Enacting the Spiritual Self: Buddhist-Christian Identity As Participatory Action

Nothing vivifies the First Noble Truth of Buddhism—dukkha, suffering, the impossibility of satisfaction—like the act of writing. Recently I sat in a coffee shop and rewrote a single sentence for nearly an hour. The argument refused to advance. Words bounced against my skull. I just knew my efforts dishonored the material. Nothing worked. And then the mountain spoke. Ten minutes later I was hiking up Evey Canyon in the foothills of Mount Baldy in Southern California. Among the old-growth oaks, beside a spring-fed stream, the noisy concepts in my head dropped away. I returned to my body: footsteps, breath, sunlight on skin, vivid blue sky, scent of sage, croaking of ravens. Anxiety evaporated. I became present to the world.

To walk this path again in memory risks entering deceptive territory. It is difficult, if not risky, to reflect critically on one’s own spiritual experience, and Belden Lane has noted that an author’s self-disclosure creates significant challenges for scholarship in Christian spirituality and those who write it.¹ Yet, Buddhist practice demands examination of personal experience. Buddhist thought discourages conceptual analysis or evaluation of the experiences of others, even under the guise of “critical distance.” So to protect myself and others, I am adopting here the method of critical interiority, something Mary Frohlich describes as “critical self-presence,”² a knowing-what-you-do-as-you-do-it. In this effort I am assisted by the practice of vipassana or insight meditation, the core discipline of Theravada Buddhism, which I have engaged for nearly thirty years. Vipassana hones non-interpretive awareness of subtle, ever-changing movements of the body, thoughts, sensations, and consciousness.

Critical self-presence may be especially crucial when it comes to parsing an experience of religious multiplicity³ (that is, claiming or being claimed by multiple religious or spiritual traditions at once).⁴ I think of myself, and in some public contexts I identify, as Buddhist-Christian. I do not intend to provide an account of how and why I came to a complex religious identity; the process was, and is, complex, multifaceted, intimate, and risky. I will simply say that I was drawn to Buddhist teaching and meditation as a young adult who yearned for apophatic spirituality. A long association with a Vietnamese-American monk (with whom I share a guru-chela relationship) and the practice of vipassana returned me to the Christian tradition into which I had been baptized as an infant but had not been significantly shaped or formed. Buddhist thought and practice are life-giving for me. My dream life often features Buddhist themes and imagery. However, Buddhist practice can also be my own type of works-righteousness. My spiritual life requires grace, radical love, and intimacy, sacred qualities I experience primarily through Christianity and seek to convey to others as a pastor in the Presbyterian Church (USA).

Again, this essay is not a history of my spiritual identity; rather, my modest intention for this Spiritus symposium is to contribute to generative conversation about religious multiplicity, highlighting some themes, concerns, and critical issues of interest to scholars of spirituality. In the process I try to model a rigorous, critical-descriptive, interpretive, and self-aware engagement of spiritual experience. More specifically, I analyze experience to suggest that Buddhist-Christian identity can result from participatory action, brought forth and sustained through an interplay of human attributes and ultimate realities. A primary goal for my work as a pastoral theologian engaged in the scholarship of spirituality is to clarify how people come to practice, experience, articulate, affirm, and sustain spiritual identities that are neither this nor that, but both-and (and maybe-more). Accounting for these processes seems vital to caring effectively and faithfully for those who experience religious multiplicity, as pastoral and spiritual caregivers are increasingly challenged to do.

But first things first: my reverie in Evey Canyon.

TOUCHING GROUND IN EVEY CANYON

While hiking up Evey Canyon I did not pray or engage in Buddhist practice; I simply walked until I felt grounded, present to and engaged by the world in...