Well, in our discussion of contemplative prayer, we come to the third section in which I promised to explore some implications for a Christian worldview with you, stemming from what we have said so far about contemplative prayer. We started out, just to refresh your memory, with the peak experience, which provides the point of reference in our own experience for contemplative prayer and for anything that we can see about contemplative prayer. It is a moment of that vision of the heavenly pattern, if you want, which is one half of contemplation, the other half being the action which, the process which puts this pattern into action on earth as it is in heaven.

[01:12]

And then in the afternoon yesterday, we went a step further and we saw gratefulness as a key to how to go about this contemplative process, namely to put that vision into practice. The vision being God's very life within us, of which we become aware in our peak moments. And then throughout this idea that this paradox which we experience, we lose ourselves, and so find our true selves, becomes through faith, or in faith, the courage to give thanks. That tremendous courage that you need to give thanks because thanksgiving is not so much appreciation of the gift not primarily, but trust in the giver. That's the first thing that thinking expresses, trust in the giver. And then we explored the thought that the paradox which we find in the peak experience that yes is the answer to all our whys,

[02:24]

becomes through hope that openness for surprise, that ultimate openness for surprise that must transcend all our hopes, must go beyond anything that we could even envisage and hope for by our hopes. And then we saw that God's very life in us also finds its expression in that paradox that we are alone, in a happy, positive sense, when we are most one with all, and that we are truly one with all, when we are most deeply and happily, peacefully alone, and this belonging, which is really the mystery behind this paradox of being alone together, this belonging becomes, through love and as love, simply grateful living. Love is the grateful living that flows out of that ultimate belonging.

[03:31]

And now I want to once more emphasize that what we're doing here is really putting a gridwork over a reality that is in itself whole and undivided, cannot be parceled out or cut up into pieces, and that we are merely trying to distinguish without separating. Life cannot be separated without being cut into pieces. We can only distinguish. but we must distinguish so as to understand better and more fully. It's merely a matter of emphasis, and if we keep that in mind, that it's merely a matter of emphasis, then we can now, this morning, explore three what I would call dimensions of contemplative prayer, of all our prayer life, because as you saw, contemplative prayer is not separate from prayer, it's even separate from life. It's in itself a dimension of human life, the most comprehensive one.

[04:34]

So when I call them dimensions, I do that to forestall the idea that these are boxes into which we put things, or parts that are pieced together to make a whole. They are simply aspects of one and the same reality. And the first aspect that I'd like to focus on is contemplative prayer as prayer of faith. and under that aspect it is particularly familiar to us in the biblical tradition and the way the Bible speaks about contemplative prayer as prayer of faith is as living by the word of God that is the expression that the Bible uses from the Old Testament all the way through the New Testament actually Well, that's from the first to the last page of the Bible. And today we are in the lucky position on this Sunday to have the central portion of this marvelous unfolding of the idea of living by the Word of God right before us in the Gospel, because it's the Gospel of the temptation in which Jesus answers the first temptation by saying,

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man lives not by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God. That is almost the node that binds this whole wonderful development of living by the Word of God together. When the Bible speaks of living by the Word of God, it means much more than we would offhand suspect or are inclined to think. And the reason why we don't offhand get it correctly is that our understanding of religious truth here in the West, and particularly in the United States, is always slanted towards ethics. We can't really be religious, because the moment we open our mouths, we're already slanting towards ethics. We want to say something religious, but we say something about morals. Now, malls are an integral part of religion, but our talking about religion always slants into malls. As somebody put it very well, we are playing theology like people who are playing a football game on a slanted football field, and every time they kick the ball, it rolls down onto the one side, and that side is ethics.

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So every time we start getting the bar rolling in religion, it rolls down into ethics. And the moment we hear living by the word of God, first thing that comes into mind is God gives the command and you carry it out. That's living by the word of God. But that's not what the Bible calls living by the word of God. That's part of it. But the most important aspect is that you are nourished by the word of God, like you are nourished by bread. that you come alive by eating and drinking the Word of God. And therefore, the imagery of eating and drinking is always associated with living by the Word of God. Very much as in our English idioms, where we say, if we are really interested in something, oh yeah, I ate it all up, or I lapped it all up. There you have the eating and the drinking, or the book, I devoured it, cover to cover. Very much like in the Bible, again, Jeremiah eating the scroll and John in the Apocalypse eating the book that the angel gives him. That's the idea of living by the Word of God, that you eat it all up and assimilate it and it makes you alive.

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That's the idea. And not merely carrying out something that's outside of you as a command. And this idea of living by the Word of God is quite central to the whole biblical tradition, that means quite central to not only to Christianity, but to Judaism and even to Islam, to all the book religions, to all the Western religions, this is central. Their great insight is that God speaks, if you want to put it in one word. And Martin Buva has a beautiful story there in the Tales of the Hasidim in which the great Rabbi Susya, one of the great Hasidic saints, is said never to have been able to quote his master, which is a great lack for any rabbi because a rabbi is always expected to quote a good saying in the name of him who said it, because that hastens the coming of the Messiah.

