God the
Father bore and bears unceasingly in eternity is now born in time, in human
nature. Saint Augustine says this birth is always happening. But if it does not
happen in me, what does it profit me? What matters is that it shall happen in
me.3
That Christ is born in me (I might revise Meister Eckhart's statement
to say us) is indeed the important
thing. God's supreme revelation in his self-emptying entry into our world is in
fact of no consequence if it doesn't happen in us, if it doesn't turn us
around, change us to the core, start us out on the path of our own
self-emptying. If we're not struck with the fact of this radical self-emptying,
and then if we're not struck with the corresponding revelation of intimacy with
our fellow creatures who are all in the same boat, then the event itself
doesn't matter. But if it does change
us, if it does set us in an eternal process of reorientation toward God, then
it wouldn't matter if the Christ event, his Incarnation, Death, and
Resurrection, were somehow “proven” to be mythical rather than literal. So, it seems to me, that even the incarnation
as a concept isn't something to be clung to as an end in itself. If I believe literally in every aspect of
what is said about this glorious event in the Gospels, the fathers, the
definitions of the councils, but am unkind to my brother and unrepentant for
the unkindness, it doesn't matter if it happened anyway.
When it came to the
ongoing experience I'd call the life in Christ, I found that the truest things
I could say about it always sounded
paradoxical. I found “God” to be infinitely other. In some ways every
further step “toward” him reveals him to be further away, yet every successive
revelation of that infinite distance reveals him to be more intimate to me than
I am to myself. If I keep talking, the
only kinds of statements that arise are paradoxical like that. The movement
seems to be ever toward paradox rather
than back to anything easily expressible. I wonder if it's true that
comprehensibility to the human mind is a sign of untruth.
I don't take any of
this to be unimportant to understand. It's not a matter for academic
theologians that ordinary people don't need to get. It's not rocket science.
You don't have to be especially intelligent to experience it; you don't have to
be able to articulate it. It's not the exclusive vocation of monastics or of
those with a special interest in mysticism. It's not optional for anyone who
aspires to love what's true. Seeing it
doesn't turn one into a saint. It turns one into something more of an ordinary
person, though an ordinary person with an ever-increasing tendency to be aware
of the ways one moves in a different direction, with a resulting natural repentance
that's not much different than joy. The effort to empty oneself to God, as
manifested in prayer, participation in the sacraments, and so forth, is simply
the logical reaction to the experience of God.
It's not about praying in expectation of some sort of reward for doing
so, whether the hoped-for reward is
inner peace or salvation from damnation. It wouldn't matter if the “reward”
were inner turmoil or damnation. The response to God isn't results-driven.
The experience also leads me to an awareness
that salvation isn't an individual activity, but something that we work on
together. The saints aren't pretending to be humble when they see themselves as
the greatest of sinners. It's just that the darkness/brightness, the
otherness/intimacy of God, reveals to them that none us are significantly
different from one another. One could even say there's no “progress” in
salvation, since every moment of the journey reveals how limitless it is, to
the extent that the notion of any of us being in some way further along it than
our brother or sister is laughable. I don't believe Christ ate with the tax
collectors and sinners as a ministry to the fallen, but in witness to the fact
that there's no essential difference between any of us.
This life in Christ,
this life of communion with God and my fellow beings in response to God's
compassionate revelation of himself to
the world, is something that's experienced rather than explained or codified.
Saying much about it is difficult, because, like I said before, paradoxical
statements arise as soon as you try. It can
be spoken of, of course, and even codified into theology if it needs to be. St.
Gregory Palamas described the relationship wonderfully well, it seems to me, to
the extent I've been able to read and understand him, mostly by way of the work
of Fr. John Meyendorff. But people had the experience of this truth long before
he made the distinction between Essence and Energies, and people continue to
experience it who have no knowledge of or interest in his brilliant
articulation of it. People get confused by theology, so often taking it to be
of greater importance than the reality it describes. For that reason, remaining
silent is usually the best practice, unless speaking up becomes necessary in the face of falsehood,
as it did with such urgency for St. Gregory.
Much of the above is missing from—or even
quite at odds with—Christianity as it's very often taught. And because so, my
Buddhist brothers and sisters likely do well to reject the concepts they
received about “God.” But the trap I saw
some of them falling into was a sort of forceful pushing away of concepts
rather than just letting them go. Then a kind of identification of themselves
with their rejection in a way that led to the “not-believing-in-God-but-mad-at-him-anyway”
behavior that I observed and chuckled about.
2. Present
But there's a subset of Orthodox Christians who don't feel
significantly different to me than these
God-hating Buddhist friends. These are the ones for whom “believing in God” is just
the flip-side of the Buddhists'
rejection of God: rather than rejecting the concept, they cling to it as though
it were a raft on a turbulent sea, hoping that if they say they “believe” that the raft will save them. The only sort of God that can be clung to
like that is an idea about God, and any idea about God is inevitably
unsatisfying. It doesn't matter if the
God-concept is something as simple as My Big Imaginary Friend or something much
more sophisticated. Even profoundly true words like “ineffable, inconceivable,
incomprehensible, ever-existing, and eternally the same,” can also be made
untrue by making them ends in themselves.
