Trust and Desire
There is always an aspect of life, of art, of religious practice that is a little bit out of our reach. We can trust that. The three essentials of trust - trust in your spiritual practice, trust in the creative process, and trust in yourself - must ripen if we are to free ourselves. Give yourself permission to be yourself, and don’t be frightened by the unknown. John Daido Loori, The Zen of Creativity
Sometimes you come across a piece of writing that hits you over the head and says pay attention. Like the sound of one hand clapping, this bit woke me up.
I’m not sure I’m a Christian anymore, because I seem to have no use for Messiahs. There are two reasons why. One is that looking to a man for my salvation, and calling him God, is just too hard. The other is that it is just too easy. If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him. Makes perfect sense to me.
The closest I come to having an understanding of salvation through Christ that I could live comfortably with is in process theology, which was the focus of Paul’s dissertation. (Looking to a man to help me understand looking to a man for my salvation. The irony is not lost on me.) A God that suffers with you, and through that transforms suffering, means more to me than a God who saves you from your weakness and limitations. A God that heals the world’s brokenness through creative power, rather than sitting in judgment upon sheep and goats, wheat and chaff, is more my idea of God. OK, so we lose the Omnipotence. I can live with that.
The one thing that holds me back these days from full fledged Zen - if we don’t count the laxity of my practice, that is (and I'm working on that) - is that where my understanding of desire is concerned, I am still very much in the Christian tradition. I mean the authentic Christian tradition, not the pseudoChristianity so many people follow that sees desire as evil. I still believe desire is a positive, creative force in one’s life pointing toward ultimate fulfillment in God. I believe that it is the right alignment of desire that is our task in this world, not the overcoming of it. (In the interest of full disclosure, I got that language from a man too. I’m hazarding a guess it was Augustine.) Perhaps a more complex understanding of Zen detachment would bring me to the same place, but the notion that all desire is illusion makes little sense to me. Led to its logical end, it results in fatalism. My belief is that if anyone can get to the place of compassion both Christianity and Buddhism agree is a state of grace, that compassion itself is the purest form of desire.
And so I think you must trust desire also, though you will make mistakes in following it, mistakes that will inevitably cause you and others pain. You must trust the mistakes. You must even trust the pain. (In the interest of full disclosure, neither Jesus nor the Buddha, Augustine nor Loori, taught me this. Childbirth did.) It is part of the practice, part of the process, and part of becoming Yourself.