One day, a few years back, Hubby and I were walking from The Slipper Chapel the mile and a bit pilgrim route back into Walsingham itself. Along the way we passed a car hub cap abandoned on the verge. Though this caught my eye, I did not respond instantly to my interest. So it wasn't till we'd walked a hundred yards on that I turned and went back for it. I'd had an idea, I wanted to create a reliquary out of it.
Since we first visited Walsingham I've been drawn towards the place, and the figure of Our Lady of Walsingham. A Christianised substitute perhaps for a local pagan fertility or water goddess. Who swirled in an atmosphere of sacredness much older than the early medieval of her foundation. There was once a small Roman temple here, and they tended to build on existing pagan sacred water sites. Being drawn to this figure is not solely about my love for the baroque vulgarity of Anglo Catholic imagery, though that has a role. It's proffering something more important than just a sense for aesthetics.
The What and the Why of it, has not become clear to me. I've been reluctant to over analyse the obsession with it, but have let that be whatever it is. I have accumulated a modest collection of Anglo-Catholic shrine devotional objects, censors, rosaries, church incense, day glo figures, olive wood tea light holders, and painted crosses from Nicaragua. I have rolled with this acquisitiveness just to see how far I'm actually willing to go.
Whether these incidents were pointing towards an interest in Christianity was one question. A theme of the last year was to see if there was an answer. I've read The New Testament cover to cover, plus a biblical commentary and a history of Christianity - I've watched innumerable Christian You Tube videos - I recollected my own childhood upbringing as a Methodist, and how that has influenced my life choices. Tom Holland's book Dominion demonstrated just how transformative an influence Christianity has had upon the development of Western Civilisation, and hence upon me too. This has not been by any means exhaustive, but I've covered some ground.
None of this has convinced me of any personal need to convert to Christianity There are a number of significant doubts, nay impediments. The Christian churches ditheringly wrong headed attitude towards homosexuality - its tendency towards fundamentalist authoritarianism as currently being enacted in the US. To name but two. On the level of beliefs, I cannot for the life of me get my head around the so called 'penal solution ' of Jesus's crucifixion, this seems to make no sense whatsoever to me. Its worth noting that its a female figure I'm responding to, I have no great feeling for Jesus at all.
But it has served a purpose, to clarify if there was a God, whether there was some shape or form of deity I could identify with. The traditional Buddhist viewpoint on Gods and whether they exist or not, is a studied indifference. Gods exist on The Buddhist Wheel of Life, but they are shown as essentially vain and self deluded about their higher divine status. Never what they might claim to be at all. Issues like Gods, God or No Gods, the purpose of the Universe, the intricate inner workings of karma, are all considered not worthy of devoting masses of time to. No help whatsoever in the pursuit of states of higher consciousness and ultimately Enlightenment. So get back on your zafu and practice monk!
What is unusual about the Judeo-Christian God is their relative visual anonymity. A deity whose divine interventions and punishments, are often petulant, fickle and unpredictable. God moving in a mysterious way its wonders to perform. I cannot really get onboard the bus with that type of deity. Neither can I support Phillp Goff's idea of a God of limited capability, that is meant to explain why God doesn't always intervene. A God who intervenes ineffectually, unpredictably and erratically, why would you want to honour any deity that behaves like that? It's as though all the Greek panoply of Gods were condensed into one single divinity, erroneously claiming omniscience.
However, all this depends on what sort of picture I draw of what God is, ultimately. I've written previously about the point in religious theologies where whatever is ultimate, whether that is God, Enlightenment or The Tao, disappears into the unknown, into whatever the unconditioned is, into no- thingness, into what John Vervaeke refers to as No-theism. I'm currently toying with the view that all religions present an alluring but essentially false picture of the nature of whatever that ultimate thing is like. Because what we are talking about here is something beyond the human ability to conceive.