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First of all, you are spreading the light by quoting, and secondly, you are spreading humility by attributing it not to yourself, but to the one who said it. And this poor Rabbi Susse couldn't even quote his own teacher, because he had never heard a sermon that his teacher gave, because his teacher was in the habit of starting every sermon with a reading from scripture, and he would open the Bible and would say, and God spoke, and then he would read a particular passage. And when Rabbi Susi heard, God spoke, he was already in ecstasy. And so it carried on so widely, they say, that he had to be taken out of the synagogue or out of the school. And there he was standing in the hallway or in the woodshed, beating against the walls and yelling, God spoke. Imagine, God spoke. And Martin Buer ends the story by saying, probably Rabbi Susha understood more than all those who could quote the sermons from beginning to end, because with one word, the world is created, and with one word, the world is redeemed.

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that when God commits himself to the world by speaking as we hear in creation, and this creative word through which everything is created becomes the redeeming word that is made flesh. not only the word spoken now, but the word addressed. That's what we humans are. All the rest of creation, as far as we know, is word spoken, a sense of embodying the message that God has. But we are not only word spoken, we are word addressed. And then in the midst of all of us, who are merely word spoken and word addressed, there comes one who is even word answering God fully. That's the Christ event. And we all have a share in that by entering into it through, again, faith. And that's where we are. So living by God's word means eventually living in the word made flesh through faith.

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through the Eucharist as we understand it, which is the Word made flesh given to us to eat and drink. It means much more than that. It means Eucharistic life, which is the overflowing of that Eucharist into every part of life. That means the overflowing of that sacramental thanksgiving, which is the making present of Christ's thanksgiving sacrifice in every part of our life. And that means simply that grateful living with which we started out, which is the key to everything. That grateful living in faith, in trust, implies living by every word that God speaks and learning to live by every word that God speaks. When God speaks many different words, and in the gospel today, the temptation consisted precisely in making God say something else than God said.

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The tempter suggests, now your God is saying stones. Why don't you make God say bread? And Jesus says, but man lives by every word that comes from the word of mouth of God. And if the father says, stones, then I as the obedient son, the one who really listens to the word of the father, will live even by stones. Now stones is the one thing by which one cannot normally live. and therefore is even a symbol of death, just as bread is a symbol of life, and Jesus in saying, I can live by stones, says, I can live even by that word of God which spells out death. And then that is why Luke says at the end of the temptations, and the tempter left him for a season to come back at the time of the passion. And then comes the real showdown whether Jesus can live by every word, and even by the word that spells death.

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And if we can live by every word, then we can also live by that one word that God says to us in the end, and that spells death. So we eat it all up. And that is why Paul says, death is swallowed up in death. Eating up as Christ is eating up. While he's swallowed up by death, he swallows up death by death. And so enters into life because I can live by every word that comes from the mouth of God. Every word is a word of life. And our whole spiritual life, in a sense, consists, particularly in its biblical version, that is, particularly for Christians and Jews and Muslims, in learning to live by every word so that ultimately we will be able to live by that final word of God which is dying into fullness of life.

[14:35]

We learn this now and that means that whole joy of learning all the many ways in which God spells out the one eternal word. Because God, theologians tell us, is so simple that God cannot say various things. God is too simple for that. God says everything God has to say in one eternal word, and that is the Logos. But that is so inexhaustible that it needs to be spelled out forever and ever in everything there is, and all that there is is only around because that one word is so inexhaustible. Very much like lovers who have really nothing else to say to one another but I love you, but never come to an end seeing it in so many different ways. And God being love has nothing to say but that eternal word which is the word of God's love. But that needs a spelling out forever and ever. And no lover will say, well, I told you that last year, didn't I?

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I love you. So what's there to be added? Anything to be added? You have heard it once and for all, that's it. Nobody says that. But you go on in spelling it out over and over again in words and songs and gifts and flowers and caresses and everything else. And this goes on. And so everything there is, is a spelling out of that one eternal word that always says the same thing, namely that God loves us. But it does make a difference whether we taste and see how good the Lord is by eating apples, or whether we taste and see how good the Lord is by eating brownies or whatever else it may be. There is an untranslatable way in which God says that we are being loved in which we cannot know unless we have ever tasted brownies. So if we want to know all the languages of God, We better open all our senses, not only our taste buds, but our eyes, our ears, our sense of touch, sense of smell.

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This is one of the most neglected areas of the spiritual life because for most people there are just two smells, good and bad. So why did God bother to create noses and smells in an infinite variety? Biblical religion, living by the word of God, when God said lilac, God meant something there, something very different from saying gasoline. But there are no bad smells, there are only different smells, because God didn't make anything that's bad. And so we have to rise to the occasion and use our noses and go around and smell all these different things. That's why we are around, we Christians. That's what it means to believe in the Incarnation. Not to shut off our eyes and our ears and everything, just an occasion for temptation, and in the end you get the impression that we would be best off if we had no senses at all. That's obviously nonsense. This is our particular task as Christians, let alone the Muslims and the Jews, to live by every word that comes from the mouth of God and live it up, become alive to this in this full sense.

[18:03]

But there is a very profound word that comes very early in Christian tradition and unfortunately I cannot tell you who it was I've been looking for the last few days and the particular book in which I found this quotation has disappeared from our library. But it is a very early one of the Christian fathers who said, those who can truly hear God's word can also hear God's silence. That's a very profound word. Because the silence is an entirely different dimension of contemplative life, an entirely different dimension of prayer. It's the dimension of hope, if you want. It's the contemplative prayer of hope, which is the prayer of silence. And that, while it is familiar to us and should be familiar to us in our Christian tradition, in our Western tradition in general, is really more typically the dimension of Buddhism.

