Thich Nhat Hanh, a well-known Vietnamese Buddhist monk, said
one day to Thomas Merton: We don’t teach meditation to the young monks
-- they are not ready for it until they stop slamming doors. Another teacher, Richard Rohr, cites this
in order to show that spiritual practice really does mean and require ongoing change
from within. It is easy to use religious
or spiritual profession to present oneself otherwise than we really are. I imagine we have all done it. It is even easier, I have to say, once you
have clad yourself in a cassock and gown, a surplice or a clerical collar, a
mitre or a cope.
Anthony Trollope in The
Warden, the first of his wonderful Barsetshire series, introduces us to the
Rev Septimus Harding, who is entirely without guile, a man apparently incapable
of pretence or dissimulation. Trollope’s
story tells how such a man scarcely survives in the church, let alone in a
devious world. He would be eaten alive
today. In the saga he is contrasted with
his son-in-law, Archdeacon Theophilus Grantly, and with the new Bishop of
Barchester, Dr Proudie, to say nothing of the lamentable Mrs Proudie -- and not
forgetting his chaplain, the execrable Rev Obadiah Slope – all of whom spend their
days plotting how to get what they want and still come up smelling of roses.
We do it more subtly these days… perhaps. But I have had parishioners who took pride in
never changing, or had some heavy investment in refusing to forgive, or in
assuming that they were somehow exempt from the clear teachings of Jesus. As Kierkegaard put it, religious people
regard the Sermon on the Mount much as they might set their watches
deliberately a little fast, so that although seeming to be late they might
still get there on time.
Contemplative life and prayer is a journey, along which,
what we might become in Christ and what we are in fact now come closer and
closer together – much as a chemist might add something to a cloudy liquid and
as we watch it clears and becomes transparent.
Classical teaching explains the changes in us as the gracious action of
God, diminishing the ego -- the ego being the accumulation of our various masks
and social strategies and what we do to be accepted; it includes the power of
memories over us, our care of self first – and bringing to life the true self,
the person God always saw before we were born, and knows and loves. It is not so much improving us as changing
us, finding us, not so much renovation as retrieval or even resurrection.
And so the young Buddhist monk will have to wait until it
dawns on him that his impatience and bad temper, all his emotions and
reactions, are not the issue. Growth
means change. It means discovering how
to sit lightly to these things, or even to let go of them and relinquish
control, how to avoid taking ourselves so seriously, how to make friends with
risk or doubt or mystery – and how to stop slamming doors.
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