Following on from the previous blog and the use of the word "revisit". Apparently, reading the book referred to, of Merton's record player, Bob Dylan called his great album "Highway 61 Revisited" in part as an allusion to the novel "Brideshead Revisted" by the Catholic author Evelyn Waugh.
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| An old Dansette Record Player - we all had them! |
Never having read the novel I have no idea of how one related to the other. Looking it up the novel is about "aristocratic privilege", a "nostalgic study of class and character". Quite what that has to do with Highway 61 I am unable to discern, but I assume Bob had his reasons - as we all do for the associations made by our own minds as we stumble along through this thing called Life.
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Nevertheless, "revisit" does call me at the moment. Going back, knowing experience as being more a spiral than a direct line forward. Even if it leads back to the beginning and "knowing it for the first time."
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| Spirals in nature |
Thinking back, I was first inspired to walk the Buddhist path by the words of the Buddha, as recorded in the Theravada Canon of Scripture, that he taught "this and this alone, suffering and the ending of suffering." Deeply involved then in theodicy and having read many weighty books on the subject, I had come to the conclusion that there was in fact no "answer" to our world's suffering. The various attempts to get God off the hook - so to speak - had failed to impress or satisfy.
It came close at one point, walking along, reflecting, adding up the many arguments and justifications; well yes, just maybe.......then a braking car, a squealing dog, and the terrible reality of pain and suffering swept the words away. "Only a dog". But for me, then, so much more.
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| A dog can be so much more |
The closest any "answer" got then was from the Old Testament book of Job, where God speaks out of the whirlwind and as good as says, "don't try to figure it out, just suffer and have faith". Which is in fact profound, but I needed a few more spirals to know it. At the time, that "answer" gave no satisfaction. The Buddha promised an "end to suffering" and claimed to have found it.
Around this time I remember asking, on a Buddhist Forum, the question:- "In what sense does suffering end?" Like most questions on Buddhist Forums, it received no definitive answer, though some there - I am sure - considered that they had found it, lived it, shared it. And perhaps they did. We need the eyes to see and the ears to hear. It takes two to tango and just then I could not dance. Life goes on...…
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| It takes two |
"Master, master, what must I do to gain illumination?"
"Well, my son, to gain illumination you must rise in the morning, dress and then eat."
"But master, I do not understand"
"Well, if you do not understand, you must rise in the morning, dress and then eat."
So it was back to the kitchen sink for me where, fortunately, things can happen beyond our calculations, where things are made to become so of themselves. It is called grace. Which, come to think of it now, is close to the word gratitude, which is the Nembutsu of Pure Land folk in colloquial English; thank you.
Revisiting some of my very own spirals, there was the "contact of two liberties" where I was, in the transition between theism and non-theism, disturbed by Meister Eckhart's words that if we "left ourselves" then God must enter in. Where then was the liberty? As the spiral turns, comes the realisation that the gift is of God Himself, that He is His own gift, and that it has already been given, eternally. The freedom and the liberty are in fact the gift itself. Yet we cannot know it until we know it.
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| Freedom? |
Another spiral were the words of Eckhart that "love has no why". What is the point of anything, why is there something rather than nothing? We always seem to be trying to get somewhere, become something more, never satisfied. "The jaws of hell are never filled". Various turns of the spiral led to the journey itself being home, of each moment being the "thing itself", that each cut of meat is the best", each moment arising from emptiness and returning, unowned.
And if the moment is one of suffering, of grief, of loss?
Just suffer and have faith? Not quite. But close enough. Close enough to reach out to others, to open to others without judgement; each has so much to share and give themselves.
"Differentiation does not mean separation"
To finish, I now recall that part of the intent of this particular blog was to speak of revisiting the "Wisdom in Emptiness" dialogue between D T Suzuki and Thomas Merton, an essay in "Zen and the Birds of Appetite". I tend to reread, or revisit, this every now and again to find just how the sand has shifted. But this blog never made it. It was going to drift towards some words of a South American theologian that Merton recited to Suzuki when the two met in New York:- "Praise be to God that I am not good". Suzuki was moved by those words.
Suzuki, a Zen Buddhist, with leanings towards the Pure Land, said "those words are so important."
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| Suzuki - just thankful that he is not good |
Yes, very much so. But this blog never made it there! Perhaps another day.
Related Quotes:-
"When we go out of ourselves............and strip ourselves of what is ours, then God must enter into us; for when someone wills nothing for themselves, then God must will on their behalf just as he does for himself."
(Meister Eckhart from "The Talks of Instruction" , "On true obedience")
"In giving us His love God has given us the Holy Spirit so that we can love Him with the love wherewith He loves Himself."
(Meister Eckhart, and Merton states this is "perfectly orthodox and traditional Catholic theology." Suzuki states that the lines were "the same as Prajna intuition.")
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