Holy Envy

by Barbara Brown Taylor

  It was not so bad. Mariah recovered so well that she earned an A in the class, chiefly on the merit of her final project. All of the students had the same assignment: to put their newly acquired knowledge of the world’s great religions to work by designing an interfaith chapel for Piedmont College. Some of the plans were brilliant and others were predictable, but none of them touched me the way Mariah’s did. I may have embellished it by now, since I have visited it so often in my imagination, but as I remember it her chapel was round, with nothing inside of it but polished floors, walls, and ceilings made entirely of black marble. “There will be no religious symbols or furniture inside,” she wrote. “The lighting will be soft and carefully placed, so that no matter where people look, all they will be able to see are each other’s faces reflected back at them.” The self and the neighbor, I thought, made visible to one another in the dark marble of God.

  By the following semester, word had gotten around that you could not pass Dr. Taylor’s class if you did not worship idols, but if anything that helped enrollment instead of hurting it. Students seem to be up for anything that promises to relieve the tedium of their education. I think some of them are still waiting for me to come into class one day with a live chicken and a boning knife.

  That first field trip opened a whole new folder of questions for me, both as a person and as a teacher of young persons. Is it better to read about a religion in a textbook than to risk actual contact with it? How would I feel if a group of students visited my church and treated the holiest things inside it like oddities? Can anyone who visits a sacred space remain an observer, or does one become a participant simply by entering in? Does taking part in the ritual of another faith automatically make you a traitor to your own?

  The most troubling question of all was why my religion seemed so much less gracious than Dr. Acharya’s religion did. She seemed to be an exemplar of it, and her hospitality was impeccable. She welcomed all of us to join her at the high altar in her temple without asking what we believed. She enlisted the priest to offer special prayers for us. She did not distance herself from those who snickered. She did not take anyone to task for refusing the prasad. She opened her arms to us from beginning to end. If there were any problems with the visit, they came from the religious worldview of her guests, who had been taught to be very careful about who and what they embraced. I stewed about it all the way home in the van. Why was my crowd so defensive? Who had convinced us that faith was a competitive sport and that only one team could win for all eternity? With an attitude like that, who could blame a neighbor for sensing that Christian love was mostly charitable condescension?

  It was not the first time I had felt shame about an aspect of my faith—or envy of an aspect of someone else’s—but it was the most acute. What else was I going to notice about my own religious home as I visited the homes of others? There was no telling, but clearly the time had come to find out.

  3

  Wave Not Ocean

  While living the life of a wave, the wave also lives the life of water. It would be sad if the wave did not know that it is water.

  THICH NHAT HANH

  What do you mean when you say “God”?

  The question takes students aback, since most of them assume that they all mean the same thing. God is God, right? But all of a sudden they are not so sure. I ask them to write their answers on index cards. A great silence settles over the room. Several minutes later, when I ask who needs more time, half a dozen hands go up. The students who have finished thinking about God are checking messages on their phones.

  “Don’t sign your name,” I say when everyone is done. Then I collect the cards, promising to type the answers on a single page of paper so they can read each other’s definitions the next time we meet. Later that night I am freshly struck by how fluid a solid-sounding word can be.

  Naming God creates God.

  God is the alpha and omega, the beginning and the end.

  God is anything that is served by humans and worshipped by humans.

  God is the embodiment of absolute love, wisdom, and temperance.

  God is a fatherlike figure who does not take part in the world.

  God is a possibility one can choose to seize or abandon.

  God is Abba, daddy, a lap to climb in and cry.

  God is a big white guy in the sky.

  God is my road, my food, my shelter, and my goal.

  God is not the proverbial ear that attracts our stray thoughts and pleas.

  Mostly what I know about God is how little I really know about God.

  What does any of us mean when we say “God”? We use the word as if it were made of steel girders instead of silk netting, but when we compare what we have caught with it, the divine array confounds—even in a class of twenty-five undergraduates. How much more when we press the word into service for discussion among people of many faiths? The word will not work at all when we come to our study of Buddhism.

  The Buddha’s teachings never mention God, at least not in the capitalized form that monotheists use. Buddhism’s founder, Siddhartha Gautama, grew up in a world of small-g gods, but by the time he was a young man he realized that all the gods combined could not bring human suffering to an end. After his enlightenment, he laid out a path to peace that did not involve divine mediators. Instead, he asked people to take responsibility for the working of their own minds. Their desire for pain-free lives was a real problem, he said, since life is never pain-free. The sooner they learned to accept the human condition with equanimity, the sooner their suffering would end—not their pain, but their suffering—since suffering is so often a measure of how much we want things to be different from the way they are.

  Contrary to popular opinion, the Buddha never claimed to be God. He never denied the existence of God, either, though there is really nothing for a capital-G God to do in his teachings. The things that happen to us are the natural consequences of our actions, and no one can relieve us of them. If we do not like what is happening, it is up to us to change. No one is watching over us to punish or reward us. Enlightenment is its own reward, the peace that passes all understanding. If we want something to do while we are learning to let go of our demands about the way life ought to be, we can devote ourselves to relieving the suffering of others.

