Christian Zen, Muslim Zen, Jewish Zen: Getting to Interfaith Experience
- Sensei Sevan Ross
The Argus fish lives throughout Asia, where it
first hatches from the egg in inland fresh water streams and rivers, and then finds its way slowly to the estuarial, brackish costal waters. Along the way it grows and matures, and it biologically changes
to better tolerate the high salt content of the costal mangrove swamps. Though this is a massive change for the little fish, there is
still more change to come, since as an adult the Argus is found in purely marine waters, where it has
matured into a creature which no longer absorbs salt, but instead repels it. One could make the
argument that the Argus is no longer at all the fish that existed back in inland fresh waters. It
is, in a sense, a different species.
This is our spiritual journey as well. We must move from an environment of doctrine and ideas to one of
direct experience with perhaps a hint of reference to these things. When we encounter a spiritual tradition for the first time, be it our “baggage” tradition (that which our family-of
and culture-of origin starts us in) while we are growing up, or be it a new tradition that we have later chosen to explore, we normally
actually “enter into” this tradition through philosophical enquiry and doctrinal understanding -- we go to “Sunday school,” or read
books that lay out the tenants and traditions of a possible spiritual path for us.
We listen, discuss, and attempt to
explore through our brain. (Even if we are forced into ceremony early in life, it is the
questioning of the early teenage years that launches us into deep spiritual exploration.)
But, spiritually speaking, we do not
have 20/20 vision. We are ill-equipped for real spiritual exploration through our lack of
experience (if the encounter happens when we are younger), or we carry the attitudes and prejudices of our currently practiced tradition
with us into the encounter with the newer tradition.
We tend to see the newer tradition
through a kind of lens shaped by the older tradition. Comparisons flood forth, and these
eventually coalesce into barriers to our understanding. Once, a student in a seminary class I
was teaching said to me, in all sincerity, “I like Buddhism very much, and I think I understand it, but why can’t we still have a little
religion on the side. I think Buddhism could use a little religion.”
What may cripple us the most in trying
to fathom a new or foreign tradition is the ironic certainty we have concerning our current/past spiritual experiences. Without really knowing it, we hold up the new against the old and start to filter the new through
the old. So nothing is likely to shift for us. Though
we may learn names, facts, figures, we remain almost certain to simply confirm old ideas and beliefs. This
is the classic story of any prejudice.
But now how to get beyond this point
-- how to open ourselves to other traditions in a sincere way in order to better understand at a deeper level, and thus really heal some
deep wound of separation within ourselves, and bind with others in order to lessen the pain and strife in the world -- the uniquely deep and
abiding pain and strife that comes from great divides between spiritual communities.
In interfaith dialogue classes I have
taught over the years, I have often seen students take this immediate road to a shallow and prejudicial
understanding of other faith traditions. I have witnesses first hand that clever smile
of self assured knowing creep over the features, the confrontational questions, or worse, the lack of any questions at all -- both revealing
that the student’s mind may be with the discussion, but the heart is not engaged. This can
happen starting within minutes of the first class, and it can repeat itself all through the course. Some
students of faith traditions do not really take the course at all, but instead take the first hour or so over and over again until the
semester has passed. In my own experience, argument does not bridge the gulf between traditions
-- only experience does.
So I have concluded that we must try
another, fairly radical approach to free us from this cycle of entrenched prejudices repeating themselves.
I really feel that it is the only way to short-circuit the process. Stated simply, it is this: We should make little, or possibly no attempt at
all to exchange information about, nor to try to “understand” the various institutions, beliefs, or doctrines of each others’
faith traditions or communities; we should instead only seek to exchange practices and throw ourselves into each others’ actual
practice settings. We need to wear each others’ traditions PHYSICALLY for there to be any
hope of our finding real, enduring common ground, respect, or understanding. Doctrinal
exchanges, discussion of ideas or beliefs or institutions -- indeed, even discussions of the physical practices themselves -- can be
counter-productive, confusing, and are certainly woefully insufficient.
We need to “walk in the shoes of the
other” in order to come to know the other as ourselves.
There is a clear reason for this
conclusion: Every spiritual tradition requires at some point a suspension of disbelief -- a
leap of faith, if you will -- for that tradition or community to come alive. No religious
tradition makes “sense.” All require us to make
two moves beyond where words and reason can go. The two moves are Faith and Experience. And these two are linked. One cannot have faith that
passes common intellectual understanding without that faith being informed and invigorated by real tactile, on-the-ground experience. And there will be no experience without that initial faith in the meaning and potential of
experience.
Without these facets, any so-called
spiritual tradition wastes away to mere argument. But with faith leading to the willingness to
experience the inner truths available in any real faith tradition, and experience leading to yet deeper faith, spiritual traditions can
bubble over with deep insight, behavioral change, inner peace, and even some inter-tradition community.
All this may be impossible to access or even communicate through reason, doctrine, discussion, learning.
Through my continuing involvement with
interfaith work I have had many individuals come to our Zen Temple to personally dip into our rich tradition and acquaint themselves on a
personal, physical level with what actually happens here. They get to experience the
slipperiness of the mind, experience leg pain, and that initial panic of not being allowed to break off the sitting posture. They for themselves encounter the teacher, smell the incense, feel the silence of the Zendo, and the
magic of chanting. They come to understand us, to some degree, as PRACTITIONERS. We spiritually “break bread” and share a meal. We
hear each other breathe in the meditation hall. The visitor may not now so easily simply sift
our tradition’s ideas through the practice of her own tradition. We are no longer so “foreign.” Like that newly evolving Argus fish, she cannot simply return upstream again.
And in some parallel to the
development of the Argus, our real exposure to other traditions will help move us downstream in our personal spiritual development. How? When we can be moved to some tactile, first-hand
experience of another tradition, we often discover some aspect of our own tradition anew. If
somehow the songs, chanting, ceremony, or silence of another’s community can reach us and even move us, then we revisit our root
relationship with our own faith practices. The whole interfaith experience suddenly moves away
from some intellectual game to a place where we discover our own capacity for a leap of faith. This
is the deepest reward of interfaith work -- a deeper degree of practice back home in our own tradition.
I have personally witnessed a
Christian rediscover the power of the love of Christ in my Zendo, through no effort on my part, and to their own great surprise. Having laid themselves open, quite beyond mental comparisons, they reinvigorated their own practice. And I myself, some years ago, while attending a Catholic Mass with my then quite ill mother-in law,
left renewed in my own Zen practice for the time spent there. I was neither expecting nor
looking for this renewal. I was simply open to the Mass in fully being with someone who was
herself very open indeed to it. It was not the words spoken by the priest, nor the references
to anything in the liturgy. I was simply opened up by a beauty available to me then.
So the Argus fish ends up a marine
creature in open water, and so can we. This is not an attempt to weld together various
traditions, not to reinforce an already too common American penchant for spiritual “shopping” trips.
This is only a request to, as it were, swim in the ocean, to trust that which goes beyond comparison and intellect, words and
doctrine. The power of the other’s faith tradition becomes clear only when we touch and taste
it firsthand.
The Argus lives out its life in the ocean, but lays its eggs back in fresh water again to repeat the cycle of life, discovery, and transformation. We should not abandon our traditions in some mish-mash of eclectic process. We must contribute to and help to renew our own communities. But we should also be able to swim in the great ocean of greater community.