Benedict and Buddha: 2 saints and 2 authors

Benedict and Buddha: two saints and two authors

Joan Chittester, OSB, cites the legend of St. Benedict’s restoring the life of a farmer’s son. The dead boy had been brought to Benedict by his grieving father. At first, the Saint urged the father to “accept that which afflicts us all,” but the man became enraged and demanded that Benedict use his renowned intimacy with God to revive his son.
“And Benedict understood. He threw himself down beside the boy, prayed his heart out, and the boy stirred to life again. It is a story of human suffering and human response that is repeated every day of our lives.
The implications are clear: every day the suffering of the world look to the secure of the world to do something to save them from even more disaster. No one has a right to preach platitudes to the poor. We must each do something in their regard. It is not our job to work miracles but it is our task to try.” (A Radical Christian Life: A Year with St. Benedict)
I find this story troubling, but insightful in a way I had not considered before. I contrast it to the following story, taken from Recovery: the sacred art by Rabbi Rami Shapiro.
“A woman approached the Buddha in tears…and said, ‘Lord Buddha, I have heard you can bring the dead back to life. This is my son who died only this morning. I beg you, Lord Buddha, restore him to me.’ The Buddha agreed, provided that the woman bring him a single mustard seed from a home in the village that had not experienced death. The woman ran to the village and went door to door…”
Of course, she could find no such household, and when she returned to the Buddha “she knew the inevitability of suffering and the futility of seeking to make things other than they are. She could now mourn the child and move on.”  

What pastor has not been confronted by the cosmic grief of a parent? Ultimately, they must come to terms with the reality described by Ravi Shapiro: even a miraculously revived child is still subject to the vulnerabilities of life in the world, and might die tragically again at any time. Even if they are “lucky” and outlive their parents, somebody else’s child will die tragically and far too soon. Benedict did not wander around Italy reviving dead children, nor did Jesus do so in Galilee. The importance of the two stories lies more in the different attitudes assumed by the two saints: the Buddha assumes a detached attitude, seeming to agree to the bereaved parent’s request, but subtly assisting her to a place of acceptance; Benedict at first does not agree to attempt a miracle, but is persuaded by the parent’s desperate grief to do so. It almost seems that he was afraid not to.
For Joan Chittister, the way of serene detachment seems like “preaching platitudes to the poor.” For Rami Shapiro, the hope of miracles seems to “waste…energy denying reality.”
To me, both stories are deficient, and both convey profound truths. Benedict’s example leads us to passionately identify with the sufferings of others. For me, God is most undeniably present in the grief of a bereaved parent, and, before I can arrive at anything like serene detachment,  inevitably leads to a place of anger.
It is not for us to teach such parents how to find their way to God, but just the reverse. Our contribution might be to help find a way for each of us to survive the trauma of such proximity to God. The greatest gift we can offer may be our own outraged empathy. For me this is not difficult, because I can imagine nothing worse than the death of any of my own children. It is not enough that so far they have been spared, because I am all too aware that tragic deaths befall people’s children every day, and we must all live in such a tragedy-prone world.
So miracles are good, but not enough. The resuscitation of one dead child does not resolve the reality of all the others who go unrevived. Therefore we must move beyond anger to a place resembling that taught by the Buddha. Benedict leads us to a place of compassionate identity with the sufferings of others, but we need the Buddha’s teaching to help us if we are to move on from there. This is true, not only because it is the true path to compassionate wisdom, but also because, most of the time, miracles do not occur, leaving us to perish in impotent cosmic rage.
In Ravi Shapiro’s story, it is the bereaved parent who changes, while the Buddha and the dead child stay the same. In Joan Chittister’s story it is Benedict who changes, as well as the parent and the boy. In the Biggest Story, everyone dies, and everyone is changed.  

A Northwest Alabama Travelogue

Driving down Highway 278, headed for I-65 and the long drive back to, Michigan, I arrive at the outskirts of a small town where a sign reads: “Addison, Alabama, home of Pat Buttram”, and then adds parenthetically, “Sidekick of Gene Autry.” I think to myself, “if you have to explain who your celebrity is, do they qualify as one?” In my case, the explanation was unnecessary, as he was on television every afternoon when I was growing up the early 1950’s. At least the town fathers were not so uncertain as to add an explanation of who Gene Autry was. I even remember the name of his horse.

In the same town are two churches, “Central Church of Christ” and “Addison Church of Christ,” not more than 150 yards apart. There is a story to be told there, no doubt.

