Many years ago, I participated in a Buddhist-Christian retreat in Bodh Gaya, India, that was co-led by His Holiness the Dalai Lama and his friend, the Benedictine priest, Fr. Laurence Freeman. I learned that the Dalai Lama is considered an incarnation of the Bodhisattva of Compassion, Avalokiteshvara – a deity who has chosen to be reborn to help all beings attain enlightenment. As a student of the Blowing Zen (Japanese: Sui-Zen) tradition, I was asked to play the shakuhachi (end-blown bamboo flute) to introduce the interfaith meditations. During one dialogue on the qualities of spiritual maturity, someone asked His Holiness, “Where or what is the origin of these qualities of compassion and love? Do individuals, through sincere practice, simply discover these natural qualities in themselves?” The Dalai Lama said that he himself is not a mystic, “So I can only speak from my own experience.” Then he said that when we live in a dedicated community (a sangha) and nurture in ourselves the discipline of silent meditation, compassion simply arises out of the silence. Silence is the doorway into eternity. Simply being present in silence with an open heart and mind plants the seed of compassion in our awareness. Once it is planted in us, we bring compassion to the people, creatures, and all living things that we are aware of. He then added that one can be aware of awareness itself—awareness as distinct from what we are aware of. I understood him to mean that through the discipline of silence, and with the proper guidance, awareness itself becomes compassion. Then we don’t simply “practice” compassion. Our ground awareness becomes compassion. I wondered if Christians would interpret their experience in the same way.
Then Fr. Freeman responded to the same question. He said that, in general, Christians use the word “love” more often than “compassion,” and that all experiences of love are rooted in a transcendent or ultimate Love. This root of Love is described in Jewish and Christian scripture as arising from the Creator, whom Jews name in a hundred different ways (including Elohim, Adonai, Ain Soph, Shekinah, and yud-hay-vov-hay). Jesus named Creator as Abba, an Aramaic-Hebrew word for Father, a “someone” who is the blessed origin of reality. Abba was used by Jesus and the apostle Paul to address Creator in a personal and intimate way. For Jesus, ultimate reality was relational rather than simply individual and impersonal. Therefore, Jesus would speak to Abba in an I-You or I-Thou fashion. Christians and Jews name this I-Thou love, agapé.[1] When a person experiences agapé Love, this quality is understood to be arising from Abba. Thus, when one experiences love for someone in an everyday situation, he or she is aware that this love arises from an eternal root relationship.
We can’t “find” the origin of this eternal Love (capital L) because it comes from a holy Somewhere that is nowhere in particular and therefore everywhere. It is a gift from Elohim or Abba, who, in the act of Creation, gives humans a capacity to relate to all creatures in a tender, interpersonal way. In the Christian tradition, the experience of divine Love is the essence of Creator’s eternal Presence. This transcendent Love might appear in the interpersonal loves of érōs and philía, but for a Christian, it is most clearly glimpsed as agapé -- invisibly anchored in the Beyond Within—the infinite landscape of Love within us and around us.[2] It springs from the ultimate reality of Creator’s Presence, as we read in 1 John 4:8, 4:16: “God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.” The words “God” and “him” are nouns and pronouns that refer to the Divine and to human beings—they are “someones” who live in an interpersonal field of awareness.
When the portal of agapé awakens in our hearts, linear time dissolves as we are transported into the Beyond Within of a timeless experience. This portal is flexible, like the iris of our eyes in changing light--always opening and closing, always revealing, hiding, and revealing the paradoxical depths of Christ’s Presence and Absence. As the 15th century German Catholic bishop Nicholas of Cusa described the feeling in Latin, we experience a moment of coincidentia oppositorum (a coincidence of all opposites), a mortal and eternal journey in which we dance the ever-flowing opposites of our visible and invisible existence.
