The Spiritual Journey : from Medieval Christian Mysticism to the Ancient Eastern Religions

The Summer after my sophomore year in high school, I went to Young Life camp in the beautiful Adirondack  mountains of upstate New York.  We slept in half-timbered log cabins after long days spent exhausting ourselves with water sports, mountain hikes, and beach volleyball.  I went with a big group of my friends and remember the other campers from around the country as very cool and very attractive.  It was the perfect place for a 15 year old to have a spiritual experience.  Instead, I left there with questions that would culminate in this Blog, where 20 years later, I am attempting to find answers. 

I had been attending Young Life regularly that school year, primarily to meet people and for the chance to play Truth or Dare with older boys.  After dinner each night at Camp, we would have a more intense version of those weekly youth group gatherings back in St. Louis.  The college age counselors would put on skits and charismatically recount how they converted to Christianity after hellish experiences with drugs and alcohol.  They would tell us about how awesome Jesus is, how much he loves us.  One night midway through our week, we all assembled together as usual in the fellowship hall. Sitting cross legged, chatting about our sunburns and full bellies, we cheerfully awaited the evening’s entertainment. Abruptly, everyone quieted down.  The youth minister had silently been waiting for us to notice him.  He had a very solemn look on his face.  He told us we were all in very grave danger.  If we did not accept Jesus Christ as king of our hearts, our souls would go to Hell.  He said, “Close your eyes. He paused Imagine a tiny grain of sand on a vast beach.  He paused again Now imagine the worst pain you have ever felt.  He paused a final time If you go to Hell, the pain you feel will be like all the grains of sand on the beach put together and the worst pain you can imagine is like that one tiny grain of sand.”

I can not accept that there is only one way to find God.  Through researching for this blog, I have become increasingly aware that all World religions are interconnected.  I intuitively believe that they all arise from the same source.  What if important religious thinkers, leaders, and prophets throughout history are those who have an especially strong connection to the spiritual realm, including Jesus Christ?  I think it is worth consideration by Christians that, while their religion is right for them, people for whom Christianity does not work, or people from non-Christian cultures are not wrong.

Religions communities reflect a culture’s values and philosophy.  21^st century American society puts a lot of emphasis on the individual’s happiness and personal fulfillment, which our media urges us to seek via consumerism.  Even by our fellow western countries standards we are considered to be incredibly self-centered.   The Europeans point to the uproar over “Obamacare” and the more than a decade long war over foreign oil as proof of American egocentricism.  We come across to other cultures as having an attitude that we are always right and we know everything.  Also, our capitalist economic model depends on taking far more than our share of the world’s resources and results in a lot of waste that poorly impacts others.  This is a gross perversion of what God tells Adam in the book of Genesis: “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.”

This gift of the earth came paired with free will.  Our self-will pushes us to find enjoyment and then deceives us into thinking that pursuit of pleasure is the way to find God.  The catch with free will is that we can make selfish and immoral decisions, but then we have to live with the consequences.  Some non-Americans count climate change and the global recession as our karma.  In this post, I want to explore the similarities between the Christian mystics of the middle ages and the much older, Eastern religions of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism. 

Ironically, the free spirited Christian mystics have been viewed as self-centered by institutional Christianity according to “Ordinary Mysticism” a book by Dennis Tamburello.  He defines mysticism as knowledge of God through experience of love: his love for us, and our love for him and our neighbor in return.  Secondly, the Christian mystics assert that our idea of God is too small and that we must recognize that no image can enclose the meaning of God. (41)  Tamburello details the lives and works of three important Christian mystics: Bernard Clairvaux (1090-1153), Meister Eckhart (1260-1327), and Teresa of Avila (1515-1582) who were French, German, and Spanish respectively.  They all maintained that a symbiotic relationship should exist between the two dimensions of spiritual life.  Our prayer life is the contemplative dimension and our love and service of others is the active dimension.  The book concludes:

