Paradox is the silence of God. In the silence of God, as the heart sutra says, form is emptiness and emptiness is form. All times are now, all places are here. Interbeing is a real thing: everything is part of everything else, including its opposite. In the silence of God, all potential is actualized. The silence of God is the Koan of koans.
To steal an idea from Jordan B. Peterson: our paradigm for God echoes our self concept because they formed at the same time. Our idea of God “speaking” or “forming us with his hands” is an account of what it was like for us to transition from a preverbal to a verbal society, from a society that doesn’t use tools or throw pots, to a society that does.
So, for God as it was for us, to speak is a twofold maneuver: for one thing, it’s a journey from the general and potential to the actualized and specific. To say one thing is not to say another. To make one clay form is not to make another. Articulation is, on some level, loss. For another thing, though, all articulation contains a reminder of the whole, the original unity. Since we’re a “Word of God” our speech is, forever, the articulation of an articulation. It’s fuzzy, like a copy of a copy. So for us, speech comes more easily than remembrance. Writ large over the whole of human history, the problem only engrains more deeply.
Some traditions have a better program than others for facilitating, on a deep, felt level, the richness present in the silence of God. Zen, by prioritizing transformation and giving the negative principle mu the pride of place it has, does a better job of transmitting living memory of interbeing. It recognizes and deals prudently with, the root of the problem: a dualistic mindset. A Zen Student who is “working on mu” shuts down his rational mind. Sure, there are different forms, but form is emptiness: a tree becomes a flower becomes a trash heap. Christianity has, in large part, baptized a dualistic mindset, and in turn graffittied dualism across its cosmic paradigm. This gives Christian theology more moving parts than it needs. Transubstantiation and Divinization both employ platonic philosophy. Divinization says that we can all become God by a concert of wills and rigorous mix of imitation and intimacy. Transubstantiation says bread and wine can become the body and blood of Christ if the right words are said by the right people over the right substances. In the west, the innermost nature of things becomes a divine baseball card, traded poorly by those unaware of their value, and well by the more savvy.
Hinduism, in its ability to accept the Goddess Shiva, does a better job of conveying the deconstructive or destructive aspects of divine, and therefore human life. In Christianity, destruction is a natural evil, a consequence of human sin. Even the most pointed meditation on the image and likeness of God can’t backpedal fast enough to counter that. We create theologies that add some force to our backpedaling, but it doesn’t solve anything because it misses the dualistic mind, the source of the problem.
Meanwhile, our own finitude isn’t a consequence of sin, it’s part of not being the creator. Jesus’ kenosis may expiate sin, but it also recapitulates all creation, restoring to all things the dignity they possessed before the fall, and to all people the ability to accept their common finitude. These “deconstructions” are part of the divine life, not a consequence of primordial mistakes.
The processes by which apophatic spiritualities let go of divine ruckus to embrace the peace of the here and now isn’t a consequence of sin, it’s an acceptance of createdness. Wisdom literature in general exhorts us to remember that “all flesh is like the grass.” Myriad sacred texts echo the rule of St. Benedict when it counsels the constant remembrance of death.
When I first brought the idea of Logos as Mu to a Hindu friend, he listened intently. After I was done, and after a small, pregnant pause, all he said was “Om Nama Shivaya”—in other words, when I posited that perhaps the negative, deconstructive and destructive principle was lodged in the windpipe of God, he praised the Goddess of destruction. The Triune God may be Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier, but his creatures were finite from the start, which makes Jesus and the Spirit co-conspiring catchers in the trust-fall of life, quite apart from the realities of sin.
For me, increased mental noise begets anxiety. If remembering I’m part of the whole involves two steps in Zen, and five in Christianity, Zen is the path of peace. If, for un-nuanced Christianity, all deterioration routes through the moralizing gauntlet of human mistakes, then we owe it the nuance that Logos as Mu lends: perhaps dualism is the real problem, but one that comes simply from being the creation we are.
There is only one center point. Maps are great efforts to show it: the Judeo-Christian map has important landmarks. Peace is the still middle of Christian contemplation. Tranquility is in the way that Brother Lawrence’s “Practice of the Present Moment” meets the divine in all things. Serenity is the fruit of Jewish “Remembrance” that unites past with present, and the end of all wisdom literature’s meditation on death. On the journey, the Western Mind requires, and most Western Spiritualities take, too winding and anxious a path to that point. I need to remember that, while there may be one, winding path for me, there are many direct paths for God. The map I have is a good one, it’s just incomplete. What I discover, I draw in.
But not too much. After all, on the path, there’s pausing to do. Once in a while, a bloke’s gotta smell the flowers.
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