Eastern Light: Awakening To Presence In Zen, Quakerism, and Christianity
by Steve SmithTable of Contents
Introduction
Part I: Purgation
Chapter One: A Quaker in the Zendo
Chapter Two: Standing Still in the Light
Chapter Three: Pure PassionPart II: Illumination
Chapter Four: Living Peace
Chapter Five: Healing Gender Hurt
Chapter Six: Friendly Pedagogy
Part III: Union
Chapter Seven: In the Love of Nature
Chapter Eight: Joyful Witness
Chapter Nine: Walking Cheerfully Over the World
Bibliography
====
CHAPTER THREE PURE PASSIONUntil we bow down and bear the suffering of life—not opposing it, but absorbing it and being it—we cannot see what our life is. This by no means implies passivity or non-action, but action from a state of complete acceptance. Even acceptance is not quite accurate—it’s simply being the suffering. It isn’t a matter of protecting ourselves, or accepting something else. Complete openness, complete vulnerability to life is (surprisingly enough) the only satisfactory way of living our life.—Charlotte Joko Beck
¹We must weep before we can laugh.
—Lin Yutang
²On Waxen Wings
Gathering myself in August 1957 for my first year of college, I sip a heady brew of fear, eagerness, and overweening ambition. This intoxication is briefly sobered by a disconcerting tone, however: a poem composed for me by our quiet Quaker neighbor, Edith Smith. Edith has known me since infancy and has followed my growth to the cusp of manhood with reticent, kindly eyes. No mere doggerel wishing me bon voyage, Edith’s poem voices her misgivings about my way forward. Soon I have lost the copy that she had given to me. I now recall only the first four lines:
Like proud and headlong Icarus, into the path
Of the rising sun, he is gone without goodbyes.
For him, the eager, lurks no aftermath
Behind the hope in his far-fixed eyes.
At the time I am only dimly aware of the ancient myth of Icarus, who flew on waxen wings too close to the sun, then crashed into the sea. I regard Edith with condescension, as a timid, inhibited soul who is so concerned with propriety that she has never truly lived. I thank her for her
efforts and silently dismiss her concern.
Yet Edith was wiser than I knew. My waxen wings carried me ever higher for 17 years, then melted in the heat of apparent success—and I plunged into depression and despair. For many years thereafter I was emotionally and spiritually at sea, struggling to stay afloat while assembling my own life raft.
Icarus did not see himself clearly, nor did I. What were the roots of this blindness? Though I cannot speak for Icarus, I now see more clearly the contours of my own youthful confusion. Fearing that I was profoundly flawed, I compensated by compulsive pursuit of external success. I saw the hollowness of these efforts only years later, when I slid into a losing endgame of alcohol and substance abuse. In the words of AA, I hit bottom.
Before I can hope for transformation, I must see myself clearly. My first painful efforts come through psychotherapy, a challenging exercise in self-honesty. Slowly I unravel the tangled web of my life and expose it to the light. Feeling a need to come clean, in my first summer of sobriety, I write a confession of my misbehaviors and give it to my wife, who has borne the heaviest burden. (I learn later that this exercise is similar to Step Four of AA, which requires a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.)
³As I drop my resistance to truth, I awaken to a new world. My vision clears, my awareness deepens—and I am given the gift of aligning my life with reality. Blessed by small moments of grace, I discern my next steps and find strength to take them.
The Paradoxical Theory of Change
Know thyself.
—The Oracle at Delphi
If you want to know God, learn to know yourself first.
—Evagrius Ponticus
⁴Resolving to introduce my nascent insights into my professional life, in spring 1975 I taught a new philosophy class to help students to clarify for themselves their vision of the life they hoped to live.
⁵ Because I had benefitted from my own efforts at honest self-assessment, I began the course with a paper assignment, A Look At Myself, in which I asked students to describe their present state and declare their personal goals for their participation in the course.
⁶ Before the paper was due, I shared with them some of my own struggles, hoping that my candor would be infectious. Over decades of tracking their development, I observed that students who took the risk to describe themselves honestly were also the ones who later reported the most significant insight and growth. In contrast, those who played it safe (claiming that they already knew everything that they needed to know) used the course to confirm their prejudices and to rationalize standing pat.