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That is where Buddhism comes into our view of world religions. When Jesus is asked, who are you? He gives an answer that is very enigmatic, or at least the way we have it now in the Gospel according to Jim John. You might want to look it up, John 8, 25. Very enigmatic answer. Apparently, it took us 2,000 years and we still haven't figured out what Jesus really said in answer to, who are you? But one thing is sure, it says something about, I am the one who is speaking to you. More or less, I am the one who is simply identically with the message. See, I'm nothing apart from the message. I am word. That's somehow what comes across. The exact wording is not clear. And there's only one other person in the whole history of religion, one of whom with equal importance and with equal emphasis, we are told that he was asked, who are you?

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Very much in the same sense, and that's the Buddha. And the Buddha's answer was, again, like Jesus, not I am this or I am that, simply, I am awake. That's the answer to that. I am awake. And that means I am awake to that silence which no word can exhaust. I am awakened from words to that silent message which is in all words. To wake up means to let the limited words lead us into the limitless silence. That is that openness of hope which transcends our hopes, which transcends everything we know. Word in that sense is silence come to word. And silence is the word that has come home. Just this form is emptiness and emptiness is form.

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This silence is central to the Buddhist tradition. as the word or the notion that God speaks is to the biblical tradition. One of the sure things that we know about the historic Buddha is called the noble silence of the Buddha, and that means that he didn't say anything about all those questions about which religion normally speaks. He didn't say anything about metaphysics. He didn't even say a word about God. That's something we don't talk about in Buddhism. And the reason he gave for his noble silence is that famous image of the poisoned arrow. He said, if a man should be shot in his arm by a poisoned arrow, he is not going to say Well, I won't pull this arrow out until I have found out who shot it, and whether this was a tall man or a small man, or whether he was white or yellow or black, or whether this is a green arrow or a blue arrow, or whether it came from

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such a bow from a different bow? And all these questions, Buddha says, all these questions that religions normally concern themselves with are like those questions. They are just alibis from the only thing that's important, and that is, pull this arrow out. and we are shot by God with an arrow. It sits in our flesh and now do something about it rather than philosophizing about God. This is the Buddhist notion. Now you will see when you study Buddhism a little more closely that there is plenty of word in Buddhism too. The Buddhist scriptures are many times as voluminous as the biblical scriptures are. But the Buddhists will say burn them all. It doesn't matter, burn them all. They don't burn them because they're human and because the word and the silence belong together and because it is only a matter of emphasis. But Christians or Jews or Muslims would not say about the Bible or about the Qur'an, burn it all.

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We cannot say that because our emphasis is different. But Buddhists can say that even though they don't do it. They are completely centered on the silence, just as much as we are centered on the word. And therefore, when you speak to a Buddhist, about the Christian truth, and I can tell you that from experience. I have had many wonderful experiences of talking with Buddhists in situations in which there was no pressure and in which each one was convinced that the other one was simply trying to explore the truth. You even gave the other one the benefit of the doubt that the truth wasn't something that you had anyway, but it was something that had you, and so the truth had all of us. And so in those situations, when you come to talk about mystery, Edo Roshi, for instance, I had many conversations with Edo Roshi. When you finally came to, he was always sort of sitting at the edge of his seat, just listening very intently when you're explaining Christian truth.

[24:59]

When you came to say, well now this is a mystery, this is where words just come to an end. We talked about mystery yesterday, that whole dimension of mystery, which comes from the Greek term, murein, which means to shut up. Shut your mouth, shut your eyes. This is a presence that is too great for words. When I came to this point where I had to say, well, this is just where then we have hit upon one of the Christian mysteries again. He was already anticipating that. He was always only waiting for this. This is the point where the Westerners, when you talk to them, say, now come on, this is where I have no problems. Explain this again. Can't you explain it a little more? What do you mean, mystery, and so forth? When you came to the Buddhists and you said, well, this is a mystery, I was only waiting for that. I was sitting back with a big smile. I understand, I understand. No more problems. We had entered the Buddhist realm of the Christian message, you see. But if I was, then of course sometimes he got carried away too and he would talk about Buddhism in this exchange.

[26:03]

And in the middle of a word, he would break off and he would just start laughing and say, I've been talking again, I've become a Christian. that there was also a Christian dimension to Buddhism and it's the dimension of the world. Or if I explained to him, he said, now did I understand correctly what you said? This is how I understand this and I would give Buddhist doctrine as precisely as I possibly could. He would just laugh and he would say, Absolutely correct, but what a pity that you have to say it. Our Buddhists, many different Buddhists you might have come across, would say, oh, St. John of the Cross? Oh, he was a Buddhist. We have no problem with John of the Cross, because the prayer of silence, which belongs to us, is the Buddhist dimension of the Christian tradition. And that's very obvious to Buddhists, still more obvious to them than it is to us at this time of history.

