Hence it is a shared personal experience. So it may be useful to have a better idea of who I have been.
Not because of vanity or a desire to provoke conflict or sympathy, but to be able to get past the distortion of "me" to see what is being offered more clearly. My story may seem to some like a common story lived by thousands of others, with certain revisions and edits peculiar to my own life. It is no more special or common than the rest.
Starting with Christianity
My earliest memories of religion come from time spent in a local church that was part of the larger Church of the Nazarene. They had a large building which included a a whole wing used for a day care center as well as an outside playground. I was enrolled in their day care until sometime in the first or second grade and between that and Sunday services I literally grew up in a church. We went their until we moved part way through third grade. Being so young we weren't really exposed to much theology or Christology beyond "God loves you".
I vaguely recall in a Sunday School class being led in some version of a Sinner's Prayer and since Jesus/Christianity was the only path to which I had access, my inclination to follow that which is just, fair, and true seemed to be tied to that path. No one baptism at that time for the children in my class, and as time went on I found I really didn't like the idea as it was presented. The idea of being up in front of everyone while someone prayed and held me underwater in a theatrical fashion was not particularly appealing, and after later everyone just assumed I had already been baptized at some point.
I spent the rest of my years living at home with my parents attending somewhat evangelical/legalistic/fundamentalist "non-denominational" Protestant churches. On the one hand, I grew up identifying as a Christian and faithfully attending and fully participating church affairs. I was often frustrated with a lack of devotion and seriousness on the part of my peers, the root of the same spiritual pride displayed by the elder brother in the Parable of the Prodigal Son. On the other hand, Jesus always seemed remote - a cosmic sacrifice, a King, a Lord, a Judge - but not someone to whom I could relate as a person. The idea of a "personal relationship" with Jesus was really just a euphemism for "believing the Gospel", i.e. giving intellectual and verbal assent to a series of historical propositions concerning the events surrounding the life of Jesus which made you a "believer".
The selective literalism I was raised with had no place for any greater depth to understanding either scripture or Christ, such as ahistorical/timeless insights beyond secular forms of knowledge. In some ways the theology just seemed to me to dead-end on a sixth or seventh grade level, and as I got older I had an increasing difficulty applying a sixth grade understanding of God and the Bible to an ever more complex and mature world. As I got older, the tension between seeming contradictions about God, about Jesus, etc. became more apparent, and like many people in this situation, the tension only got worse when I left home for college.
Moving to agnosticism and atheism
After my freshman year (1992-1993), I decided to put all things spiritual and religious on hold until I had a broader and deeper appreciation of history, other cultures, science, etc. As if following a common script, over several years this became a sort of default Deism, and then a default agnosticism.
It was then, around 1998, that I started posting on online to meet people from different places and differing views to learn and share with them. Yet I typically found people who were intolerant and from my evolving point of view willfully ignorant. My frustration with the hardcore legalist/fundamentalist forms of religion, Christian and otherwise, started to grow and eventually boiled over, and years before Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, and the like started publishing I and others were online honing and refining the same kinds of arguments. I went from a skeptical agnostic to a hardcore anti-religionist.
Eventually this gave way to decision to start fresh, with as few influences as possible, as a seeker, rather than staying in the self-satisfaction of my anti-religionism. I found that many of the skeptics and cynics in the atheist camp could be just as willfully ignorant, often as misinformed and using the same kinds of poorly developed arguments as I had seen from the more acerbic and dismissive Young Earth Creationists; one simply bashed an uneducated strawman of science and other a simplistic strawman of religion. Yet it was growing clearer to me that the religious instinct was part of our human heritage that would manifest itself no matter what we professed to believe, even if it was outside of the structure of sacred traditions. The fact of scientism, Stalinist and Maoist forms of communism, and the deification of democracy and free markets in many parts of the world attested to that. Perhaps there was some insight to be found in religions, since they had been able to speak to so many people for so long. How many other ideologies and cultural programs can claim to have been relevant as long?
I was still convinced however that organized religion had been contaminated and corrupted beyond all redemption, and that I wouldn’t just accept their teachings on the weight of their longevity or popularity. I decided that whatever insights had been available to others in the past ought to be available or make sense to me before I would give them any credence or authority. I imagined this would be a matter of sifting through what others had said and done to try to rescue and reformulate a basic set of principles to live by and to evaluate the claims of any existential philosophy. I settled on some basic axioms that seemed to be fair and generous and set to work.
Discovering Buddhism
I found that I was trying to reinvent the wheel and that many of my ideas had already been espoused in Buddhism. This realization began with conversation with a Nichiren Buddhist I had met online. I tried to become informed about all of the major Buddhist schools and traditions and to circumvent pop Buddhism and its limited depth and scope as much as possible. From an initial atheist/strictly securalist intro to Buddhism I came to appreciate the deeper possibilities of spirituality, the benefits of liturgy and ritual, etc, outside of the constricted view of such things with which I had been raised. I took advantage of the chance to practice a combined form of Chan/Pure Land Buddhism for a while. Soon after I began that practice I started this blog in 2005.
