Days of Visitation

The wise one’s heart discerns both time and judgment. – Ecclesiastes

Opening the butsudan (Buddhist shrine) for meditation, I see among the Buddhas and bodhisattvas an image of Thomas Merton. The Trappist monk, who through his writings was a mentor for me from the time I was twelve years old, died almost forty-three years ago at the age of fifty-three, electrocuted during one of his few trips away from the monastery. I was nineteen years old then, losing my Catholic religion to reason and ethics, at loose ends in every way, a long way from making peace with my heart. And, although I could not have known it and would not have believed it in that time of war, I was a long way from death.

Nineteen then; sixty-one now. Almost a lifetime of seeking and struggling has passed, suffering of the sort that is lost unless it bears fruit for the future. Scripture tells us that there is a proper time for everything: now, I see, is the eschaton, the time of judgment, for me. However long it may last, this is my hour of krisis, the time for my life’s harvest to be gathered, weighed, and shared.

For most of my life, I have followed Jesus’ advice to allow tares to grow with the wheat. I have had little choice: tares and wheat are confusingly similar. I have never been adept at distinguishing them, even after the more differentiated fruits, or ears, have appeared. And now I am presbyopic as well. If I were to attempt alone to separate and destroy the weeds, little wheat would remain. With the harvest at hand, how will I manage?

Fortunately, the discerning is not my task. I can reap everything and reserve the sorting to an abler wisdom. In the years since Merton first described it for me, I have met that wisdom, whose name is agápē, in my own heart, have seen its discerning power working carefully and effectively there. By now, I know that I can trust its judgment.

Feeling agápē‘s strengthening power within me, I am learning to allow it to shine continuously on the fields of my soul. In its light, differences are clearly seen. Shining on the harvest, the light of agápē will show me the wheat and the weeds. That which it identifies as useful and compassionate, that which reflects the light, I will store as treasure for distribution; that which it identifies as useless or harmful, that which absorbs the light, I will burn.

I will fulfill the time’s imperative and promise, then, by means of recollection, mindfulness, surrender, and fidelity. I will gather the harvest of my life. I will attend to agápē as its unsparing light illuminates my soul and leads me to divide aright. I will accept agápē‘s judgments and act on them, saving and sharing love’s fruits while I still live. This is the task and opportunity that remains for me, and, with gratitude to Merton and others who have helped to guide me here, I vow to devote myself to it.

Beginning now, as I take my seat on the cushions before the butsudan, and continuing through each uncertain day that remains, I will live this vow as if there were no tomorrow. For the time that was coming is now, and there will be no other.

On Extended Wings

To say that I am made in the image of God is to say that love is the reason for my existence, for God is love. Love is my true identity. Selflessness is my true self. Love is my true character. Love is my name. — Thomas Merton¹

On a Sunday almost twenty years ago, I traveled to New Jersey for the funeral service of a friend who had been something of a father figure for me. On the way, I stopped in Mount Holly for worship with Friends. As it happened, worship was held that day in the house in which the “Quaker saint” John Woolman had lived. After the meeting for worship, I would tour the house and read some passages by Woolman, noting that the phrase “living deeply” appeared more than once in the brief selections I’d found. From then on, that phrase would color my understanding of Quaker practice.

Even more significant, though, was my experience of worship there. As we sat together in a small room, the sincerity and depth of the silent worship lifted me up. And when another visiting Friend spoke of seeing a rare hawk soar over his home in Delaware, I was touched by his love and concern for the natural world. I had joined the Friends in Mount Holly in sadness, but in waiting with them upon the spirit of love, and in hearing words spoken from the heart of another, I was strengthened, even enabled to soar above the “ocean of darkness and death.”² I was put in mind of a poetic passage from the Book of Isaiah.

They who wait upon the Lord shall have their strength renewed; they shall mount up on wings, as eagles; they shall run and not stumble; they shall walk and not falter.³

Sitting in worship this morning with the gentle Friends of Little Falls Meeting, I thought back to days when, forgetting the lesson of Mount Holly and the “they” of Isaiah, I had experienced myself as a lone eagle, propelling myself upward, toward the light, on powerful wings. But time has a way of dispelling delusion. I am much older now: winging heavenward, even with help, is beyond me; on mere feet I falter. Retiring from full time work, I stumble into an uncertain but certainly briefer future as I struggle daily with frailties of body and soul. Observing those memories in the familiar peace of the meetinghouse today, I understood that I am a different person now, and that I need a different kind of poetry. And I smiled as an appropriate passage came to me, lines from Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning.”⁴

And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

No soaring eagle now, I am an anonymous old bird among the many flocks of pigeons – “rats of the air,” I’ve heard them called – known as “baby boomers,” my existence increasingly a burden to others, my vanishing traces ambiguous, my trajectory drawn “downward to darkness.”

