Kairos, Koans and Conversion: 4, Divinization

St. John says “the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Because koans unite opposites in the here and now, I know how I would handle half of this. But the other half of this Koan is overt about what it involves: namely what the Christian West calls “Divinization.”  My initial impulse is to see this as a dissolving of egoic boundaries into God.  But this old foundation begins to crumble from the start.

Jerusalem’s temple is a good image for my sense of self.  Post exile, the Jews returned to find temple destroyed and society in ruins.  Similarly, given the baggage I bring to spiritual efforts, I feel destroyed from the start.  Just as the jews hoped return to the Promised Land would induce calm or offer real prospects for rest, I hoped the same thing about spiritual life.  Were my ego the temple, I’d still be jockeying between working too hard to rebuild the house, and avoiding it altogether.  I haven’t found a consistent space of presence, that listens to God’s Law with renewed placidity, even with hammer in hand.

Jesus got to a place where he became the temple.  He yielded so completely to God that he allowed the temple to be destroyed, with full faith that it would be rebuilt and resurrected.  I’m not there yet.  If I’ve had other incarnations, I don’t remember them, and I tend to feel so unequal to this life’s demands as to spend give zero thought to the hereafter.  I’m still seeing too many similes, not enough metaphors.  I’m becoming like Jesus, not being myself.  While I may be attempting to do what Jesus did, there remains too much mental noise between me and “doing what I’m doing.”

Granted, the level of the ego is dualistic from the get-go.  But my false self is damaged, unable to do even the things for which a healthy defense mechanism is designed.  Adult Children of Alcoholics would say I have an externally referenced sense of self.  I’m prone to addiction, and too hooked on drama.  In terms of Koanic work, when the ego is damaged to begin with, I don’t know how to handle the collapse into oneness that Divinization requires.

One of my two best friends is a jewish bloke with years of Buddhist practice.  We met in the monastery, at a time when we were both discovering deep spiritual wounds, as well as a shared ambivalence about redemption.  He was the one to name it: we both needed a redeemer. But at the time, I was facing the reality of my own codependence, imbibing a 12-step tradition that said things like “God won’t do for you what you are unwilling to do for yourself” and again “you alone can do it, but you cannot do it alone.”  I was as apt to isolate and overwork as I was to be needy and pass the buck.  Neither are a fabulous way to treat prospective messiahs.

My friend was ambivalent for his own reasons.  He felt the pressure all Jews feel, to explain why he didn’t—nay, couldn’t—believe in Jesus.  Religiously, he had only ever been superficially Jewish, but culturally, he knew that conversion to Christianity would be too deep a betrayal.  For a while he dabbled uncomfortably in Chabad Judaism—it emphasized the performance of mitzvahs—and empathized with the messianic longings of the Hasidim, but he’d formally committed to neither.

In short, we both felt the survivor’s guilt of our brokenness.  Pulled between responsibility and dependence, we needed what the messiah’s redemptive death offered, yet it conflicted with the call to become what we needed, a call that echoed in the teaching “if you find the Buddha, kill him.”  I can’t speak for my friend, but over the years I’ve discovered what for me, is the source of the tension.

Both Contemplative Christianity and Zen have a caricature of prayer practice: in both, the goal is to get “beyond” or “go deeper than” the pain of our lives so as to be blessed by an amorphous ultimate reality beneath or beyond everything.  That caricature comes from a spiritualized, egoic program for enlightenment in which God is wholly “other,” the events of our lives are the American Ninja Warrior course we navigate to get to him, and the redeemer is the drug we take to achieve the finish line despite our own deficiencies.

Such a vision is not what prayer or redemption are about.

Realizations are great.  But they are only half of a healthy contemplative practice.  To my “Aha Moments” it’s important to add “Here We Go Again” moments.  These are the moments of confronting my perennial obstacles. Whether those obstacles be generational pain (such as parental dysfunction) or a natural evil (such as growing up disabled, or a general resistance to mortality), that pain is actually more a cavern than it is an obstacle.  Just as the the Logos is a negative space I enter into, so the open wounds of my damaged ego are habitable spaces, with much to teach me.  The “solution” is not to stumble through its sharp, dark corners looking for an exit.  The solution to such pain, each time it arises, is to sit in its center, where it’s warm and safe and my voice echoes clearest.  Indeed, when my own anxious chest becomes the cavern in which I am sitting, God will be there.  Anyone or anything that makes that sitting in that tension possible qualifies as Christ.

“The Word was with God, and the Word was God.”  When this post began, I was focused on the union between God and man. I temporarily forgot that a Koan unites opposites.  My wounds are precisely the places I feel least like the God I need to become.  But I’ve cause to hope those are precisely the cramped and confused spaces where my redemption is actualized.  If, as saint Paul says, my true self is “hidden with Christ in God” then the mechanics of egoic collapse include admitting I’m not God and being utterly confused about who I am.  While The “Aha” moments might provide exile with a leaven I understandably crave, ultimately the “here we go again” moments are the places where God makes real return to myself possible. 

The book of Ezra says: 

When the builders laid the foundation of the temple of the Lord, all the people responded with a great shout when they praised the Lord... But many of the priests and Levites and heads of families, old people who had seen the first house on its foundations, wept with a loud voice when they saw this house, though many shouted aloud for joy, so that the people could not distinguish the sound of the joyful shout from the sound of the people’s weeping.

In your hearing and mine, in the here and the now, this scripture is fulfilled.