"A Flower Does Not Talk"

One of our orchids.

I had a great idea (or so I egotistically thought) for a justice/politically-minded post that would have pleased many of you, but I decided “what the world needs now,” as the song goes, is Zen! Today and next Wednesday I am revisiting two posts that are Zen-like in orientation, one from 2018 and the second from 2016. I pray they bring peace to our troubled souls!

The whole world today, both East and West, seems to be going through a period of convulsion, a time of travail, as it seeks to give birth to a new culture. There cannot be one simple cause for the tensions in so many parts of the world, but one of the major factors may be that while remarkable progress has been made in the use of new scientific knowledge, we human beings have not developed sufficiently spiritually and ethically to meet the new conditions.

It is most urgently required, therefore, that we must work to create a new human culture by striving for a truer understanding of humanity and a higher level of spirituality.

This seems to echo the observations of Teilhard de Chardin, writing just after World War II, and speaks to our own time nearly two decades into the 21^st century. But it comes from a book written in 1970 by Zenkei Shibayama, a Zen master and then abbot of Nazenji Monastery in Kyoto, Japan. The book is titled, A Flower Does Not Talk: Zen Essays, and was translated into English by one of the author’s disciples, Miss Sumoko Kudo.

I took this from my bookshelves very early morning of the Saturday I write this, a little more than a week before leading a contemplative retreat, which I should continue preparing for, but I prefer to write this post, to be published a week after the retreat. The title possibly appealed to me because I am a little anxious about my impending leadership. In her helpful book, Be Still: Designing and Leading Contemplative Retreats, Jane E. Vennard writes that the best way to lead contemplation is to be a contemplative. A flower that does not talk seems a good role model.

As I read Shibayama’s preface and Daisetz T. Suzuki’s introduction, I wondered how I had never read this book that has sat alongside my books of Eastern wisdom for at least three decades. I was moved to find that the introduction was the famous D. T. Suzuki’s last writing, having completed it the day before he took sick, dying the day after that at the age of 95.

Only when I sat down to write this post did I see “Culbertson” handwritten on the title page and realize that this was either a loan or a gift from my friend, Linda Culbertson, recent executive of the Presbytery of the Pacific.

Suzuki evokes a smile with his very first sentence, “Zen claims to be ‘a specific transmission outside the scripture and to be altogether independent of verbalism,’ but it is Zen Masters who are most talkative and most addicted to writings of all sorts.” As a would-be contemplative who obviously loves words, I find this comforting.

He then writes how Zen Masters enjoy bringing their readers “to bewilderment with their apparently irrational and often irrelevant utterances.” I underlined “bewilderment” because yesterday I used a fanciful version of the word preparing a guided meditation for the retreat, writing, “We will flee from the familiar to the wild-ness and bewilder-ness of the wilderness.” Suzuki asserts that their purpose is to lift students to “the higher way of observing things.”

“Zen tells us to change or reverse our usual way of understanding,” he writes. “Zen always aspires to make us directly see into Reality itself, that is, be Reality itself, so that we can say along with Meister Eckhart that ‘Christ is born every minute in my soul,’ or that ‘God’s Isness is my Isness.’”

Yet the author, Abbot Zenkei Shibayama, cautions in his preface, “We should not too easily conclude that there is just one Truth, and that East and West are after all the same.”

Hallelujah!

The book’s title is that of the author’s poem:

A Flower Does Not Talk

Silently a flower blooms,

In silence it falls away;

Yet here now, at this moment, at this place,

            the whole of the flower, the whole of the world is blooming.

This is the talk of the flower, the truth of the blossom;

The glory of eternal life is fully shining here.

I think I’ve found my personal reading for the retreat.

I will be leading a virtual, at-home retreat open to the public for Columbia Seminary’s Spiritual Formation Program September 17-19, 2020 entitled An Open Receptive Place: Henri Nouwen’s Spirituality. You are invited!

Find out how you can support this blog—thank you! Click on: 
https://mccchurch.org/ministries/progressive-christian-reflections/

Be sure to scroll down to the donate link below its description.

Copyright © 2018 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.  

"A Flower Does Not Talk"

One of our orchids.

The whole world today, both East and West, seems to be going through a period of convulsion, a time of travail, as it seeks to give birth to a new culture. There cannot be one simple cause for the tensions in so many parts of the world, but one of the major factors may be that while remarkable progress has been made in the use of new scientific knowledge, we human beings have not developed sufficiently spiritually and ethically to meet the new conditions.

It is most urgently required, therefore, that we must work to create a new human culture by striving for a truer understanding of humanity and a higher level of spirituality. 

This seems to echo the observations of Teilhard de Chardin, writing just after World War II, and speaks to our own time nearly two decades into the 21^st century. But it comes from a book written in 1970 by Zenkei Shibayama, a Zen master and then abbot of Nazenji Monastery in Kyoto, Japan. The book is titled, A Flower Does Not Talk: Zen Essays, and was translated into English by one of the author’s disciples, Miss Sumoko Kudo.

I took this from my bookshelves very early morning of the Saturday I write this, a little more than a week before leading a contemplative retreat, which I should continue preparing for, but I prefer to write this post, to be published a week after the retreat. The title possibly appealed to me because I am a little anxious about my impending leadership. In her helpful book, Be Still: Designing and Leading Contemplative Retreats, Jane E. Vennard writes that the best way to lead contemplation is to be a contemplative. A flower that does not talk seems a good role model.