[27:05]

But it should be obvious to us too. And therefore Buddhists will say to us, and that's not so much a criticism, but a tremendous help at this point of salvation history and the unfolding of the revelation that was given to us in full, but certainly hasn't been understood in full yet. Buddhists will say to us, sort of half laughing, everything's fine with you Christians, there's just one problem, you have a tendency to get stuck in Christ. You get stuck in the word. And Christ himself will be your judge because Christ says, I am the way. Now the way isn't something to get stuck on. The way is something to be followed. The word wants to lead you somewhere. And where does the word lead you? It can be looked at on the two aspects. On the one hand, the word always leads you into the silence out of which the word comes.

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you really understand, you get very silenced, because the word, a true word comes out of silence. It is the silence of the heart come to word, and it reaches into words, into silence. But there's another direction, other aspect, rather an aspect only, of this leading of the word. The word also sends you into action. When we really are touched and moved by a word, we say, it sent me, it sends me, it sends me to do something. And that action is a third dimension of prayer, is a third dimension of the contemplative prayer. And that is the dimension of love. The contemplative prayer of love is what we call contemplation in action.

[29:15]

We have this in our own tradition, although it isn't in the focus of our tradition. It is there, just as prayer of silence is there, as our Buddhist dimension. The Buddhists have that in the center. So contemplation in action is here, but it is not in the center. It's in the margin. But it belongs to the religious quest in any tradition, because we said that the religious quest is the quest for meaning, and meaning always has those three dimensions. There must be a word in the widest sense, otherwise there would not be anything that has meaning. Word is simply that which has meaning. It doesn't have to be a spoken word. A canon by Pachelbel that we heard after Maz was every bit as much a word as the gospel was, or the piece on the flute that brother played was every bit as much a word as the words that preceded and followed it.

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Whatever has meaning is word, but then the word isn't really word without silence. It's just chitchat, but a real word is silence that comes to word and word that leads into silence. But there's then this third dimension, and that is understanding. If there were not understanding, there wouldn't be meaning either. or it wouldn't be meaning for us. We must understand it. And understanding is neither the word nor the silence, but it is rather something that ties together word and silence. It is that process by which we so give ourselves to the word that the word leads us where it comes from, and that is the silence. And this is the process of understanding. And one could make a good point that just as living by the word is the biblical dimension of contemplative prayer and the prayer of silence is the Buddhist dimension of contemplative prayer, so living by the word is really the understanding or contemplation in action is really the Hindu dimension.

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As one of the great exponents of Hinduism today, Swami Venkatesananda says, and we have had him here as a guest at Mount Sevier, and if I remember correctly, it was even here at Mount Sevier that he said this great word, although he's probably said it on other occasions, yoga is understanding. Yoga is understanding. Yoga, which is the central discipline of Hinduism in many different forms, don't just think of yoga postures that are familiar to us, but yoga in all its different forms. It yokes together, and it comes from that same word as yoke, it yokes together, it ties together the word and the silence. God as manifested, Atman, and God as unmanifest, Brahman, and that is why the central assertion of Hinduism, if you want, is Atman is Brahman, and Brahman is Atman. God as manifested is the unmanifest God.

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The unmanifest God is manifest. And the word is the silence. I am the father of one. That's how Jesus put it. And this cannot be understood until We enter into it and know the world and do the truth in love. It cannot be understood from the outside because understanding means standing under. And Ido Roshi again is the one who keeps saying, you Westerners say you want to understand, but really what you want to do is overstand. You don't want to stand under it. You don't want to get into it. You are like people who take a shower with an umbrella up. You say you want to understand, but you only understand by doing, by entering into it. And that again would be the gist, if you want, and I can't prove that to you, but I can only remind those of you, and I'm sure many of you, are familiar with the Bhagavad Gita, which plays such an important part in Hinduism.

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It's so central to Hinduism. If you want, the gist of it is that Krishna says to Arjuna, you will never understand until you do it, and do something which Arjuna cannot understand. He finds himself confronted as the leader of an army with another army, and quite apart from the fact that he doesn't want to fight in the first place, here he is to fight not only another army, but his very cousins and uncles and relatives. And the gods appearing to him instead of encouraging him in his peacefulness says, you find yourself in that situation and so all you can do is do it and then you will understand. That is where we reach the point where we have really reached the limit of understanding

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It is a way of understanding God by God's own understanding, which is something which, again, to Hindus is perfectly understandable, but should be understandable to us, too, that no one can understand God except by God's own self-understanding, because St. Paul very clearly tells us in 1 Corinthians 2, no one knows what is in the mind of a human person except the spirit of that person. No one knows what is in your mind except your own spirit, ultimately. And no one knows, St. Paul goes on to say, no one can fathom the depths of God's mind except God's own spirit. And you would think that from these two premises, Paul would draw the conclusion that therefore no one can understand God, because if you can't even understand another human being, how could you understand God? Paul jumps to this conclusion. translogical conclusion that we have received the very Spirit of God so that we can understand the gifts of God.