  As the textbook says, Buddhism is not about God but about the teachings of a man, which raises an interesting question for students in Religion 101. Can you have a religion without a God? If you can, then what takes God’s place? How do Buddhists manage without a deity to run the world, forgive sin, punish evil, and grant eternal life?

  The more interesting question to me—one I do not take up with the students—is why I am drawn to a tradition so different from my own. Christianity and Buddhism both recognize the centrality of suffering in human life. Both stress compassion. Both seek lasting peace. Beyond that, they could not see things more differently. The Buddha shows his followers how to achieve salvation. Jesus achieves it for his. The Buddha says the problem is ignorance. Jesus says it is sin. The Buddha says the self is impermanent. Jesus says it is destined for eternal life. I am pretty sure these two teachers could stay up all night talking, but their followers are left with two distinct views of what it means to be human. So why do they both work for me?

  One of my favorite authors, Paul Knitter, has written a book called Without Buddha I Could Not Be a Christian. In it, he describes the “double-belonging” that led him to become a more committed Christian at the same time that it led him to become a more devoted member of a Tibetan Buddhist community in the United States. When one of his students at Union Seminary in New York asked him if this was “spiritual sleeping around,” Knitter took the question seriously. His core identity is Christian, he explained, but it is an identity that flourishes only through mixing it up with others.

  Well, that’s true, I thought, counting how many other religions Christians mixed it up with during their early years—not just Judaism, but also Samaritanis
m, Zoroastrianism, and Greco-Roman, Egyptian, and Syrian religions. When Islam arrived in the seventh century, it changed the way Christians thought about their religious images. During that same century, manuscripts blending Buddhist, Taoist, and Christian teachings were being written in China under the influence of a Syriac monk named Alopen.1 In all of these ways and more, Christian teaching has flourished from its mingling with other religious teachings.

  “The more deeply one sinks into one’s own religious truth,” Knitter says, “the more broadly one can appreciate and learn from other truths.”2

  That has been true for me, both as a teacher and as a spiritual seeker. Unlike the young man bent on keeping his Christian faith uncontested and pure, I have gained insight every time I have put mine to the test. Sometimes the results are distressing, as when I find the silence of the meditation bench more healing than the words of my favorite psalms, or when I take greater refuge in the Buddhist concept of impermanence than in the Christian assurance of eternal life. Yet this is how I have discovered that I am Christian to the core. However many other religious languages I learn, I dream in Christian. However much I learn from other spiritual teachers, it is Jesus I come home to at night.

  One of the quietest revolutions in Religion 101 follows a student’s recognition that he or she has a worldview, a particular way of viewing reality that is not the only way. A worldview is a wave, but not the entire ocean. Sometimes I bring a globe to class to make the point, since it is easier to identify a physical position than a philosophical one. The globe is a nice big one on a wooden stand. When I put it on my desk it is taller than I am, with the North Pole pointing up and the South Pole pointing down. My country is near the top where it is supposed to be. All is right with the world.

  When the students are settled in their seats, I say we are going to talk about the difference between Eastern and Western worldviews. I spin the globe laterally while I am talking so that it looks just like the Universal Studios logo they see at the movies. Then I tip it upside down. “Are you okay with that?” I ask them, once Australia is on top and Canada is at the bottom. “Or did that just make your stomach do a little flip?”

  None of us knows we have “a worldview” until we see the world from a new angle. If we are used to seeing ourselves on top, we may feel oddly combative the first time we see someone else up there. We may forget that the reason we are on top is because people like us made the maps. Before Europeans used the North Star to decide which way was up, the worldview of the East was dominant. That is where the word “orientation” comes from: the earth was once oriented toward the Orient. Religions may not be as solid as landmasses, but the same feeling of vertigo can overtake you when you see reality from another angle for the first time—especially if the new view happens to make sense.

  A few weeks after the field trip to the Hindu Temple, a small group of students and I are driving up and down Briarcliff Road trying to find Drepung Loseling Monastery in Atlanta. According to the website, it is the North American seat of the Tibetan Buddhist lineage to which the Dalai Lama belongs. Since it is also an affiliate of Emory University, the monk who picked up the telephone earlier in the semester assured me that students were welcome at the Tuesday night public lecture. If that is the case, why is the place so hard to find?

  I know we are close, but there is nothing to indicate the presence of a Buddhist monastery nearby. I was hoping for clear signage or at least a Tibetan flag, but the only sign in front of the bunkerlike complex at 2531 Briarcliff Road advertises how many square feet of office space are available for rent. Since the street number on the sign matches the one on the Post-it stuck to my dashboard, I aim the van at the driveway like Harry Potter aiming for platform 9¾ at King’s Cross Station the first time he went to Hogwarts. After I find a parking space behind the office buildings, the students get out and stretch.

  “Where are we?” one of them asks.

  “I wish I knew,” I say. Then I start searching for the monastery on foot with the students trailing behind me like puppies. Sometimes I worry that their trust in me is misplaced.

