by Richard Rohr
I have lived in Buddhist monasteries in Japan, Switzerland, and the USA. They are definitely more disciplined than most Christian monasteries, and definitely much more serious. The first question out of a Japanese abbot’s mouth to me was “What is your practice?” The first question when meeting a Christian abbot would probably be something like “How was your trip?” or “Do you have everything you need for while you are here?” or “Are you hungry?”
Both approaches have their strengths and their limitations. In most ways Buddhism is more a way of knowing and cleaning the lens than a theistic religion concerned with metaphysical “God” questions. In telling you mostly how to see, Buddhism both appeals to us and threatens us because it demands much more vulnerability and immediate commitment to a practice—more than just “attending” a service, like many Christians do. Buddhism is more a philosophy, a worldview, a set of practices to free us for truth and love than it is a formal belief system in any notion of God. It provides insights and principles that address the how of spiritual practice, with very little concern about what or Who is behind it all. That is its strength, and I am not sure why that should threaten any “believer.”
By contrast, Christians have spent centuries trying to define the what and Who of religion—and usually gave folks very little how, beyond quasi-“magical” transactions (Sacraments, moral behaviors, and handy Bible verses), which of themselves often seem to have little effect on how the human person actually lives, changes, or grows. These transactions often tend to keep people on cruise control rather than offer any genuinely new encounter or engagement. I am sorry to have to say that, but it is my almost-fifty-year experience as a priest and teacher in many groups.
Transformation, or salvation, is so much more than a favor that Jesus effects for certain individuals in a heavenly ledger somewhere. It is a full map for a very real human journey. Not really an absolute necessity, but surely a great gift! And this map is also a participatory experience with a community of some sort, even with the community of unfolding history. I believe the Christian notion of salvation is not just personal enlightenment, but also social connection and communion—which ironically ends up being divine connection too. This alone is full incarnational Christianity, with both the vertical line and the horizontal line forming our central logo of the cross. Never trust only the vertical line or only the horizontal line. They must cross and intertwine and become one. And that is indeed crucifixion.
Spirituality is about honoring the human journey, loving it, and living it in all its wonder and tragedy. There is nothing really “supernatural” about love and suffering. It is completely natural, taking us through the deep interplay of death and life, surrender and forgiveness, in all their basic and foundational manifestations. “God comes to you disguised as your life,” as my friend Paula D’Arcy says so well. Who would have thought? I was told it was about going to church.
Authentic Christianity is not so much a belief system as a life-and-death system that shows you how to give away your life, how to give away your love, and eventually how to give away your death. Basically, how to give away—and in doing so, to connect with the world, with all other creatures, and with God.
My Methodology
Epistemology is a science that tries to ask and answer the question How do we know what we think we know? Then Christians need to go further and ask, How do we know what we think we know for sure?—so we stop producing sterile fundamentalism, so much arrogant knowing, and dualistic patterns of argument. To be forced to choose between two presented options is never to see with depth, with subtlety, or with compassion. In our Living School here in New Mexico we teach a methodology that we call our “tricycle.” It moves forward on three wheels: Experience, Scripture, and Tradition, which must be allowed to regulate and balance one another. Very few Christians were given permission, or training, in riding all three wheels together, much less allowing experience to be the front wheel. We also try to ride all three wheels in a “rational” way, knowing that if we give reason its own wheel, it will end up driving the whole car.
Up to now, Catholics and Orthodox have used Tradition in both good and bad ways, Protestants used Scripture in both good and bad ways, and neither of us handled experience very well at all. Experience is the new kid on the block. It was always there, but we did not have the skills or the honesty to admit that we were all operating out of our own experience. Now we have the tools of psychology and spiritual direction—and Google—to help us trust and critique the always-operative source of experience: the human person that we are.
Mostly, we must remember that Christianity in its maturity is supremely love-centered, not information- or knowledge-centered, which is called “Gnosticism.” The primacy of love allows our knowing to be much humbler and more patient, and helps us to recognize that other traditions—and other people—have much to teach us, and there is also much we can share with them. This stance of honest self-knowledge and deeper interiority, the head (Bible), heart (Experience), and body (Tradition) operating as one, is helping many to be more integrated and truthful about their own actual experience of God.
Other Viewpoints
We are also learning from other cultures that we do not “know” or contemplate only by quiet sitting and disciplined posture, which we might have “overlearned” from our Buddhist and monastic friends. After all, Jesus never talks about posture once! In her book Joy Unspeakable, Barbara Holmes shows us how the Black and slave experience led to a very different understanding of the contemplative mind.*2 She calls it “crisis contemplation.” Enlightenment or knowledge of God cannot possibly depend upon people who are willing to sit erect on a mat for extended periods—or 99 percent of humanity would never know God. Barbara teaches how the Black experience of moaning together, singing spirituals that lead to intense inner awareness, participating in de facto liturgies of lamentation, and engaging in nonviolent resistance produced a qualitatively different—but profound—contemplative mind that we saw in people like Fannie Lou Hamer, Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King Jr., Howard Thurman, and Sojourner Truth.
