When the monk takes another sip of tea, Bryan turns his head around, so I can see his face—eyes wide, eyebrows up—mouthing words in a big way so I can get what he is saying.
“This is just about life,” he mouths, making his eyes even wider.
This is just about life. When he says it, I know this is what draws me to the Buddhist way. This way is not about God. It is not about gaining converts or opposing other ways. It is “just” about life, with an open offer of methods for living more mindfully to anyone who would like to try them out and decide whether they are useful or not. This is another significant difference between the Buddhist way and the Christian way. In my way, belief is essential—especially belief in things that are hard to believe. In the Buddhist way, belief is optional. Try it and see, the Buddha says. Walk the way for a while and decide for yourself what is true. This invitation is thrilling to me. By comparison, my own tradition seems to have much less confidence in my ability to decide anything for myself. Or perhaps it has less confidence in its ability to withstand this kind of scrutiny?
On the day I bring singing bowls to class I know no one will remember a word I say. The bowls are far too interesting—meditation aids made from resonant metals in many shapes and sizes, each tuned to its own key. In Tibetan Buddhist teaching, the different keys speak to the different chakras, or energy centers, of the human body. With a little practice you can learn how to run a wooden striker around the rim of a bowl, so that it produces its own singular song: a faint hum that builds to a thrum that can make the hairs on your arm stand up. One bowl speaks to the crown of the head. One speaks to the heart. Another speaks to the base of the spine. There are seven chakras in all, and I have brought twice that many bowls to class. The students are all over them, coaching each other on how to hold the strikers, but no one knows which bowl is tuned to which chakra yet.
“Listen for the one you like best,” I tell the students, “and listen for the one that makes you crazy.” While they are making the bowls sing, I take roll, matching the names in my grade book to the students in front of me. There is one I am worried about, a young man from out of state who is all but mute in class. Like many of his peers he has come to Piedmont to play sports, though his family is farther away than most. I am worried about him because he is not turning in his homework assignments and he never speaks to anyone, including me.
While the others are busy passing the bowls around, clamping their hands over their ears when someone loses control of the striker and makes a bowl shriek, he sits looking at his bowl as if it were alive. He does not run the striker around the rim of the bowl. He uses it to tap the bowl gently on the side instead. Then he brings the bowl to his ear and holds it there until the sound has completely died away. He does this over and over again, his eyes shifting to softer focus every time.
“What do you think?” I ask him, leaning a little closer so I can hear the sound too. He smells like rain.
“I think this bowl might be speaking to me,” he says. “What chakra did you say it was?”
I turn the bowl over and look at the small sticker on the bottom.
“Heart chakra,” I say. He nods as if he already knew.
For many years I began the unit on Buddhism by writing a quote from the Buddha on the board: “Believe nothing, no matter where you read it or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.” Then I found the saying listed on fakebuddhaquotes.com. That was a bit of a blow. But even if the Buddha never said it, it still led me back to something Jesus said—not once but in many ways—when someone tried to get a definitive answer out of him.
When a man asked him what he had to do to inherit eternal life, Jesus said, “What is written in the law? What do you read there?” On another occasion, when someone asked him if it was lawful to pay taxes to the emperor or not, Jesus said, “Why are you putting me to the test?” Then he asked to see a coin. When someone showed him a coin with Caesar’s head on it, Jesus said, “Whose head is this, and whose title?”
As much as Christians regard Jesus as the answer man, he sounds a lot more like the question man to me.
“Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye?”
“Can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?”
“Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?”
“For who is greater, the one who is at the table or the one who serves?”
“Do you want to be made well?”
Jesus seems to know more about the way of transformation than many of his followers do. If someone wants to learn more about God, he implies, it will involve more than believing someone else’s answers. It will involve thinking deeply about the questions you are asking and why. Then it will involve acting on the answers you come up with in order to discover what is true.
Back in the teaching hall, the teacher is wrapping up his talk with another brief period of meditation. Later Bryan will tell me what happened to him during this, his first attempt. He did everything right, he said. First, he paid attention to his posture. Then he focused on his breathing, letting it go all the way from his nose down to his feet and back up again—which was when he noticed a deep warmth moving up one of his legs.
“I can’t believe this!” he thought to himself. “Here I am meditating for the first time in my life, and I am being given a taste of enlightenment!” Then he opened his eyes to see that the person next to him had spilled her coffee, which was wicking up the left leg of his jeans.
I saved Bryan’s field trip report, along with one written by a young man who had been particularly on guard. “There may have been some rituals and ceremonies that I was not sure I wanted to take part in,” the wary student wrote afterward, “but when we arrived it was different.” To his surprise, he was able to clear his mind during the meditation periods, reaching a place of calm that was new for him. “The whole experience made me think about changing my perspective on what is going on in my life,” he wrote. “Not about changing my religion, but the way that I look at things. This may be what we have been learning in class about different worldviews, but I did not understand the concept until I saw it firsthand at the monastery.”