Mystical union (with God) has to do with experiencing God’s presence in our lives
God is always present to us, though sometimes we are distracted from our awareness of this by our busy lives.  It is important to cultivate a life of prayer – so that his presence will become more apparent to us in our regular daily activities…. It is especially important to recognize the connection between union with God and with one another. (119-120)

All three mystics discussed in the book stress the importance of finding salvation, which is equated with a loving relationship with God, through prayer and meditation.  While faith communities can help with this process, they are not required.   Bernard Clairvaux asserts that our salvation originates in God, he makes the first move, but then we must accept his saving action in our lives.  We then grow spiritually when our prayer life feeds our life of service to others.  Similarly, Teresa stressed that “we do not attain intimacy with God in isolation from others; rather we must help each other to grow spiritually.” (94)  She described her contemplative experience as passive, however.  According to her, prayer flowed directly from God to our souls and espoused the prayer of quiet which begins in God and fosters a sense of great serenity and sweetness in us.  Finally, for Meister Eckhart, union with God should be enacted in a rich life of service.  We should strive to identify our soul with God.  Our success depends entirely on God’s grace, which is the mystical tradition defines as the presence or self-communication with God.

I am struck by the parallels between the basic tenets of mysticism and the three eastern religions of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism.  Hinduism is the world’s oldest religion, dating back possibly as far as 10,000 BC.  The first written Vedas (from Sanskrit root meaning knowledge) date to 3,000 BC.  The most significant Veda asserts that Reality is One or Absolute and equated with God or Brahman.  The ordinary world is an illusion.  It is only through meditation that we can experience our true self in a state of nirvana or total union with Brahman.  The Buddha or Siddhartha Gautama was born the son of a wealthy Hindu in 563 BC.  He ran away at 29 to seek enlightenment and after many years of meditative practice achieved it at the age of 35 sitting under a Bodhi tree.  Buddha comes from the Sanskrit root for “to awaken” “to be enlightened” or “to comprehend.”  Buddhism teaches that we suffer because of our desire for earthly goods.  We find liberation through meditation and training our mind in the laws of karma, or cause and effect.  When we engage in right actions, good things come to us.  Along with Buddhism, Taoism is the other great religion of ancient China.  It was adopted as the state religion in 440 BC and its founder Lao Tzu was honored as a deity until 1911 when China became a Republic and dynastic rule ended.  Tao means “the way” and in Taoism the Way is the spiritual force that flows through all life, connecting it to all things in the Universe.  A happy life is one in harmony with the Tao and this principle is well illustrated by the Yin Yang.  In the West, the Yin Yang concept is of complementary duality.  While the idea of harmony is consistent with Taoist thought, the two separate parts is not. The curved lines of the symbol as well as the dark and light spots of light are meant to show that the two opposites are intertwined and bound together in a continuous ebb and flow.  Thus, all is One and interconnected.

On the final day of my Young Life summer Camp experience, we gathered one last time in the Fellowship Hall before boarding our busses for the ride home.  The Youth Minister asked us all if we had accepted Jesus as our Lord and Saviour.  He called for everyone to raise their hands if they had, one from almost every of the several hundred sets of hands shot into the air.  He then asked those of us who were not yet sure to raise our hands.  There were five of us.  We were asked to go down to the boat house with 2 of counselors, while everybody else remained where they were seated.  When we got there, the counsellors asked us if we had any questions.  We asked things like, “Will our Jewish friends go to Hell?”  “What about people in remote parts of other Continents, who had never even heard of Jesus Christ, what would happen to them?”  Each of our questions was met with a shrug and a sigh and a, “Well, the Bible says….”  What I heard was, “We are right and they are wrong.”  My doubt arose back then because of a thought I feel confidant about today.  We are all right.  The important thing is to make the individual effort to know God and then to follow as you are guided in your spiritual journey, wherever and to whomever it may lead you.