Then there are the walking meditators, like the Russian Pilgrim, who walked all his life reciting the Jesus Prayer, the American Peace Pilgrim, who walked across the United States from 1953 till her death in 1981, and now their modern successors, like Jonathon Stalls and Andrew Forsthoefel, who teach the deep wisdom of goalless walking or “living life at three miles an hour.” My own Jesuit spiritual director when I was a young man told me that Type A personalities like myself would do much better with walking than with sitting meditation. Many others come to the contemplative mind through activities like music, dancing, and running. It is largely a matter of your inner goal and intention, and whatever quiets you in body, mind, and heart. As the old joke put it: It is forbidden to smoke while you are praying! But it is wonderful and meritorious to pray while you are smoking!
Contemplation allows us to see things in their wholeness, and thus with respect (remember, re-spect means to see a second time). Until Richard recognizes and somehow compensates for his prejudicial way of seeing the moment, all Richard will tend to see is his own emotional life and agenda in every new situation. This is the essential lesson of Contemplation 101, but it does not feel much like “prayer” to the average person, which is probably why many give up too soon and frankly never truly meet the other—much less the Other. They just keep meeting themselves over and over again. In Contemplation 201, you begin to see there’s a correlation between how you do anything and how you do everything else, which makes you take the moment in front of you much more seriously and respectfully. You catch yourself out of the corner of your eye, as it were, and your ego games are exposed and diminished.
Such knowing does not contradict the rational, but it’s much more holistic and inclusive. It goes where the rational mind cannot go, but then comes back to honor the rational too. In our Living School, we call this �
��contemplative epistemology.” Contemplation is really the change that changes everything—especially, first of all, the seer. If I try to “know” or understand the present state of American politics, for example, I only become disheartened, angry, and start making absolute statements, which helps nobody. If I “take it to prayer,” as we used to say, I really do receive the data on a screen much bigger and kinder than my small screen, which is always filled with irritating static and electrical charges.
But Why So Much Talk of Suffering and Dying?
My assumption is that Jesus’s totally counterintuitive message of the “cross” had to be sent to earth as a dramatic and divine zinger, because God knew we would do everything we could to deny it, avoid it, soften it, or make it into a theory. (Which is exactly what we did anyway.) Yet this is the Jesus message that cannot, and must not, be allowed to be pushed into the background. We believe in a Jesus kind of Christ—a God who is going to the mat with humanity and not just presenting us with a heavenly, cosmic vision. If Christ represents the resurrected state, then Jesus represents the crucified/resurrecting path of getting there. If Christ is the source and goal, then Jesus is the path from that source toward the goal of divine unity with all things.
It is not insignificant that Christians chose the cross or crucifix as their central symbol. At least unconsciously, we recognized that Jesus talked a lot about “losing your life.” Perhaps Ken Wilber’s distinction between “climbing religions” and “descending religions” is helpful here. He and I both trust the descending form of religion much more, and I think Jesus did too. Here the primary language is unlearning, letting go, surrendering, serving others, and not the language of self development—which often lurks behind our popular notions of “salvation.” We must be honest about this. Unless we’re careful, we will again make Jesus’s descending religion into a new form of climbing religion, as we have done so often before.
“Blessed are the poor in Spirit” are Jesus’s first words in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:3). And although Jesus made this quite clear throughout his life, we still largely turned Christianity into a religion where the operative agenda was some personal moral perfection, our attaining some kind of salvation, “going to heaven,” converting others rather than ourselves, and acquiring more health, wealth, and success in this world. In that pursuit, we ended up largely aligning with empires, wars, and colonization of the planet, instead of with Jesus or the powerless. All climbing and little descending, and it has all caught up with us in the twenty-first century.
Buddhists talk a lot about suffering and dying, making it its own kind of “descending” religion—even more directly and straightforwardly than Jesus did. “Life is suffering” is one of the Four Noble Truths. But in the Buddhist frame, suffering is not a requirement for following Jesus, not a way to gain merit for eternity, not the proverbial “carrying of the cross” toward salvation, not “no pain, no gain.” Instead, suffering is seen as the practical and real price for letting go of illusion, false desire, superiority, and separateness. Suffering is also pointed out as the price we pay for not letting go, which might be an even better way to teach about suffering.
