Amazing Grace Revisted

 

Moving on, relating to posts here from @Crazywaterspring and @PrincessOfHell, I find that the origins of all our World's Faith Traditions are shrouded in mist and cloud. Difficult to truly know just who or what copied from who else. What I would say is that the presumed power of Satan has grown and grown in many christian imaginations until he has become virtually as powerful as God Himself!

Those same imaginations are those who speak more of fear, guilt and damnation than of love, even sometimes appearing to relish thinking of the fate of the damned. Such Good News! For such "good news" to have substance they must first proclaim the Bad, their game given away in the words of the famous hymn, "Amazing Grace":-

Twas grace that taught my heart to fear and grace my fears removed.

First the bad, then the good. Yet what is changing here?

The Old Testament speaks of a God whose "mercy endures forever" and more, the Bible reports God as proclaiming :- "For I the Lord do not change".

This all points to an understanding and a knowledge of God (or Reality-as-is) as the one constant. Acknowledged in the East and the West:-

My eyes being hindered by blind passions,
I cannot perceive the light that grasps me;
Yet the great compassion, without tiring,
Illumines me always

(Shinran, from "Hymns of the Pure Land Masters")

And Julian of Norwich, who wrote her "Revelations of Divine Love", speaking here on the same theme......

If there be anywhere on earth a lover of God who is always kept safe, I know nothing of it, for it was not shown to me. But this was shown: that in falling and rising again we are always kept in that same precious love.

In zen the 13th century zen guy Dogen, in his "Genjokoan" , comes down to the mechanics, with his allusions of shore and boat, in his usual poetic style. That it is the boat we are in that moves, creating the illusion that it is the shore. To become still and receptive is the key:-

Be still and know that I Am God

Whatever, as Dogen says, "we are what we understand", which is quite profound, encompassing many things including karma..."we ARE our karma".

As I see it, becoming still is paradoxically to move forward, but in the sense of allowing the "myriad things" to reflect in us, for us to then reflect them back upon our fragile world. True freedom is only to be found in God, Reality-as-is, not in our own petty choices. In unity, in reflecting, we find our freedom. In a constant advance unto novelty. Truly moving at last.

Yet as Dogen - again - says, whatever our understanding, shallow of profound, nevertheless flowers fade even though we love them, weeds grow even though we dislike them.

"There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in"

May true Dharma continue.
Be kind. No blame. Love everything.

Thomas Merton and Suzuki

A lovely little backwater here, far from the madding crowd. I was thinking of the great friendship between Thomas Merton and D. T. Suzuki, which flowered through the "spirit of all truth" in our world of division and conflict.

Merton, a Christian whose fidelity to Christ is unquestionable, once wrote this to Suzuki that the missionaries of our Western World should have approached the East truly in the spirit of Christ. Not to convert, but to learn, with the recognition that God is ever present in each and every heart.

The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.

Merton went on to say:-

I want to speak for this Western world.................which has in past centuries broken in upon you and brought you our own confusion, our own alienation, our own decrepitude, our lack of culture, our lack of faith...........If I wept until the end of the world, I could not signify enough of what this tragedy means. If only we had thought of coming to you to learn something..............If only we had thought of coming to you and loving you for what you are in yourselves, instead of trying to make you over into our own image and likeness. For me it is clearly evident that you and I have in common and share most intimately precisely that which, in the eyes of conventional Westerners, would seem to separate us. The fact that you are a Zen Buddhist and I am a Christian monk, far from separating us, makes us most like one another. How many centuries is it going to take for people to discover this fact?......


Possibly quoted before, but bears repetition.

Once when Merton escaped from under the monastery wall () he met up with Suzuki in New York. Near the end of their conversation Merton quoted the words of a South American theologian:- "Praise be to God that I am not good!". Suzuki responded:- "That is so important".

Theistic language, yet Suxuki saw through the "word as text" and has drunk from the Living Words of the spirit of all truth that blows where it will and not according to human understanding or reasoning.

