Two Strands of holiness

How does a 20-21st century man navigate the spiritual practices of East and West, especially Buddhism and Christianity? My story might provide some clues. Here is a piece I just wrote to my fellow Board members in the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies:

As one of the newest Board members of SCBS, I’m grateful for this community of colleagues and for the circuitous journey that brought me here. In 1947 I was born in northern Wisconsin, into a German Lutheran family. When my parents tumbled into alcoholism and divorce, my grandparents sheltered me and my two siblings, providing family stability and faith. We children would gleefully hide under the canvas tarps that Grandpa Fred Radenz, a house painter, spread out to dry in the backyard. When Grandma Leona put me to bed, she taught me the Lord’s Prayer and the prayer, Ich bin klein, mein Herz ist rein, soll niemand drin wohnen als Jesus allein (“I am small, my heart is pure, no one lives in my heart, but Jesus alone”). I felt comforted to know that despite the chaotic, even dangerous household of my parents, I had a home within me, where Jesus lived.

When I was in my early 20’s, two events disrupted my Christian journey. First, I realized that the paintings hanging in my grandparents’ home weren’t true-to-life depictions of Jesus of Nazareth; they were artistic representations by Warner Sallman, a businessman and illustrator. Second, in 1996, as a Luther College undergraduate, I was startled by the Time magazine cover story that asked in large, bold colors, “Is God Dead?” This provocative question revealed my secret doubts about Christianity. In my junior year I transferred to Dartmouth College, where I majored in Government and stopped going to church.

During my first semester at Dartmouth, I happened to walk into a Ch'an Buddhist Tai Kwan Do class. Instantly, I felt that I had found a new home. A life-long athlete, I soon became passionate about karate. However, I found the practice of Zen meditation difficult. Sitting on a cushion in my sacred, loose-fitting garment (a Gi), I felt guilty: according to my Midwestern, Lutheran upbringing, doing nothing was sinful – working hard and staying busy was morally essential.

After college I joined the burgeoning “back-to-the-land” movement—young people who rejected the corporate lifestyle and wanted to create a new way of living that connected us to premodern and indigenous values. I became a New Hampshire farmer who spent all my daylight hours in the fields and selling produce at local farmers’ markets. I began to explore Christian wisdom that was missing in my Lutheran experience. I met and began to pray with a group of Carmelite monks, who introduced me to St. John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila. I fell in love with the Roman Catholic mystical tradition, and I joined the Church.

To describe Christ’s self-emptying (Greek: kenosis), St. John of the Cross sketched an image of a sacred mountain that we could all climb. At the top, he penciled nada (Spanish: nothing or emptiness). Meditating with the monks, I began to glimpse that mountaintop where, from the standpoint of “nothing,” I could witness thoughts and feelings pass through me without sticking anywhere. While honoring the unknown, I felt present to everything. St. John’s nada awakened a liberating, contemplative silence that I had never known in my Lutheran upbringing, but one that resonated beautifully with Ch’an, Vipassana, and Zen meditation.

Finding that I couldn’t support my family as a farmer, I applied and was accepted at Harvard where I wrote and completed a doctoral dissertation in the field of Object Relations psychology. While there, I frequently attended Mass and also took part in many Buddhist retreats that resonated deeply with my Carmelite training

By now I had learned to treasure silence and emptiness—even when this unmanicured openness brought up previous traumas and fear. Yet I also hungered for something more: a sacred, personal relationship with the Mystery that transcends and sustains everyday relationships and material reality. I longed for the deep relationality that I had always experienced as a Christian. St. John continued to guide me. I noticed that he had encountered a beloved Someone in the eternal silence:

When you looked at me

your eyes imprinted your grace in me;

for this you loved me ardently;

and thus my eyes deserved

to adore what they beheld in you. . . .^[1]

John reminded me of my early experiences with Jesus, whom I had grown to trust as a living Presence who knew me better than I knew myself, an invisible Someone who was always whispering in my heart, “I am here. I know everything about you. I love you. I will never leave you.” As a doctoral student in psychology, I became close friends with Fr. Henri Nouwen, then teaching at Harvard Divinity School. I learned that he had studied at the Meninger psychiatric Institute. I was drawn to his deep devotional path, one that seemed to integrate the best of Catholic mystical tradition and psychotherapeutic healing. Henri often said that our core identity as persons is the unmerited gift of being beloved. He helped me reclaim the spiritual and psychological importance of what Jewish philosopher Martin Buber called the I-Thou dimension of spiritual life. I realized that this relational view resonated with psychiatrists like D.W. Winnicott, who wrote that “There is no such thing as a baby, there is a baby and someone.” But in the psychiatric and Christian spiritual worlds, there are always someones and a Someone within us.

I soon realized that the spiritual and psychological teachings I had experienced completely contradict the reining American culture of secular individuality, and I brought this understanding into my work as a psychotherapist. Seeking a deeper post-doc experience of the Catholic mystical path, I attended and graduated from the Weston Jesuit School of Theology. My thesis was called “A Perfect Storm of Healing: Christian Contemplative Prayer, Buddhist meditation, and psychodynamic psychotherapy.”

In the early 1990’s I realized that my eclectic spiritual practice wasn’t being taught in Buddhist or Christian settings, so in 1994 I renovated a carriage house in the Cambridge area and called it the Empty Bell (Japanese: kyo rei). Very often in the next ten years I invited Buddhist and Christian monks and nuns to the Empty Bell for meditations and inter-spiritual dialogues. For awhile it was the go-to place for Buddhist-Christian conversations and friendship in the Boston area. As the Empty Bell opened, I met a shakuhachi master, Yoshio Kurahashi, and over the years I gradually learned the complete repertoire of Sui-Zen (Blowing Zen) pieces which I played at all the spiritual retreats that I led. Within ten years I had recorded three albums that integrate Buddhist and Christian music, and was invited to play shakuhachi three times at the Dalai Lama’s multifaith gatherings in India, Italy, and Belfast, Ireland.

When I work with younger folks who are exploring spiritual paths I now recommend both Buddhist and Christian practices because each one taps a quality of life that the other has insufficiently articulated. I explore this integration of East-West spiritual practices in the recent book, My Dear Far-Nearness: The Holy Trinity as Spiritual Practice (Orbis, 2022).

I now consider both Buddhist and Christian aspects of awareness to be holy: abiding in imageless Mystery and experiencing a sacred and timeless I-Thou relationship. While sitting still, doing nothing, and being present, I also intuit the presence of universal belovedness. Amidst emptiness, there can be Someone to thank, Someone with whom to co-create one’s life.

Robert A. Jonas, Ed.D. (Harvard University), M.T. S. (Weston Jesuit School of Theology). Dr. Jonas is the founder and director of the Empty Bell sanctuary, a home for contemplative practices, inspired by the Christian-Buddhist dialogue. He is author of Rebecca (Crossroad), Henri Nouwen (Orbis), The Essential Henri Nouwen (Shambhala), and My Dear Far-Nearness: The Holy Trinity as Spiritual Practice. Websites are:

Emptybell.org

Mydearfar-nearness.org

^[1] St. John of the Cross. The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross. trans. & eds. Kavanaugh, Kieran, O.C.D. and Otilio Rodriguez, O.C.D. Washington, D.C.: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1979 (New Edition, 1991); Spiritual Canticle, pp.,47-48.