In the teachings of form and emptiness I found a parallel with the idea of a conceptually transcendent but historically (i.e. within the reality of space and time) immanent Source from which existence springs and dissolves and that both existence and the Source are different aspects of the same reality. This is akin to the theological notion of the vertical and horizontal dimensions of reality, or to the (functional) dichotomy of the historical and the ultimate, which fits well with what has been described as the panentheistic view of the Divine.
Circumstances arose which prohibited me from continuing on with my sangha, which initially was quite a disappointment since I had hoped to formally take refuge with them. While I had only considered this possibility privately, its appeal came from the benefit I had experienced just from an association with an organized and dedicated group of fellow practitioners. I felt that it might be possible to deepen and extend that positive influence while giving something back.
The necessity of moving ensured I wouldn't be able to return to regular practice with my former group, and I was unsure where to look next. I had an affinity for Chan, traditional Pure Land, Shin and Nichiren Buddhism. I considered possibly trying something else, perhaps a school of Tibetan Buddhism. I continued to read and blog, but I had never been able to sustain much of a focused and consistent practice in my personal life nor could I perceive (i.e. "measure") benefits from such stand-alone solo practice. I was back once again wandering in the desert.
Rediscovering Christianity
I became interested in interfaith and interspiritual writings which lead me to the work of Br. Wayne Teasdale and his mentor Fr. Bede Griffiths along with folks such as Fr. Thomas Merton, Fr. Thomas Keating, etc, who are/were all Catholics commenting on and learning from other faith traditions. I was deeply fascinated with the dialogue that has taken place and with the perspectives offered by the aforementioned Catholic scholars and writers, as I had simply presumed Catholicism to be extremely conservative in all areas and generally if not totally closed to any appreciation of spirituality or religion outside of the Church.
I also sought out Buddhist authors commenting on Christianity such as Thich Nhat Hanh and the current Dalai Lama. The former has said much about the growing relationship between Christianity and Buddhism, as well as Buddhist converts from the West:
He also wrote in Going Home -- Jesus and Buddha as Brothers:
Many Westerners attracted to Buddhist practice have abandoned their own spiritual traditions. They reject the churches and clergy of their own traditions because they feel constricted and uncomfortable with the attitudes and practices they have encountered there. They have suffered within their own tradition and so have sought another. They approach Buddhist practice with the hope of replacing their own tradition and may wish to break away from their own tradition forever.
According to Buddhist wisdom, such wishing is in vain. A person severed from her own culture and traditions is like a tree pulled out by the roots. Such a person will find it hard to be happy. Buddhist practice can offer effective means to heal, reconcile, and reunite with one’s blood and spiritual families, in order to discover the precious gems in one’s own traditions. Thanks to the practice, people will see that Buddhism and their own spiritual tradition have many things in common, and therefore it is not necessary to reject their own spiritual tradition. They will see that there are things that need to be transformed in Buddhism as well as in their own tradition.
–Thich Nhat Hanh, from Teachings on Love (Parallax Press)
Thirty years of sharing Dharma in the West has bought opportunities for me to meet Europeans and Americans who...are hungry for something beautiful to believe in, for something good to believe in. They are hungry for something true to believe in... My tendency is to tell them that a person without roots cannot be a happy person. You have to back to your roots. You have to back to your family. You have to go back to your church.
To be able help a hungry soul, you have to first earn his or her trust, because hungry souls are suspicious of everything. They have not seen anything truly beautiful, good, and true. And they suspect you and what you have to offer. They are hungry, but they do not have the capacity to receive and ingest, even if you have the right food to offer them, even if you have something beautiful, true, and good to offer them.
In our time, society is organized in such a way that we create thousands of hungry ghosts every day. They are mostly young people. Look around us. There are so many. They have no roots. They are hungry. They suffer. We have to be careful in our daily life, trying not to help create more hungry ghosts. We have to play our role as parents, teachers, friends, and priests with understanding and compassion...
When the time is right, when they are capable of smiling and forgiving, we tell them, "Go back your own culture, go back your own family, go back to your own church. They need you. They need you to help renew themselves and no longer alienate their young people. Do that not only for your own generation but for the future generations as well."
I think he has something here. It is tempting to be spiritual but not religious and sample different things. Because Eastern religions are so exotic and alien, it is possible to project our desires onto them, filling in the blanks with our needs. But that is superficial and ultimately unfulfilling. Because the same humanness will be discovered beyond a view from a distance. Scratch the surface and there are habits, politics, superstitions and the like which speak to the ordinariness one seeks to flee. When the fascination with the shiny new item in our spiritual collection wears thin, it is time to move on. To go shopping again for another shallow experience to consume.