In an essay contained in "Zen and the Birds of Appetite" Merton writes this of Suzuki:-

Speaking for myself, I can venture to say that in Dr. Suzuki, Buddhism finally became for me completely comprehensible, whereas before it had been a very mysterious and confusing jumble of words, images, doctrines, legends, rituals, buildings, and so forth. It seemed to me that the great and baffling cultural luxuriance which has clothed the various forms of Buddhism in different parts of Asia is the beautiful garment thrown over something quite simple.

And further:-

But I did feel that I was speaking to someone who, in a tradition completely different from my own, had matured, had become complete and found his way. One cannot understand Buddhism until one meets it in this existential manner, in a person in whom it is alive. Then there is no longer a problem of understanding doctrines which cannot help being a bit exotic for a Westerner, but only a question of appreciating a value which is self-evident.

Yes. A value that is self-evident. Self-evident at least to those whose mind/hearts truly share the Living Word and have not been corrupted by the "word as text" and their own time conditioned understandings.

May true Dharma continue.
No blame. Be kind. Love everything.

Different Graces

 

Reflecting upon the "different graces" and such, of Merton's insights into any book of meditations. There is a strong link to some words of the 13th century zen master Dogen, to be found in his "Genjokoan" (variously translated, but I like "The Actualisation of Reality")

Dogen's words:-

Conveying oneself toward all things to carry out practice-enlightenment is delusion. All things coming and carrying out practice-enlightenment through the self is realization.

Living within a concrete, presumed "self" as the centre, I think we simply impose ourselves upon the world around us. We are virtually seeing a reflection. Yet "if a grain of wheat fall into the ground and dies", if we are "empty" and receptive, the grace of Reality can come to us, as it is, in and of itself. A constant advance into novelty. And although such can be thought of as passive, it is not so.

Correspondances can be found throughout our world of Faiths. The Christian mystic Meister Eckhart speaks of true obedience in his "Talks of Instructions".

Here is Eckhart:-

In true obedience there should be no ‘I want this or that to happen’ or ‘I want this or that thing’ but only a pure going out of what is our own. And therefore in the very best kind of prayer that we can pray there should be no ‘give me this particular virtue or way of devotion’ or ‘yes, Lord, give me yourself or eternal life’, but rather ‘Lord, give me only what you will and do, Lord, only what you will and in the way that you will’. This kind of prayer is as far above the former as heaven is above earth. And when we have prayed in this way, then we have prayed well, having gone out of ourselves and entered God in true obedience. But just as true obedience should have no ‘I want this’, neither should it ever hear ‘I don’t want’, for ‘I don’t want’ is pure poison for all true obedience.

Seeking to distinguish between theism and non-theism seems often a pointless pursuit, at least within the mind/heart of experience.

The Great Way of the Hsin Hsin Ming:-

The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences. When like and dislike are both absent, everything becomes clear and undisguised. Make the smallest distinction, however, and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart. If you wish to see the truth, then hold no opinions for, or against, anything. To set up what you like against what you dislike is the disease of the mind. When the deep meaning of things is not understood, the mind's essential peace is disturbed to no avail.

Anyway, as said elsewhere, I tend to waffle.

Getting back to the "different graces" found in Thomas Merton's words, for me Grace is fundamental. Understood on a wide spectrum - as a gift from "Him up there", to the insight that we do not attain emptiness but are empty from the very beginning (an insight drawn from a dialogue between Merton and D T Suzuki) Such a spectrum takes in all, from the most literally minded to the most "mystical", from those who live in an "I-Thou" relationship with the divine to those who can say "Not I, but Christ lives in me"

So grace is one, yet differentiated in how it manifests.

It also relates to the true prayer spoken of by Eckhart, which is more a giving up of ourselves, rather than making requests. More seeking to allow God/Reality to play in us, rather than playing God ourselves.

So we can plan and anticipate, have our techniques for "gaining" salvation/enlightenment, look for our own justifications, seek to make our "self" a suitable case for the receipt of any gift from the divine. Or actually seek to be receptive to what is given, when given. Not recognised or known until given. So always new, and not what we may have expected. Never ours, only ever to be reflected back into the world, as gift and grace to others. Shared but never divided.

