Buddhism, The Four Spiritual Pains, and Christ

Buddhism (as reported by Richard Rohr, the celebrate Franciscan contemplative) identifies  Four Limitless Qualities: loving kindness (maitri), compassion, joy, and equanimity.

The American Book of Living and Dying - a wonderful text often favored by hospice chaplains, identifies four areas of universal spiritual pain, often faced by those who are dying: Meaning/Purpose, Relatedness, Forgiveness, and Hope.

It seems to me that these two sets of ideas can be connected together...layered. Also, that the central living-giving truths of the Christian Way - that is Christ Himself - provide a uniquely effective way to satisfy the deepest human needs that these two sets of 'four' map out:

Meaning and Purpose: Each human person has a profound need to to matter, to have made a difference, to have discovered our place in the universe. That is, we need to have understood that we, our life, has meaning and that we exist for a reason.
The Buddhist value of equanimity connects here, and closely resemble what Christians mean by 'peace', We find balance - equanimity and peace when we are at rest in ourselves. This comes when our unrest is satisfied. When we discover that our purpose is to love God, others and ourselves, when we have insight that the meaning of our lives is to worship and love God, we find rest for our souls, we can focus our seeking and yearning and it finds its satisfaction in discovering the loving God who is above us, beside us and within us. This active, growing rest, is what Augustine spoke of when he said that 'we find our rest when we rest in thee', meaning Christ. Christ alone purposes us and gives us meaning and thus we find equanimity in Him. The Gospel of John calls this 'abiding'.

Relatedness refers to the ability to relate to people, places, times and things (pets even) and yet to hsve the grace to let these connections slip away and release, especially as we die. you can see that this requires great peace and a certains restful , centeredness in Christ, to do well. Only when we have anchored our meaning and purpose in Christ and found equanimity, can we yield up all other relationships. The Buddhist quality of Loving Kindness connects here because it is essentially a relational quality. Kindness is shown from one creature to another - in relationship. Love is also a relational quality. What Buddhists call maitri, what Jews call hesed, is this Loving Kindness - sometimes rendered in Judeo-Christian circles as mercy - although I think that word has come to mean something slightly different these days.) Hesed is an essential quality of the One True and Living God - Yahweh - who came to us as Jesus Christ. On the cross, Christ demonstrated the ultimate and one-time-forever relational loving kindness when God died to absorbs and nullify the power of all death and darkness so that we might be free from death and it's seed, sin Sin is essentially broken relationship.

Forgiveness can follow now that the cross means that God has forgiveness us. As we respond to this wonderful truth and accept God's forgiveness, we can offer forgiveness to others. All the offenses against us pale in scope and significance when we gain insight into the depth to which God has forgiveness each of us, and us collectively. Only when we have forgiveness another person, can we have full compassion with them. Compassion means to have co-passion - to 'feel together' with them. To allow ourselves to feel what they are feeling. Indeed I have long held that compassion is not only a fruit of forgiveness but also it's precursor. When we can climb into another person's shoes, then we can understand them, realize that we are not so very different from them, and in turn find the compassion to forgive them. God has compassion toward us, that is he is forgiving toward us. The Cross enacts His compassion and forgiveness as God was alone able to clear away all that stands between a healed relationship between us and Him.

Finally, Hope, which is the prospect of life and goodness, the sum of all that has gone before, is yet ahead of us. The dying can die in hope because God has broken death and provided eternal life. Those who die without God , die with crippled hope. Hope is not just for death but for every moment of life. Indeed the contemplatives of both Christianity and Buddhism encourage us all to live 'in the moment' by which they really mean to live fully alive - to have life and to have it abundantly. Christ alone brings thi s hope and abundant life. Without hope there is no joy - Joy and Hope are synonymous in that hopelessness and joylessness are also synonymous. Just ask anyone who has faced suicide. Hope, Joy, Life - these words travel together. They are facets of Christ, who alone brings Joyful Hope, Hopeful Joy.

To Christ be the glory, Prince of Peace, the Hope of Nations, Minister of Reconciliation, The Way, the Truth and the Life, now and for all ages, Amen!

Ashley Madison and Germanwings

This is a two - part post.  Here a brief thought from earlier this year that I did not publish at the time.

Depressed Morality April 17, 2015
Today I have been taking in the enormity of the Germanwings aircraft crash, in which, it now seems, the co-pilot locked the captain out of the cockpit and flew the airplane into a mountainside at full speed, killing all aboard.  The cockpit sound recorder carries the steady sound of the co-pilot's breathing and the screams of the passengers just as the airplane hit the ground.
     Subsequent reporting reveals that the co-pilot had been suffering for some years with bouts of depression.  Of course lots of people suffer with bouts of depression without intentionally murdering almost 200 people - men women and children.  It seems to me that something else must have been happening in that man's mind.

Now for a more recent musing - Ashley Madison
The Ashley Madison website for married people who are seeking to commit adultery, or at least play with the idea - was always reprehensible to me.  So I  don't feel any sorrow for the 33 million people whose identity has been revealed in the recent hack and Internet-publishing of their client base.  What has surprise me is that they had 33 million paying customer. The NYT reports that only 3 zip codes in the USA did not have payin Ashley Madison customers - two is Alaska and one in New Mexico, all are tiny towns with sometime intermittent Internet connectivity.  Wow.  What does this tell me?  Some commentators write that this is another fruit of the individualism and the metaphysical-sexual fulfilment culture that is the zeitgeist of our culture. I agree.

I'm not making any further connection between the Germanwings mass-murder and Ashley Madison, except this - that in both there is the assertion that the need of the individual trumps the needs of the 'other'.  That pilot was surely mentally unwell - and just how and in what way, we will never know. What we do know is that he chose his own perceived and immediate needs over the very lives of 200 people.
 Surely those who act out their need for further sexual excitement than their marriage currently provides, are engaging in deeply selfish short term thinking that will reap deep and long lasting pain in the very souls of their spouses, parents, children and friends. Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.

I yearn to ever more become the sort of person who embodies a deep, loyal, empowering, dignifying presence not just in my own self, but in the community and families that I am a part of.  More and more I see this Christian life as shared.  Truly no person lives alone. Our lives are not our individual fiefdoms, they are a shared and deeply connected organic life in which sin never affects just the sinner, and love never can be contained in just one soul.  Both ripple through the connections that are the essential us.

I acknowledge the darkness, sin and dysfunction that remains in me, a work-in-progress, a sinner saved by grace and currently being sanctified by Christ.  Inside me is a little piece of the Germanwings pilot. Inside me is the potential to be in the Ashley Madison shame database. There is no them, only us. Thanks be the Christ, the author and sustainer of our faith, our life, our hope.