Under the Huang Jiao Tree

by Jane Carswell

  The only problem with this practice, this discipline, apparently, was its simplicity. I could understand that; I knew that I complicated almost anything I touched. Anyone could do it, monk number three insisted calmly, and so we did. This discipline was called Christian Meditation, which at first baffled me. My idea of meditation was of thinking about something, and that was just what we weren’t doing. It’s always hard to get a word that wraps right around a mystery, and the practice itself wasn’t at all confusing. It felt right – no special feelings, no special experiences – just a feeling of rightness and an awareness, that grew over time, of a dimension of being that just … just was.

  I wasn’t expecting to find anything that evening in the Cathedral. Nor was I looking for anything; I didn’t know there was anything to find. I’d only gone to the talk because someone I liked had told me about it. I came away wondering if I’d at last found a way of prayer that made sense to me. The only prayers I’d ever known were variations on the theme of batting words hopefully in the direction of the boundary. Having sent the messages, I always wondered if they’d got there – wherever that was – and if so, could whoever was there understand them, and were they acceptable? It seemed an extraordinarily uncertain way to approach a supreme being, a surprisingly distant way to address a spirit that claimed to be indwelling as well as beyond, and such a chilly way to address your father. But I didn’t know any other way, and I did, desperately, want to make the connection. I’d read about people who quite definitely had found a line-in; I could tell because it made such a difference to them. And why would Love deny us that connection?

  But where was the socket?

  John Cassian, John Main, Laurence Freeman … what did they have in common? I was reassured that they all pointed consistently and firmly beyond themselves: none had any interest in being a magnetic guru. And, strikingly, all these monks had asked someone to teach them how to pray. So, now, was I.

  As I persevered in this discipline of connection, one of my links led me back to the old man under the tree in Chongqing. I felt I now knew where he’d been and what he was doing, and that it was as necessary for me as it was for him. He and I, from our different worlds and different beliefs, had felt hunger for and found our way to the same place. In my society, that heaps its passion on sport, shopping and television, it was a counter-cultural place to stand, and perhaps it was – to a lesser extent – in his too; I didn’t see any other old men in Chongqing standing alone under a tree to meditate. The form of his meditation didn’t matter to me; I knew his form and mine had enough in common to allow us to stand together. Perhaps his society, skilled at embracing contradictory forces, absorbed his eccentricity more placidly than my society does mine. But even in my culture, obsessed as it is with making and buying, a surprising number of people of all beliefs and none, unsatisfied by the confident claims of the marketplace are searching for something that may give them a clue to who they really are and why they’re here – or at least allow them a brush with peace.

  If you’ve been brought up, as I was, in a spiritual belief system based on dualism – those interpretations of scripture or tradition that insist you’re either in or out, have enough credits or haven’t, are believer or non-believer, Catholic or Protestant – you’re in trouble, my sort of trouble, if you can’t see the lines and dance a little in all the different squares.

  In China, spiritual identification with faith or philosophy often seemed to be seen as a hand of cards, appropriate for the game you were playing, that you built up. From what your experience dealt you, you kept what was useful and discarded the rest. I saw that the hands of several friends combined elements of Buddhism and Taoism with a Confucianism so deep-laid it was almost unconscious. The lives of these Chinese friends persuaded me that this sort of mix-and-match wasn’t necessarily at odds with spiritual integrity; there were many strong, straight lines in their living.

  In my growing-up years in New Zealand, to decide to worship in a tradition other than that in which you were born was to ‘turn’; to turn traitor was what they meant. What, I wondered when I returned from China, if you combined traditions? Why couldn’t I honour my longing for the Catholic tradition and yet remain faithful to my Protestant heritage? Why couldn’t it be both/and instead of either/or? A friend told me darkly that if I understood the two theologies better, I’d know why not. Why would I want to know the reasons one tradition thought itself more valid than the other? I wasn’t buying into any tradition’s competitive impulses.

  Gradually I came to realise how I felt about the two Christian streams.