May true Dharma continue.
No blame. Be kind. Love everything.

Little Selves

 

Hello again. Getting back to this. Only 11.30 here and it's already been a long day, up at 6.30 with the grandchildren (girl 9, boy 11) with us, get them up and ready for school. Breakfast. Still have to tie their laces! Bless them. Taxi to school, the buses totally unreliable. Drop them off then a three mile hike back, popping in for shopping on the way. Now a bus into town - it turned up, hallelujah!!!!! Now burger and chips in McDonalds before my 4 hour stint in Oxfam, then pick up the kiddies, back to theirs, feed them, then wait for mum to get home around 10.30. Another taxi home. All good fun. Not sure why I'm telling all this. Just love the ambience of McDonalds. Therapeutic.

I can only see the "self" as a becoming, not as "being". As a "becoming" it can then be a partner to "truth", which itself is an unfolding, a constant advance into novelty. "Truth" as writ on stone (self as "being") has to become a truth writ on human hearts. So many seem content with the former, even think it is the latter.

It's said that if the Buddhist teaching of anatta (not-self) is not understood, then the whole Dharma will be misunderstood. After many years I still seek to understand. - to truly understand, when knowledge becomes praxis, spontaneous. I see it as error to think of "self" as "being", as under construction. I think we can inherit a way of being (conditioning, not particularly choosen) and then our life is simply a reflex action. As someone else has said, every time we happen on a statement or sentiment that fits in with our conditioned notions we adopt it, perhaps with enthusiasm, at the same time ignoring, as though they did not exist, the statements or sentiments which either we did not like or did not understand. And so our little persona is constructed, set in concrete.

To me such a self must needs be "dropped", become "dark", this so as to reflect truth. Once we reflect, we can perhaps become its partner. This presumes Faith in Reality, that it is worth "reflecting", becoming a partner of. My own faith is that Reality is infinite compassion, infinite wisdom, infinite potential.

I'm very much into the so called "eastern" ways, and speak of zen, Dogen, the Lotus Sutra etc etc. All deemed exotic. But I think back to my past when I had a yearning to travel - and the yearning was for deserts, palm trees, pagodas, camels and all the rest of it. When this yearning had been satisfied I found myself back in my home town, on the railway station which overlooks the town. A drizzly day, rain on the rooftops. I remember thinking that the adventures were over, I was truly back home. But then, looking at the skyline, a few random thoughts. Not an epiphany or some sort of cosmic consciousness (!) but transforming nevertheless. What is more exotic? A cow or a camel? An oak tree or a palm tree? A pagoda of a church spire? Sand or grass? I will not labour the point......perhaps I already have!

So what is "exotic" and what is mundane, run of the mill? As Proust says, we need new eyes, not new lands to discover. Or something like that.

I simply wish to surrender (as it were) and reflect, and become a partner of that which is for me - in faith - Reality.

Whatever "enlightenment" is (and the fundamental Buddhist Theravada texts do not use the word, speaking only of "unshakeable deliverance of mind") as Dogen says:-

Flowers will still fall even though we love them, weeds will still grow, even though we hate them.

Or as per the zen koan:- "A clearly enlightened person falls in the well. How is this so?"

Our little selves have strict limits, and yet, thinking about it, are limitless from another perspective.

Well, I waffle and ramble.

I must ask about your "screen name", has it to do with "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" by Haruki Murakami? I seem to remember, way back, actually reading this book, and all I remember is something about a particularly gruesome death (skinned alive or something - talk about grasping at anything that fits our conditioned notions  !) but I might have the wrong book. I know I made very little of it at the time.

Anyway, thanks for the conversation.

Grace

 

Time again for a waffle as I sip my coffee.

It is sometimes claimed that Christianity is the way of God's Grace, while all other religions are only man-made, basically self-power, people seeking to earn salvation by "works"; false ways.

This is simply not true. All of our world's Faith Traditions deal with the interplay of the transitory and the eternal, the inter-play of Grace and Works, of self-power and Other Power. Of the scope of effort.