It seems to me there is little difference between rejecting an
inadequate “God” and clinging to one in “faith.” Both modes confuse concept for reality.
This version of
Christianity in which God basically becomes an idol has always existed, of
course, and probably always will, as a kind of doppelgänger of the
harder-to-pin-down genuine life in Christ. People bought into that regrettable
version of truth aren't better or worse particularly that those who've had the
grace to see past it, and among them are people of genuine good will. But when
their view becomes dominant enough to overshadow the vision of the Christ who is
inexhaustible, I can only see it as a tragedy for everyone, especially
them. Their comfortable ideology is on
the rise in Orthodox Christianity in America, and our odd little sect is
ill-equipped to withstand the onslaught.
It's ironic, because it should have been
otherwise. The brilliant and naive
Frenchified-Russian Orthodox theologians who landed in the United States after
World War II were responsible for opening a lot of eyes to the freedom that comes from the
experience of truth of Christ. They were steeped in the teachings of the
Orthodox Church fathers, but, having grown up in emigration, educated in the
Western intellectual tradition, they were unable to ignore some aspects of the
world outside the boundaries of their Church.
I suspect that experience may have contributed to the clarity of their
vision. They transmitted their experience to many, but not everyone, even among
those closest to them, necessarily got
it, and some even seem to have taken their message to be something other than what
it really was: something to do with Orthodoxy as a banner to be waved with the
pride of identity, or of attachment to ancientness or correctness, or even
scholarship.
Their message is
obscured more and more these days as people go the opposite direction and take
the mental easy way out of constructing
a church of concepts one mustn't to look past. This shouldn't be surprising, as it's always been easier to
construct a comprehensible God than it is to live with the truth of paradox,
and it always will be. But the situation
has gotten considerably worse in recent years, as the Orthodox Church in the
U.S. has been inundated with people from the Evangelical churches for whom
“faith” too often means abandoning
reason in the face of the revelation of Christ. Christ thus becomes a concept
that can't be looked past, a concept who must be clung to in order to avoid the
hell they fear being cast into by not embracing it. Not having understood the life in Christ to
be something profoundly different than that, they strain to make the Orthodox
Church conform to their truncated vision, and they flee to it as a more
theologically and ethically conservative version of the same thing they were
doing before, with a beautiful liturgy.
If they made an idol of the Bible before, they can now do the same to
Tradition, fathers, hymnography, icons. They seem to be succeeding in remaking
the Orthodox Church in America into something that suits their purposes, helped
along by like-minded folks who already inhabited the church when they
arrived. These are the people who may
ultimately be responsible for my excommunication.4
3. Future
I can't say it won't be heartbreaking if this happens (and, the way
things are going now, it would be unrealistic not to be prepared for the possibility),
not just for me and others like me, but for all Orthodox Christians whose
confrontation with Truth makes it impossible for them to exclude us or to
themselves remain in communion with those who would. Though, as heartbreak
goes, it won't come close to the suffering so many other people have endured
throughout the history of the world. That puts things in perspective. But in
the midst of the sadness there will also be a good deal of cause for
encouragement.
For myself, I have
the blessing of having had some preparation for this exclusion. I spent several years away from the Church
dealing with the many things I hate about it, and I missed it terribly the
whole time. From that experience I came to see that longing is in itself a kind
of participation of a sort I can't be excluded from. I also can also take my
excommunication as an offering in the Church's ongoing effort to understand
what's true. Progress in that realm
seldom happens overnight, and I take to be a worthwhile thing to bear witness
to the point of being excluded from the Church. That would also be in itself a
kind of participation.
But the main source
of happiness comes from my knowledge that it's impossible to take away the
experience of my life in Christ as I've tried to express it above or to
eradicate my participation in it. I can be excluded from the Church's
sacramental life, but no one can take from me the experience of the
encounter. I can't be set in another
direction by anyone but myself. I
suspect that exclusion from the sacraments would make this feeling only
stronger.
For the most
important thing I seem to have discovered in this life in Christ is that it
happens eternally right now: the way to God is open before me at every moment.
The truth Christians identify with the person of Christ is experienced with
great and subtle power in the Church's teaching and its sacraments, but it is in no way limited
to them. It’s right here in this moment, in this cafe, as I sit drinking coffee and typing these words on my laptop.
Christ is inexhaustible, and, once you've gotten the most gracious hint,
unavoidable. All I have to do is split a piece of wood, lift up a rock, or
return the waitress's smile as she pours a refill.
There's nothing to
worry about.
___
Notes
1. Translated from the Coptic by Marvin Meyer,
from his Gnostic Bible (Boston: New
Seeds, 2009).
2. 1 Corinthians 10:4.
3. Franz Pfieffer, trans. Meister Eckhart (London: John M. Watkins, 1956).
4. For anyone reading this who doesn't know me,
the reason for my excommunication would be the fact that I am gay and in a
relationship with a man, for which I have not to date repented. Details of how
I came to be in this position in conflict with what is said by many to be the
church's teachings will have to be left for another essay. As aspiration to
truth compels me to always hold in my heart the possibility that God will
reveal to me I am wrong in this, and that I'm suffering from willful
self-delusion on the matter, though that hasn't happened yet.
No comments:
Post a Comment