Something The Buddah Can Teach Christians

I wrote a book a few years ago called Faith to Faith. I wanted to call it How a Buddhist Taught Me To Be A Better Christian but my publishers resisted. They said Christian bookstores wouldn’t sell a book with that title. They were right. Unfortunately, they also failed to take into account that Christians who purchase books at Christian bookstores are usually not interested in other religions anyway. So they ended up publishing a book for people who were not interested in other religions while ignoring people who were.

In the meantime, I got paid to research other religions, meet tons of interesting people, and learn a lot.

I found Buddhism particularly intriguing. I had to keep asking myself, “Is this really a religion?” Oh, Buddhism eventually evolved to include statuary, temples, rites and such.  It proscribes a practice and a lifestyle. It presents clear belief structures and so forth. It’s just that the Buddha’s teaching reveals a profound interest in states of consciousness and inner life. That’s a territory modern Westerners tend to categorize as psychological rather than religious. Since my secular training is in psychology, I found that fascinating.

Perhaps the real issue is our definition of religion. It’s a word many modern Christians reject when describing their own faith. That irritates me to no end. However, perhaps the word religion is at fault. Perhaps religion is an artificial category we impose on thought systems that would have nothing in common otherwise. I mean, what exactly makes us define a particular system of belief as a religion rather than as a philosophy? Habit mostly.

The further back we go in time, the more problematic such categories become.

Ancient people did not have a separate vocabulary to express ideas about disciplines we now call cosmology, physics, philosophy and psychology. They used ‘religious’ words to talk about nearly everything abstract. That’s because religion is the foundation of disciplines like ethics, jurisprudence, cosmology and so forth in every culture. Nations do secularize over time, but their religious underpinnings remain. That’s just the way it is; there are no real exceptions to that principle.  Religions create culture, including modern ones. Nothing else is up to the task, at least not yet.

So Buddhism was a gift of ancient India. By the time the Buddha came along, Indian thinkers had already been thinking about the nature of consciousness, reason, personhood, and other inner states of awareness for a long time.  They used religious language to ask questions like, “since I sometimes dream I am a butterfly, how can I be certain that I am not now a butterfly dreaming I am a man?”

That’s funny. It is however, a deadly serious question.  What is dreaming anyway? Should we take it seriously?  Why not? Can we be certain that our day-to-day life is not really a dream? Why not? Modern thinkers in the West didn’t’ ask such questions for a long time, at least with such earnestness. The Buddha asked them during the days of Jeremiah.

I think the reason the Buddha’s ideas provoke me so much is they shock me into paying closer attention to the Bible. As it turns out, our scripture also addresses such subjects – howbeit in passages we don’t read very much.

For example, some people think Freud got his ideas about the id, ego and superego from St. Augustine’s Confessions. Augustine, in turn, was reflecting on St. Paul’s teaching on temptation in Romans. Paul asks us to consider what is happening when a part of me wants sometime another part of me thinks I should not have – like an extra piece of pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving, for example. He says that when two parts of me get into an argument, there must be a third part of me that makes the final decision. So there are at least three kinds of consciousness inside me, sometimes arguing about which way I should go. But which one of these three kinds of consciousness is the real me? Freud found that so fascinating he developed the modern discipline of psychology while pondering it.

The apostle Paul says the real me is not the one that demands more pie. He claims that the whiner is a false self, an old self, that has been put to death.  Thats good to know, but if that piece of consciousness is still in there yelling for stuff, what is it? Who is it?

The Buddha solves the problem by claiming that all three kinds of these conscious states are illusions.  In that case, what we call “self” is actually a constantly shifting collage of perceptions, impressions and judgments without any real core.

In Faith to Faith, I suggested we might offer Buddhism the following hymn.

Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream

Merrily, merrily, merrily merrily,

Life is but a dream.

