On December 10, 1968, the body of Father Louis was found in the cottage where he was staying while attending a monastic conference near Bangkok. A short circuited Hitachi fan lay across his chest, but some observers felt the wound on the back of his head was not consistent with a fall, due to either electrocution or heart attack, possible natural causes of death, leading many, including the theologian Matthew Fox, to suspect that he had been assassinated by the CIA, that the scene discovered there at that Red Cross conference center was staged. I’m not a huge fan of conspiracy theories, but the CIA did that sort of thing a lot back then, though they were less brazen than the Russian, North Korean, and Saudi assassination squads that ply their trade around the globe today.
It might have made sense for the CIA to take out Brother Louis, for under his given name, Thomas Merton, he was one of the most influential Catholic thinkers in America at the time, a committed pacifist in a time of war, a supporter of interfaith dialogue, and a Catholic friend to Buddhist leaders, including the Vietnamese Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh and the Dalai Lama, the temporal and spiritual leader of free Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism. Vietnam was burning hot in 1969, not just from the napalm we were dropping from the sky, not just because of the struggle between the Chinese-backed Communist north and the very corrupt US-backed south, but also because of the struggle between Catholics and Buddhists within the south, the former group considered the elite who had collaborated with the former colonial power, France. Yet here was Merton, a Catholic friend to Buddhists, traveling in the region.
This is how I got to Buddhism, this weird route, not through Beat poets like the great Gary Snyder, but through this Trappist monk, Thomas Merton. I suppose the Catholic spiritual director who first recommended Merton’s influential autobiography to me, “The Seven-Story Mountain,” had expected me to stop reading after that volume. He obviously didn’t know me that well. One of the most dog-eared volumes in my library is a second-hand copy of “The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton,” a work assembled by faithful editors after that last fatal trip.
Merton’s appreciation for non-Christian spiritual practice comes through on every page, even as he remains firm in his own Catholic monastic practice and belief. Merton sees the parallels between the Catholic and Buddhist traditions, especially around contemplative prayer and meditation. He just doesn’t feel the need to change his own location, that of a Trappist.
I continue to love many aspects of Catholic spirituality, though I’m not a Catholic, of monasticism, though I am not a monk, of Buddhism, even though I am not a Buddhist. I especially love the Buddhist belief we errantly call emptiness, for it does not have a good English translation. Thich Nhat Hanh tells us it might better be described as inter-being, a verb, a state of coexistence not as discrete and separate, but as overlapping and entangled, though the last term is one I borrow from the world of the quantum. He argues that inter-being necessitates compassion, for that person is you too, and you are them, an idea that is especially challenging in our social Darwinist world of tribalism and othering. I’m also drawn to the parallel with Christ’s teaching that the hungry, the poor, the imprisoned, are Christ, and by extension, you too are Christ.
Thich Nhat Hanh gets there, to emptiness or inter-being, in one of his most famous teachings, with a newspaper and the Heart Sutra, the text we heard echoed in the dialogue from “Little Buddha,” the last line of that sutra tattooed in Sanskrit on my right arm, “Gate, Gate, Paragate, Parasamgate, Bodhi Svaha,” which can loosely be translated “Gone, gone to the other shore, everyone gone together to the other shore, awakening! Rejoice!”
For if you co-exist with your sister and brother, inter-are with them in the words of the Zen master, see the Christ in them, than Enlightenment means you want to bring everyone along, must bring everyone along. The Bodhisattva, a title rather than an individual name, has attained Enlightenment, but chooses to remain here, on this side of Nirvana, reincarnating as a lama in the Tibetan tradition, precisely because enlightenment is love and compassion.
This is very different from the enlightenment we find in today’s Hebrew Scripture text, text that many of us find challenging for a whole score of reasons, from what it says about God to what it has been claimed to say about women. Though, for the record, I’m totally cool with giving snakes the blame for everything. My love of all of God’s creatures hits a snag when it comes to poisonous fangs.
It might not be a particularly useful ancient myth, at least the answer it gives us is not useful, but the question is, for like Siddhartha sitting under the Bodhi Tree, the question that is asked is a whole slew of questions really… What am I? What is consciousness? What is this thing that faces two directions, faces out toward the world, but also faces back toward self, an ambiguous observer that I call “me.”?
I read this story of the tree of knowledge as a story of epiphany, self-awareness, a sort of enlightenment, not the selfless and spiritual enlightenment of the Buddhist, but rather that “aha” moment where knowledge of self-existence also means, by default, knowledge of non-existence. Thoughtful people have always asked existential questions and used the tools they had at hand to craft answers, however provisional, the speculation of Genesis, the speculation of the physicist facing the mystery of the Big Bang, and that is what this is, ancient Hebrews using story to try to make sense of that almost-not-yet of engaged being.
Again, and with apologies to the herpetologists among us, but I’m okay with throwing the snake under the bus. I want to get at this other question, what does it mean to be human, human within ourselves, human amongst other humans, human in this creation, human before mystery, mystery some of us name as God. And I don’t have the answers. The best I can do is live into the questions.
And here we are in Lent, and I could have chosen the reading with the temptation of Jesus in the desert, an easy sermon on passing through the hard stuff in life, but not for me, the easy way…
Many of us are in the desert already, and if we are not in the desert, we certainly know others who are. We don’t need to be told “happy desert!” What we need are skills. We need tools, flint and steel and knife and tarp. We need a map and compass.
The tool I’d like to suggest as a Lenten discipline is the sort of prayer Father Louis practiced at the Abbey, the sort that he believed had analogs in other traditions, in Buddhism for sure, but also in Judaism and Islam. It is the sort of prayer that is not transactional, is not prayer and petition, but is instead a letting go.
I’d like to suggest some empty time where we don’t try to think, for we think in words, and we have thrown enough words at mystery across the centuries, all to no avail. You words cannot contain waves and stars and blood pumping through a heart of love.
Just stop. Just stand there before mystery. Even if only for a few moments a day, stop thinking about everything you don’t like, the minutia about which we complain ceaselessly. Stop trying to control everything. As much as I love Nike, the brand and their slogan, for just a small time in Lent, don’t “just do it.” Instead, just be.
That’s going to be hard. As a group, those attracted to our way of following Jesus tend to over-think and over-function.
Just be. Go for a walk. Listen to Mahler. No analysis! Just existence.
Lent is long enough for analysis, repentance, for chasing down every rabbit-hole of sin and imperfection. Next week, we can go back to making our plans and trying to control everything. This week, just be. Instead of “Who am I? What is this? Am I still when I am not?” Instead of all that…
I am.
We are.
This is.
Love.
Empty and hungry, we come to the table.