I've come to realize that Christian Tantra is extremely important; the whole world has been told to go to its room and shut the door. The number of Church congregations who have endangered their members' health by continuing to gather makes me realize that something of the Wisdom teaching at the core of Christianity has been lost. In a way, Christian Tantra is an account of the "prayer to the father who sees in secret." The upshot is, Tantra is also the reward--because, put quite simply, since I began meditating and practicing this way, my life is better. I'd guess that others' lives would be improved by a similar set of tools. [bxA]
On a personal level, I've needed to focus on the basics. Part of my own need for Christian Tantra is something I share with my former theology students: there are so many useless things vying for my attention--shiny objects to which I've gladly conceded my focus--that my ability to be present to things is seriously impaired. Combined with a worldwide pandemic, the narrative careens toward the catastrophic. Luckily, this is part of what the practices of Christian Tantra have begun to heal. There is a balm in Gilead indeed, and Gilead is precisely where each of us is sitting, right now.
It's hard to say why I think Christian Tantra is necessary without presenting a caricature of "Popular Catholicism." I call it "Christian Tantra" (as opposed to "Catholic Tantra") because, while I believe the things I'll speak about to be consistent with the example of Jesus, modern Catholics, particularly American ones, may feel that Christian Tantra lacks historical roots. Fair enough. Further than that, I'll claim, in some cases, to be accurately distilling the silences of Jesus--to accurately read what he is not saying in a way my college theology professors would claim is isogesis--reading into the gospel-- and in a way critics of the monastic scriptural tradition have claimed is psychologizing the gospel. I am guilty on all counts. When I claim to read Jesus' silences correctly, I don't do so lightly. I can only testify that doing so has made the burden of my own ego and attachments lighter.
I've talked before about the overblown sense of egoic permanence in Western Christianity. It's a permanence driven by the mind, and the mind, seeing only illogicality and contradiction, seeks to argue its way out of its self-made prison. While there are exceptions to this--more people than we know wade into the mystical end of the ecclesial pool--I do believe that the popular Catholic mind is shackled to mind, and to concepts. The Enlightenment battle cry was "I think therefore I am." Mixed haphazardly with the scientific revolution's empiricism, Darwin's Origin of the species, and the industrial revolution's way of making workers a cog in so many machines--what that battle cry leaves us with is a populace that thinks at the expense of feeling emotion and sensation, and then is eaten up by remorse, guilt, blame--and addiction upon addiction for those in denial. It's as a tool of this kind of spiritual bypassing--clinging to faith's positivity as a way of ignoring the rot beneath the surface--that religion becomes precisely the opiate of the people that Marx said it was. Either that, or our faith inflates our egos--in other words, we're guilty of the spiritual materialism that Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche talked about, where faith's different "experiences" become things we treat as credentials and lord over others. Either way, the prognosis for religion in modern culture is not terrific at all.
In the hands of one's ego, religious devotion gets abused. We wait in joyful hope for the coming of the Lord, but in the hands of Ego, it seems as if he'll never come. As often as we've prayed the Lord's prayer, we've asked for his kingdom to come, but ego's a drain on our waiting. This is all, too often, invisible to us--so, while ego holds the things of God at arms length, we wonder what we're doing wrong. If it's anything, Christian Tantra is a radical reminder that the solution was never far from us. God is "I AM--" he's closer to us than we are to ourselves. His kingdom is already here: he's not slow as some think of slowness. Instead, when humanity loses its glasses, God waits for us to realize they're already on our face.
By way of Rinzai Zen's koan tradition, I came to something different than illogicality and contradiction. Best case scenario, and always from the other side of confusion, paradox would blink back at me. I would question along with Master Joshu--about whether dogs have a buddha nature--and feel that paradox viscerally until my ego loosened its grip a bit. What was happening was precisely what the pilgrim--the bloke who prayed the Jesus Prayer--talked about. I was descending "with the mind, into the heart." I was embarrassed to feel like I was returning to my own house to find it ransacked. I have more anxiety, more sadness and anger than I care to talk about, and a million little ways I've tried to use those things to manipulate situations. In the humdrum light of claiming my part of universal human schmuckery, I saw I had some house cleaning to do. But I felt, as well, like a new path had opened for me. The suspicion that my problems are universal made me want to talk about the solutions.