I observed this pattern also in group psychotherapy. Breakthroughs of healing and growth occurred when we surrendered to the moment and acknowledged the hard truths of our lives. In contrast, steadfast denial assured only that we remained stuck. I came upon a study of the therapeutic technique of Fritz Perls, the noted Gestalt therapist, that gave theoretical underpinning to these observations. Perls did not advise his patients; rather, he simply described with devastating candor what he saw in their lives. If they accepted the truth of his observations, their self-awareness deepened and their lives rounded into greater wholeness. Describing his approach, Perls said simply that awareness in itself is healing. In a widely cited paper, Arnold Beisser defined the core assumption of Perls’ psychotherapeutic technique as the paradoxical theory of change: Change occurs when I become what I am, not when I try to become what I am not.
⁷This concise piece of analysis helped me to recognize the secret of what I had seen in Alcoholics Anonymous, in psychotherapy, and among my students: if we refuse to see and acknowledge who we are, and instead struggle to mold ourselves into preconceived images of health and success, we only bury our unresolved issues more deeply and become less authentic. On the other hand, when we fully accept the reality of our
present state, we are freed—and our lives unfold in healing growth.
In Zen practice I found a rigorous application of the paradoxical theory of change, as well as elegant concepts to express it. Compulsions of the mind arise from attachment (tanha, or thirst, in Sanskrit)—aversion and craving that give rise to fantasies of safety and satisfaction. Through systematic training in zazen, the meditative practice of Zen, we practice the art of suspending this passive drift. Rather than retreating constantly into thoughts of the future or the past, we develop courage to live in the present moment. Through disciplined attention, we remain in place and experience our impulse to escape—coming face to face with our underlying distress.
The discomfort of this discipline is most pronounced during extended meditation retreats (called sesshin) in which one sits for lengthy periods in a carefully-prescribed posture, maintaining silence and stillness, returning again and again to one’s breath, facing one’s demons as they arise—not to exorcise them, but simply to be present to them. Unresolved childhood traumas bubble up; the pain of a broken relationship hits with full force; self-deception becomes obvious; false hopes die. The teachings counsel us to drop all resistance, all efforts to avoid the truth, and surrender to the reality of our lives. Out of this descent into our own private purgatory gradually unfolds a life of wholeness and equanimity. In August 1995 during a five-day sesshin at the Zen Center of San Diego, one such hellish yet healing moment came upon me:
Sitting on my zafu facing the wall, I relive a buried childhood trauma: while drinking at a water fountain, I am suddenly kicked in the seat of the pants by a girl whom I know from school. As she walks away, I stand dumbfounded, gripped by shame and utter impotence—nothing but a piece of shit. Reliving my memory, I become consumed by intense, unadulterated hatred, which appears in my mind’s eye as a pulsing, brownish-red ball. Gradually my anguish subsides. In the aftermath comes a wave of relief, and I find that my buried hostility has eased.
This incident is an object lesson in zazen, which requires that I pay full attention to this moment—to the immediacy of my sensory experience.
Noting my thoughts yet not yielding to another round of obsessive rumination, I return to direct awareness of my body. I do not attempt to change my experience; I do not suppress or try to overcome it. Instead I pay close attention, observing my compulsion to go somewhere else. Finally the root of my resistance reveals itself as buried pain or fear. Knotted pain unravels. In this wordless awareness of my suffering, I am cleansed. I become at home within my skin, more at peace, and more alive to the joy of living.
One of the most beloved Western teachers of Buddhism, Pema Chodron, gives this counsel:
Pause, take three conscious breaths, and lean in. Lean into the energy. Abide with it. Experience it fully. Taste it. Touch it. Smell it. Get curious about it. How does it feel in your body? What thoughts does it give birth to?… Just do not speak, do not act, and feel the energy. Be one with your own energy, one with the ebb and flow of life. Rather than rejecting the energy, embrace it. This leaning in is very open, very curious and intelligent… . Then relax and move on.
⁸As we become less self-obsessed, our natural compassion emerges. Anxiety eases—and small joys break into awareness. We are more adaptable and creative. A traditional Buddhist image for this transformation is the lotus flower, at home in the muddy water.
