Practises for The Faithful Incarnate: Part 1

Sarah Coakley wrote a ravishing set of meditations for Easter entitled "Meaning beyond meaning" available here. Oh, do read them - and slowly - if you have a chance. I have found the ones I have read and spent time with rich and rewarding. The last section is the Noli me tangere incident and it has provided sure guidance and deepened my own reflections on the question I left off with in the last post.

I had an inkling that the key was going to be Practice. Coakley encourages us to believe in 3 possible, (and yes, granted,) extraordinarily demanding things; and not only to believe them, but to practise them, with soul and mind and body, on and on up to your life's end, until you come to "see the Lord" face to face. Practice of what, specifically? Three specific things based on the first encounter with the resurrected Jesus. They are

• the practice of death and
• the practice of turning, and finally
• allowing for these prior practices to open the heart and the mind to enable a vision of Christ 

In the next few posts I'll share how these make sense for the time being for me. As to the third point, that is a constantly unfolding mystery and one that I do not think I can approach any way but 'slant'.

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To 'practice death' might seem a strange idea but it is not without Biblical foundation. Paul in his epistle to the Romans writes that we are 'to die with Christ' and be 'baptized into his death'. As Coakley notes, Paul's call is uncomfortably at odds with the individualizing drive in modern (particularly western) societies. For me, however, there is something recognizable in the call, something familiar that I have witnessed and learned from living in this far eastern milieu. Here, where people take belonging to the land, the culture, the family and the group with the utmost seriousness, the self is not at the centre in the same way as it is in western (and invariably more multi-cultural) societies. As the stereotype goes, the Japanese are a group-oriented people. I catch glimpses every now and then and think that this might well resemble what the early church looked like for is not this strong sense of dependence and interdependence within the group surely at the root of the word 'religion' (Old French: 'obligation, bond, reverence; Latin: to bind)?

There are these informing virtues, too, that (ideally? in my opinion and experience?) flavour Japanese morality and which have had great and lasting impact particularly on the traditional arts. I remember being shocked in my early days here talking with a lady who was going to 'a tea lesson'. I asked her how long she had been taking lessons and she told me she'd been a student for more than 25 years. I confess my younger self did wonder whether she was an inordinately slow learner, or, giving her the benefit of the doubt, if 'making tea' was especially hard to learn.

Mastery, I have since learned, is intimately connected to the practice of death. I took up calligraphy, Japanese brush writing, and learned something of the lesson there. You practice and practice and practice, and then practice some more, and then some, until, like the line from Yeats--"How can we know the dancer from the dance?"--you are at one with what is true. Coakley notes that it is only by 'handing ourselves over', into a seeming loss of selfhood, absorbing ourselves in the practice (prayer, sacraments and service) that we will 'find our true selves - the living Christ-like selves that God longs us to be.' But note well, you do not know how that is going to look or how it is going to feel. Therein lies the rub.

A draft sketch on unstretched paper and below, a photo, of the mounted verse

Once upon a time I found a poem, or part of a poem, by the Zen Buddhist master, Dogen. It read: 'Forget the self. Become one with ten thousand things.' (I do love those ten thousand things!) I decided it would be a nice reminder and went about thinking about the ideograms I could use that would come close enough to what I heard Dogen's words trying to say. With my teacher's advice I settled on 'mu ga mu shin'. Muga means selflessness, self-effacement, self-renunciation, 'no self' -- the Buddhist concept that in nothing does there exist an inherent self, soul, ego. All of which may be easier to digest in the words of John Muir, he of the Californian woods, who said, 'When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.' Mu shin means a kind of freedom or innocence, something like the kind of heaven Jesus recognizes as most fit for children (Matt. 18:3). In adultspeak, mushin means to be free from obstructive thoughts. I am not a Buddhist but I find I am surrounded by the ethos and it is gentle and it has gentled me.

But this verse made me wretched. The painting became a painful reminder of the chasm between my vision and ambition and what came out of my brushes. My teacher saw no such thing; she liked what I had painted so much she deemed it worthy of framing on a scroll. Why, oh why did I ever agree? And having had it mounted on a silk scroll, I then had to sit with it in an exhibition for days on end. Oh, the woe of it, the burning shame of it. I couldn't stand to look at it. But what I learned was what Dogen had to teach, I suppose, though for a time those ten thousand things bugged the hell out of me and I confess to having been filled with 'obstructive thoughts'!

Coakley writes

But when, in all the difficulties and agonies that authentic prayer brings, we realize that persevering in it means "handing over" the reins of control to God and just letting Christ's Spirit pray within us, then we begin to see that our false, conscious, striving self has to go. And as that self is worn away in a process that feels like death, something unimaginably mysterious starts to emerge - the new life of selfhood that is Christ's own and which transcends all individualism. To be a Christian is to "practise death" in this way, until we are no longer afraid of death; and when we are no longer afraid of death, we are no longer afraid of life - the ecstatic, abundant Life that Jesus holds out to us.

 *

"Be brave, cherry blossoms
 and fall!"


the little trout
~Issa

                                                           心して桜ちれちれ鮎小鮎

                                                kokoro shite sakura chire-chire ayu ko ayu