Christian Tantra is, in fact, a Wisdom tradition. Life, Death, Sin, Suffering, and bridging the gap between reality and ideal--these are all jobs we can't farm out. They are our crosses to bear. And just as Jesus became sin: too often, they're jobs we can't do without morally getting our hands dirty. Our best attempts reveal thorns in our flesh: relief, at the best, that we've all fallen short, and pleas, at the worst to be freed from this body of death. The point is, our speech is often warped by an inflated sense of its own usefulness. Much of Christianity rests on a weird entitlement some have felt to instruct or exhort others--Paul speaks, for instance, of his right to correct the communities he founded. Even leaving our hypocrisy aside and assuming the best of intentions--unless compelled by angst or impelled by admiration and desire, no one will change who still has an excuse not to.
Christian Tantra is non-transcendental. (I'm indebted, here, to the Tantra scholar Christopher Wallace, for naming the inter-religious tantric commonality I'd been babbling about for years.) When I say it's non-transcendental, I mean things like "Heaven will take care of itself if we face the ways we make our reality a hell. Being "Good" will take care of itself so long as we don't ignore the ways we cooperate with evil. Ego and attachment and desire will take care of themselves so long as we acknowledge they're there, and admit, as Psalm 6 says, that our bodies and souls are racked with pain because of it. In other words, Christian Tantra starts with the parts of reality we'd prefer to ignore, the center of which is our own bodies. The Flesh remembers all things. Jesus descended into hell. He ascended into heaven. The body is the entire stage on which we make his journey.
Christian Tantra--distinct from the dualistic nature of Christianity's classic formulations--is a "theistic monist" religious outlook. That means that the Godhead somehow is creation. A few cautions: God isn't confined to his creation, as in pantheism or animism. Though there are bits of truth in traditions that say otherwise, for Christian Tantrikas, no tree or spirit, no finite thing at all has the creds to sell itself as divine. But we have a God who named himself "I AM" and then incarnated in the fullness of time. We have a redeemer who lived a whole incarnation to recapitulate all things, who made himself present in bread; who said he was sheep gates and shepherds, and vines and a light for the way, if those who had eyes would just see it. Paul hints that his true self is hidden with God--in a place that St. Therese of Lisieux later found, calling the Christian an other-Christ.
To begin, Christian Tantra makes bold to admit Christ is the name for "things as they are." In the end, God is, but isn't confined to all things. It's a reality to which the sacraments have pride of place as a wake-up call. Ultimately, though, Christian Tantrikas--those who practice Christian Tantra-- find the source and the summit wherever they are along the way...egos may say that some things give more grace than others, that some vocations are holier than others. Christian Tantrikas wait for that clanging gong to stop ringing. The toll on their serenity is too costly to get caught in those traps. And anyway, an old monk once said wisdom means admitting everyone's right and everyone's wrong. Everything else will drive you nuts.
More than anything, Christian Tantra is a practice that penetrates deeply through the many layers of embodied reality. I can talk about "theistic monism" all day, but if I am ignoring any aspect of my reality, claiming the role of a teacher will just gain me suffering. Thought doesn't exist in a vacuum, there are emotions attached to it. Those emotions aren't just ethereal things, they come attached to particular sensations in the body. Until that whole incarnate chain reaction is witness, accepted and nurtured, the body will be a prison.
Christian Tantra is a non-dual philosophy that incorporates all of a Tantrika's faculties. It's a system of practice undergirded by some very specific foundational principles. I'll talk about those things in great detail. For now, to suffice the "why does it matter" question: I talked about spiritual bypassing and spiritual materialism as errors to which society is prone. The fact is, I know both because I've had my hands in both, up to my elbows and for years. I noticed myself misreading my own spiritual data and skipping important steps, because there was a change in my serenity. I became more anxious. I was having to do more work to keep up the façade--that I was fabulous and everything was going swimmingly. I became increasingly exhausted.
To admit the errors in my faith life was scary...I'd invested 14 years in an image built on how exclusively graced I felt my life was. I'd said all the prayers, I'd gone to the wilderness, I'd punished my body with fasting and I'd kept silence. But to shed it was a relief. And I suppose that's why I'm writing: to talk about the new practice that finally has me able, in the silence, to sit still. I'm hoping--no, I'm betting-- that those who can empathize are more numerous as my worries were legion.
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