Leading With My Head

In matters of spirituality, I lead with my head and not my heart. In fact, in matters of the heart I lead with my head. I am most engaged with an issue when I can see the patterns in it.

The manufacturing world was like that for me. Getting an organization to cost effectively make a product and deliver it on time without killing people in the process was as good a puzzle as you could get, and it held my interest for nearly thirty years.

Spiritually, I have been skeptical every step of the way. Watching newsreels of Auschwitz when I was a kid left me with a very deep seated suspicion of fanatical nationalism, or for that matter, fanaticism of any kind. I have seen first hand how mobs turn  psychotically violent, where in seconds an "ecstacy" sweeps over people and they will suddenly do things they would never think of doing in any other circumstance.

I am suspicious of religious experience that looks a little too strange. I was at a Catholic Charismatic meeting once. There were probably close to to 10,000 people in the hall and at one point the audience began to spontaneously exhibit a manifestation of the "gift of tongues." It seemed as though everyone in the hall but me was babbling in an incomprehensible manner. At least incomprehensible to me. I noted that there was one other person not "praying in tongues," and that was our diocesan bishop who was seated on the stage.

(For the record, the Church understands the Gift of Tongues as being a gift of the Holy Spirit that allows people to speak in a human language previously unknown to the speaker. Not babbling.)

I've watched a lot of people come and go through religion because they were caught up in a "feel good" kind of experience, lured by the potlucks and hugged into euphoria, but who never spent the time and effort needed to understand what they were involved in. I've never been comfortable enough around people to have the touchy-feely  aspect of religion do much good for me, but I enjoy digging a little deeper into what is presented to me to see if I can see the pattern. In trying to see a pattern, sometimes it's helpful to find someone who is looking at the issue from a totally different perspective.

John Makransky is academic who is a practicing Buddhist. He teaches Buddhism at Boston College, a Jesuit Catholic University. I know, go figure. He has a wonderful piece on his website in which he compares some aspects of Buddhism and Christianity. It's a really good piece. And no, Buddhism and Christianity are not just different ways of saying the same things. Makransky recognizes that the two religions have fundamentally different views of salvation, but there is a certain similarity in how each provides access to deeper experience of the truths which they profess to contain. As he puts it:

"...I want to focus particularly on practices of Christian and Buddhist communities that bring people into an experience of Christ or Buddha as the living presence and power of ultimate reality, not just as a cherished figure remembered from a distant past, but as a continuing presence and liberating power in the present -- in Christian terms, communing with God in Christ and through that with God’s creatures; in Buddhist terms, communing through perfect forms of Buddhahood (Rupakaya) with the transcendent qualities and powers of Buddhahood (Dharmakaya) and thereby with all beings."

Of particular interest to me was Makransky's observation on his experience of the Eucharist:

"...In the liturgy of Eucharistic communion, as understood not only in Catholic and Orthodox traditions but also by Luther and Calvin, participants are not merely reminiscing about the historical Jesus long gone, but are entered into communion with the transcendent God through the living presence and power of Christ in the Spirit, which flows out into communion with creatures, drawing them into the Body of Christ.   This is what many Christians have understood, in part, as their ongoing encounter with the “resurrected Christ,” not merely with the historical Jesus."

"...Communing with the ultimate, unconditioned reality (“God”) by means of its perfect incarnation or form (“Christ”) through an inner liberating power (of “Spirit”) which re-creates or restores one’s inmost being in the image of the ultimate -- with qualities of unconditional love, joy, patience, self-control, spiritual wisdom, unleashing a liberating power of love and goodness that radiates to many other beings -- from a Mahayana Buddhist perspective the basic structure of such Trinitarian communion and its liberating power is recognizable, although the explanation for what it is and how it functions is different."

Here is a someone "outside the fold"  describing our most intimate encounter of Christ with more reverence and more understanding than I normally find in practicing Catholics.

It's a good article, and one that confirms something I've said before -- if I was not a Catholic, a Buddhist I would be. I like their patterns.