  The Catholic church was my birth mother. She hadn’t abandoned me; I’d simply woken up in a different home. She knew I’d always be a child, walking among mysteries, and she held out disciplines to guide me. While she was strongly rooted, for good and ill, in the world, she also offered rich symbols through which the mysteries might be glimpsed.

  The Protestant church was my adoptive mother. It was at her knee, and that of my own human mother, that I’d first learned love. They’d sung to me music of piercing beauty, held shining ideals before me, read me stories while I dreamed, let me hear prayers – some sprung from ancient hearts, some from new. They’d held me, and thrown me life-lines, while life tossed me about and while I grew – alternately exulting and despairing – until at last I too knew what it was to be a mother. Why would I ever want to turn my back on those faces of love?

  I asked to be received into the Catholic church, which welcomed me kindly and wisely, and asked few questions; I entered the current that has carried the Mass high through the centuries, and found a place waiting for me within it. If there was a wound in me from the splitting of the Christian church, and perhaps many of us carry one, it began to heal. It was a homecoming.

  I have more than one home. I seek love as often in a Protestant church. This is where, if anywhere, most of my friends and my family worship. I’m used to these more modest services, these active, kindly, practical people; I still need them. This is my family inheritance, where I started.

  I continued to meditate twice each day – the monks said this was best. I found the quietest place I could, sat down, closed my eyes lightly, and for about half an hour I sat as still as I could and let the internal voice of a mantra gradually bring my mind to stillness. For that half-hour, I let fall away from me, as best I could, all my thoughts and words; in time, I came to trust the mantra to contain them all – and all the impulses of my heart. I wanted to learn to let go of all that my hands held, to let even the mantra fly free, and allow my attention to follow its sound with the ear of a child, as it led me deeper into silence.

  Gradually, threads of being that seemed to have no belonging in my patterning found their proper place in me. These were threads, familiar over a lifetime, whose disorder had troubled me in an insistent way while I was under China’s influential eye.

  I’d been confused by different aspects of poverty. Most obvious in China was material poverty. There, porters shivering on a wet day had convinced me, as no statistics could, that their poverty was my poverty, and I must learn to embrace it. But what of ‘poverty of spirit’? The words were a mystery to me, but I could hear love wrapped within them. In time, I began to see why Francis of Assisi had spoken so tenderly of Lady Poverty: to receive certain gifts, we need empty hands. A truth so modest shouldn’t be hung about with words, so I won’t say more. As James wrote in class, after introducing himself briefly in English: ‘That’s enough.’

  And my inner room? I’d always known that I had one, deep inside, and that it was a good place to be. I remembered living there much of my childhood, but I couldn’t find my way back. After I’d mislaid my childhood, it was music that had come nearest to opening the door to this room. I wondered if touching the buttons of a CD player or the keys of a piano would always be my only points of entry. As silence and stillness reclaimed their rightful place in my days, the door inside me quietly swung open.

  The discipline of med
itation proved to be, not easy, but simple. As the months went by, an awareness of something that already was, of a reality complete, accessible to all and embracing all life, crept in upon me. This reality, too, was simple; union is simple. I supposed this was why aspects of simplicity in the world about me in China set up such a yearning inside me, striking a response from the corresponding simplicity hidden under anxious attempts at self-government.

  I was surprised that reality turned out to be a gentle thing.

  Meditation, like China, creeps up on you, carrying consequences. I meditated in my home, and once a week with a small group. But I found these half-hours of meditation were not sealed capsules – they leaked their substance all over my days. What might have seemed an optional extra was becoming a way of life, whether I liked it or not. More than that, it began to nag for expression and support in wider community. Paradox and spiritual truth are often bed-fellows, and this practice in solitude yelped for more company. I’d always liked to wrestle my angels in private, but the death of domestic privacy hadn’t hurt as much as I’d expected; perhaps now the even-more-tender area of spiritual identity could safely come into the open. The old man was still an urgent memory, one that now seemed to issue an invitation: ‘Come out and stand with me under the huang jiao tree.’