That is the silent revolution, and it has taken place inside me too. Through the years I have spent dozens of hours in the presence of Tibetan lamas who have spoken directly to my condition. Their talks have been as meaningful to me as anything I have heard from teachers in my own tradition, though the Tibetans and I speak different languages and they do not speak of God. What can this mean? Since I know how the Dalai Lama handles people who want to convert, I am pretty sure it does not mean I am being called to become a Tibetan Buddhist.
In a book called Acts of Faith, author and activist Eboo Patel tells a story about the time he and his friend Kevin were granted an audience with the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, India. After His Holiness commented on a small empty bowl Kevin wore on a chain around his neck, Kevin told the Dalai Lama how many years he had spent studying the Buddhist concept of emptiness, which seemed to have a lot in common with the Jewish concept of ayin.
“You are a Jew?” the Dalai Lama asked him. When Kevin said yes, His Holiness said, “Judaism and Buddhism are very much alike. You should learn more about both and become a better Jew.”3
I envy that. My tradition has a hard time blessing strong bonds to other traditions, especially those whose truths run counter to our own. We like people to make a conscious choice for Christ and then stay on the road they have chosen, inviting other people to join them as persuasively as they can. It is difficult to imagine a Christian minister talking to a Buddhist who has spent years studying a Christian concept and then telling him to go become a better Buddhist. In some circles, that would constitute a failure on the minister’s part, a missed opportunity to save a soul. This is another way in which Buddhism and Christianity differ.
Both are evangelistic—what else is a Buddhist mission doing in a suburb of Atlanta?—but the Buddhists seem to understand what Gandhi meant by the “evangelism of the rose.” Distressed by the missionary tactics of Christians in his country, he reminded them that a rose does not have to preach. It simply spreads its fragrance, allowing people to respond as they will.
By that definition, I have responded to the fragrance of Buddhism, and it is making me a little anxious—not as anxious as I felt in Vishnu’s alcove at the Hindu Temple, but anxious enough to wonder if my attraction to other traditions makes Jesus mad. For most of my Christian life I have been taught that God is a jealous God. In seminary I studied the Hebrew prophets, who use the word “whore” a lot for people who flirt with other gods.
Jesus never used that shorthand, but he did seem forlorn when the people he invited to follow him went in another direction. At this late date it is sometimes hard for me to separate what he said from what the first preachers in my life said he said, but I would be leaving something important out of this book if I did not own up to a palpable fear that grabbed me the first few times my envy of another tradition drew me over to smell someone else’s rose. The fear was laced with flames and pitchforks. When it got hold of me, I was no longer an adult. I was a little child, scared to death of incurring my heavenly father’s wrath and losing his love forever.
The quiet revolution of seeing the world in another way helped me with that by reminding me that I am riding a wave made from the much greater ocean. My best view of divine reality is still a partial view. Even Jesus knew that. “Why do you call me good?” he said when someone addressed him as Good Teacher. “No one is good but God alone.” I am riding on the truth of that, trusting God alone to guide my wave and carry me to shore.
4
Holy Envy
Before I read Gandhi I couldn’t see what difference Jesus made.
ANDREW YOUNG
Early in my tenure at Piedmont, a student who had taken Religion 101 with me decided to become a Jew. As anyone who has tried it knows, this is not the same as deciding to become a Christian. Judaism actively discourages converts, since a person does not need to be Jewish in order to be righteous in God’s eyes. Why take on so many extra responsibilities if you are fine with God the way you are?
The Piedmont student, whom I will call Natalie, persisted. She dug into her Jewish studies the same way she dug into her college studies, with focused drive and intelligence. After she had met all the requirements, she chose a Jewish name and set a date for her conversion ceremony at the Reform temple nearest Piedmont, which was still more than an hour away. I sat in the congregation with one of her other professors while she gave a speech about the lessons she had learned and thanked everyone for helping her. Then the rabbi called Natalie by her new name, placed a large Torah scroll in her arms, and welcomed her to the Congregation Children of Israel.
I sat there feeling very happy for her, but also a little jumpy—not because Natalie had become a Jew, but because it was possible that Religion 101 had played a part in her decision and that was not in the course plan. I was focused on teaching the basics of five major world religions, not helping students decide which one was right for them, yet that was clearly what a number of them were doing. Another student decided to be baptized for the first time after a class discussion on the difference between infant and believer’s baptisms. Another got a tattoo of a yin-yang symbol on her forearm during the unit on Chinese traditions. When she showed it to me after class one day, she asked if I could steer her toward the nearest Taoist church.
These students were the exception, not the rule, but they reminded me that there is more than one way to respond to religious pluralism. The Christian majority may have been raised to ignore the truth claims of other religions, but others are strongly affected by what they learn. Some, like Natalie, make a conscious decision to convert, either to another world faith or to another branch of the one they grew up in. There is an Orthodox Christian church eighteen miles from Piedmont that began with some local Protestants hungry for a richer worship experience. Now they worship in a building with three gold onion domes on top of it instead of a white steeple with a cross.