As a student of Zen and Vipassana meditation, I was never taught to notice the importance of this ultimate relational reality, the importance of the I-Thou. I might honor and have faith in the Buddha, but I was not told that I could speak with him in a timeless dimension, and have him listen to me as Jesus and his disciples had done with Creator (Jesus’ Abba). This is not a problem for me, and I do not believe that Buddhist meditation and Christian prayer contradict one another or that one is better than the other. I simply want to affirm that decades of Buddhist meditation, in which I learned to glide through and beyond the verbal chatter in my mind, opened my mind and heart to a more direct experience of what theologians call Christ’s Presence—a presence that is not imprisoned by concepts and words and that I experience as fundamentally relational. No matter where I look, I can step into an I-Thou relationship. This morning I stepped outside in the sun and crouched down low to gaze into a multi-colored tea rose. This simple gaze, without words, judgment, or evaluation, is something I learned from my Buddhist teachers. And then I brought words to the surface and said “I see you. How beautiful you are. Thank you.” This I-thou dimension added a sense of responsibility, as if to say, “I am here for you.”
Many years after the retreat in Bodha Gaya, I participated in a Buddhist retreat at the Zen Mountain Monastery with Roshi John Daido Loori, a Zen master who had grown up Roman Catholic. On the second day of a three-day retreat, a vivid sense of Christ’s Presence came to me, as if Jesus was on my cushion appreciating the sacred silence. When I mentioned this experience in an online blog, I was contacted by a young Christian in South Dakota, who asked, “Don’t you realize that Buddha, who didn’t believe in God, comes from the Dark Side, from all the forces aligned against Jesus?” I responded “Well, first, let me say that Buddha never denied God’s existence. Also, I believe and trust that while Jesus was a mortal human, he was also Christ who is the manifestation of our Creator—the One who created and re-creates everyone and everything. Therefore, our God created Buddhists as well as Christians, and it is God’s nature to love everyone. Christ, who manifests Creator, is not afraid to go anywhere, and he is eager to know everything about being human. I think that Jesus would appreciate a dancing relationship with Buddha.”
I could have added that Jesus himself probably touched the “emptiness” that Buddhists have named śūnyatā. I believe that this Sanskrit word points to Christ’s self-emptiness (Greek: kenosis) in Philippians 2:7). In his relationship with Creator, Jesus did a radical letting-go of all his ideas about God so that he could let God be God within him. Jesus was raised as a devout Jew who trusted the Hebrew scriptures, but he was not attached to anyone’s understanding of God. He trusted Creator (his Abba) so completely that he let Abba speak directly to, and in, his heart.
Jesus’ way of living his faith in the I-Thou dimension is our model. Therefore, even though we as Christians find our home in our relationship with Jesus Christ, we must be careful not to become attached to any particular inherited image of Jesus, Christ, or the Creator. We must be careful not to inadvertently create the Deity in our own image, and project that image onto God. Very often our search and our longing for God can be tangled up with our earthly relationships. For example, if our parents were abusive or controlling, we can, without knowing it, project that image onto God; it may feel ultimate because it’s our earliest experience of relationship. But it’s not necessarily God. On the other hand, our early and earthy experiences may have mirrored God’s unconditional love, which means that they must not be ignored or bypassed. We can give our lives to the Thou whom we’ve met in our Christian community, but we must be discerning as we identify our “Thou” who is always more then what we’ve experienced in our everyday lives.
When we face into important developmental childhood experiences and seek to integrate them with our spiritual lives, we may need to get help from a therapist or spiritual director. As we heal, we may find that our wounded relationships will always remain a reality, but perhaps not an ultimate one. In fact, our gradual realization of our childhood traumas may actually become a doorway into God’s Presence as we follow Jesus’ path to the Cross and our transformation.
The Dominican friar, Meister Eckhart (d. 1328), was acutely aware of all the ways that we create psychological barriers to the transcendent Godhead--even before the term “psychological” was introduced into European culture. Like all Christian contemplatives, he recommended regular periods of solitude and silence. In silence we can more easily discern where our attention resides and moves. God requires an open, uncluttered awareness that is unrestricted by our opinions and judgments—and sometimes, even by our beliefs. Are we primarily focused on what is happening within us, and on the quality of our inner lives, or are we pasted onto outer experiences, searching for the Divine “out there”?
