The Refusal To Take Things Seriously

But the whole teaching...contained in these anecdotes, poems, and meditations, is characteristic of a certain mentality found everywhere in the world, a certain taste for simplicity, for humility, self-effacement, silence, and in general a refusal to take seriously the aggression, the ambition, the push, and the self-importance which one must display in order to get along in society.

- Thomas Merton, The Way of Chuang Tzu

In the West the practise of contemplative prayer has been regarded as a form of privilege since the dark ages. The Reformations condemned it as such and much of Protestantism still considers it to be either a break from the Bible's teaching about coming to God through simple faith-profession (Cartesian rationalism), or an escape from the necessity to fit into society in a missionary capacity (undifferentiated psychology), or as a barrier in making your way as a responsible citizen of a modern nation-state (culturally syncretistic, individualized Christianity). Roman Catholicism on the other hand continues to elevate the exclusivity of certain forms of the contemplative life as witnessed in praying weekly at Mass for the increasing profession of many priests, deacons, and religious brothers and sisters. And while Eastern Orthodoxy allows for the ordination of lay people who demonstrate a contemplative call, they do so with a heavy hand. I have been, for varying, extended periods of time, a formal member of each of these Western religious traditions at various points in my mature adult life.

For ten years in early adulthood I was involved in Asian society, living and working there as a participant, formally studying the culture, learning the language, and to a lesser degree, practising the religion. I can attest that at no time was contemplative prayer there regarded as an extraordinary privilege. On the contrary, it was an ordinary part of life, woven into every life-stage. Throughout history Asia has been a thriving home of both formal and informal contemplative practise. Society allowed for this. In fact it would not be wrong to say that because of its ubiquity, religious practises there in general have bred a certain contextual social contempt for religion overall.

The 1970's and 1980's were a heady time for the first attempts by Catholicism to apply the interfaith mandates stipulated by the directives of the second Vatican council. Catholic theologians had heretofore generally regarded the spiritual experiences of formal Oriental religion as occurring on a natural and not a supernatural level. Yet for a long time after the first forays into interfaith dialogue real, genuine, open dialogue with Asians regarding their contemplative practises remained decidedly prejudiced and one-sided in favour of the priority of Western religious supremacy. The stance of Catholicism pointed time and again to the church's presumption that Eastern contemplative practice by necessity include a strong and necessary element of grace...that in order to accept the validity of Eastern contemplative experience that God had granted Buddhists, for example, the grace to do so. We now realize that it takes the most egregious and twisted psychology to justify someone else's religious practise by filtering it and justifying it through one's own religious matrix. So in spite of the attempts by many Catholic thinkers at the time it was, and for the most part still is, both ill and toxic to regard the contemplative disciplines of Asia as an anonymous form of Christianity, again, something that makes them in the Western Cartesian religious mind acceptable to God and therefore the church. But no attitude could be more clinically onerous, culturally exclusive, or personally xenophobic and discriminatory. Instead, it is only secure, sincere, and psychologically well people who can grow in intimate knowledge and experienced appreciation for all genuine forms of contemplative practise. It is then that we can have hope of realizing both the depth and richness of people's lives around the world and tease out their community with us, as we allow them to live on their own terms. This is the nature of true compassion, which Christianity and Judaism have always attributed to God, meeting others' needs on their own terms. This what it means to be a sincere Christian. The judgments of Western Christianity on the whole, on extra-Christian practises of contemplation, continue to be vague, undocumented, unfounded, ignorant, and typically egocentric. (Not to mention that there is also a certain infantile and cursory infatuation with Eastern spiritualities that has been fashionable in many social circles since the 1960's that reflects a narcissistic trendiness which is at its root as dismissive of the reality of Eastern contemplation through sloppy friendship as it is ignorant and dismissive of its own cultural roots in genuine Western contemplative experience.) All of this totally misses the mark required to come to our senses that the most basic commonality of people around the world who are contemplatives, lies in there being sincere people everywhere who affirm that both their true self as well as genuine social good is found not in self-assertion, but most of all in a refusal to take seriously the aggression, the ambition, the push, and the self-importance which one must display in order to get along in society, and to live in a more life-giving manner through simplicity, for humility, self-effacement, summed up in contemplative exercises.