Help Me Understand

"I am the mountain. The mountain is me." --A homemade Zen saying.

Look closely for me at the bottom of this photo of the Matterhorn, taken in 1973. 

I did not have the faith to move this mountain, but I did have the faith to be in awe.

Zen almost silenced me. Or it did, and still I’m blogging!

I’ve written several posts about a book on Zen Buddhism I’ve just completed reading. I found myself becoming quieter and quieter as I read a brief section each day during morning prayer. Part of it was that Zen was telling me to shut up, just be. And part of it was that the whole enterprise had the effect of a Zen koan like “the sound of one hand clapping” to still the mind.

I especially loved this example of Zen mondo (questions and answers): “What is it ultimately?” “Willows are green and flowers are pink.”

“Willows are green and flowers are pink.” I wish I had thought of that when asked some outlandish question during Q&A’s in the church or equally, in the LGBT community, on whether one can be gay and Christian. Or another, “Only those who know it know.”

“Willows are green and flowers are pink.” Also a good answer for thorny theological questions like, how can a good God allow suffering in the world?

“The ‘beauty’ of Zen is the inner power that unites nature and life from within,” Abbot Zenkei Shibayama writes.

I have only an inkling of what that means—some intuitive, receptive neuron in my brain that may or may not get it.

And that’s why I became quieter and quieter as I read. I often get quiet when I don’t understand something, which has saved me from embarrassing moments of pretense.

But I liked it. Like witnessing a magnificent waterfall cascading from verdant cliffs down the face of a grey stone canyon wall to a valley below. Like hearing a musical composition caringly played that lifts the soul to cosmic, heavenly realms. Like the final gasp of an instance of prolonged lovemaking so profound as to put the most elevated sacred texts to shame.

I don’t need to understand something to see its beauty.

Years ago, I occasionally worked with another activist who sometimes questioned my thinking with the words, “Help me understand…” Given the context of our connection and other put-downs of me, I always thought the words were patronizing, as in “Help me understand how you can come to such a crazy conclusion.”

Only recently have I thought perhaps the phrase came from PBS and NPR, whose news interviewers often use the phrase, “Help us understand…” to aid interviewees to better explain their thinking to viewers and listeners.

A seminary professor with whom I served on a school committee told me privately that I sometimes seem to speak aloud mid-thought, mid-thinking process, so that what led to my conclusions were unclear. Perhaps that’s what was happening with my fellow activist. Perhaps that’s what happens on this blog!

Long ago I learned that my own need to understand something could be a means of control. In college, French existentialist author and philosopher Albert Camus spoke to me when he described “true understanding as ‘standing under,’ receiving without being in control (as understanding or ‘superior’ knowledge often implies).” I wrote this in Henri’s Mantle (p 94).

So I have been standing under Zen Buddhism, hoping a little of its wisdom and beauty will gently fall on me.

A final thought from Abbot Shibayama (A Flower Does Not Talk, p 122):

Zen asks us to open our eyes to the realm where subject and object are not yet separated, and I and you are one; and then to live and work in this new dimension.

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

A Priest for the 21st Century

Though priest, sociologist, and novelist Andrew M. Greeley lived most of his life in the 20th century, he was ahead of his time in his vision of what the Roman Catholic Church is and what it could be, especially in the United States.

As a “renegade” Protestant, I valued his protests against hierarchy, elitism, corruption, and cover-ups, such as the one surrounding pedophile priests. I’m not aware of an equally prominent Protestant figure who parallels his brutal directness and public airing of dirty clerical laundry.

I did not always agree with him (who did?), but I often agreed with him, and I greatly appreciated the audacity with which he brought scientific study to religion as well as matters of faith to both academia and popular literature.

Peter Steinfels’ obituary in The New York Times and its subsequent editorial does him justice, but only Greeley’s own writings can offer a full explanation of his life and times. Steinfels correctly summarizes his work: 

If there was anything tying Father Greeley’s torrent of printed words together, it was a respect for what he considered the practical wisdom and religious experience of ordinary believers and an exasperation with elites, whether popes, bishops, church reformers, political radicals, secular academics or literary critics.

 AMEN!

And then: 

Before religion became creed or catechism, he said, it was poetry: images and stories that defy death with glimpses of hope, and with moments of life-renewing experience that were shared and enacted in community rituals.

 For me, too, it all begins with poetry, images, and stories… 

“The theological voice wants doctrines, creeds and moral obligations,” Father Greeley wrote. “I reject none of these, I merely insist that experiences which renew hope are prior to and richer than propositional and ethical religion and provide the raw power for them.”

Preach it, brother! This is not far from my Baptist upbringing that taught me that personal experience is crucial to one’s faith. In my own struggle with the Presbyterian (and broader) church, it was such experience that prompted many Christians to question the church’s attitudes toward LGBT people, while opponents decried and denied personal experience as having moral or spiritual authority. And experience collected, organized, and evaluated, as a sociologist like Greeley did, is science.

Given our own “renegade” status as progressive Christians, our spiritual grounding is strengthened by poetry, images, stories, and experience—the stuff of reflection and contemplation.

Rev. Greeley was careful not to say or do anything that might prompt his silencing by authorities. If he were really free to speak, I wonder what else he might have said.

Posts from this blog that reference Father Greeley:

I Wanted to Be Famous

Paradise Lost and Paradise Found

Put Yourself in the Nativity Story

Et II, Benedict?

Copyright © 2013 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. Check out past posts in the right rail on the blogsite. 

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