So I’m reading Thomas Merton and D.T. Suzuki on Christian and Buddhist mysticism. I am really feeling a connection with mysticism and how it allows for more than one answer even when the multiple answers appear contradictory. But I’m also feeling very frustrated and … hopeless. I don’t have time for mysticism! I’ve got too little time to deal with my normal, everyday life let alone work on attaining enlightenment. I’m lucky if I get an hour of meditation in a day. It’s especially difficult because the only time I can really meditate is when my daughter takes a nap — late night meditation has not been going well lately. So I’ve got to be ready when she goes to sleep because she sometimes sleeps an hour or less. So, unless I’m “on the cushion” toot sweet, I have to stop “in the middle.” Plus, an hour a day seems trivial and worthless compared to the Desert Fathers who left society to find God. Most of them still had issues years later so how the hell am I supposed to get anywhere still immersed in society and meditating an hour a day?
Where is the get-it-now answer to my problem? Where is the infomercial that promises results before I can finish giving my credit card number? It’s right here, all around us. It’s called mainstream Christianity! The fast-acting and long-lasting solution. Get saved right now and you’re saved forever — and they really mean forever! This is the greatest delusion that Christianity perpetrates on the “lost” but it’s also why it’s so popular — it’s easy.
In a way, it’s too easy. But it’s also the most difficult thing. (paradox — love it!) It’s easy because all you have to do is “believe in Him” and you “shall not perish but have eternal life.” But, at least for me, it’s the most difficult thing because what I have to believe is unbelievable and amazingly incomplete! They make it sound simple. “Accept Jesus Christ into your heart.” In Billy Graham’s column, his answer to every single problem was to accept Jesus into your life. But what the hell does that mean??? No one tells you that. And that’s the great delusion — this one time act, according to them, which can be done in a moment of weakness or desperation or terror, is enough to counterbalance a lifetime of doing the most rotten, despicable, awful, repugnant, evil, vile things imaginable. Salvation, to them, is not a life-long process. It’s one single, solitary, isolated, independent act.
Sure, you’re supposed to grow in your Christian life but how much can you really grow going to church a couple hours a week? At least my parents drug us to church twice on Sundays plus Wednesday nights! And if you don’t make any progress well that’s ok, too, because God’s grace is sufficient and as long as you confess all your shortcomings and you really promise to try harder then it’s all hunky dory. All you really have to do is read your Bible and pray. Well, and look the part. That’s the most important thing — nice suit and tie on Sunday morning to cover up all that you don’t want the rest of them to see.
And there’s sermons on the fruits of the Spirit and how to have the faith-filled life and all that jazz. But those are offset by sermons on eternal security and how Paul even had trouble doing what was right. A little coaxing to keep moving and grow but a lot of reassurance if you just can’t quite do it.
So, go ahead and buy into their delusion if you want to. Convince yourself that going to church on Sunday morning and reading the “feel-good” passages in the Bible are enough. Keep a stiff upper lip during the really bad times so no one knows you have doubts. But that’s not what I’m doing. And I may not get very far in this lifetime but at least I’m trying to do something that means something — to me, at least.
Is it possible that our being “drug” kicking and screaming (an experience I’m familiar with) because it’s toward someone else’s belief system? Perhaps those who are so easily drawn to Fundamentalism in any religion (and any ‘packaged deal, so to speak) are unthinking folks who are willing to trade their spiritual or intellectual effort for a type of superficial mental security. I believe the allowing is easy but not because the process is simple (just look at the choices in operating a washing machine, easy but not simple). Didn’t the poet William Blake say “to see the universe in a grain of sand”. I don’t hear the struggle in that. And the beat goes on, and the search goes on… I’d be blessed with one Eureka in a lifetime!
Valerie, I found this in Suzuki’s Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist. Not sure what it has to do with the post but it talks about Blake, whom you mention. (A footnote says that sono-mama is “in the ‘as-it-is-ness’ of things.”)
“Living in the light of eternity” is to get into the oneness and allness of things and to live with it. This is what the Japanese call “seeing things sono-mama” in their suchness, which in William Blake’s terms is to “hold infinity in the palm, of your hand, and eternity is an hour.”
To see things as God sees them, according to Spinoza, is to see them under the aspect of eternity. All human evaluation is, however, conditioned by time and relativity. It is ordinarily difficult for us humans “to see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower.” To our senses, a grain of sand is not the whole world, nor is a wild flower in a corner of the field a heaven. We live in a world of discrimination and our enthusiasm rises from the considerations of particulars. We fail to see them “evenly” or “uniformly” as Meister Eckhart tells us to do, which is also Spinoza’s way. Tennyson must have been in a similar frame of consciousness when he plucked a wild flower out of the crannied wall and held it in his hand and contemplated it.