Christian faith ends up in a very different place. For us, God’s call to personhood is central to our way of viewing and practicing life. Christians think of the self as something like Pinocchio in the children’s story. Christ has come to make us into real persons. So I can’t agree with the Buddha about my self being nothing but an illusion. On the other hand, what the Buddha says about not taking my constantly shifting moods and desires very seriously can be quite helpful. Spiritually speaking, neither my passing sins nor my passing virtues are very important. What is important is the destiny I can find through the redemptive work of Christ. My passing fancies can certainty mess me up if I take them too seriously, but if I keep my eyes on Christ I can trust him “who has begun a good work in me to complete it.”

So the Buddha is right about it not being spiritually helpful to keep focusing on me. I will become me only by getting the focus off of me and on to Christ. I become me by hearing Christ’s call to serve others. If I do that, Christ promises that he will take care of the formation of my self.

Just today I heard a good man, named Edsel Charles, say an astounding thing. He said that the words of Jesus as recorded by St. Matthew 28:19 are much more pivotal to the Christian faith than we often assume. Jesus said in that passage that becoming his disciple involves having someone teach us “all those things I have commanded you.”

What Edsel was getting at is that the teachings of Jesus may be the part of scripture modern believers ignore the most.  Some even claim that the Lord’s teachings are not a part of the gospel, but rather a part of the Old Covenant. If that is true, then the worlds of Jesus are not for anyone, seeing that Jewish people are not known to study them much. Perhaps such attitudes is how we get a modern form of Christianity with a lot of teaching about the blood of Christ but in which the living Christ has become mute.

Buddhists pray,

“I take refuge in the Buddha;

I take refuge in the Buddha’s teaching;

I take refuge in the Buddha’s community.”

Reading the Buddha, I can understand why they pray that. The Buddha is a good teacher. So good in fact that after hearing him, I always go back to listen once more to Jesus. Every time I do, I am in awe once more of the power of words I have been hearing since childhood:

“Come unto me, all ye who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn of me -- learn of me -- learn of me. For my yoke is easy and my burdens are light.”

Ender's Game and the Book of Revelation

My last blog was a mediation on Ender’s Game and the thoughts I had while watching it. Science Fiction is a much more important literary gender than people tend to think and I wanted to acknowledge that. I also wanted to show how a preoccupation with envisioning the future derives from Jewish and Christian roots. I said that because although the Bible urges us to honor the past, it spends much more time urging us to prepare for the future. 

The central word of the Bible is covenant. It refers to a web of attitudes and responsibilities one adopts that makes it possible to link generations one to the other. That link allows covenant keepers to transmit knowledge from the past through the present, and on into the future. In this way, one’s decedents come to understand and become able to carry out the purposes of God. However, preparing them to do this requires one to envision the sort of future toward which they are headed. Since the Bible forbids soothsaying, necromancy, crystal ball reading and the like, the work of envisioning the future is actually an extension of wisdom. A godly person reflects on what he or she knows about the past and present. From this practice, one begins to have some idea about what seems likely to occur in the future. To be sure, the work of prognostication is an inexact science.

As St. Paul says, we “see through a glass darkly,” and only know “in part.” We prophesy according to our measure of faith, in the humble recognition of our mortality, finiteness, and limited understanding. Nonetheless, we attempt to understand where time is headed. 

One of the more mysterious types of literature in the Bible, which is there to help us prognosticate, is called apocalyptic. It has no real contemporary secular counterpart, except, perhaps the fantasy/science fiction genre. If we move beyond the world of literature, we can see that the aims of apocalyptic writing are similar to that of some modern visual artists. In that light, the Book of Revelation might make a lot more sense after reading the Lord of the Rings or, for that matter, after meditating on the paintings of Salvador Dali and Picasso.

It is helpful to know what apocalyptic literature does and does not do. Failure to distinguish between the various genres of Biblical literature can result in serious violations of the Bible’s repeated warnings against fortune telling.  Jesus repeated that warning after his resurrection “no man knows the day or the hour when the Son of Man comes.” Unfortunately, these warnings are often ignored. 

To say it clearly, the Book of Revelation is not primarily about predicting the future. It is mainly about worship, about recapitulating the history of redemption in a symbolic way, and about developing in the reader the kind of wisdom necessary for recognizing the spiritual significance of world events as they occur. The Book of Revelation tells us that there is another world beyond the one we normally see. It tells us that events in our world are deeply interconnected to events in that other world. Finally, it tells us the best news of all – that Good will win against evil and all will be well in the end.