  If my spiritual self wouldn’t stay in its own room, but was determined to wander all over my life – a life that was largely out of tune with it – then I needed a guide for living that would allow the meditating and the daily living to co-exist peacefully.

  I didn’t know where to look, but I thought the monks were worth trying – they’d already helped me. I’d always envied monks; I felt they must be very sure about something to take on a life like that. I also thought they must be a little odd to do so. But this Christian conspiracy of three monks had already suggested a way of praying that made sense to me; no-one had done that before. So either these monks weren’t odd at all, or I was odd in rather the same way.

  Two of them belonged to the Benedictine order of my own time, while the spirit of their fourth century brother, Cassian, had lain on St Benedict’s heart as he wrote his Rule. So what was special about Benedictines? Someone lent me the Rule of St Benedict. I was mildly surprised that this spiritual compendium was only the size of a ‘What’s on in Christchurch’ brochure. I was more surprised that, for clear information and strong inducements, it beat any tourist brochure, and even offered some pleasantly wry humour. What surprised me most was to learn that this foundation of Western monasticism, and continuing vade mecum of the Benedictine order, was written by a 6th century Italian, and that though the language had been updated and commentaries written, no new model with added functions and expanded capability had apparently been necessary. Benedict had got it right the first time. He’d searched for and found his God, and knew human nature in all its variables, and all its hidden cells. Thus equipped, he stood outside the ropes of time and place to establish what he called ‘a school for the Lord’s service’, as appropriate, it seemed, for the 21st century as for the 6th. He proposed, to any who felt called to it, a simple but piercing rule of life: Benedict’s interpretation of the Christ life. He may have been writing for sixth century Italian monks, but it was clear he also knew me well, and seemed to understand the issues of the New Zealand world in which I struggled and delighted. To my ear, his voice rang true, and he offered himself, both humble and authoritative, as interpreter and guide on what he and I agreed was the essential journey. Benedict and I were clearly compulsive travellers. I needed a guide, so I fell in behind him. I became a Benedictine oblate – a monastic associate who seeks to follow Benedict’s rule in a life beyond the monastery enclosure. Later I learned that an oblate is someone who offers themself, but I didn’t know that at the time and didn’t much care what the word meant. My motivation towards oblation was simple: I wanted something. I wanted to be an oblate, whatever that was, because I knew it was a way to belong; I wanted to have a community; I wanted a shared rule of life to deliver me from the inadequacy and instability of my own perceptions and impulses.

  It was surprisingly easy to get in – no exams, no CV. There were a few questions to answer, but there were no wrong answers; they just had to be honest. Benedict’s school, though rigorous, was essentially gentle, and while I suspected an injection of rigour might help to straighten me out, it was the gentleness that won me. I found that, though no walls enclosed me, I was now thoroughly on the inside of a community. Perversely, I then wondered how easy it would be to get out again, if I wanted to.

  But I didn’t need to know that.

  During my first days in Chongqing, I wondered what the essential driving force behind my coming to China could be … what the driving force behind me was. All I knew was that it was more than all the motivations I’d presented to others, and to myself. I’d left behind many valued relationships to come here; could there be a force, behind and beyond all of them, that drove me? I wondered if this could have something to do with passion. Which left the question: what was my passion? I wished I knew. I thought about it: something that drove me … ?

  It couldn’t be music then, because music and I had always simply walked together, and always would. Music sang in my bones already; it had no need to drive me.

  Ours was a deep and uncomplicated friendship. My musical talent and perception might be limited, but I knew music’s own resources were almost infinite.

  It couldn’t be my love for country things. China had helped me see that though my love for them, like James’ love for them, was true, neither he nor I was born to country ways. Passion, on the other hand, always claims essential relationship.

  And words? Words and I had always kept company. The relationship was intense, profound and often troubled. Sometimes, I was frustrated by the limitations of words – why could they only point to and never truly contain? At other times, rare and precious times, I’d come across words that had moved so far beyond awareness of themselves that they became one with their object. Words were an ever-present sparring partner, always in the ring, always challenging me to a duel. ‘Bet you can’t find words for this!’ ‘Bet you can’t put your finger on what this poet’s saying!’ I may have hidden most of my written words from others, but I knew very well that words and I were married – for better or for worse. Was there passion here? Yes – from time to time, but in marriages it is never constant. Sometimes you just have to get on with the necessary relationship, or deal in the milder forms love can take.