It's as though each religion offers just a few random pieces from a huge but quite incomplete jigsaw. We use these pieces and what they appear to suggest, to try to imagine what the whole picture might be like. And the way we choose to fill in the gaps, just further falsifys and muddies our perceptions. What makes it worse still, is when we reify these projections into incontrovertible facts. Whatever I maybe currently conjuring from my humble imagination, I acknowledge, is also misrepresenting things terribly.
It is in the nature of what is unknown to be mysterious and ungraspable to the mundane mind. God is mysterious and ungraspable, Enlightenment is mysterious and ungraspable, The Tao that can be named, is not the eternal Tao - its mysterious and ungraspable. If I were to believe in God at all, it is as something entirely mysterious and ungraspable to the conscious mind or spiritual imagination.
However incomplete religion maybe in relation to its ultimate mysteriousness, its earthly function provides a window for us onto the ineffable. Something that can act as a go between, an intermediary, form an intercession between our conscious conditioned imagination and something which exists entirely outside that. We reach out for it, as it reaches out for us. Our fingers point towards the moon, as the moon shines back silvering our world.
Outside of these sort of abstract faith questions about ultimate reality, there are the more prosaic day to day considerations of practices and devotion. It's become clear to me, I do hold an underlying view of myself as a Buddhist practitioner, as a rather ineffectual one. My ethical practice is reasonably OK I believe. Though always room for improvement obviously. I believe this view of paucity largely arises out of the experience of meditation practice.
After the ardent enthusiasm of 'Beginners Mind' faded into routine practice, I've struggled with maintaining interest in meditating. I resorted to will power for a few years, upped the quantity of meditation, replacing ardent enthusiasm with an inflexible self discipline. Unsurprisingly this strategy failed, too goal orientated and not receptive enough. The quality of my meditation became mostly struggling to stay awake within it. I backed off and started to do Just Sitting practice, as an antidote to the goal orientation. I continued struggling to stay awake. It could be that I simply become bored by it, until I was no longer seeing its point.
These days I still meditate. Which must say something about residual confidence. I do Just Sitting, interspersed with Metta Bhavana and Taoist Micro Cosmic Orbit, a body awareness practice that imaginatively opens all the acupuncture points and smiling into them. These only rarely move beyond a pleasant feeling of relaxation. As a consequence the regularity of my meditation practice can take an erratic turn. Sometimes I meditate every day, sometimes I go for weeks, nay months, without getting on the cushion. It has been this way for more than a decade.
In that early rush of enthusiasm I did have strong experiences in meditation that still convince me an elevated state of consciousness is attainable. That was over thirty years ago, which is a long time ago to still be dining out on. I intuit I'm still looking for experiential affirmation through my meditation. I don't appear to be able to get beyond this being a bugbear. There is as a consequence a lack of Samata ( calm, equanimity & peace ) surrounding meditation, which even I can see does not help. Its almost as though I need to wipe the meditation slate clean and start again from scratch. That, or simply stop worrying about the feeble state of my meditation altogether.
The thing I remain connected with, but frankly rarely do enough of, is ritual and devotional practices. I've made a wonderful shrine that I love, yet I hardly sit myself in front of it. Am I running scared of something? Devotional practice has been where my faith and aspirations strongly emerge from. Rituals can take time to set up and then do. But they do change the religious vibes very quickly, simply by putting energy into a devotional focus.
Being left to my own devices, outside of Buddhist Sangha, or any supportive context, can stimulate ongoing doubts about the direction I am facing in relation to my faith. Hence I've spent a good part of this blog exploring abstract theoretical issues about ultimate things. Evidently there's some fogginess around what I envisage my spiritual life is currently orientated towards. In this position any lack of clarity feeds the lack of purposeful direction to meditation practices. Though having said all that, taking up Tai Chi/Qigong has brought a physical dimension to mindfulness once I have the form securely under my belt.
A better strategy for the present maybe to exercise the faith muscles and just be a devotion bunny - probably for quite some time. And in this period after and beyond the heart attack, the time for shilly shallying ought by rights to be passed. As Dogen once urged his disciples, that every moment brings a fresh opportunity - 'to throw your whole being into the house of the Buddha.'
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