I like the Book of Revelation. That is probably why I like Isaac Asimov, Orson Scott Card and Ursula LaQuin. Well-written science fiction pulls a person out of his own time and space and makes him envision life in a very different environment. The Book of Revelation does that too. 

Ready Player One, by Earnest Cline, tells the story of a boy who lives fifty years or so in the future. He lives in cyber space for hours at a time, playing games. Every morning, he puts on his helmet, which projects images through his eyes into his brain. He wears tactile-simulating gloves that make it feel as though he is grasping real objects. He keeps playing because if he wins, he will be a multibillionaire. An eccentric technology tycoon has left that provision in his will and thousands have been trying ever since. 

Ready Player One is a great read. For one thing, it helps one escapes for a few hours into another world. It is healthy to do that sometime – that what we call recreation. But there is another payoff for reading this sort of thing.  The reader begins to imagine a time not so far away, when the boundaries between ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’ may become very hazy. It makes him ponder, how does the ways of such a world connect with the Bible’s warnings about the dangers of idolatry, that is to say, of ‘image making?” And how do we prepare our decedents to live in such a world? 

In Ender’s Game, when the student warriors arrive in space and experience weightlessness for the first time, they are amused to see their commanding officer floating in front of them at a right angle. Only Ender realizes that the commanding officer believes it is he who is standing upright; that it is his students who are sitting at such a peculiar angle. They soon learn how to avoid motion sickness, caused by this kind of alteration of reality by fixing their eyes on a single object. If they do that, they can figure out how other things in the environment relate to that.

Whether or not children every make it into space, the concept here is important for everyone. Not long ago, people thought the earth was the center of the universe. Copernicus and Galileo taught us that the sun was the real center. The earth actually moves, every fast, in fact, around the sun. Then, Einstein taught us that there is no center. Everything moves around everything else. So, its is just as true to say that something we chose to be the center is the core of the universe as to say that the universe has no center.

I’m sure actually experiencing that reality up in space would make one sick to his stomach for a while. The implications certainly make me sick to my stomach down here! I am actually much more comfortable with Newton than with Einstein. I want my old world back, where up is up and down is down, and where saying “the sun sets” means precisely that and is not merely a figure of speech.

Alas, my old world is not coming back.  A flaming sword blocks the way to Eden. We are forbidden to return to our past. Time only moves in one direction. Not only are we forbidden to go back, we are forbidden to remain still. For us, time moves on a single direction – forward. What we have from the past are lessons that may help us figure out the present and the future – the inevitable and unavoidable future. The Ghost of Christmas Future beckons and at some point, I am no longer in the picture. So I prepare people to represent me (and all those who prepared me) for that coming moment.

I think the future is only scary because we are not in it.  So we terrify ourselves with images of horror and unimaginable evils, which will indeed arise according to our own apocalyptic witness. However, we don’t spend nearly enough time thinking about the unimaginable blessings and wonder that the future will also bring – when “they will beat their swords into plowshares and will not learn of war anymore,” or when the Jew will take the Egyptian by the hand and say ‘let us go to the house of the Lord together.” And we do not take enough notice of the final words from heaven “the kingdoms of this world have become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ.”

Knowing that is enough to move my out from my house and back into the mundane, ordinary work of mediating trivial disputes, comforting those who grieve, marrying another generation of delighted lovers, and walking one more step toward the reason that make sense of all of this.  

What Ender's Game Teaches Us About Orientation

The word orientation was originally a Christian architectural term. Christian churches were designed so that the altar would face east, that is to say, toward the orient. (That's why old churches often appear oddly angled when contrasted with the buildings around them. They seem out of step with their surroundings because they are aligned with Jerusalem -- oriented.)

We have come to apply the concept much more generally, and use the word orientation to describe the central interest of a given individual or community. Thus, an individual or community's orientation can be nearly anything. It doesn't have to be a geographical location.  It can even be an event or a period of time.

