1 Cor 13

Life will deny me, frustrate me

But love is patient

Life will be unkind and brutal

But love is kind

Life will show me how little I have, will compare me to others

But love does not envy

Life will applaud my success and give me medals

But love does not boast

Life will ensure me I am entitled to joy

But love is not proud

Life will trample me and spit upon me

But love does not dishonor

Life will bolster my ego

But love is not self-seeking

Life will infuriate me

But love is not easily angered

Life will demand accounts, wants to be a zero-sum game

But love keeps no record of wrongs

Life delights in the victories of the strong

But love doesn't delight in evil

Life celebrates lies

But love rejoices in truth

Life leaves the weak helpless

But love always protects

Life is a series of betrayals

But love always trusts

Life is full of despair, misery

But love always hopes

Life quits, ends

But love always perseveres

Life is finally vanquished

Love never fails

Love is the absolute basis of Reality.

Book: Sitting with Koans - John Daido Loori

The thrust of koans is to bring you to insight into dharmakaya ("the absolute basis of Reality"). When you achieve that insight you get "spacious mind" , and further koans help refine and root the insight until there can be no fluctuations. At that point you do things like pick up a bowl while holding nothing, etc....

Insight is very similar to faith, as the term is used by the mystics.

If I have faith the size of a speck I can move mountains etc. If I have faith I can heal the sick, trample scorpions etc.

The 3 pillars of Zen are: great doubt, great faith, and great determination.

Doubt

Perhaps I can equate Zen doubt with Christian Hope. I hope what the church teaches is true, I hope Jesus wasn't a madman, I hope I get to Heaven, etc. That is -- I am not sure and I am bothered about it but I will pursue it as if it was true, proven and experienced by me as truth.

Faith

Zen faith is trust in the methods of the tradition, trust in the reliability of the tradition, as well as trust of self -- "Can I do this? Yes I can!"

Christian faith is similar, but it involves faith in Jesus, or better, faith that the hope given by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit is not just a fancy of the church/.

It is v. tenuous: I must have faith that Jesus can bridge the gap between God and my profound doubt - a doubt that transcends fear of death. If I have such faith I will know it is both The Rock and The Ocean. Such faith moves mountains...

But what is it? It is an insight. An insight is an all-pervasive, all-encompassing glimpse into Creation, into Reality, into the ground of being. Without such faith it is hard to imagine martyrdom as joyful. This is love-enabling faith.

Determination

Zen determination is this relentless try-again attitude. In Christianity it may be equated with love (1 Cor. 13). Turn 1 Cor. 13 into situations and it matches well:

• Love is patient = life will frustrate you but you wait in hope-filled faith.
• Love is kind = life is unfair and unkind, brutal and short. But you persevere being fair before unfairness, kind before unkindness, gentle before brutality.
  

Furthermore love is greater than faith & hope because love is the absolute basis of Reality.

1 Peter 5

Maintaining constant vigilance, which is the same thing as mindfulness, is a practice which is not common these days in Christianity, though it was a practice long established by the time of the Church Fathers. These men and women in the deserts of Syria and Egypt have much to say about the practice of vigilance. Yes, granted, much of what they say is difficult, and their extreme (to us) penitential practices are borderline psychotic. But...

I was reading some of the writings by Greg Boyd in his website and found some stuff about an interesting theological position which he supports called Warfare Worldview. Roughly it contrasts with what he labels Blueprint Worldview. On the Blueprint position, God pre-established the world, and all events, good or evil, were either 'permitted' or perhaps directly initiated by God. Think of some of the caricatures of Calvinism and you will get the point here – double predestination and all that. In the Warfare view there is room for freedom – both angelic and human. Ad this creates multiple actors who effect changes. This leads to a position which holds that there are malevolent agents in the cosmos, both human and inhuman. I do a disservice to a more nuanced position and it is worth reading his stuff directly.

The way my prayer life has evolved I have come to a point where the obviousness of Boyd's position requires no complicated theological positioning (though it is much welcome). Of course there are malevolent entities in the cosmos, and some of them are people and some of them are angels. And of course these entities are acting contrary to God's benevolence. Does this mean we are caught in the middle of some Manichean good-versus-evil dualistic universe? I am sure that is one of the theological arguments against Boyd's view, but I take a completely different approach.

Creation is a multi-dimensional ecosystem where there exist multiple species not all of which are to be considered as benevolent to humanity's aims and goals – just as humanity cannot be considered benevolent to other species' goals. It is no different than a lush rainforest – gorgeous, complicated, multi-layered, and not all the 'critters' in there are going to be Bambi...i.e. enter at your own risk.

So I do not think it is much of an organized forces of the Dark Side against organized forces of the Light. Principally because all I experience tells me that such central planning is not available.

Now, and this is where it can get interesting. I am also aware that the cosmos as a whole is cooperative. That is the various agents within it, at some level, cooperate with each other, and most fundamentally cooperate with God. I cannot emphasize this enough: the cosmos cooperates with God. Think about it, and better, pray it into your life.

What these two insights lead me to is part of my practice: to cooperate with God and facilitate other being's cooperation. I call this the practice of almsgiving. The word 'alms' comes from the Greek eleos which means 'pity'. I think 'having pity' tends to be seen as a condescending attitude, but my goal is to look at it from God's perspective, and pity is how someone in the Kingdom sees someone outside the gates. To deepen this a little, the Kingdom IS pure cooperation, and any place where cooperation does not reign need my pity, needs my heart to break and my eyes to fill with tears, and my hands to get impatient to touch and help and heal and bring them to the Kingdom.