These days, when I offer students a list of options they may check to describe their religious identity (“Mark as many as apply”), the “spiritual but not religious” option gets a lot of checks. I know how critical some of my religious friends are about this designation, which they characterize as shallow, self-serving, and socially disengaged. Since that describes more than a few people who are still warming pews, it is hard to understand why the spiritual seeking of one group is less honorable than the other. Is it because one helps pay the utility bills and the other does not?
Based on the young people I know best, more and more of them identify as spiritual but not religious because it is easier than trying to reconcile the teachings of their faith with their affection for their non-Christian friends. According to the teachings they have received in church, their friends are not all right the way they are. Unless they become Christian, God will not allow them to enter heaven. Instead, they will roast in hell for all eternity for refusing to accept Jesus as their Lord. This does not make any more sense to some young people than the teaching that they must choose between the account of creation in the Bible and the one their biology teacher has laid out for them.
These are only a few of the serious questions they have that no one in their churches wants to talk about with them. They want more from their communities of faith than a new music leader, a youth pledge card, and the assurance that they can wear jeans to church. So of course they stop doodling in class when they discover a religion that does not require belief in God or one whose followers believe God is equally present to those of all faiths. The idea that karma might explain the apparent injustice of the universe appeals to some of them, along with the idea that right action might be more important to God than right belief.
All of these teachings caught my attention when I first learned them too. They were as yet unimagined ways of viewing the relationship between the human and the divine, and once I encountered them, I could not let them go. As this book aims to describe, it took me a while to understand that finding these things attractive did not mean it was time for me to convert or—conversely—to start making a quilt of spiritual bits and pieces with no strong center. The third possibility was to let my attraction to other teachings transform my love for my own.
The first time I heard the phrase “holy envy” I knew it was an improvement over the plain old envy I felt while studying other faiths. When the Jewish Sabbath came up in class, I wanted it. Why did Christians ever let it go? When we watched a film of the God-intoxicated Sufis spinning, I wanted that too. The best my tradition could offer me during worship was kneeling to pray and standing to sing. My spiritual covetousness extended to the inclusiveness of Hinduism, the nonviolence of Buddhism, the prayer life of Islam, and the sacred debate of Judaism. Of course this list displays all the symptoms of my condition. It is simplistic, idealistic, overgeneralized, and full of my own projections. It tells you as much about what I find wanting in my own tradition as it does about what I find desirable in another. This gets to the heart of the problem: with plain old envy, my own tradition always comes up wanting. The grass is always greener in the tradition next door.
I know my Christian pasture so well. I know where the briars are along with the piles of manure. I also know where the springs of living water are, but when I look over the fence at the neighbor’s spread, it looks so flawless, so unblemished and perfectly tended, at least from where I stand. From a distance it is easy to forget that every pasture has its turds and stickers along with its deep wells and beds of clover. So when I look longingly at my neighbor’s faith, am I really looking for greener pastures, or am I simply trying to make peace with the realities of my own?
When I finally take time to find out where the phrase “holy envy” comes from, I trace it back
to a biblical scholar named Krister Stendahl. I remember him from my years at Yale Divinity School, when he was the dean of Harvard Divinity School—a tall, Scandinavian man with a stiff neck and a head of wavy hair. He was such a friend to the women students in his school, many of whom were not eligible for ordination in their churches at that time, that they called him “Sister Krister.”
Several years after his tenure as dean was over, Stendahl was elected the Bishop of Stockholm and returned home to Sweden. He had only been in place about a year when he became aware of mounting opposition to a new Mormon temple opening in the summer of 1985. The antipathy was odd in some ways, since Sweden had a long history of welcoming religious strangers even then. It was predictable in other ways, since new religious buildings often cause more anxiety than new religious neighbors do—especially if their buildings are bigger and better looking than yours. The Stockholm temple was designed by Swedish architect John Sjöström with a floor area of more than 16,000 square feet and situated in a leafy suburb of the city.
At a press conference prior to the dedication of the building, Stendahl aimed to defuse tension by proposing three rules of religious understanding, which have by now made the rounds more often than any of his scholarly work on the apostle Paul. Here is the most common version of what he said:
When trying to understand another religion, you should ask the adherents of that religion and not its enemies.
Don’t compare your best to their worst.
Leave room for holy envy.
No one is positive what he meant by number three, but Stendahl soon acted on it in ways that required holy courage. As a Lutheran, he found much to envy in the Mormon practice of vicarious baptism, by which a living Latter-day Saint chooses to be baptized on behalf of a person who has died without completing this requirement for entering God’s kingdom. The practice provoked public outrage in the 1990s, when some members of the LDS Church bypassed the rules and submitted the names of Holocaust victims for baptism. Church officials responded by promising to remove those names from its genealogy records. They also clarified that church teachings do not include coercing dead people to become Mormons.
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