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[ Back to index of September articles ] BEARINGS: By Martin L. Smith
Zen Buddhism incorporates shock tactics that are meant to jolt people. Here's a typical saying of a Zen master: "The Buddha is a bull-headed jail-keeper and the patriarchs are horse-faced old maids." To all appearances the teacher is committing sacrilege by insulting the Buddha and the sages of old. What is going on? Well, the teacher is driving home the point that conventional religiosity can become a prison, trapping us in unreality. Under the guise of devotion, all unaware, followers can turn the Buddha into a jail-keeper instead of a liberator. In religiosity as opposed to true religion, devotion can secretly serve to keep them unchanged at heart. They put the objects of devotion on a pedestal, venerating them as miraculous heroes far above us. All the while, this devotion is insisting that the great ones are utterly different from ourselves; we belong to a lowlier order of humanity. This utterly contradicts the actual liberating message of the Buddha which focuses on waking people up into actually realizing and accepting the one true "Buddha nature" that everyone inherently possesses. Through a lens like this we can bring into focus some of the dangers of religiosity in our own Christianity. In the gospels we can see Jesus watching like a hawk for symptoms of religiosity in his own followers that might show they are heading for a religious prison instead of spiritual liberation. Jesus was quite as ready to give his disciples a rude awakening as any Zen master. He sternly challenged attempts to put him on a special pedestal as a kind of moral hero, as on the occasion when he refused the compliment of being called 'good teacher.' "Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone." (Mark 10:18) And he deflected attempts to put a devotional halo on his mother and relatives. "Who are my mother and my brothers? And looking at those who sat around him, he said, 'Here are my mother and my brother! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother!'" (Mark 3:32) "'Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts that nursed you!' But he said, 'Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and obey it!'" (Luke 11:27) The thrust of these challenges is that religiosity creates a special class of "objects of devotion," paragons of virtue in whose presence we can bask. But this devotion doesn't make much difference to us, except to turn us into 'devotees.' In contrast, the good news is not about a special class of saints and heroes, but about all of us as we are. The good news is that you and I are Jesus' family and that you and I are intimates of God, sons and daughters of God just as we are. The closeness of this intimacy creates the possibility that our lives and behavior will express the love that springs from it. By realizing that God and ourselves 'are family' we actually hear what God is saying to his beloved world and express it ourselves through who we are and what we do. Religiosity claims that the saints can help us here below because they are different from us. But in the new reality of God's grace, the saints help us by getting us to outgrow that illusion of a special spiritual aristocracy, getting us to realize that we all already possess intimacy with God as a gift and all we need to do is to realize who we are already. That is their secret, and the one they want to share with us. This insight doesn't abolish our Christian celebration of those we call saints, but it alerts us to the real promise of an authentic relationship with them. Gospel-based devotion to Mary, for example, won't turn into a Madonna cult focused on miracles and apparitions. There is no greater miracle than the gift of intimacy with God and one of the greatest icons of that intimacy is the intimacy of mother and child, Mary and her son. Anglican devotion to Mary focuses on that miracle, and does so in a way that opens us to our participation in it. The more deeply we celebrate the beauty and the costs of that intimacy, the more we know about our own closeness to God, our own intimacy with Jesus. The deeper our devotion to Mother and child, the deeper our own sense of what you and I already have, and who we already are. Martin L. Smith is a well-known spiritual writer and priest. He is on the staff of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. [ Back to index of September articles ]
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One of the values of familiarizing ourselves with the spiritualities of other faiths is that they can hold up a mirror to our own, and help us understand hidden dimensions of our traditions. Returning home from exploring strange territory, we can scan our own familiar landscape with new eyes and see features we overlooked.