re: a newfound appreciation

Before publishing my last post, I sent a copy to Simon asking him what he thought. Because I think it's worth sharing (with his permission, of course), here's his reply:

I like the blog. You are tunelling from your end as I from mine and we appear to be on track to meet in the middle.

Your scepticism about Mystery is shared, I am sure, by many people, myself among them. Most, if not all, the 'institutional' depictions leave me cold - indeed, they often arouse my deepest doubts. It makes it hard to address what I see as one of the greatest dangers facing us today, the danger of dying of spiritual thirst for all the best reasons.

As you may remember, I use the image of the desert to symbolise our trek through life - and I must recognise the influence of Nietzsche's myth in Also Sprach Zarathustra. What seems to me to have happened is that the yearning that Saint Augustine describes is no longer experienced, just as thirst finally goes away despite approaching death. This is not the "God-shaped hole", not a hole at all, it is the thirst that the Psalmist sings about. Augustine's actual words are:

Man [sic] is one of your creatures, Lord, and
his instinct is to praise you. He bears about
him the mark of death…But still, since he is a
part of your creation, he wishes to praise you.
The thought of you stirs him so deeply that he
cannot be content unless he praises you,
because you made us for yourself and our
hearts find no peace until they rest in you.

Augustine, Confessions, Book I, section I.
[Translated by R. S. Pine-Coffin (London:
Penguin, 1961)]

In Buddhism, I find the same sort of expression in the poetry, music and stories which are, for me, even more indicative than 'serious' sutras.

You, dear friend, have often demonstrated the breadth and depth of your knowledge of the Pali Canon and I hope that you take time to turn away from dry-as-dust texts to find the mind of Buddhism in Buddhist art. In Christianity, too, as you learn more about the oldest forms of it in Eastern Christianity, look at the history of icons and mosaic art (and the brief periods of iconoclasm): that is where the 'soul' of the beliefs reside.

Let me leave this with two among the texts that I use to calm my mind before mediation, which are quoted in Sogyal Rinpoche's book on Living and Dying:

No words can describe it
No example can point to it
Samsara does not make it worse
Nirvana does not make it better
It has never been born
It has never ceased
It has never been liberated
It has never been deluded
It has never existed
It has never been nonexistent
It has no limits at all
It does not fall into any kind of category
(Dudjom Rinpoche)

Profound and tranquil, free from complexity,
Uncompounded luminous clarity,
Beyond the mind of conceptual ideas;
This is the depth of the mind of the Victorious Ones.
In this there is not a thing to be removed,
Nor anything that needs to be added.
It is merely the immaculate
Looking naturally at itself.
(Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche)

Now I shall turn back to examining Article 13 of the Anglican Articles of Religion from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, which is remarkably apposite when we consider dialogue between belief families:

XIII. Of Works before Justification

Works done before the grace of Christ, and the Inspiration of his Spirit, are not pleasant to God, forasmuch as they spring not of faith in Jesus Christ, neither do they make men meet to receive grace, or (as the School-authors say) deserve grace of congruity: yea rather, for that they are not done as God hath willed and commanded them to be done, we doubt not but they have the nature of sin.

BCP 1662

Nice thoughts, eh? But what if we substitute political, national or racial terms?