As I read Shibayama’s preface and Daisetz T. Suzuki’s introduction, I wondered how I had never read this book that has sat alongside my books of Eastern wisdom for at least three decades. I was moved to find that the introduction was the famous D. T. Suzuki’s last writing, having completed it the day before he took sick, dying the day after that at the age of 95.

Only when I sat down to write this post did I see “Culbertson” handwritten on the title page and realize that this was either a loan or a gift from my friend, Linda Culbertson, executive of the Presbytery of the Pacific.

Suzuki evokes a smile with his very first sentence, “Zen claims to be ‘a specific transmission outside the scripture and to be altogether independent of verbalism,’ but it is Zen Masters who are most talkative and most addicted to writings of all sorts.” As a would-be contemplative who obviously loves words, I find this comforting.

He then writes how Zen Masters enjoy bringing their readers “to bewilderment with their apparently irrational and often irrelevant utterances.” I underlined “bewilderment” because yesterday I used a fanciful version of the word preparing a guided meditation for the retreat, writing, “We will flee from the familiar to the wild-ness and bewilder-ness of the wilderness.” Suzuki asserts that their purpose is to lift students to “the higher way of observing things.”

“Zen tells us to change or reverse our usual way of understanding,” he writes. “Zen always aspires to make us directly see into Reality itself, that is, be Reality itself, so that we can say along with Meister Eckhart that ‘Christ is born every minute in my soul,’ or that ‘God’s Isness is my Isness.’”

Yet the author, Abbot Zenkei Shibayama, cautions in his preface, “We should not too easily conclude that there is just one Truth, and that East and West are after all the same.”

Hallelujah!

The book’s title is that of the author’s poem:

A Flower Does Not Talk

Silently a flower blooms,

In silence it falls away;

Yet here now, at this moment, at this place,

            the whole of the flower, the whole of the world is blooming.

This is the talk of the flower, the truth of the blossom;

The glory of eternal life is fully shining here.

I think I’ve found my personal reading for the retreat.

I will be speaking during the 11 a.m. worship this coming Sunday, May 13, 2018 at Ormewood Church in Atlanta.

Related Post: A Flower’s Tears

Find out how you can support this blog—thank you!

http://mccchurch.org/ministries/progressive-christian-reflections/

Be sure to scroll down to the donate link below its description.

Copyright © 2018 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

Is Marriage Sacred?

Copyright © 2012 by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved. Permission granted for non-profit use in public gatherings with attribution of author and blog site.

At dinner with a close friend during a time when I was writing a book on same-gender marriage, I was stunned by his blunt rebuke to my musings about the spiritual dimensions of marriage.

“There’s nothing sacred about marriage,” he said matter-of-factly.

Now, granted, I wrote in my book that author Jonathan Rauch said at a book-signing that he believed the one thing that most prompted resistance to marriage equality was people’s association of marriage with something sacred, even if they weren’t religious. And thus I spent pages in my book deconstructing the notion of marriage’s association with the sacred, which makes the rethinking of marriage a deeply held taboo. Variants on what is held up as “traditional marriage” are thus suspect to the dominant culture, especially those of same-gender love, yet another taboo.

But I had come to the conclusion that marriage is, in fact, a spiritual discipline attempting “to give a future to a present love,” in the words of Christian ethicist Margaret Farley. Just like joining a spiritual community, cultivating a prayer life, developing an ethic of justice and mercy, or following a vocation, committing oneself to marriage is a means to grow spiritually.  In the book I quoted a romantic “chick flick” in which the protagonist, a woman, says regarding her relationship, “It’s not so much about monogamy. It’s about focus.” Spiritual disciplines are about focus, or, to use the Buddhist term, mindfulness.

As I reflected afterwards on my friend’s words, it occurred to me that their ability to jar me came from my very different view of the world. I see everything as sacred, or having sacred potential. As Henri Nouwen wrote in Creative Ministry, “The whole of nature is a sacrament pointing to a reality far beyond itself.” The mystic Meister Eckhart said that even a caterpillar is so full of God a sermon would prove unnecessary!

That’s why I so readily see the sacred or sacred potential in the marriage of same-gender couples as well as opposite-gender couples, and why I fail to comprehend those whose vision of the holy fails them when it comes to same-sex marriage.

Martin Luther called marriage a “divine and holy estate of life” and “church of God” that was to take in and care for strangers much as monasteries and cloisters did. John Calvin claimed marriage as a vocation equal to all religious vocations, containing a holiness closer to the reign of God than a cloister. Anglicans held that marriage was a little church that served as a “seminary of the Church and Commonwealth.”

I concluded in my book, As My Own Soul: The Blessing of Same-Gender Marriage, that “we might best view marriage as a little monastery, a contemplative order of the partners in marriage themselves, who have reined in conflicting desires in order to focus on one another (and their children, if so blessed) to love and honor and in some sense obey, obey as in mutually trusting one another’s spiritual leadership.”

Such definition does not exclude Luther’s understanding of marriage as providing hospitality to strangers, Calvin’s understanding of it as a calling, nor the Anglican understanding of it as a church and seminary where worship and education occur.

Nor does it exclude same-sex couples.

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Chris is available to give presentations and workshops on marriage in the Bible and Christian tradition as it relates to same-sex marriage. For more information, click here.

Tax-deductible contributions to this ministry may be made by check to MCC, P.O. Box 50488, Sarasota, FL 34232, writing in the memo area, “For Progressive Christian Reflections.” Thank you!