Zen Catholicism -Dom Aelred Graham

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"According to Catholic tradition, man is a unity made up of soul and body; he is part spirit, part matter, but substantially a whole. The Church, not having defined the nature of either spirit or matter, this generalized description of man, while answering to common sense observation, permits of detailed filling in. Thus, from the psychological standpoint, we can look at ourselves in terms of our bodies, feelings, perceptions, volitional impulses, and consciousness - which are the chief aspects of the human personality as seen by Buddhism.

Feelings, perceptions, volitional impulses, and even our bodies manifest themselves at the level of our conscious egos. The level, that is to say, at which we are keenly aware of ourselves as distinct personalities, as separated from the world around us. This awareness is obviously of great importance. Without it we could not function purposefully, either in a manner leading to the gratification of our wishes as individuals, or as playing our part in the various groups - domestic, social, political, religious - to which we belong. The ego, aware of itself. is what places us in a subject-object relationship to ourselves, to other people, and even to God.

Indispensable as is this self-conscious ego to our well-being, it is also the condition and focal point of our deepest distress.By it we function, but by it we also suffer. We suffer the sense of alienation inherent in the subject-object relationship: alienation from self, alienation from the natural world and other people, alienation from God. The feeling of not knowing where one is, of not belonging, being ill-adjusted, forces us to play a part, more or less successful according to circumstances. We prepare a face to meet the faces that we meet. On the basis of such insight that we have, we come to a working compromise with life, adapting ourselves as best we may to the social round, to the "one damned thing after another" which largely makes up the world of space and time.

Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
(T.S.Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock)

Daily life, for most people, consists of a series of personal encounters, pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. The original meaning of the word "person" (persona) - as distinct from the technical sense which it has acquired in Catholic theology - is that of a mask used by actors. A person is someone who assumes, in however slight degree, a disguise. As soon as the word is extended to "personage". we have no difficulty in seeing the point. A personage is an individual with a role; he must, like an actor, project himself in accordance with the appropriate "image". An aspiring politician is obliged to appear as simultaneously cheerful, confident, and statesmanlike; a movie star as arresting and sexually attractive,; an ecclesiastic as at once grave and benign, with perhaps a hint of a bright clerical smile. These conventions are well understood and acceptable enough. They only become tiresome when the individuals concerned, forgetting that from the basic human standpoint they are merely playing a part, identify themselves with their role. This invariably leads to trouble both for them and for those associated with them.


Here in fact we are on the brink, according to an age-long wisdom, of humanity's chief source of trouble. Deep distress inevitably occurs whenever we identify what may be called our true self ( the "I") with the assertive, separative ego (the often all-too-demanding "me") : when, in other words, we allow our lives to be immersed in a private sea of feelings, perceptions, desires, and aversions, whether physical or mental. This can involve us in a kind of counterfeit self-awareness, so vivid that we may mistake its contents for our very being: all we are is what we feel we are.

The tendency to this condition, from which our humanity must perpetually struggle to free itself, has always been regarded as a primary fact of life by the Hindu-Buddhist tradition which lies behind Zen. A comparable outlook, though not commonly expounded with a parallel depth of insight, is to be found in the Catholic doctrine of original sin...." (23-25)


"The true inner self is what Indian religious thought, which lies behind Zen Buddhism, calls the Atman. Here we must pause; for we are at the heart of our subject. To come to terms with the inner self, or as Zen describes it, "seeing into our own nature", is very much more easily said than done. "'The Self is not to be attained by one without fortitude, nor through slackness nor without distinctive marks of discipline'. To see the Self one must become 'calm, controlled, quiet, patiently endured and contented.'" (Upanishads). We should note that this highly desirable condition, according to the masters of the spiritual life, is indistinguishable from what is required to live consciously in the presence of God. "man must first be restored to himself, that, making in himself as it were a stepping-stone, he may rise thence and be born up to God." ( St. Augustine). There is thus the closest connection between being truly aware of ourselves and being aware, in some degree at least, of God.

This raises the interesting question: How far could one, as a Catholic, agree with a position, which many expositors hold to be implicit in Buddhism, namely, that to become aware of the inner self (Atman) is to become aware of the Ultimate Self (Brahman) which is God? Succinctly the doctrine is expressed in the Sanskrit formula tat tvam asi ( That thou art) ; "The Atman, or immanent eternal Self, is one with Brahman, the Absolute Principal of all existence; and the last end of every human being is to discover the fact for himself, to find out Who he really is." (Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy)

We should be foolish to quarrel over words and descriptive terms. Provided we remember that our individual self is finite and creaturely, we may call it Atman, and call God Brahman. Indeed, god may even be regarded as the Ultimate Self - a thoroughly Augustinian notion, as well as being a fair paraphrase of Exodus 3:14 ( "I am Who AM"), or of St. Thomas's Ipsum esse subsistens. But it would impose too great a strain on the orthodox formulas to attempt to equate them with such a typical statement as the following: "The real which is at the heart of the universe is reflected in the infinite depths of the self. Brahman ( the ultimate as discovered objectively) is Atman ( the ultimate as discovered introspectively). Tat tvam asi (Thou art thou). Truth is within us." (A Source Book in Indian Philosophy). Nor is there the least necessity to do so.