Peter reminds me that almsgiving has a component of martyrdom in it – I resist the attacks by malevolent agents, human and inhuman, not because I am strong, or because I am Conan or some Greek hero. No I resist because people are suffering, I resist out of pity, I resist because in the end I want to bring my attackers into the Kingdom too. And this makes the 'war' a very different sort of war. It is not one of punishment and violence, it is one of pity and generosity.

I resist you who are evil because I want to cooperate with you who are good, because I want to eradicate evil – I want to hate with a perfect hatred the enemies of God (Ps. 139), a hatred devoid of prejudice and selfish ambition and greed, hatred without sin.

Hard stuff, but this is the practice. Scares me too.

Galatians 5

Why is Galatians 5 such a pivotal text for my understanding of my call? First of all because it is an impassioned call for walking freely. As part of my understanding of how to live out my call I am to be open to God and to mimic Him in my life.

But first a step back. Monastic life for millennia has been an attempt to live as completely as possible in Jesus. To this end since the Desert Fathers & Mothers men and women sought out ways to create an environment which was acoustically perfect to hear God's Voice. By definition such an environment is artificial. A monastery is as close to real life as a university. Sure a young man or woman in college discovers a new world, and learns many things about real life which they would not otherwise find back at home. But a college is also as far removed from life as possible - ask anyone about a year out of college int he 'real world'.

I am not putting down artificiality. It is important to design habitats where we can exercise certain facets of our existence. A good university is optimally constructed to maximize exposure to learning opportunities, be they intellectual or social. A monastery is a similarly structured environment (in fact it is no surprise that the first universities were monasteries) - it is designed to maximize the individual's exposure to prayer opportunities. Everything is focused on that. To take this further, even a home is artificial. It is a place where I can maximize my exposure to my family. The same approach can be applied when thinking of an office. And so on.

In fact, I am hard pressed to come up with places or spaces where we do not artificially arrange our environment to maximize some facet or another of our lives. I am not in any way pleading for sort of fantastical 'noble savage' ideal, where all is 'natural' nothing is artificial. This is a fantasy, and it too, in its own way, is artificial!

The first step is to simply recognize all these various artificial environments. How many do I enter into every day?

After recognizing them for what they are, the next question is to ask 'What are they teaching here?' What is this environment designed to do? What kind of opportunities does it afford me? I have worked in a company whose sole focus was making money, and it designed its environment accordingly. I have also worked in non-profits whose goal was serving others, and it was designed very differently. Even within companies each dept. has its own environment. I have worked in accounting which works one way, and I have worked in marketing which is different.

All these environments have rules. There are clear and codified and often written down rules and regulations for behavior. There is a lot here that can be drawn from Game Theory, but essentially there are two critical things to grasp: one is that each artificial environment is designed and developed to maximize the opportunities to exercise a certain trait; two all social environments are artificial.

So far so simple. The tragedy comes when people simply lose sight of the artificiality of their environment and take it as an immutable law of nature. "This is the way things are", they will say. They then become trapped within the 'game', within the confines of the environment - just like the 'permanent student' who goes to college for 12 years without graduating and who lives with his parents - unable to transition out of the safe and nurturing environment of college.

So where is freedom in all of this? Well the first step of freedom is to recognize that in Christ you do not need to be limited to a few of these 'games'. This is part of what Paul means by being all things to all people. Jesus blew through social conventions in ways which we are still discovering to this day - he touched the outcasts, he broke Levitical law, he had close women followers, he called YHWH 'Daddy', and so on.

When I am in Christ, that is when he is before me and behind me above me and below me to my right and to my left as St. Patrick suggests, then I am not imprisoned by these rules. I am free.

But Paul, a savvy student of human nature, predicted a danger in this freedom. If I can see the artificiality of my environs, and if in Christ I am freed from such bondage, then what stops me from indulging in, let's say, less than Biblical behavior? After all aren't some (all?) of our social mores and taboos just 'game rules'? Well yes and no says Paul "do not use your freedom to indulge in your sinful nature".

This is quite a subtle piece of advice. On the surface Paul seems to say what most have come to equate with church-speak, a condescending form of sermonizing, which pretends to talk about freedom just to go right back to the old standards. But looking at it more carefully I can see that what Paul is suggesting is that I drop my hypocrisy! What he is suggesting is that to be the freed of Christ, I need to be completely free. I must not allow this gift to lead me back into slavery.

The insight here is simple: recognize that social rules are artificial, but also recognize that inner tendencies are artificial also. There is not much space to discuss whether this is an innate or learned mechanism. Ad in fact it does not matter. The simple fact is that my inner drives are compulsive and most often unhealthy. If I 'let go of the reins' in some misguided attempt to be free I will end up enslaved to much worse things than stifling social conventions!

And here's the final piece: while all society is a large artificial environment, some of these rules are healthy (just as some of my inner drives are healthy). Just not all. To be free one must pick each one at a time and discern its spirit. Ask yourself is this environment a spirit of good or evil, one which leads me to health or to illness? Is this environment one which teaches me how to be less selfish, more loving, more prayerful, or is it one which glorifies power, greed and hubris?

My freedom lies in choosing - today, now - between life and death. Meditate for the next week on the passage below, especially next to Galatians 5.

See, I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction. For I command you today to love the LORD your God, to walk in obedience to him, and to keep his commands, decrees and laws; then you will live and increase, and the LORD your God will bless you in the land you are entering to possess. But if your heart turns away and you are not obedient, and if you are drawn away to bow down to other gods and worship them, I declare to you this day that you will certainly be destroyed. You will not live long in the land you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess. This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live. (Deut 30:15-19)