But if these wings, weary yet still extended with the strength of worship, carry me downward now at evening, I can speak only of change, not of loss or gain. For soaring toward the sun is beautiful, but one must descend to go deep, and darkness need not be deprivation: after all, darkness is where the light shines. It may be that the darkness into which I sink is, in Merton’s words, “blazing with the invisible light of heaven.”

At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. It is so to speak His name written in us, as our poverty, as our indigence, as our dependence, as our sonship. It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely…. I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere.⁵

The emptiness of me is the name of God, written in the void of my heart. And the name of God is Love. Descending into the darkness of spiritual poverty, I may vanish into the hidden spark of love that is “in everybody” – not the isolated glory of a soaring eagle, but the pure and invisible “glory of God” shining in the nothingness that, in essence, we all are.

However I may be known to the world⁶ within and without, Love is my true identity. Sinking into darkness, I sing my Nunc dimittis. Love is my name.

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NOTES

1. Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 60.
2. George Fox, Journal, p. 80 in Vol. I of his Works.
3. Isaiah 40:31.
4. “Sunday Morning” is in the public domain and can be read in its entirety at Wikisource.
5. Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, p. 158.
6. Friends sometimes signed in such a way; e.g., “Given forth by me, whom am known to men by the name of MARMADUKE STEVENSON, but have a new name given me, which the world knowns not of, written in the book of life.” (Stevenson, one of the “Boston martyrs,” was hanged in 1659 “for conscience sake”: for being a Quaker. The execution date, October 27, is now International Religious Freedom Day.)

For the original journal entry about my experience at Mount Holly, scroll down to “March 24, 1991 – Homewood Friends Meeting” after clicking here.

To Bridge or Not to Bridge

My 8/21/09 post on “Worship, Nontheism, & Convergence” proposed a bridge by which theistic and nontheistic Quakers might come together, a bridge that I have found in my ministry to be eminently useful for that purpose (with the welcome effect, by the way, of helping some of us to better obey the advice to “take heed, dear Friends, to the promptings of love and truth in your hearts”). The post applied a standard reading of a scripture passage — and I am grateful for seasoned Friends’ acknowledgment of the legitimacy of that reading — as a hermeneutical key to unlock the reported primitive Quaker experience qua text, a key that the texts themselves harbor as well.

Comprising only about 1,300 words and being shaped to its purpose, the 8/21 post is not a tiny theological or philosophical treatise or the prelude to one; it is simply a light on a way forward in the sometimes stalled, often acrimonious, always peculiar interfaith dialogue between theistic and nontheistic Friends. As interfaith dialogue requires, it is an attempt to point to a commonality, to a place where we might be together in peace, might even work and worship together, while we explore other commonalities and differences. It’s understandable that such an endeavor would arouse anxiety, and, not unexpectedly, I have received a number of complaints — that I am attempting to reduce God, to distort Quakerism, to rewrite scripture or history, or to do some other irresponsible thing — that, being pressed, seem to want to justify switching off this light, shutting down this bridge. They’ve kept me busy. And in addition to those conversations, other corre­spondents have helped develop the topic, while yet others have written about further interesting, more or less related, material, and it’s easy and all too enjoyable for me to walk down that road with them.

I am very grateful, if a bit overwhelmed, for the dialogue, for the sharing of concerns and information, and for the challenges that have helped me think more clearly and carefully. I’m even grateful for some opportunities to respond to adamantine opinion; if nothing else, they fired up the little gray cells, and sometimes they brought out additional aspects of the topic as well. I have tried to reply to everyone, but I may not be able to continue that: I lack the time now, I have increasingly frequent Internet access problems (thanks, Verizon), and I want the post to serve as intended and not be lost in clouds of (again, more or less) related conversation, however much I have learned from my correspondents in these threads.

So while further comments on that post are certainly welcome, I can’t promise to publish or reply to those that rehash issues already discussed or that carry us into philosophical or other areas much beyond the scope of the post. I want to use the time I can give to that post to focus on its ministry of reconciliation for those who are open to the message. And I have more posts in me; for one thing, I’d like to get back to my analysis of George Fox’s metanoia.