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That means even though this means having received not more of the Spirit of God than a thimble can hold of the ocean, still whatever understanding we have of God is understanding God by God's own self-understanding. And that means getting into it, understanding by doing. And contemplation in action means understanding God by acting, in the action, not doing the action, not also keeping our mind on God while we're doing something else, but understanding God by acting. by doing the truth in love. You can keep your mind on God while you are knitting stockings if you are a good knitter. That might be a wonderful way of knitting stockings, but it is a contemplation during action. But if you find God in the knitting of the stockings, that means if you find God's love in the love that goes into the knitting,

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then this is contemplation in action. And there are many actions in our daily life in which it is better not to try and think of God while we are acting, because otherwise things will go wrong. The knitting of the stocking may not go wrong, but taking your children to the zoo may go very wrong if you don't keep all your attention on those children. and therefore it will either be time cut out from prayer or it will be contemplation in action, in this very action, in this very complete attention that you're paying to those kids there. You contemplate God's love and attention to you from within, you understand it from within, because there's no other way of understanding understanding except by understanding. There's no way of understanding understanding from the outside, just as there is no a way of tasting, tasting, except by tasting. You take a bite and you will taste, but you can't taste it any other way. We are taught, taste and see how good the Lord is.

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So contemplation in action is a tasting and seeing how good the Lord is. And this notion of contemplation then is really, if you remember still, the contemplation is the mirroring, or more than that, the channeling of the eternal pattern, of the heavenly pattern, into action, this process of contemplation then means a channeling of God's very life into everything through gratefulness because the Father is the giver and the word is the gift and the thanksgiver and the one is totally gifted because the son has nothing, as St. John tells us, that he has not received from the Father. And he gives himself back to the Father, and that means in the spirit of thanksgiving, which is the Holy Spirit, the spirit of understanding,

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And that is what the Greek fathers called the round dance of the trinity, where the word comes out of this abyss of silence into which creatures can drop their thoughts forever and ever, as C.S. Lewis says. never really hear an echo coming back. It is the abyss of the Father, eternal silence. But that abyss of silence becomes the home of the Word, because God is also Mother, and God speaks that eternal Word, that one Logos. And the Logos says, incarnate, I have come forth from the Father, I've come into the world, and I'm leaving the world and I'm returning to the Father. And that movement, it mirrors the movement of the Trinity. In the Spirit, we go through the words to the Father from whom we have come forth.

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Therefore, this round dance in the Trinity is mirrored in the dimensions of contemplative prayer, in our prayer of silence, in our prayer of living by the word, in our prayer of contemplation and action, and it is also mirrored in the dimensions of grateful living, faith, as that courage to give thanks through living by the word, hope as that openness for surprise in complete silence, love as doing the will of God in love, doing the truth in love, contemplation in action. And it is mirrored finally in this round dance of the traditions. in which the world tradition of the West dances with the Buddhist tradition of silence and the Hindu tradition of understanding. They are all at one piece. They are all dancing together.

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And that is one of my favorite images for the relationship of the world traditions to one another, because it allows you to see that as long as you look at them from the outside, you are like a person who stands outside of people who are engaged in a round dance. And wherever you stand, you can always say, look, they are going in two different directions. The ones closest to me are going this way, and the ones further away are going the opposite direction. Imagine if you were now dancing and somebody stood outside. You would say, look, the ones over there are going this way, and the ones over here are going this way. And then you look from another side, and from whichever side, as long as it is outside of the circle you look, always the ones closest to you are going in one direction, and the ones furthest from you are going exactly in the opposite direction, until you allow them to open their hands and take you in, and the moment you are part of the circuit, you notice, without any further explanation, that everybody is going in the same direction. And if we can do that and enter into our own tradition wherever we stand, we recognize that that is really the ultimate of contemplation, that we mirror that dance of the Trinity that is going on.

[42:22]

I don't know if you can imagine something like that. I've been doing this for a long time. [...] Many people find themselves in that situation already and many more people will find themselves of course as history flows together and becomes one. I'm very glad. And the most beautiful thing about it is, of course, that without distracting or detracting the slightest bit from anything that we have, it opens up so many more possibilities that we anyway have, but that we need the stimulation of other traditions in history to bring forth.

[44:20]

We don't need it for the fullness. The fullness is there, as it is actually in every one of the traditions. But we need the stimulation of one another to bring out that fullness. That is, again, God's plan. That isn't just something that happens. And it's so clear in our own tradition, you see, I live, yet not I, Christ lives in me. That is true today, St.

[45:24]

Paul said it. That means that the Christ is not exhausted by Jesus and that's it. I'm most grateful for your image, very nice image. Optimistic? The image of the surgeon, that's a very effective image. He peeked at the surface of the Anglican religion, because it seems so inadequately done in the film. We haven't come to terms with the world we're supposed to. I think that's all, and that's why I feel you're a little optimistic. I mean, why sympathize with everybody? Is it being done? Well, I can point out to you, others who have spoken and written about it more eloquently than I, and one is Raimundo Panica, and you have his tapes here. I don't know whether he speaks about this matter or not. Another one is Dr. Hewitt Cousins at Fordham, who is very much into that, and there are others.

[46:28]

We have only now, relatively recently, progressed to this Trinitarian approach to world religions beyond the anonymous Christ approach, which is all right, theologically correct, practically very ineffective. And Panika himself wrote a book first called The Hidden Christ of Hinduism. and if you want to see what happened in this process, he then wrote this book, The Trinity and World Religions, and that's a very interesting comparison of progress that he has made. Another thing is, of course, that it is now the accepted Catholic teaching that has not come down to the pulpits in the parishes yet, but that's your responsibility, that's why we have meetings of this kind, I guess, explore this and spread it everywhere. I would think there's more of a continuum, you see. I think in India, we would identify Christianity with the action and the brigade.