There are, to be sure, varieties of meditation that seek to transport us elsewhere—forms of spiritual materialism
⁹ that promise escape from the muddy water. In my experience, those who give themselves to such practices fall into one of two groups: the few who have achieved an overwhelming enlightenment experience and see themselves as members of a spiritual elite (while secretly retaining their character flaws)—and the many who yearn for such experiences, viewing their present life with distaste.
During the early years of my Zen practice, I was consumed by just such yearnings. Joko treated my spiritual fantasies kindly, since they are common among beginners. Yet she consistently redirected my attention to the very present that I was trying to avoid—the actual texture of my
experience, moment to moment. Joko devised a practice chant (used daily at the Zen Center of San Diego) to summarize this core teaching:
Caught in a self-centered dream—only suffering.
Holding to self-centered thoughts—exactly the dream.
Each moment, life as it is, the only teacher;
Being just this moment, compassion’s way.
One of Joko’s senior students, Barry Magid, writes that the fundamental paradox of [meditative] practice is that leaving everything alone is itself what is ultimately transformative.
¹⁰ This is a transparent restatement of the paradoxical theory of change.
Jon Kabat-Zinn, a major contributor to the movement of mindfulness meditation from the fringes into the mainstream of contemporary Western culture (including medical and psychotherapeutic practice), summarizes the point in admirably lucid language:
Meditation is not about trying to get anywhere else. It is about allowing yourself to be exactly where you are and as you are, and for the world to be exactly as it is in this moment as well… . the paradox is that you can only change yourself or the world if you get out of your own way for a moment, and give yourself over and trust in allowing things to be as they already are, without pursuing anything, especially goals that are products of your thinking. Einstein put it quite cogently: The problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them. … We need to return to our original, untouched, unconditioned mind. How can we do this? Precisely by taking a moment… to get outside of the stream of thought and sit by the bank and rest for a while in things as they are underneath our thinking… . That means being with what is for a moment, and trusting what is deepest and best in yourself, even if it doesn’t make any sense to the thinking mind.
¹¹When we open without reservation to the present moment, we awaken to hidden resources within ourselves, unexpected gifts of grace—creativity, compassionate energy, new perspectives, fresh insights. Kabat-Zinn writes, "dropping in on the bare experience of the present moment is
actually dropping in on just the qualities you may be hoping to cultivate—because they all come out of awareness, and it is awareness that we fall into when we stop trying to get somewhere or to have a special feeling… . Awareness itself is the teacher, the student, and the lesson."
¹²Kabat-Zinn’s disclosure of the heart of meditation dispels the misconception that meditative practice is a retreat into a passive inner citadel, insulating oneself from the suffering and injustice of the world. Passivity is acquiescence to the status quo, stepping back from our own raw energy and natural vitality. In contrast, mindfulness opens us to these very realities. Instead of shrinking from our experience, we yield to it; rather than remaining imprisoned by fear, we take the risk to become all that we are in this moment. Awareness floats lightly upon the waves of experience, like a lotus upon rippling water. We do not rein in our positive energy, but express it in spontaneous activity. Yielding to the fullness of the moment, we become more sensitive to the needs of those around us. Work becomes playful and joyous, releasing energies that we did not know we possessed.
Just such an explosion of exuberant and healing energy is seen in the extraordinary growth of 17th-century Friends. The fruit of standing still in the Light, all naked, bare and uncovered before the Lord,
¹³ is to become real in this present moment. A veil drops away, and one awakens to the grace and the joy of a new creation. Fox’s challenging counsel to set aside all agendas and surrender fully to the truth of our present condition is yet another iteration of the paradoxical theory of change.
From Self-Centeredness to Reality-Centeredness
To be self-centered is to be off center from life itself.
—Marc Ian Barasch
¹⁴John Hick, the eminent English philosopher of religion, declared, The function of religion, as [our] response to ultimate Reality, is to transform human existence from self-centeredness to Reality-centeredness.