Any time you surrender a negative, accusatory, compulsive, or self-serving thought, word, or behavior, the Buddhists describe this as “dying”! Power, self-image, and control do not give up without a fight, and this is first of all true inside of our minds, where the illusions begin. Just watch a two-year-old learning to say no to his parents. The battle starts early, comes back in full force in the teenage and young adult years, and in truth never really stops. On a practical level, many Buddhists understood Jesus’s words very well, “Unless the single grain of wheat falls into the ground, it remains just a single grain. But if it dies, it will bear much fruit” (John 12:24). In fact, they might have understood this message more concretely and immediately than we Christians did! Such daily and “necessary suffering” is the price of both enlightenment for the self and compassion for others. This is what all spiritual masters mean by “dying before you die,” or “practicing dying.” I myself do not really trust any spiritual teacher who is not up front and utterly honest about a necessary path of descending.
Both Christianity and Buddhism are saying that the pattern of transformation, the pattern that connects, the life that Reality offers us is not death avoided, but always death transformed. In other words, the only trustworthy pattern of spiritual transformation is death and resurrection. Christians learn to submit to trials because Jesus told us that we must “carry the cross” with him. Buddhists do it because the Buddha very directly said that “life is suffering,” but the real goal is to choose skillful and necessary suffering over what is usually just resented and projected suffering. In that the Buddha was a spiritual genius, and we Christians could learn a lot from him and his mature followers. For Christians, of course, the goal is divine love and not the overcoming of suffering. Yet look how many Buddhists become highly compassionate human beings.
Both groups are saying that death and life are two sides of the same coin, and you cannot have one without the other. Each time you offer the surrender, each time you trust the dying, your faith is led to a deeper level and you discover a Larger Self underneath. You decide not to push yourself to the front of the line, and something much better happens in the back of the line. You let go of your narcissistic anger, and you find that you start feeling much happier. You surrender your need to control your partner, and finally the relationship blossoms. Yet each time it is a choice—and each time it is a kind of dying.
The mystics and great saints were those who had learned to trust and allow this pattern, and often said in effect, “What did I ever lose by dying?” Or try Paul’s famous one-liner: “For me to live is Christ and to die is gain” (Philippians 1:21). Now even scientific studies, including those of near-death experiences, reveal the same universal pattern. Things change and grow by dying to their present state, but each time it is a risk. “Will it work this time?” is always our question. So many academic disciplines are coming together, each in its own way, to say that there’s a constant movement of loss and renewal at work in this world at every level. It seems to be the pattern of all growth and evolution. To be alive means to surrender to this inevitable flow. It’s the same pattern in every atom, in every human relationship, and in every galaxy. Native peoples, Hindu scripture, Buddha, Moses, Muhammad, and Jesus all saw it early in human history and named it as a kind of “necessary dying.”
If this pattern is true, it has been true all the time and everywhere. Such seeing did not just start two thousand years ago. All of us travelers, each in our own way, have to eventually learn about letting go of something smaller so something bigger can happen. But that’s not a religion—it’s highly visible truth. It is the Way Reality Works.
Yes, I am saying:
That the way things work and Christ are one and the same.
This is not a religion to be either fervently joined or angrily rejected.
It is a train ride already in motion.
The tracks are visible everywhere.
You can be a willing and happy traveler,
Or not.
*1 This is the import of my earlier book The Naked Now.
*2 Barbara Holmes, Joy Unspeakable; Contemplative Practices of the Black Church (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004).
17
Beyond Mere Theology: Two Practices
Telling is not training.
—Advice offered by executive coaches
You have kindly allowed me to walk you through this Christ journey, and I thank you for your trust. I do believe it has been an act of humble trust on your part. But you might still be wondering, What difference does this make? Is this just more theory and theology? Another set of ideas to put on the shelf? Another well-disguised religious trip?
These critical questions make an important point:
Unless the awareness of the Christ Mystery rewires you on the physical, neurological, and cellular levels—unless you can actually see and experience it in a new way—this will remain another theory or ideology. Another book you have read and considered, and then forgotten about as the weeks go on. It took me most of my seventy-five years to begin to see and enjoy my Christian faith at this experiential level of awareness. My hope is that I can save you a few of those years, and help you to start enjoying an actual Christ Consciousness much earlier. And as the epigraph to this chapter says, just telling people things is largely ineffective if there is not actual training in how to practically rewire our responses. In this chapter I want to offer you two embodied practices we teach at the Center for Action and Contemplation. First, let me say a bit about practice itself.
Practice is standing in the flow, whereas theory and analysis observe the flow from a position of separation. Practice is looking out from yourself; analysis is looking back at yourself as if you were an object. You may learn something intellectually through analysis, but in doing so, you might actually create a disconnect from your deeper inner experience. Until you know what your own flow feels like, you do not even know that there is such a thing. And you must also learn to recognize how resistance feels. Does it take the form of blame, anger, fear, avoidance, projection, denial, an urge to pretend? You want to spot the clever ways that you personally push back from daily reality, or they will run your life—and you will never spot them. You will think you are “thinking” or “choosing” when you are actually just operating according to program. To get out of your programming is a big part of what we mean by “consciousness.”