As some attempt at evidence, two quotes from Traditions other than Christianity:-

"By God's grace alone is God to be grasped. All else is false, all else is vanity." (Guru Nanak of the Sikh Faith)

"They who have known God have known also this one certainty; that it was God's grace that led them to it, and framed them in readiness for it, and prepared their heart and mind for it; and it was God alone who lifted them to that embrace." (Swami Abhayananda of the Hindu faith)

Moving on, in the interplay of self-power and Other Power there is the necessary step when we recognise that what we might first of all believed to have been self-power, our own choice and decision, was in fact the work of Other Power. That Grace is not an "offer" to be received or rejected, but is rather the very fabric of Reality - to be recognised, never earned or attained. The causal basis of salvation/enlightenment is Grace, not any decision we might have made.

One of the great Christian mystics, Meister Eckhart, once said:- "They do Him wrong who only know God in one particular way. They end with the way rather than God."

When offering such words for thought and reflection, some have been known to throw back the well known NT verse:- "I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father but by Me." Spoken by Jesus.

There is a branch of Christian thought concerned with interpretation of the Biblical text. Hermeneutics. Some claim that the Spirit guides the true believer in their interpretation. Which often leads to those who believe vastly different things each claiming to be the "true" Christian..... 

As I see it, the actual import of Eckhart's words can be related with the words of Jesus by a simple application of hermeneutics. A way of understanding, of interpretation, that is NOT "new age", NOT a "turning away from what has always been taught" - NOT any other claim made by a certain kind of Biblical Fundamentalist. It is rather an understanding that has been held throughout the twenty centuries of the Christian Faith.

The One who speaks is the Eternal Logos. The Universal Christ. Otherwise known as the Tao, Brahman, Buddha Nature. "Truth is one, sages know it by various names".

Well, I am no sage, but I get the drift.....

What of human freedom? Freedom is found not in our choices, but in the reception of grace, where we become "one" with the radical freedom of God (or Reality-as-is) Freedom itself is Grace. Finite human beings are not burdened with deciding their eternal destiny by the cards dealt them by the apparent chance of time and space, but by the very nature of Reality.

Therefore the only viable "theology" is Universalism. All are chosen. And why not? Why would anyone wish to argue? To hold onto their "specialness"? To hold onto their "decision" as the causal basis of their salvation - in effect, a way of works.

To look around our world and not see sheep and goats, us and them, but only ever to see others "chosen" like ourselves, others we are called to love as ourselves - not to convert, not to try to change into mirror images of ourselves to justify our own beliefs.

Just to finish, a few words from a literary essayist speaking of the works of the poet T S Eliot, which in parts illuminates some of what I have said:-

Eliot feels no compunction in alluding to the Bhagavad Gita in one section of the poem and Dante's Paradiso in the next. He neither asserts the rightness nor wrongness of one set of doctrines in relation to the other, nor does he try to reconcile them. Instead, he claims that prior to the differentiation of various religious paths, there is a universal substratum called Word (logos) of which religions are concretions. This logos is an object both of belief and disbelief. It is an object of belief in that, without prior belief in the logos, any subsequent religious belief is incoherent. It is an object of disbelief in that belief in it is empty, the positive content of actual belief is fully invested in religious doctrine.

Ending, it seems to me that much religion broadcast here on SW is in essence Jesusianity. Not Christianity. And should anyone feel compelled to say that Jesus WAS the Christ as some sort of rebuttal of what has been said, then they haven't really understood a word..

Thank you

May true Dharma continue.
No blame. Be kind. Love everything.

The Moon as Enlightenment

Often in the east, particularly in Japan, the moon is seen as a symbol for enlightenment. Which has many ways of being understood.

On Buddhist forums you cannot wander far without coming across the little phrase:-

"Don't mistake the finger that points for the moon itself."

But the 13th century Japanese zen master Dogen suggests that such a way of thinking is in fact dualistic - that there is the moon and that which points to it. For Dogen, the finger that points is in fact the thing itself. Which places enlightenment among us.