[47:43]

And the Logos, the traditional Western model, is certainly the aggressive love that is going out to the world. And maybe there is a continuum in which the emphasis shifts, and the Hindus slide in further than just the presenter. I would have said the Marxist therapy was perhaps closest to the doddery action end of that. In its heretical form, Marxism comes closest to being the action representative. Well, first of all, I felt a little inadequate anyway to propose this in your presence here. But secondly, the emphasis here really was not so much on action, and I'm glad you gave me this opportunity because that would really quantify the picture almost. The dimension of this particular dimension of prayer in our Christian tradition is called Contemplation in Action.

[48:48]

That just happens to be the title, and it's a relatively late one, comes from the 16th century. Contemplation in Action has been here from the beginning, and we just didn't call it by this name, and this has been here from the beginning of every religion, so not only in Christianity. But that was just the title of this particular form of prayer, dimension of prayer, while the emphasis was on understanding when I spoke about Hinduism and on the spirit. It's interesting for Christians, particularly with the charismatic renewal in the church and so forth, but I've spoken to several people who are very much part of the charismatic renewal and quite knowledgeable in this matter, quite open, and they will agree that the emphasis, even in the charismatic Christianity, is not on the Spirit. The emphasis is on Christ. It's on the Word. The Word is in the center. The one religion in the world where you will find the Spirit in the center is India.

[49:53]

It's Hinduism. That's where you'll find the Spirit. It doesn't mean that we don't have the Spirit, nor that India doesn't have the Word. It's just a matter of emphasis. But there is where the understanding is, where you enter into understanding because you know that you have the Spirit of God and that everything is filled with the Spirit of God. That is, if we didn't know that, the Old Testament knew it already, long before Pentecost. The Spirit of the Lord fills the whole universe and holds all things together. And we were created, human beings were created by God breathing the Holy Spirit into our nostrils, as the Bible tells us. So this whole idea of the Spirit filling us, that's nothing new to us, but the emphasis is not there. That's more or less how I would correct that impression a little bit. But the most important part is, as you say, that they are interlocking and overlapping and we are just trying to make it a little easier for us to see where the points of crystallization are in this whole foil.

[50:58]

Understanding. This is how I put it, you know, the spirit of understanding, because the Holy Spirit is often called the spirit of understanding. And that word, that notion of the round dance of the Trinity comes from a very early Christian tradition, comes from the Cappadocian fathers in the 4th and 5th century, which goes very far back, and Christ being called the leader of the dance, which is something that was then picked up by later tradition. No, the connection between the two and the way I presented it, and again with our apologies for it. No, it's quite deliberate, because the contemplation, the matching of the pattern in heaven with the action on earth, which is the essence, as we said, of contemplation, of bringing the two together on earth as it is in heaven, that

[52:27]

In that sense, then Buddhism mirrors the silence of the father. The Western traditions mirror the word that comes out of the silence, and Hinduism mirrors, in some sense, the spirit of understanding, or better still, channels it into life. That's really important because that's our hope. our hope. We don't see the forest for trees, we see the forest for hope because of our hope. And so we never get into action because of the forest, because of the trees are our actions. I hadn't thought of it in this way, but I think there's some truth there.

[53:30]

Only condensation and action are action and condensation. You must be one. Then there is not just action of one man. That's a very beautiful point, I hadn't thought about it in this context, but of course it, well. So Gambler says, if it is the truth, don't ask who said it, it's always the Holy Spirit. Which is actually a very important thing to keep in mind when you're talking about world religions. If it is the truth, don't ask who said it, it's always the Holy Spirit. But it ties in with Taoism, you see, that the real action, is non-action. Our meddling, our busybodying, is precisely, as you put it, I think, if I understand you correctly, what prevents that action, this ultimate action, which is non-action, you see? Non-interference with the great action of God, or flowing with the great action of God, or response, which isn't so much action, but it's passive action, it's response.

[54:45]

Yeah, doing but not doing. That is the great teaching of Taoism, which in turn has influenced this Japanese Buddhism to a great extent. It's interesting because I'm just giving this off the cuff. I haven't worked that out. But as you're asking the question, I'm inclined to think, first of all, The mantra in Hinduism, in this context of understanding, is probably to a large extent the word dimension that belongs to that understanding tradition. So, as we said, there is a Hindu tradition within Christianity. that's contemplation and action, so there must be a Christian or Biblical dimension to Hinduism.

[55:51]

And to a certain extent, probably the mantra belongs to that. But it immediately calls to mind that there is a great difference between the way in which the mantra is used in Hinduism and, for instance, the way in which the Jesus Prayer is used in the Western tradition. Because the Jesus Prayer is Word, there is no question about that at all. The mantra is to a large extent A melody with which you swing, you see? It isn't a word on which you concentrate to understand it. It is rather putting you in the swing of things. You sing the mantra within yourself quietly. Listen, well-written melody. What is it? It goes with that. Can you swing as you're knitting your sweater? Does that interfere with the contemplation and action of the knitting? Well, no, it wouldn't, because you cannot say the Jesus Prayer while you're knitting and all the rest.