¹⁵ Setting aside our narcissistic self-preoccupation, suspending striving, we open to the intimacy of the present moment and align ourselves with its
truth. This pattern is found not only in Hinduism, Taoism, and Buddhism, but also in the three great Western traditions. In his classic study, The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James describes this shift:
The transition from tenseness, self-responsibility, and worry to equanimity, receptivity, and peace, is the most wonderful of all those shiftings of inner equilibrium, those changes of the personal center of energy, which I have analyzed so often; and the chief wonder of it is that it so often comes about, not by doing, but by simply relaxing and throwing the burden down. This abandonment of self-responsibility seems to be the fundamental act in specifically religious, as distinct from moral practice."
¹⁶One of the many paradoxes of spiritual practice is that the generality of abstraction locks us into a prison of our own making, whereas when we open to the immediacy of this particular moment, we awaken to our unity with the world. In familiar words, William Blake invites us:
To see a world in a grain of sand
And heaven in a wildflower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.
¹⁷A similar sentiment is captured succinctly in a few lines by the medieval Japanese Zen master, Dogen Zenji: To study the self is to forget the self; to forget the self is to awaken to the ten thousand things. Ruben Habito, a Jesuit priest who is the first Catholic whose experience of enlightenment was authenticated by recognized Zen masters, cites the Japanese term botsunyu (to lose oneself and enter) to convey this intimate surrender. Habito writes, Zen enlightenment involves a stance of readiness to plunge right into the very heart of the world, in solidarity with all the joys and hopes, the pains and sufferings, the blood, sweat, and tears of all sentient beings—right here and now.
¹⁸During a session at the Zen Center of San Diego in November 1984 I gain a small taste of such wonder:
On Sunday morning while waiting to see Joko, I experience a mini-opening: an unannounced aura of beatitude, of appreciation, in which the ordinariness of things about me seems invested with magical presence, a distinct flavor of wonder, of suchness; this moment blossoms into a small epiphany.
Metanoia
Every seeker of Ultimate Mystery has to pass through interior death and rebirth, perhaps many times over.
—Father Thomas Keating
¹⁹Salvation comes only when we can say, Father, into thy hands I entrust my spirit, or Lord, though thou slay me, yet will I trust in thee. This is resignation or self-surrender… ready to have thy will prevail upon a world of finite beings. This is the characteristic attitude of a religious mind toward life and the world.
—D.T. Suzuki
²⁰Many years into my recovery, I came across a concept that names my experience of death and rebirth: metanoia. From the Greek, the term denotes a change of mind, a reorientation, a fundamental transformation of outlook, of an individual’s vision of the world and of him/herself, and a new way of loving others and the Universe. Though commonly associated in Christian theology with repentance of sin, the scope of metanoia goes beyond dwelling upon one’s failures and shortcomings, to a lifting of past burdens and an awakening to natural glory and freedom. In Carl Jung’s psychological theory, metanoia names the disintegration of rigid, limiting patterns of psychological functioning, making way for emotional rebirth and regeneration.
²¹ AMA Samy, a contemporary Zen teacher, relates the following Christian account of metanoia, so rich that I quote him at length:
Let me give you the radical conversion story of the Polish-American Jesuit priest, Walter Ciszek. …During the Soviet occupation of Poland
during World War II, Walter entered Russia disguised as a worker but was soon discovered and taken prisoner by the NKVD and… asked to admit and sign that he was a spy. … He felt he was the defender of his country, his Church and his God and was determined that he would never betray them. But finally, with the incessant questioning and threats he broke down…. In his own words: Then one day the blackness closed in around me completely… . I had reached a point of despair. I was overwhelmed by the hopelessness of my situation… . I knew that I had gone beyond all bounds, had crossed over the brink into a fit of blackness I had never known before. It was very real and I began to tremble. I was scared and ashamed, the victim of a new sense of guilt and humiliation… . For that one moment of blackness, I had lost not only hope but the last shreds of my faith in God. I had stood alone in a void and I had not even thought of or recalled the one thing that had been my constant guide, my only source of consolation in all other failures, my ultimate recourse: I had lost the sight of God.