A poem:-

Although the wind
blows terribly here,
the moonlight also leaks
between the roof planks
of this ruined house

(Izumi Shikibu)


Jane Hirshfield, an American poet and essayist, comments that in Japanese poetry the moon is "always the moon" yet is also an image of Buddhist awakening. She adds that the poem reminds her that "if a house is walled so tightly that it lets in no wind or rain, if a life is walled so tightly that it lets in no pain, grief, anger, or longing, it will also be closed to the entrance of what is most wanted."

So "enlightenment" is among us. It can never be ours to possess, only to allow in, and then to reflect back to others. Not from any centre of perfection, from a state of being we own, have earned, or gained, but simply as a sharing of a common humanity. As in "The Tao can be shared but never divided".

Such understandings can be found right across the world of our Faith Traditions. That "enlightenment" is an inherent part of this world, manifested here, now. Not a passport to some imagined "other" world of "perfection" beyond this life, beyond this world. Which is a form of betrayal.

The moon does not seek our worship. It does not judge. It's light is given indiscriminately, we walk in its light whether acknowledged or not.

Old Poems

Just a few of my old poems here, written over 40 years ago.

The first reveals why I never made much upward progress in my office working life. Instead of getting on with my work I would be idling, looking around......

often as I look around me
at odd times of the day
I see people as they might have been
if love had found a way
a hope a chance a maybe
will flicker for a while
a face more used to sorrow
will break into a smile
then the past will catch the present
and a shadow fall once more
to leave the heart so lightly touched
as lonely as before


The second concerns our reaction to the death of those we love. I've sometimes been shocked by what could be called "testimonies of faith" by those touched by the death of a loved one. Once I worked in an office where we had an ardent Christian fundamentalist. Hard core. In fact a kind man with an open genuine smile - demonstrating at least to me what I still see to be true....that often a deeper mind/heart can unfold, a deeper intimacy with Reality, more in spite of our beliefs rather than because of them. Anyway, this guy told us that his mother was seriously ill. We would get an update now and again. One morning he came in and one guy asked him if there was any news of his mother, was she well. "Yes she has never been better" he said (and, yes, I knew what was coming) "She is with Jesus in heaven." Stoic, not a blink. To him, a demonstration of "faith". Whatever he thought it was, the man who had asked him how his mother was was not impressed.

Faith and belief. Opposites. At least as I see it and experience it.

Another "testimony" I remember, of a 12 year old girl of a deeply Christian family who lost her brother. She said she had never shed a tear, that he was in heaven.

Strangely enough, Martin Luther seemed to approach the "middle way" of the Dharma. When he lost his young daughter he said:- "How strange. To know that she is safe with Jesus in heaven yet to feel such sadness."

To me this relates to the story (told somewhere else here) of the zen master who was seen by a novice sitting beside those who had lost a family member, weeping with them. "You of all people" the novice said, "I would have thought would be beyond all this." The master said, between his sobs, "It is this that puts me beyond it."

You see it, know it, or you don't. Finding our true humanity is not, in effect, to deny it; it will never be to betray this world, the only one we have known, for some imagined "other". If you lose those you love, you grieve and weep, not reach for some "belief". The healing, the true grace, is in the tears.

"Jesus wept"

Here is the poem......

Death dissolves with distance
And the questions asked
More academic at the rim
Than at the centres blast

Affect and affectation
Ours until is heard
The answer told by death itself
When our heart breaks in turn.

Well, I will pack up now. Just a last little ode, of how we can often think ourselves inadequate in terms of expressing love, of building deep relationships. Yet back in my own life I have had moments when a simple unexpected smile from someone has lifted my heart. Reality can be so simple at times, full of surprises.

Love is where you give the most
No inner warmth or starry host
Eternal, waiting to be caught
Waiting for the words "I ought".

All our lives spent searching for
A roaring wind, a Holy Law,
When our love, all the while,
Was in a word or in a smile.

May true Dharma continue.

No blame. Be kind. Love everything.