[56:52]

But the essence of contemplation in action, the essence of the concept of contemplation in action, while you are knitting, would be to swing with the rhythm of knitting. That's the idea. And when you are driving, contemplation in action is to swing with the rhythm of the driving, even though you may repeat all sorts of other things while you're doing. I think that's right. Not just to the liturgy. I mean, in a sense, it is a micro-liturgy. I think that, may I have your opinion on, that Hindus, Orphans, and the Japanese tradition, did much more with getting the body to synergize with the spirit. So in a sense, use our bodies and get constrained through yoga, through exercise, through reality. And the mantra is part of a verbal physiology. But where verbal physiology is, when I went to the chapter the first day, I noticed the same thing.

[57:55]

And when I joined here, I arrived in the second, which is putting me orally into an excited state, which is closer. to be able to see the wood from the trees and all that. So we need some physiological aid. And I think the East has been much better at that, except of course in the monastic tradition. But for the average layperson, they have none of the stuff, none of the physiological aid, which the East provided. I mean bathing, or yoga, or vatana, and going on with the whole yoga exercise, because entire back up, and I think the mantra is this tiny little verbal back up to make it possible to concentrate, because the concentration itself isn't a consequence, I think it's just a device. That was also true, for instance, of the psalm singing before we laboriously translated it to English, which is a help in some respects and a distraction in other things.

[59:02]

In other words, because it distracts you from this marvelous hum of the great beehive into which you entered when it was all hummed sort of in Latin, which was very good, too, in itself. It was meant to be partly that. But what you're pointing out is also the responsibility that monasteries have towards the world, or towards others, because it isn't right, I guess, to say, yes, yes, it's only the monasteries, it isn't the church. The monastery belongs to the church, the monastery is in a sense the heart of the church, and so if you really want to know what the church is like, you have to come to a monastery, and this ought to be possible. The problem is, it isn't practically very well possible, because if too many people come to a monastery, the monastery ceases to be a monastery. So we are stuck with some problem here. Don't call it a mystery.

[60:03]

They've been refined by man. Those who come to worship the monastery don't have any offerings to begin with. We have all these people coming in today and with no offerings. And this is very important. He endures the word of not theirs only, and believe me, yours needs a fitting name that looks like John Wilkes. And it seems to me that the action, as we think of action, this has to do with the Salvation Army, has to do with the YMCA, has to do with very specific ethical things, and nature just plants up from mysticism to action.

[61:06]

It's a pretty positive thing. Well, now you make me bend backwards in the other direction, because it is true that once start with religion, you will inevitably get into ethics. And the main reason why I stress so much that we shouldn't start with ethics is that if you start with ethics, you might never get to religion. This is what has happened. You go to any church and you hear morals. And so there's where it begins and there's where it ends and mostly ends because nobody is particularly eager to hear moral precepts. We are only willing to take them for the reason of something else. One of my favorite stories is Swami Sachidananda giving a talk at Manhattan College And it was so crowded that the students were climbing up with ladders and coming in through the windows because they couldn't get in by the doors anymore, just to listen to those wise words.

[62:16]

And sort of towards the end of it, one nun was overheard saying to another one, he isn't saying anything that my novice mistress didn't say. And it was absolutely true. The only difference was, possibly, that he started out with making people, bringing people to that center from which they are willing to listen to the do's and don'ts. But when you start out with the do's and don'ts, they leave before you ever get to anything else. But isn't the danger today now that this it is religion without it. Right, and that's why I'm so happy to see this now and sort of to redress the balance because something like you did when I came in is absolutely essential to a meeting like this and I would feel terrible if I would leave and just having spouted all these things about religion and then people go out and think that this has no implications for nuclear disarmament or anything of that sort.

[63:20]

That is absolutely essential and I can only afford not to talk about it explicitly because I can trust in you that you will do it anyway. If I couldn't do that, I couldn't open my mouth about the other part. Yeah, he's a good example. You're a good example. That's the first claim, that in myself, I see the need of the world more clearly than if I'm out there on the red line for the Catholic work. And it wasn't only a matter of seeing, you see. He did more or less what Krishna tells Arjuna. You find yourself in this situation, now act. Don't think that you can start acting where you would like to be. You can only start acting where you are. And our problem in the spiritual life is that we always wait

[64:24]

until we are where we would like to be before we start acting. But we never get there. So start acting where you are. Now, he found himself as a contemplative in this cell, and he did not leave that place and go somewhere else where he could maybe start acting. But he acted where he was in this very humble and very limited way, and it moved more people than if he had... certainly more than if he had gone out and found his own way of acting. That's very significant. He has had an enormous influence on many people, making them politically conscious and in many other ways, but not by going out and doing it in the, but by simply doing what he could, where God had put him. That was the decisive thing. And that's also the decisive thing for all political action, that we do it wherever we are and not wait until we get in a position where we could do something about it. Every one of us is in a position where we can do a great deal about it just by writing a letter to the editor or just by sending a letter to your congressperson or something like that.

[65:30]

I've been converted to that only recently. That's why I'm a fervent convert because I always thought that these congresspeople would get so many letters they couldn't care for whether they get one or more less. And now I find that one letter can be the straw that breaks the camera's back. And one vote can change things on such an enormous scale through something that seems to have nothing to do with world hunger. Some import tax vote that you have hardly ever heard about can change everything so much that if you gave everything that you ever earned in your whole life, it wouldn't make the slightest bit of difference if you sent it directly to the poor. And that little letter, that you can change that vote, makes billions of dollars being channeled in the right direction, which otherwise would have been channeled in the wrong one. Those things were typical, that's the point.

