Around 30 AD, in Palestine, a guy woke up to the fact that he
was what had been referred to as “God.” He then saw that as god, all he
could do was sacrifice himself for others, to the point of his own
nonexistence. And then he saw that death really didn’t matter in the face
of all this. So those who listened to him thought he didn’t die (though
their accounts varied wildly and those who put together the record of it slyly
knew that.)
He woke up within Judaism but didn’t leave Judaism behind.
He might as well have left being male behind, and no one asked him to do that
(even though he knew that there was, on some level, no such thing as male or
female.)
It took the Fathers (there were no Mothers yet, as nice as that
would be) several hundred years to figure out who he was, and even then they
fought about it. If there were Internet back then, or if the city you lived
near didn’t determine your theology, I probably would have been a Nestorian
(but not a classic one, more like Nestorius himself, not that that matters at
all).
He never intended for a religion to arise from himself, let
alone the primary one of Europe and the Americas. But he probably knew it was
inevitable that a religion would arise from him, that it should be small, and
that it would be over as soon as possible. And he probably knew, as he
preached, as he had to, he had no control over it.
I was a follower of this man, Jesus, until recently. I still am
really. In the Orthodox Church, which, until lately, preserved his
teaching best. Until the probably inevitable takeover of the institution
by the Evangelical heresy, which tried and succeeded in making him
understandable.
Now the Orthodox Church has become the place, incredibly, where
“serious” Evangelicals go, as weird as that is. Even though folks had
tried to make Jesus understandable from the beginning. And the Fathers’
argument was probably appropriate, because he was truly the most complicated of
humans. His self-sacrifice was the most important thing, and I always
felt it was what Christianity had that all the others didn’t.
About 25 years ago I started practicing in the Buddhism which
seemed a natural fit for me in my youth, primarily Zen. Before I got hijacked
by Christianity, Eastern Orthodoxy in particular. But I was one of those
Zennies who came that way through Christianity, and who always felt the great
truth of that, that there was something Christianity had that the others
didn’t, and it had to do with that extreme self-sacrifice. And that
extreme sacrifice was missing from Buddhism. (Though I did see that in the
ideal of the bodhisattva.)
I liked the precepts and the eightfold path, and the silent
sitting that is only part of it, though it’s taken by many to be the whole
thing. I like the looking into our true nature that silent sitting is all
about. I sense no difference in my direction, even though I feel I had to leave
the Church behind.
My borders are, necessarily, thus somewhat indistinct.
Embarrassingly so. I cannot identify with the (large) number of Buddhists
who follow that path because it is not the Christianity or Judaism in which
they were raised. Because it was Christianity that led me here.
I always had an aversion to folks who mixed and matched the
traditions according to whim, and now, naturally it seems, I am one of them. I
find that I usually end up becoming what I don’t like. And this is no
exception.
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