A few miles back, in Double Springs, a forest of yard signs admonished passers-by to “Vote Dry.” Amongst them was a solitary sign reading, “Vote No on Alcohol,” placed there, I presume, by the closest thing the town has to a free-thinker. If you think there were any signs saying “Choose booze,” you are wrong.

Is it the height of snobbery to pray that, after I am dead, no one decorate my grave with brightly-colored plastic flowers? It is characteristic of all rural cemeteries in this part of Alabama. And yes, it is snobbery. Jesus called people into the kingdom of God, not the kingdom of Good Taste. Those piles of plastic flowers represent a labor of love, and a link between the living and the dead. So what if they’re ugly?    

Thomas Hobbes, St. Augustine, and Political Theory

Adam Kirsch, in the Oct. 29/Nov. 5 New Yorker, provided a review of The Polity:A New History of Political Thought, by a Princeton scholar named Alan Ryan. According to Kirsch, Ryan makes an interesting distinction between “Persian” and “Greek” models of governance, but the part that interested me the most has to do with the influence of Christianity on political thought, and the critical importance of Thomas Hobbes for consequent developments. 

  Ryan’s interpretation of St. Augustine, Kirsch writes, is that “we are on earth only as pilgrims, traveling back to the God who placed us here for inscrutable reasons. It follows that nothing we do on earth, especially politics, is of ultimate value.” This commonplace observation about Christianity has never struck me as 100% true. In my own experience, Christianity has been a major incentive for political activism, with the kind of Augustinian resignation cited by Ryan-via-Kirsch serving as a fallback position when all else fails. Yet, I have to admit, that political events of my lifetime have led me to have low expectations of any politician, even the ones I like.

More interesting in importance Ryan places on Thomas Hobbes, the 17^th Century English writer, whose opinion of human nature was so negative that, in Kirsch’s words, he thought “it…in everyone’s interest to establish a single, superior authority, which will stop us from killing each other…[and] we live politically not, as Aristotle thought, because we are sociable creatures but precisely because we are not.” The review goes on to explain how Ryan sees Locke, Hegel, Marx, and contemporary political philosophy as, in varying degrees, efforts to “come up with some more hopeful understanding [than Hobbes’] of what people are like, and how they naturally interact with one another.”

Hobbes was writing in the aftermath of the English Civil War, and probably thought, with good reason, of religion as a primary cause of social misery and conflict. In any case, there are plenty of contemporary voices expressing this point of view. To no one’s surprise, I still believe that there is a legitimate part to play for Christians who understand themselves to be accountable to a Christ who values compassion, reconciliation, justice, and nonviolence. It is our role to advocate for the oppressed, critique the injustices of whatever social system we inhabit, and share in the vulnerability of the least powerful. No doubt our efforts will fall short of the kingdom of God, but that is where our status as “pilgrims, traveling back to God” comes in handy. As the old song says,

“This world is not my home,

I’m only passing through;

Fixed it up with Jesus

In 1952.

Angels beckon me,

From earth’s shifting shore,

And I can’t feel at home

In this world anymore.”

Quotes from Wendell Berry, Poet Laureate of Kentucky

“…most people are living on the far side of a broken connection, and…this is potentially catastrophic…most people are now fed, clothed, and sheltered from sources toward which they feel no gratitude and exercise no responsibility…what can turn us from this deserted future, back into the sphere of our being, the great dance that joins us to our home, to each other and to other creatures, to the dead and the unborn? I think it is love…”

." Is it realistic to assume that the present economy would be just fine if only it would stop poisoning the air and water, or if only it would stop soil erosion, or if only it would stop degrading watersheds and forest ecosystems, or if only it would stop seducing children, or if only it would quit buying politicians, or if only it would give women and favoured minorities an equitable share of the loot? Realism, I think, is a very limited programme, but it informs us at least that we should not look for bird eggs in a cuckoo clock."

Wendell Berry

Alarming Emptiness

At the daily office, even as we plod methodically through the psalms, sometimes the words begin to throb with a strange intensity, and to dance in the air like overcharged particles of light. Around us the  air seems to ring with the anticipation of bells and birds. What can we do in response to this unexpected surge of incipient light? In fact, all do is proceed  with our psalmody, for we are a battered and weary church, wearing our ancient vocation like a salvation army coat, wearing it in full knowledge that in so doing we have made ourselves a target for God’s alarming emptiness, and that aliens and strangers will teach our own truths to us as if we had never heard of them.