Zen and Leo the Great

I have made it a habit to read a little bit from a variety of books each morning, occupying in this way a good half-hour of my hour’s prayer time, following a half-hour of silent contemplative prayer in front of the Blessed Sacrament. I occupy the posture and breathing recommended by Buddhist works in the silent period, after an opening prayer to the Holy Spirit, in quiet awareness both of the thoughts that run through my head at the time and, once these thoughts and the emotions linked to them run their course and reveal their illusory, unreal nature, of the Presence in front of me, that reconciles all separateness into One.
The books have a spiritual content which puts them in the same general category—the Breviary, containing the official prayer of the universal Church; Obras espirituales, a collection of brief writings and reflections by Blessed Charles de Foucauld; Soul Mates, Honouring the Mysteries of Love and Relationship, by Thomas Moore; and Zen Training, Methods and Philosophy, by Katsuki Sekida.
I take a paragraph, sometimes two, each day from each of these books, after praying the psalms and readings from the Office in the breviary, and savor the content. Sometimes there is a coincidence, like the alignment of planets, among the books, or other times one weaves into the other, although very often each treats of a different aspect of spiritual and transcendental reality, related but not particularly linked to each other.
Today there was a kind of ominous reference to suffering running through the various texts. The Office for the day—seventh in the Octave of Christmas—is in Spanish (since I live in a Spanish-speaking country), and began with the cheerfulness of the season: Alégrese tierra y cielo/, pues el Verbo que ha nacido/ viene, siendo Dios, vestido / de carne en humano velo. … , but the hymn of the Office soon alludes to the wintry cold of the northern hemisphere (the opposite of our heated, long days here), La nieve siente y el hielo, aunque es Dios de Dios venido, …and while the Psalms of the day leap about in joy, Alégrese el cielo, goce la tierra, …, we then pass on to a worried Paul, in his letter to the Colossians, when he warns of “false doctrines” that tend to divide his beloved community during his absence.
Such warnings touch my own concerns for the parish community here in La Pintana. Different groups of pastoral agents or consecrated personnel in the community tend to criticize each other behind backs and out of hearing. I find myself trying to avoid sounding desperate, as I remind people time and again that such criticisms must be leveled at each other face-to-face. Nothing seems more fractious to me at this moment than such habits of letting out frustration by finding like-minded allies and creating forums for denouncing the absent. I reach into what I can recall from Scripture and try to exercise the wisdom of a Solomon to quell the bitterness and anger, and maybe what I say actually does help.
“Remember that Saint Paul often had to remind his communities not to divide into groups of fans of this or that personality,” I frequently tell each group of people who provide some specialized service to the community—catechists, the choir, the people who visit the sick, other people who work with youth. “Who is Apollo? Who is Cephas? Are you baptized in the name of Paul?”, I roughly quote. “The same thing tends to happen to us, when we start declaring ourselves fans of the pastor who left, or of the pastor who arrived, or this person, or that. It is Christ who unites us all, who is the source of our life in this community. We are all concerned that the world come to know Christ—no one else need concern us.”
I talk in this vein for a while, and the silence that follows can pass for thoughtfulness, or it could just as easily be tolerance for the gringo priest who obviously doesn’t understand the situation. I’m not sure which, in most cases. But it worries me, since the opportunity to speak in this line seems to appear often, after listening to complaints about that or the other group or person.
At times we seem to have so many problems in this community, with so much implication for what I’m not doing and what I should be doing and what I will be doing in the future, …it tires me just to consider that I’m the one to solve it all. But thanks to these daily periods of prayer and reflection, I realize that this self-expectation is unwarranted and unrealistic. And is, in the final analysis, a thought, capable of creating stress, worry and a negative view of myself, although it has no substantial reality. It’s all in my head, and the head tenses the body and causes acidic juices to churn around in the gut. Taking the time to realize all this frees me to consider that reality is something other than this fantasy in my head, and actually helps me to respond to situations that do need my attention more effectively and, dare I say it, joyfully.
Saint Leo the Great wades into these Pauline waters with his own sermon, part of today’s Office, and gives great weight to unity—not just the unity of a group of people trying to achieve a common goal, but our underlying unity with Christ himself, so that the very Birth we celebrate in this season is also our own birth. We adore the Savior, but we also celebrate our spiritual birthdays, since Christ is the head of this Body of followers, and if Christ is born, we are born. When Christ dies on the Cross, years later, we die. When Christ defeats death and rises to New Life, so do we. Sure, says Leo, we become members of the Church at different moments in our individual lives, but all things considered, Christ’s birth and our own in the baptismal waters are one and the same thing.
And this leads Leo to pick up Paul’s theme, and my worry: Peace in the community. The same “Peace on Earth/ Good Will to Men [and Women]” that the angels sing out on Christmas, peace as a gift from on high, is the peace that we live out in turn, since with Christ’s birth we are born as children of God, and united to God, and thus united to each other as members of the same family.
Loosely translated from the Spanish, Leo quotes Paul and goes on, “…Therefore, those who trace their origin not from blood nor from carnal desire nor by the will of a human being, but from God Himself, [Paul’s words] may they offer to the Father the harmony proper to those children who are moved by the desire for peace, and may all members of this family by adoption live united in him who is the firstborn of the new creation, who came not to do his own will, but rather the will of the One who sent him. For those who have been adopted by the grace of the Father, in order to become His inheritors, are not those who live in the midst of disagreements and contentions, but those who have one single mind and one desire. … For this reason the birth of the Lord is the birth of peace; …”
Not a peace without its pain, warns Charles de Foucauld. “…He who chose the Cross for himself, concedes it to all who love him. …As a shepherd, he leads us to bitter pastures which He knows are good for us. …”
Moore counsels that self-knowledge requires a great deal of self-acceptance, and openness to “the power of the would to work in mysterious ways. …I may even act in certain ways that disturb others, not out of some character failure, but because my soul is trying to move itself into my life, against my resistance and my ignorance. …” Bitter pastures indeed for those bent on self-improvement in perfectionist terms.
Moore quotes Paul Tillich today, in this perspective, most profoundly: “…’The depth of our separation [within the individual] lies in just the fact that we are not capable of a great and merciful divine love towards ourselves. …We are separated from the mystery, the depth, and the greatness of our existence.’ ”
“His solution,” Moore writes, “is not knowledge, but love: ‘When the old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades, when despair destroys all joy and courage, sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: “You are accepted. You are accepted.”…’ ”
And Sekida, our final reading, quotes Heidegger today, regarding the sense of “throwness” in Being, as something “thrown”, but, “not of its own accord.” Sekida infers that this inconformist, unsettled sense of one’s being comes from Heidegger’s sense of uncomfortableness with existence, its “whence and wherefore.” Another pasture of bitter, but healthy, herbs.
The peace of Christian communities does not exclude anguish and hurt, the Cross, but brings about the kind of awareness that takes on the troubled existence of humanity in the light of God’s overwhelming, liberating love for humanity, thus perceiving that the basis for despair and desperation have been removed. It is a peace that can weep with those who weep, it is a peace that moves us to the side of the lonely and oppressed. “Happy those who mourn, …Happy those who hunger and thirst for justice, …” Just the opposite of the touted “joy” of a consumerist society that aggressively champions the loud laugh and the disregard of the poor, the “loser”.