  Bryan, the student who had such a strong experience at the Hindu Temple, walks beside me reading the nameplates on the identical office doors. One belongs to an orthodontist, the next to an attorney. We pass the offices of a travel agent, an accountant, and a massage therapist before we come to—a Tibetan Buddhist monastery! Or at least the teaching and meditation center of one.

  The room we step into looks more like a library or a shop, with bookshelves lining the walls and a shoe rack by the door. After the students have taken off their boots and sneakers, they drift off in different directions to investigate. A table in the middle of the room holds the model of a proposed new monastery complex. The bookshelves are full of CDs, T-shirts, “Free Tibet” bumper stickers, and incense holders. Bryan heads straight for the rack of Buddhist prayer beads. About twenty other people are milling around the room talking, sipping tea, adding their names to sign-up sheets on a clipboard. There are more women than men. Some wear yoga pants and others wear jeans. None wear orange robes. They look a lot like our group, only older.

  “Where are the monks?” asks a curly-headed sophomore named Spencer. During the first week of Religion 101 he declared himself a Buddhist. Since I was too green to know better, I believed him, feeling chastened when he corrected my pronunciation of Thich Nhat Hanh’s name in class.

  “I think you mean ‘Thay,’” Spencer said right there in front of everyone.

  “I beg your pardon?” I said.

  “His name is Thay Nhat Hanh,” Spencer said.

  “That’s news to me,” I said.

  After class I looked it up and discovered that thay is the Vietnamese term for “teacher” or “master.” Since I had not yet learned to let students teach me anything—at least not willingly or with any kind of grace—I pointed out the difference between a surname and an honorific at the beginning of the next class.

  “Fine,” Spencer said. “I just heard it on a tape.” Though his Buddhism has turned out to be more aspirational than actual, he is right that there is not a monk in sight at the monastery. Then again, the lecture has not started yet. From where we stand in the bookstore area, we can see into the teaching hall where people are already sitting down on fat black cushions or claiming one of the folding chairs in the back.

  The hall is tiny compared to the Hindu Temple, though still plenty dazzling to Western eyes. At the far end of the room stands a large altar flanked by a pair of wooden thrones covered with colorful silk brocade. A framed portrait of the Dalai Lama rests on one of the thrones. The other throne is empty. In between them, a large golden statue of the Buddha sits between images of Padmasambhava, the Indian teacher who brought Buddhism to Tibet, and Green Tara, an embodiment of the divine feminine. There are smaller statues of other teachers and bodhisattvas clustered in threes on either side of them, with ancient-looking books stacked in shelves over their heads and bronze offering bowls lined up on a ledge below them.

  There had been a great deal of discussion back at Piedmont about what students would and would not be expected to do in such a room. Since the only religious world most of them knew was Christian, they assumed that the Buddhists were going to try to convert them. One had checked to make sure he would not be asked to bow down to the Buddha. Another had asked for permission to leave the room if she became uncomfortable. Remembering the scene on the front porch of the Hindu Temple, I said, “Yes, of course,” hoping there would be no need for an exit strategy this time.

  The dharma hall is beginning to fill up. I tell the students they had better find a place to sit quickly, or they will be stuck on a cushion in the front row. Most enter the hall as if they are going through airport customs in a strange country. Spencer chooses a cushion nearest the wall. Bryan chooses one in front of the empty throne. I settle in a folding chair two rows behind him, watching the other students find their own zones of safety.

  A few moments later
a volunteer welcomes us and goes over dharma-hall etiquette. No placing of sacred texts on the floor. No pointing of the soles of the feet toward the altar. If you have to leave, leave quietly, without turning your back on the teacher. After the donation basket has been passed around, the regular members of the community stand with their hands pressed together and bow as the teacher enters the room.

  “It’s like curtseying to the queen,” I said in the van on the way down here. “It doesn’t make you a Buddhist, I promise.” Some of the students bob their heads a little bit, but most are too busy looking at the teacher, who is wearing orange robes. He bows to us in return, sits down on a cushion behind a small teaching desk, and clips a microphone to the crimson part of his robe. First he chants something in another language that the regulars chant with him. Then we sit in silent meditation for five minutes before he begins his talk. Since I did not know this part was going to happen, I hope the students know it does not constitute worship.

  The monk has to clear his throat a few times before he can get a sentence out without croaking. Maybe it is the pollen, or maybe it was all that chanting. Then he has to move his microphone around on his robe a couple of times when people in the back of the hall say they cannot hear. After taking a sip of the hot tea someone places in front of him, he finally gets down to business. His topic for the evening is “Cultivating Happiness.”

  Have we ever noticed, he asks, how quickly our unhappiness with not being in a relationship turns into our unhappiness with our new relationship? Have we ever noticed how soon our unhappiness with not having a job turns into our unhappiness with the job we finally get? In no more than four sentences he has made his point: our unhappiness is not dependent on our circumstances, which are always changing. Tapping his temple with the fingers of his right hand, he tells us that our unhappiness is a product of our own minds, as we persist in locating the source of all our problems “out there” instead of “in here.” While we spin our wheels trying to control things beyond our control, we ignore the one thing that is within our power to change: our way of seeing things.