Meditation: Learning to be a Christian, Looking to Eastern Religions

Dear People of Christ Church,
Last weekend, I was blessed to join in the Sakadawa Interfaith Celebration at the Kurukulla Center in Medford. The center had invited all of Medford and beyond to join in chanting and prayer for peace in honor of the Buddha’s birthday. Leading worship I do pray in church, of course, but it was also completely delightful to have someone else do the heavy lifting.

I am not, of course, a Buddhist or a Hindu, but Eastern religions have still had a profound impact on my spirituality. When I was in college I studied in India for half of my senior year and I had the chance to stay for two weeks at the Chinmaya Ashram. When I was looking for a place for my retreat, I met a woman who had gone to this community every year for forty years. “Hinduism,” she said, “basically seeks to make people happy. Meditation," she said, "will bring you bliss. The ashram is Hindu. But we don’t want to make you a Hindu. Hinduism wants you to be a better person. It wants Muslims to be better Muslims. It wants you to be a better Christian. If you learn to cultivate this now, your life will change.”

And it did. Two years later I was in seminary, somewhat to my own surprise and even more so to those around me. I think you have to practice for a lot longer than I have to achieve bliss, but there are glimmers. The thing that Buddhism and Hinduism and Christianity all share is the knowledge that true freedom isn’t to be had in always getting your way. Whether Jesus on the cross, or Gautama Buddha under the Bodhi tree, or an 80 year old Hindu woman willing to have tea with a 21 year old American girl, the basic movement beyond ego and self-interest flows in the same direction. Many deeper minds than my own have engaged in serious interfaith dialogue on this.

Buddhism, a religious sibling to Hinduism, teaches profoundly about compassion, particularly compassion for ourselves—the wellspring of our compassion for others. The teacher Roshi Pat Enkyo O'Hara says the thing that gets us caught is the story we tell ourselves about who we are—we get caught on our former selves and forget that the “we” we are has always been an illusion, a set of ideas that props us up to face the world, but ultimately of no more weight than a breath. These stories we tell are a deep part of the suffering we create. As a Christian, I look behind the un-substance of that breath and see the image of God in which we all are made—and the detritus of sin that separates me from living into it more honestly. As a Christian, too, I know nothing can separate me from the love of God.

I’ll leave you with one of those stronger interfaith minds than my own, the monk Thomas Merton (1915-1968).

Both Christianity and Buddhism show that suffering remains inexplicable, most of all for the [one] who attempts to explain it in order to evade it, or who thinks explanation itself is an escape. Suffering is not a ‘problem’ as if it were something we could stand outside of and control. Suffering, as both Christianity and Buddhism see, each in its own way, is part of our very ego-identity and empirical existence, and the only thing to do about it is to plunge right into the middle of contradiction and confusion in order to be transformed by what Zen calls ‘the great death’ and Christianity calls ‘dying and rising with Christ’.

Blessings,
Sara+

More on Roshi Pat Enkyo O'Hara here.
More on Thomas Merton here.