Certainly, God is both within us and outside of us. But we must be careful not to create our own private doorway from God’s Presence to ours. For Eckhart, realizing ourselves requires the practice of moment-to-moment detachment (German: Abgescheidenheit)—not leaving our everyday lives, but wiping the table of our awareness clean in each moment, so that God can be free to nourish us. He emphasized that we must even let go of God, for God’s sake.[3]
Sometimes we need stories, music, liturgies, and images of God that awaken our longing for the infinite Love that is promised in the Gospels. But sometimes we become too attached to holy icons, hymns, and stories of any sort—even scriptural ones. We must maintain an inner freedom to receive a holiness that transcends what we think, hope for, and believe. Living in open awareness allows God to come from anywhere—a person, a season, a flower, a memory, or even a painful diagnosis. Eckhart once used this analogy to the landscape of our awareness. He wrote,
Take an illustration. A door [gate] swings to and fro through an angle. I compare the breadth of the door to the outward person and the hinge to the inner person. When the door swings to and fro, the breadth of the door moves back and forth, but the hinge is still unmoved and unchanged. It is like that here.[4]
Some of us on a spiritual journey think that God is totally separate from us, in a heaven far away. When I meet fellow Christians who feel this way, I remember my Jesuit professors at Weston Jesuit School of Theology who often defined sin as separation from God, Nature, and others. Our spiritual practice can become an effort to leave this everyday, embodied world for a pure and painless state of being. We can even get addicted to an impulse to escape our reality. But I believe that God has no location. God is everywhere, inside of us and out there in the world.
I like Eckhart’s metaphor of the hinge and door working together as a unit, as an image of a way to live in the flow of Presence. The hinge is unchanging, and its qualities of love, mercy, forgiveness, beauty, and compassion are eternal. We must bow to the reality that our outer world is always changing. Buddha himself was struck by this realization. He offered his followers Four Noble Truths. In this teaching he mentions that we often suffer because we try to stop the outer world from changing. We long for the eternal and we mistakenly try to find it in the external world. We reject the fact that all created things are impermanent. As a result, we suffer. This teaching mirrors Eckhart’s metaphor of the ever-swinging door of material reality and of the holy hinge that never changes.
Wisdom tells us to welcome our longing for eternal holiness, but not to expect to find it in the material world. Instead, we can awaken to the eternal that is already beckoning from the Beyond Within. I might add that we also shouldn’t expect to find God only within. Our Nicene tradition assures us that Jesus is both fully human and fully divine. He experienced no separation between the eternal and the mortal, and he offered this way of living to us. No separation.
We live right here at the meeting ground of door and hinge, right here in the midst of constant change and eternal truth. And here is also where Buddhists and Christians find some common ground. Still, it is not the exact same ground because Christians consider the I-Thou and I-thou aspects of awareness and action to be critically important. As Christians we don’t simply attempt to find, cultivate, or achieve the feeling of love in ourselves. Our agapé love is always relational, and there is always someone here with us.
Our Creator—ultimately invisible to our outward-looking eyes—created us out of a timeless Love, and is always summoning us out of aloneness and into relationship with Thou, and with thou. For the theologically-inclined. God’s Love is said to flow out of the God as a Holy Trinity (One-in-Three and Three-in-One). In this we trust that one of the first actions of God, as presented in Genesis, is that humans are created in the image and likeness of God (Gen. 1:26). This image and likeness is not a thing. Rather, it is a way of living, whether we are young or old, suffering or joyful, worried or at peace. We are never alone, but always living in Abba’s Presence. As St. Aquinas wrote, “Esse est co-esse” (Latin: "to be is to be with").
[1] See especially the Gospel of John 14-21. Ancient Greek ἀγάπη or agápé is often defined as the highest form of love, charity, and kindness of one person to another, and the love of God for all persons and of persons for God.
[2] Érōs, from the Greek: ἔρως, transliterated as Érōs) is the Greek word for "love" or "desire," particularly sensual or passionate love. It is the basis for the English word "erotic." Philia is one of the four ancient Greek words for love, alongside storge, agapé and eros. In Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, philia is usually translated as "friendship" or affection. Its opposite is called a phobia.
[3] We should keep in mind that there are different kinds of silence, different reasons for seeking silence, and different results of solitude in our earthly relationships. Some people might use silence and solitude to escape pain that arises in work or relationships.
[4] Raymond Bernard Blakney, tr. & ed. Meister Eckhart: A Modern Translation. New York: Harper & Bros., 1941, p. 87.
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