As I was watching Ender's Game, it came to me with some force that developing a future orientation is critical for any person or group expecting to survive into the future.

Recent studies suggest that children who enjoy science fiction often develop a passion for science, or at least become technologically creative. Having learned to find delight in an imagined future, they began moving themselves toward that future. We get things like iPads as a result. 

In contrast, an orientation toward the past produces a traditionalist, a person who feels ill at ease with the present and who dreads the future because future can only represent a further deterioration of his or her ideal past world.

Of course, everyone who honors tradition is not a traditionalist. Some people thinks of me as a traditionalist because I treasure tradition. Also, my first degree was in history. However. for me, history is not an ideal world. It merely gives me valuable information about how civilization emerged and developed. Its also teaches me valuable lessons about how society works.

Another important reason we study history is so each generation won't have to start over. 

Young mathematicians study Euclid and Leibniz so they can go on to develop their discipline. However brilliant, young mathematicians they won't get very far if they spend their lives discovering principles already discovered centuries ago. They honor the past by expanding on the lessons of those who lived in the past. They don't label Einstein as irreverent because he moved beyond the knowledge he learned from the likes of Euclid. Einstein knew he would not have made his discoveries without the contributions of people like Euclid. Einstein didn't suppose that living in Euclid's world was the right way to honor him. Young mathematicians study Einstein in the same spirit. 

The same holds true for any discipline, including theology, incidentally.  

The past provides a base, a foundation. However, it is the future that provides the inspiration, the motivating power that pulls individuals toward new understandings of the world. Setting up conflict between history and the future is thus a most foolish and destructive tendency.

That is what Americans have been doing politically, in my opinion. When conservatives grow hostile to the idea of progress and the notion of the common good, and progressives become hostile to tradition and the notion of the private good, we end up losing both history and the future. We become fools, wallowing in our self-righteous sense of ideological entitlement, without either sufficient wisdom from the past or an adequate vision of the future to keep making sense of the world.  

Fortunately, there is a way out of this impending cultural lobotomy. It is a third way, a way that honors tradition without making us into slaves of the past and honors the future without making us addicted to endless novelties unhinged from any context or meaning.

In The Beginning of Wisdom, Leon Kass describes this third way far better than I can. He tells us how the ancient Hebrews founded a culture around their confidence in a teleological universe. That simply means that they saw history as a continual movement toward some good and purposeful future. Like all ancient cultures (and unlike our own) the ancient Hebrews honored their past. However, they focused even more on their promised future and on the duty of parents and community leaders to prepare the next generations to walk into that future. Armed with their deep awareness (and acceptance) of individual mortality, Jews prepared and blessed their offspring to move forward in time toward ever greater understandings of the world. 

Christianity inherited this Hebrew belief. Ours is thus a prophetic faith. It assumes that time is not the result of some past event from which we have been moving into ever greater dysfunction; it is the result of a future event toward which providence has been pulling us into greater levels of understanding and blessing.

God is not in the past then, waving sorrowfully as we helplessly descend into ever greater kinds of evil. He is in the future, waiting for us to grow into full personhood and fulfill the completed creatures he envisioned as one day fully embodying His own image and likeness.

God is also in the present, giving us understanding of the revelations of about the past and hinting about what awaits us in the future. 

These are the implications of what is often called an ancient/future faith. It views Christian orthodoxy as a foundation upon which one builds and matures rather than as a prison from which one transcends at his own peril. Faith is thus a compass more than a map; a formation of character and intellect more than a rule book to hammer us into conformity with the past or uniformity with our peers. It is a prophetic call that assumes that moving into the future is the best way to honor the past.

To use biblical language, after the pillar of fire shifts and moves, it becomes a sin to remain in our old camping place. Canaan is before us, not behind us. Although we honor the dead, we are not obligated to remain with them so we can perpetually venerate their remains. We carry their bones with us as we proceed with them to Beulah. As  the writer of Hebrews puts it, "so they without us will not be made perfect."

We are an oriented people. However, that does not mean we are stationary. We were created to transcend all that we should continue to honor. We are called to love the earth as we keep heading for the stars.