[66:38]

I want to look at another file there involving doing things to help the diplomat out. And one person couldn't really hope to be well informed but there are agencies now that will provide you with this necessary information and one of them I'm very happy to have a chance to mention is Bread for the World. Just write to them and send them a dollar and they will supply you with very detailed and precise and succinct information, which it doesn't take very long to read, and then you can make up your own mind whether you will do something about it or not. But you will at least get from a fairly reliable source—you can always make allowances for their errors if you can—but you'll get from some source, you at least know where they stand, very succinct and specific information. network.

[67:44]

Bread for the world is almost exclusively for hunger. Network, as you say, has a much wider application, and there are others like that. But I do think it's a very important thought these days to put your money and your energy, which is more a matter of energy really than of money, behind those efforts that change the causes than where it is more gratifying when you adopt a little orphan in Chile or something like that. That's very nice and I'm not saying that you shouldn't do it also. Maybe that's what conscientiousizes you and what gives you then the the energy also to do something on another level. But if you have only limited energy, then where it should be channeled is that little leverage that changes. That's why it's so important for us to face the fact that we are living in this country with all the criticism, with all the problems that we have.

[68:46]

This is the place where we can also have the strongest leverage on government and through government. on the rest of the world, and what's done wrong or right in other parts of the world. You know, the subject there are folks who are about to assume a biblical action, and to tie together their fighting and understanding the action. And when you ask those questions, whether or not it's different between hope and hope, and action and action, means when thoughts are infused with silence and understanding or when actions are infused with proper excitement, then they become action. That if they are lined up, it's so that one of the disciplines, and I think again, the monastic tradition, unfortunately, they do it, but other people don't have a chance to do it.

[69:48]

We should think a little, like Bread for the World organizes its course about which role. That's difficult, except we don't have the time and energy. But if we were thoughtful and prayerful and silent and deep about our actions, then they would form a pattern, instead of being random motion. Then the dance would go on. in step, and what happened in both of our actions, two feet back and three sideways, we would learn the steps. So maybe one of the tragic absence of discipline, in saying, what is the role of discipline? Coming to the question is that, how does discipline mates back with your peak experience? We have this rhythm of saying there must be thoughtful, disciplined approaches. There must be room for good experiences and so on. Unplanned. How are they made?

[70:49]

It is the same kind of making, I think, of this. You have the same thing in the finance. Good actions. Well, what's our desert today? Well, if you've got to find it somewhere, where do you want? You know, it might be an office, it might be a building, it might be a place where you can pan off the keys in your hand in case it's gone. That's what you're asking for. That's what's there really. If it doesn't do that, then it's clear. That's what taught me to play the clarinet back in my hospital. I still don't feel like playing the violins because it's too quiet. It's just terrifying. Don't tell me. I can't stand it. It's too quiet. I think sometimes Americans, that's what we're meant to change all the time.

[71:52]

We walk in the house and there's no one. There's no one. Home comes. If anything, it's where it starts. Because it's just... It makes us feel that we're wrong. It's not so much that we don't like the silence. We don't like the meaning of uselessness. There's nothing happening. It's not the silence itself that we don't like. It's what we think is useless. One of the management ideas is that time is money. That's Benjamin Franklin. Time is money, I knew. They go to any courts and manage their practice management and that's what they're drummed in, time and money, and what the... It's not for you to preach yet, but we'll talk to you soon. The question, and there were a lot of times for students to think about this. We simply talk, and if they ask a question, we expect them to answer. If they don't, they're given an answer, and they don't answer the next question.

[72:56]

There's that kind of feeling that there's no place in mind for solving. I think this is partly something that you said yesterday, David, about the eternity. God's time is much different from our time. I think we're so impatient about things in that part of part of the same thing about being uncomfortable with silence, because we want something to happen, and we expect something, and when we think that there's nothing going to be accomplished, that's the way we think about things, that something has to be done, or accomplished, and we're impatient. The story in the Bible I always think of is Moses being out in the wilderness 40 years, before he saw the burning bush, that maybe he had to think that long before he could see the bush burning.

[73:59]

But there's also a beautiful saying of the rabbis about this burning bush. The story starts with saying, and Moses was in the desert, minding the flocks. And the rabbis say, if Moses had not been minding the flocks, he would have never seen the burning bush. And that's the other half of his contemplation, you see, and action. One shouldn't say ever, I catch myself saying contemplation and action. This is wrong. Contemplation implies action. Without action, contemplation is only templation. But the con is precisely putting the vision in action. You shouldn't say that. Two belong together. Yeah.

[75:03]

Yeah. [...] We spoke about discipline. This is a beautiful discipline. And Eliot also has the passage almost literally, time, not our time.

[76:17]

Be attuned to time, not our time. not when we feel like it, but when it is time. And that's one of the things around which the whole monastic experience revolves. We do things when it is time, not when we feel like it. which reminds me that maybe it is time now. I would like to end this with a saying and I think it would be very appropriate if we ended in silence for a moment. Thank you.

[78:56]

Thank you.

[79:08]

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