I find Buddhism to be utterly fulfilling. Yet I was a little too comfortable as a Buddhist, a little to smug. Buddhism in the West is currently seen as hip and tolerant and all of the things that Abrahamic religions are perceived as lacking. My ego is always trying to latch on to something to make an identity. But when I identified with Christ, suddenly the unpopularity and misuse of Christianity was what I latched onto, and then I saw my ego at work. This has been beneficial, but to some I'm sure it is disconcerting. Benefiting from two different religious traditions, that is. In the same book Hanh goes on to write:
We have blood ancestors but we also have spiritual ancestors. If you were born in the West there is a big chance you are a child of Jesus and that you have Jesus as you ancestor. Jesus is one of the many spiritual ancestors of Europeans. You may not consider yourself a Christian, but that does not prevent Jesus from being one of your spiritual ancestors because your great-grandfather might have been a good Christian. He has transmitted to you the seed, the energy, the love, and the insight of Jesus. If you do well, you will be able to help this energy to manifest within yourself. There are those who think that they don’t have anything to do with Christianity. They hate Christianity. They want to leave Christianity behind, but in the body and spirit of these people Jesus may be very present and very real. The energy, the insight, and the love of Jesus may be hiding in them.
A Buddhist is someone who considers the Buddha as one of his spiritual ancestors. You can say that the Buddha is an enlightened one, a great Bodhisattva, a teacher, and the founder of Buddhism. You can say that the Buddha is your spiritual ancestor. To me the Buddha is very real. I can touch him at any time I want. I can profit from his energy and insight any time I want. It is very real... The Buddha as a spiritual ancestor is manifest in you. You are able to allow the Holy Spirit to be in you, to guide you, to shine on you like a lamp. Jesus is then alive in you that very moment. It is possible to know the Buddha and at the same time know Jesus.
Indeed, and in the process of rediscovering and reconnecting to my religious and cultural roots and honoring them I decided to make a more substantial commitment to them in electing to be baptized at a local Episcopal parish in 2010. This was not a whim or merely a chance to pay respect to my cultural heritage or make peace with my personal history. The experience of Buddhism in its teachings and practice, along with Christians who have made connections between their own traditions and other faiths, provided an opportunity for me to understand and seek Christ that was previously unavailable.
I am sure for some the most important element of this decision is "choosing" Christianity or "rejecting" Buddhism, although that isn't how I see it at all (either in terms of what happened or what is important). I am sure many will consider me a suspicious if not heretical member of the Christian family, and others will see me as strictly a former Buddhist or perhaps a non-genuine sort of Buddhist-lite. That is fine. They may label me as they wish.
There is some limited, relative truth to be found in sorting out groups in a religious taxonomy, so if I am not regularly visiting a Buddhist sangha, lighting incense at an altar with a Buddhist statue, or chanting in an Asian language, by some standards I really am not a Buddhist. That is OK. I don't need to "be" a Buddhist to be a Buddhist or even just someone who benefits from the teachings and community of the Buddha. There may be similar complaints from some Christians. The irony of our ego-driven society and its cultural bias in the formation of identity through individualism trying to receive a tradition espousing the dangers of ego-centrism is astounding -- and now we have another one entering the scene in the form of Buddhism. Don't worry. Siddhartha is bigger than Buddhism. Jesus is bigger than Christianity. Humanity is bigger than religion.
Walking the path
There is no right or wrong path in life. This doesn't mean choices are essentially irrelevant, or that there is no right or wrong in choice. It tells us exactly the opposite. Choice is everything. If we have handled one moment badly, we have, and we must face what comes of that. But more urgently we are called to focus on what to do next. Now. To open our hearts and find the courage to change direction if necessary to move toward that which is kind, generous, tolerant and merciful. To shed our scripts and shells and be naked before our own being, before being itself.
It is in this way that we are born again. It is this way we walk with the spirit of God. It is in this way we recognize that samsara is nirvana. It is in this way we see the Kingdom of God in ourselves and the face of God in neighbors. This is the path of no path. This is the the beginning and the end of the spiritual journey. It is where the prophets, Jesus and the saints walk. It is the way of Lao Tsu and the Buddha. It is always before you no matter which way you turn. Every step in on holy ground.
So, here I am. Whatever I choose to call myself or how others choose to label me, my experiences in legalistic/fundamentalist Christianity, atheism, Buddhism and mature, inclusive Christianity have shaped who I am today in a relative sense, but those are merely things about me. They are not me. The actual me, the collective we, the common I, etc, is beyond any knowledge or conception or label. I hope to be able to share my ongoing experiences with you in respect, humility and love.