Then Walter remembered Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane praying to God, Not as I will, but as thou wilt. Jesus’ prayer was not just conformity to the will of God; it was total self-surrender, a stripping away of all human fears, of all doubts about his own abilities to withstand the Passion, of every last shred of self including self-doubt… . "I can only call it a conversion experience, and I can only tell you frankly that my life was changed from that moment on. If my moment of despair had been a moment of total blackness, then this was an experience of blinding light. … Up until now, I had always seen my role… in the divine economy as an active one. Up to this time, I had retained in my own hands the reins of all decisions, actions, and endeavor; I saw it as my task to ‘co-operate’ with his grace, to be involved to the end in the working out of salvation. God’s will was ‘out there’ somewhere, hidden, yet clear and unmistakable. It was my role… to discover what it was and then conform my will to that, and so work at achieving the ends of his divine providence. I remained…the master of my own destiny. Perfection consisted simply
in learning to discover God’s will in every situation and then in bending every effort to do what must be done. Now, with sudden and almost blinding clarity and simplicity, I realized I had been trying to do something with my own will and intellect that was at once too much and mostly all wrong. God’s will was not hidden somewhere ‘out there’ in the situations in which I found myself; the situations themselves were his will for me. What he wanted was for me to accept these situations as from his hands, to let go of the reins and place myself entirely at his disposal. He was asking of me an act of total trust, allowing for no exceptions, no areas where I could set conditions or seem to hesitate. He was asking a complete gift of self, nothing held back."
²²AMA Samy reports that as Walter makes this complete gift of self, he is flooded with blinding light, swept up in a fresh new wave of confidence and happiness…, born to a new world and new self… . He has let go trying to control all of life and reality and learnt to surrender himself to mystery that is graciousness. His heart has found its abiding place in… equanimity… . It is his ‘yes’ to the Mystery that is emptiness, and at the same time it is the great ‘yes’ of Reality to his being and existence.
²³The Cross Event
The language of Walter Ciszek’s spiritual transformation recalls St. Paul’s challenge: I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters… to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. (Romans 12:1) This image is inspired by the archetypal metaphor of Christianity, the cross event—the Passion of Christ. No portion of Christian scripture has been more thoroughly analyzed or variously interpreted. My purpose here is modest, to offer my own personal responses to the story.
Current use of the word passion obscures the earliest meaning of this term. We think of passion as unleashed emotion: yielding to impulse, an uncontrolled flood of fear or desire. Yet in dictionary entries for passion, the usual first meaning is the suffering of pain—where "to
suffer means to allow or to receive."
²⁴ (In Medieval Latin, the term that is translated as passion, passio, is contrasted to action.) The Passion of Christ begins with the story of the Garden of Gethsemane, where we see Jesus wrestling with the choice before him, pleading with God (Abba) to be relieved of his burden. The turning point—the metanoia—of the Passion is the moment when Jesus surrenders his own human wishes and says in utter sincerity, Not my will but yours be done.
Christians have expressed this insight in various ways: there can be no cheap grace; no peace of heart without taking up one’s cross; no victorious Christian living without suffering unto death. Quaker scholar Michael Birkel describes the views of early Friends: pure motivation arises from holy surrender, resignation, dying and rising with Christ.
²⁵ When we become willing to face our lives honestly, our vision is clarified and our hearts are freed.
The spiritual regeneration of Walter Ciszek follows the pattern that we find in the Passion of Christ. Ciszek now understands that God’s will was not hidden somewhere ‘out there’ in the situations in which I found myself; the situations themselves were his will for me. What he wanted was for me to accept these situations as from his hands, to let go of the reins and place myself entirely at his disposal. Likewise, Jesus does not deliberate between competing legalistic obligations; rather, he struggles inwardly, then accepts that his present dire situation is God’s will for him—and makes a complete gift of self. The remainder of the Passion story plays out the inevitable consequences of this decision. Even as the agony of the crucifixion awakens our sympathy, our interpretation of it as a supreme act of loving sacrifice on behalf of creation grounds a deeper reverence and devotion.
It will be apparent to those who are familiar with the main strands of Christian theology that I do not endorse the traditional doctrine of substitution according to which Jesus’ death was a singular historical event that once and for all lifted the burden of sin and suffering from humanity, freeing us to enjoy a promise of salvation that had formerly been unavailable; rather, I believe that this promise has always, in all
places, been implicit in the human condition.
The Idolatry of Orthodoxy
The true light… enlightens everyone.