I’ll leave you tonight with this from Thomas Merton‘s No Man Is an Island (1955, p. 165):

Charity [i.e., caritas, love] alone is perfectly free, always doing what it pleases, since it wills nothing except to love and cannot be prevented from loving. Without charity, knowledge is fruitless. Love alone can teach us to penetrate the hidden goodness of the things we know. Knowledge without love never enters into the inner secrets of being. Only love can truly know God as He is, for God is love.

Wrestling with Nothingness

The intuition of nonexistence, which I wrote about recently, continues. It has a definite Buddhist flavor, as in these lines from Ryōkan (1758–1831), a Zen Buddhist poet and hermit.*

This is an old truth; don’t think it was discovered recently.
“I want this, I want that”
Is nothing but foolishness.
I’ll tell you a secret:
All things are impermanent.

But given my bi-spirituality, I acknowledge a Christian aspect as well. Zen and Christianity come together in the religious experience of the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, who, through his writings, was my spiritual guide for many of my younger years, and who in the latter part of his life studied and wrote about the Zen experience. Here is a statement from an interview with Brother Paul Quenon, a Trappist who studied under Merton at Gethsemane Abbey.

[Merton and I] were talking about prayer and that prayer is like a struggle with God. It’s like Jacob struggling with the angel in the night, and when you’re encountering God God is not a thing, and so God is more like nothing, so when you enter into the depth of prayer it’s like entering into nothingness.

Wrestling with nothingness seems to be a good description of where the intuition leads me. If I possessed the kind of theistic faith that sustained Merton, I might be able to frame the intuition as apophatic mysticism. When I am just coming out of the experience, I can sense how easily my perception of it could be changed by such faith. But while I don’t rule faith out on a priori grounds, each time I consider it I see that the world makes less, not more, sense from the perspective of theism. And so I wrestle, trying to come to terms with the experience, learning to accept the unacceptable and to allow this reality to shape my remaining time.

For without God, emptiness is truly empty. In Buddhist thought, the term “voidness” is not always reframed as “plenitude”: sometimes it is permitted to mean what it says, and that’s how I must use it now. This all seems most ironic to me, that a man who is grasped by the moral vision of the Hebrew prophets and Jesus comes, as he approaches the end of his life, to this Buddhist-like experience of voidness, of emptiness — without even the escape hatch of a substantialist interpretation of the doctrine of Buddha-nature, sometimes used to pretend that emptiness isn’t really empty.

Ryōkan again:

The village has disappeared in the evening mist
And the path is hard to follow.
Walking through the pines,
I return to my lonely hut.

When I was young, the Catholic Church was my village. (See “The Making of a Quaker Atheist.”) Leaving there discouraged, I found this poor heart-hut at hand and stayed here, thinking that it would be but a temporary shelter. It became my base for exploration. After wandering about and staying awhile among other communities, I discovered the Quaker village, and it is there that I continue to visit when I leave my inner hermitage. But that village, too, is swallowed by mist at the end of the day, and I see no path elsewhere. In the obscurity of age, I return to my lonely self. I will visit the village again, but I understand now that this temporary hut is my spiritual home. And I am beginning to understand that no one lives here. But if that truly is the case, I wish I could learn it fully while no one is still someone.

When you encounter those who are wicked, unrighteous, foolish, dim-witted, deformed, vicious, chronically ill, lonely, unfortunate, or disabled, you should think: “How can I save them?” And even if there is nothing you can do, at least you must not indulge in feelings of arrogance, superiority, derision, scorn, or abhorrence, but should immediately manifest sympathy and compassion. If you fail to do so, you should feel ashamed and deeply reproach yourself: “How far I have strayed from the Way! How can I betray the old sages? I take these words as an admonition to myself.” — Ryōkan

In the physical house in which I bide my time, there is a beautiful, although damaged, Buddhist shrine, in which reside images of the Buddha, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, and Thích Quảng Đức (who immolated himself in Saigon when I was 13 years old). For a couple of years, the shrine, facing a space too small for sitting in meditation, has been closed. The shrine is something like my heart: beautiful, intricate, Bodhisattva-harboring; broken, misoriented, latched. Today, I think I will turn both of us around and open the doors.

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*Note: passages from Ryōkan are from “Zen Poetics of Ryokan” by Meng-hu, reprinted at The Hermitary.
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[Related post: "I Know What It's Like to Be Dead"]