  I wondered – but in a small voice – if my passion could possibly be Christ. But how could you claim someone as your passion, when you’d spent your life insisting that you were only good friends? On the other hand, what else but a passion can you call the hero who won’t go away? What do you call a voice that rings out so clearly off a page that everything in you stops still? What name can you give to the point at which your dreams converge and are held, and what to a light that spills more glory than you can bear to look at? Is this passion? I don’t understand most of the answers Christ gave in the Gospels; his questions, on the other hand, are like strings plucked in me.

  Perhaps I’ve taken the wrong meaning from ‘understanding’; perhaps, for me, it has to mean ‘to stand under – and wait’. In a Chinese world, I’d seen how China waited, and learned from that – and from meditation. Waiting, more than a place of expectation, can be a point of attentive presence. Waiting can be enough.

  I don’t know, with my head-knowing, exactly who Christ was and is, but I know he’s connected to the truth about us. I don’t know exactly what that truth is either; I only know he’s my connection. In the culture of materialism, he’s seen as an inconvenient love, an unfortunate association. So be it. I claim my inconvenient love.

  ‘Maybe I won’t know why I’ve come here until I get back to New Zealand’ – it was the best answer I could give Lily. And although there have been obvious and far-reaching consequences, I’ll never know all the reasons behind my two journeys.
There’s always meaning unknown to the traveller. I confessed to Lily: ‘I only know I want to learn.’ China is a wise and generous teacher. The Chinese world I came to know, for all its avowed materialism, knows better than to honour only the observable, the expressible and the countable; it knows that contradictions can lie in the same bed and not fight, and that tolerance is a gracious way of accommodating valuable differences. In many ordinary lives, if not always politically, it allows different passions to co-exist.

  I must live my own passion now, because that’s what passions are for. In the years I’ve not lived my passion, I’ve shrunk. It’s time to come home to myself.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  When I was eight, and used to ask my two-year-old brother how much he loved me, he told me: ‘Two or four’. It’s always difficult to quantify important things, like love … or thanks. Therefore I simply offer thanks beyond all numbers to these friends: to Colin, who believed in the book when it was only a hope and a mess of words, and for his loyal support through all the revisions; to Jen who also believed-before-seeing, and dealt firmly to my punctuation and gently to my doubts; to two Naomis: the Naomi who gave me my first opportunities to write and be read, and who managed to make cheerful comments, and helpful warnings, about the muddle of 140,000 words that was the book’s first form; and the other Naomi who gave me a model of the sort of self-respect-invulnerability that’s a good starting-point for any writing; to Janie for her fearless and perceptive blue pencil over the script; to Simon, with his photographer’s eye, for pointing out that a book – content and appearance – is a single animal, and fonts count; to Diana, who’s known me since I was a reserved and cautious child, and who urged me to be open and brave, showing me in her own writing how to do it; to Ron who rescued the book by taking scissors and literally cutting the wandering stream into chapters, and shone useful light on my verbal redundancies; to Tony, valued Chinese friend in New Zealand, who – like his namesake at the school in China – helped me with my communications technology without making me feel stupid, and made the writing of this book a practical possibility; to Anne who gave me thick crayons and poster paper to write large – and therefore see – what was going on inside me; to Alice and her mother Ruth, for lending me a home on a hill by the sea where I could practise writing and write the final draft; to Ross who showed me, in the NZ Oblate that it’s good for Benedictines to write; to Professor Bill Willmott (for whom Chongqing was part of a Chinese childhood) for his meticulous checking of facts and figures, valuable textual advice, and the inspiration of his own love for China; to Barry Scott, publisher, for making the process of publication feel as simple as friendship; and to Sr Joan Chittister OSB, for warning me: ‘If you know you’re a writer, and you don’t write . . .’