—John 1:9
Even less do I believe that literal acceptance of the sacrificial act of the historical Jesus is essential for spiritual redemption. Rather, I see the story of the Passion as the reflection of a universal archetype: regardless of our cultural and religious backgrounds, each of us daily chooses either to avoid the reality of our lives or to face ourselves honestly and open to the wisdom that lies within.
As a boy I heard my father reading reverentially from the King James Version of the Bible. My spiritual life took form around its language, and the Bible remains my primary religious comfort food. Yet I recognize that persons raised in other religious traditions find their own spiritual nourishment in the language and rituals of those traditions. In keeping with my Quaker tradition, I believe that the elements of an authentic religious life are not the words that we use to describe our religious experiences, but those experiences themselves. I do not assert that beneath the infinitely varied expressions of religious experience around the globe lies an unchanging experiential core—the essence of religion. There is no sharp distinction between the immediacy of experience and the interpretation one gives of that experience. What we sense is informed by what we believe; the sensual takes shape around concepts that we have learned and take for granted.
Yet I am persuaded by my own experience and my encounters with persons of many faiths (including generations of students, many from abroad, who have passed through my courses) that within all of us, regardless of religious or cultural identity, lies a touchstone of discernment that if faithfully heeded leads to lives of greater justice, compassion, humility, and joy. Friends call this capacity the Inner Light or the Inward Teacher, and (citing the Gospel of John) have seen it as the true light, which enlightens everyone. (John 1:9)
²⁶ While orthodox
Christians identify the Inner Guide as the Christ-Spirit or Holy Ghost, uniquely linked to the Jesus of the Gospels, I regard this account as but one among many cultural constructs created to express a Source that lies beyond all concepts.
Any discussion of the vexing question of Christian universalism versus Christian exclusivism must come to terms with John 14:5-6: Thomas said to him, ‘Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?’ Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’ I believe that this passage can be understood without strain as compatible with Christian universalism. Doubting Thomas worries that when the physical Jesus is no longer present, Thomas will be unable to find his way to God. When Jesus says to him I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me, does Jesus refer to the physical human presence whom Thomas now sees? Obviously not, since Jesus is reassuring Thomas that what Jesus now incarnates in physical form will still be available to Thomas when the physical body of Jesus is absent. But if the pronouns I and me do not refer to the physical body of Jesus, to what do they point? Do they name a spiritual personage who is exclusively identified with the Christian revelation? Or do they draw our attention to the sacred Inward Teacher that is present in all of us, regardless of religious and cultural tradition? In this reading, Jesus reassures Thomas that when Jesus is no longer physically present, the wisdom that he incarnates—"the true light, which enlightens everyone"
²⁷—will still be available to Thomas. Elaine Pagels, Professor of Religion at Princeton University and a widely-read historian of Christianity, draws upon her reading of the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas to affirm a similar interpretation: The divine light Jesus embodied is shared by humanity, since we are all made ‘in the image of God,’ which is hidden within everyone, although most people remain unaware of its presence.
²⁸The 18th-century Quaker abolitionist, John Woolman, affirmed this understanding:
There is a principle which is pure, placed in the human mind, which
in different places and ages hath different names; it is, however, pure and proceeds from God. It is deep and inward, confined to no forms of religion nor excluded from any where the heart stands in perfect sincerity. In whomsoever this takes root and grows, of what nation soever, they become brethren in the best sense of that expression.
²⁹Given our propensity to conflate the inner voice of wisdom with the confused desires of our small selves, to twist genuine insights toward self-serving ends, it is not surprising that institutional keepers of religious order seek to define and enforce the boundaries of correct belief, distilling the tenets of authentic confession into a uniform religious loyalty oath. When religious orthodoxy is co-opted by political authorities, this temptation to codify and enforce true belief becomes virtually irresistible.
Yet any effort to impose a tidy conceptual order upon the ineffability of Wonder and Mystery must fail. Worse, it diverts our reverence away from that which is most worthy of our devotion, redirecting that reverence toward verbal constructions, virtual towers of Babel. The traditional Zen saying cautions, You may use a finger to point at the moon—but do not mistake the finger for the moon. The opening lines of the Tao Te Ching aver that The Tao which can be spoken of is not the eternal Tao; the name which can be named is not the eternal Name.
³⁰ Insofar as orthodoxy diverts devotion away from Mystery toward dogma, it is inherently idolatrous.
If religious words are fingers pointing at the moon, they are unavoidably colored by the unique character and location—cultural, geographical, social, political—of those who point. Attempting to impose a uniform system of sacred symbols and rituals upon this infinitely rich multiplicity of religious expressions is the height of religious imperialism. I will not rehearse the immense injustices (past and present) that have been perpetrated by such imperialism.
³¹ Suffice it to say that I rejoice in the varieties of religious comfort food; in sampling these piquant fares, I come to know myself better as a Quaker and a Christian. To suggest that faithful practitioners of other traditions follow a lesser revelation than
mine demeans not only them, but me as well.
Yet we eat good food not only to satisfy our palates but also to nourish our bodies—and we know all too well that these criteria do not always coincide: what tastes good may not be healthy to ingest. Likewise with religious fare: that which satisfies religious impulse may ultimately be destructive to ourselves and to others. Even as we seek a convivial accommodation between religious traditions, we must retain our commitment to careful discernment of our own paths. As we seek to balance these sometimes seemingly contrary considerations, we find that the devil lies in the details. I do not offer a general solution to this dilemma; instead, I am content to describe my own personal responses to it.
Pure Passion
What I sought after… was nothing but how to become wholly God’s. This made me resolve to give the all for the all.
—Brother Lawrence
³²I have been crucified in Christ, and it is no longer
I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.
—Galatians 2:19-20
I am helped by the words of John Hick, quoted above: The function of religion… is to transform human existence from self-centeredness to Reality-centeredness. I discern the ground of this transformation in the central theme of this chapter: suspension of self-preoccupation and striving, yielding to direct awareness of one’s present state in all of its immediate, concrete particularity. I have felt the healing power of this full attention to one’s actual condition in many settings: in my own psychotherapeutic openings and in the rigorous progression of Twelve-Step Programs; in the courageous candor of my students and the subsequent blossoming of their lives; in the suspension of striving that takes place in deep zazen; in yielding to the wisdom from above that
frees me from violence; in the environmental activism that springs from our love of nature; and in the holy surrender of the Passion of Christ. When I no longer cling to coveted narratives about myself and instead open to the truth of my present state, my heart stands in perfect sincerity—and I open to the grace of a clarifying, liberating vision.
I term such moments pure passion. Pure does not imply conformity to external moral standards, nor denial of the darkness within oneself. On the contrary, confrontation with that darkness—indeed, with all that I am—is the essence of such moments. In pure passion I suspend all willed actions and all habit energy, the compulsive reactions that obscure the present moment. Thus pure passion stands apart from fear and desire, which channel our energy into fanaticism or obsession and blind us to the larger import of our behavior. The estranged husband and father who, overcome with spiteful rage against his former wife, murders his own children and then himself, illustrates the potential evil of this self-enslavement. In contrast, pure passion relinquishes all partiality and awakens (in the words of Dorothy Soelle) to that objectivity that issues in a complete giving over of oneself to what is being experienced.
³³ Through abandonment of self-will, we awaken to a higher freedom than mere pursuit of preferences and taste the unencumbered peace of union with our heart’s desire.
Compassion
If one completes the journey to one’s own heart,
one will find oneself in the heart of everyone else.
—Father Thomas Keating
³⁴When I acknowledge my own pain, I am much less squeamish about drawing nearer to yours.
—Marc Ian Barasch
³⁵Why does surrender into the moment lead to compassion? Why does it not leave us in splendid isolation, content to bathe in our private bliss?
The answer lies within the word compassion, which means to suffer with. When we drop resistance and become wholly vulnerable, the walls that we have erected to guard ourselves melt away—and we awaken to our intrinsic connections with one other, and with creation itself. Every person who cares for the suffering of another knows the heart connection that brings joy even in the midst of distress. To comfort a crying child; to listen sympathetically as a friend unburdens her troubled heart; to sit by the bedside of one who is dying while sharing the final flickers of his life, is to taste the blessing of uniting in love. As we open without reservation to our own lives, we also open to others; pure passion naturally converges upon compassion. Awareness enlarges beyond self-interest and awakens to what has been always true: in spite of our ignorance, our fears, our conflicts and struggles, we are inextricably interconnected.
Yet we know that when we encounter pain—our own, or that of others—we may not respond compassionately, but rather contract into a defensive posture and strike out against perceived threats. None of us manifests the radical openness to life that we see in great spiritual leaders such as Siddhartha Gautama or Jesus of Nazareth. Compassion in the presence of pain requires courage and discipline, and a recognition that we will always be on the path, never fully arriving. In the pithy words of Jack Kornfield, a beloved Buddhist teacher, There is no state of enlightened retirement.
³⁶What remains to us are the choices that we make on each step of our journeys.
³⁷ Spiritual growth is a moment-to-moment challenge: encountering difficulty, shall we open or close? Embrace or withdraw? Extend ourselves, or contract? We do both—sometimes more of one, sometimes more of the other, and often both simultaneously. Through centering silence we soften and become more resilient, more able to suspend our reactions and relax into the moment. Instead of focusing upon our own suffering, we awaken to a larger vision that lifts us from self-obsession into a more expansive, forgiving state. This is George Fox’s counsel to the troubled Lady Claypoole
³⁸: do not obsess about your troubles, but rather, be aware of "the light that makes them manifest. For looking down at sin, and corruption, and distraction, you are swallowed
up in it; but looking at the light that discovers them, you will see over them. That will give victory; and you will find grace and strength, and there is the first step of peace."
³⁹Nowhere in Fox’s lengthy letter to Lady Claypoole does he mention the crucifixion of Jesus, nor claim that a conventionally Christian interpretation of that event is required for redemption. The archetype of passion and redemption that Christians view through the prism of the Gospels transcends religious and cultural boundaries, appearing in many forms of healing growth around the world. The Spirit of Easter belongs to all.
I close by returning to the language of my own religious comfort food, in the sincere hope that my readers will look beyond my own pointing finger to the moon itself and, using their own preferred religious language, give voice to what they see. Allowing for expansive, non-dogmatic interpretations of words like Creator, God, Christ, and Divine, the contemporary religious writer whose language most fully captures my own inklings of spiritual devotion is Lloyd Lee Wilson, a Quaker who (like myself) comes out of the Conservative" tradition of the Religious Society of Friends.
⁴⁰ In a splendid little pamphlet, Holy Surrender,
⁴¹ Wilson contrasts holy obedience with holy surrender:
What does bring me peace is surrender: a relationship rather than a set of behaviors. One can be obedient at arm’s length, as it were—but surrender places us in an intimate relationship with our Creator. When I give up to God, when that relationship in all its grace and mercy shapes my life, there is a peace that passes beyond all understanding or describing. One way to think about surrender is as the desire to enter fully into the Body of Christ—to take my proper place in the Body, responding as fully and as quickly to the Divine thought as my own hand or tongue responds to my intention. This is a love relationship… .
It has been my experience that surrender to the Divine is not only our calling but also the occasion of the greatest, deepest, and most enduring joy I have known. Outward events may cause us pain, grief
and sorrow, but nothing can touch or impair the deep joy that results from this continual intimacy with the Divine Love… .
The surrendered life, then, is one that loves God with the entirety of one’s being, eliminating all that is not of God, and opening ever more fully to the true presence of God… . The surrendered life is one lived in the present reality of the Kingdom of God, while still physically located in this broken world. To love God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength is to hold nothing back.
⁴²The third-century Desert Father, Anthony, is said to have remarked, If you see that a young man is striving for heaven with his own will, grasp his feet and drag him down; for it will do him no good.
⁴³ Looking back to August 1957, I now see that my feverish flight on waxen wings was driven not by healthy aspiration, but by eagerness to escape a self-engrossed and troubled life. It has taken me a lifetime to reverse this flight, to discover that the true journey of healing and wholeness leads not into the distant skies—but inward, into my own heart. The joy of pure passion comes not through escape but through willing surrender… to Ultimate Mystery, and to a life of service that flows naturally out of that surrender.
Everyday Zen: Love and Work (New York: HarperOne, 1989), p. 108.