If Catholics may conceivably be helped by certain insights from Zen, expositors of Zen, for there part, will loose nothing by a consideration of why Christianity insists on the truth that the creature is really distinct from the Creator. Yet it may prove that the differences on this point, fundamental as they appear, could in their practical implications, be more apparent than real. Nothing is clearer in the Christian revelation than that man's "self" has the closest affinity to God. we are made in God's "image" (Genesis 1:27) ; man's spirit is "the lamp of the lord" (Proverbs 20:27) ; we are to be "perfect" with God's perfection (Matthew 5:48) : being joined to the Lord, we are "one spirit" (1 Corinthians 6:17) ; by God's gift we are actually "partakers of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4). These texts do not indicate man's identity with God, though they point to the possibility of the closest communion with Him. They are the positive aspects of one of Christianity's basic teachings - that the only misfortune is to be separated from God.

The tradition behind Zen is not dissimilar. Authorities on Hinduism and Buddhism come out strongly against the "monism" which is often ascribed to them by Western critics. The doctrine of the Vedas (i.e., the Hindu sacred writings), declares Coomaraswamy, is "neither pantheistic nor polytheistic, nor a worship of powers of Nature except in the sense of Natura naturans est Deus (St. Thomas Aquinas refers to God as "natura naturans" in the Summa Theologica, I-II, 85, 6: "Deus a quibusdam dicitur natura naturans" - "God is said by some to be the Nature Who makes nature." It is clear from the context that St. Thomas finds the term quite acceptable.) and all her powers but the names of God's acts." In the same sense we find one of the leading exponents of Zen insisting, "Buddhism is often regarded a being pantheistic. This must be corrected. Buddhism is absolutely not pantheistic. Buddhism stands stands in itself and is not to be subsumed under any such category. Pantheism is apt to ignore differences, while Buddhism does not. Differences are differences and as such they remain. But there is something in the particular differences which makes them most intimately related to each other, as if they all came from one source." (The Essentials of zen Buddhism). This is hardly distinguishable from St. Thomas's position, that God exists in all things, not as part of their essence, but as the immediate cause of their being." (26-29)


"Catholicism is at one with Zen in extolling the self-less life; but selflessness is an attitude of the human spirit resulting from its surrender to God, the Ultimate Self, not a denial of the existence of the creaturely ego. Zen enthusiasts in the West may profitably search their hearts on this point. Why do they find the "there-is-no-ego" doctrine so attractive? As indicating the creature's relative insignificance before God, it could have meaning: as it has for the Catholic mystics - St. Catherine of Siena, for example: "Thou, O God, art an abyss of everything and I am an abyss of nothing." But divorced from a religious context, to what does it lead? To some kind of aesthetic intuitionism, perhaps. Not, however, so far as I can see, to "regeneration" or any deeply significant way of life. On the contrary, the evidence points to an old familiar degeneration, the path that leads to individualistic anarchy and spiritual rootlessness.

It should be noted also that the nonexistence of a created self or ego is not indicated by any one of the Buddha's Four Holy truths, whatever the Hinduist assumptions that may be read into them. Guatama Buddha, as Aldous Huxley points out, was one of those strict practical teachers who had "no use for speculation and whose primary concern is to put out in men's hearts the hideous fires of greed, resentment and infatuation." This is a fruitful thought. Applied to Christianity, it transforms the somewhat abstruse metaphysic of the Creator-creature relationship into the highly rewarding practical truth, namely, that it is to God alone that man both appropriately may, and imperatively needs to, surrender his created self. "The thought of Thee stirs him so deeply," writes St. Augustine in the well known opening to his Confessions, "that he cannot be content unless he praises Thee; because Thou didst make us for Thyself and our hearts find no peace until they rest in Thee.

We should observe that it is God Himself, not a "thought" about Him, that brings satisfaction. The thought may be helpful, but it also may be erroneous - in which case it is the reverse of helpful. Of necessity it may be inadequate. (See Isaiah 55:9.) It is not in the realm of thoughts about God, but in God Himself that we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28). He is present to us by His creative power, itself one with the divine substance, more intimately than it is possible to imagine. "Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet." Our existence, though distint, is rooted and grounded in God's existence. As an effect is, as it were, transcended and embraced by what cause it, so there is a sense in which we may say, echoing the thought of Augustine and Aquinas, that we exist more really in God than in our own being. What is needed, if we are to be at peace, is that we should be consciously aware of this fact. Such an awareness, as distinct from a theoretical knowledge based on inference, would constitute "enlightenment". Without amounting to a direct vision of God, it would bring us into harmony with the Principal behind the universe and so enable us, at last, to understand ourselves." (30-32)


"...suffering is endemic to the human situation.Our joys provide only an occasional respite. In this there is no blank pessimism, as if a more or less continuous state of happiness were impossible. What needs to be understood, however, is that happiness depends on the preliminary acceptance of a number of unpalatable facts. Chief among those facts is the practical knowledge, as distinct from airy theory, of what makes for happiness. This knowledge is especially hard to come by ion the West, conditioned as we are to making large demands on our environment, and to entertaining the illusion that to raise the standard of living is equivelent to nourishing the human spirit." (38)


"Man is a creature of emotions; his religion,therefore, cannot be purely intellectual or spiritual. But when religion becomes a field for emotional self-indulgence or sentimentalism - ultimately, as an Anglican Dean of St. Paul's has called it, "the most merciless of all moods" when, in other words, what is being sought is not the God of consolation but the consolations of God, then we'll left with selfishness masquerading as piety.

Thus religion itself, misunderstood or understood superficially, instead of bringing relief can actually intensify, or at least do nothing to mitigate humanity's suffering. We are faced once more with the root of the trouble -the restless craving for or grasping at something we want or fear to lose.The object of this craving may be tangible, like sensual pleasure,wealth or material security, or such intangibles as honors, prestige, power, or even some spiritual idea that we have formulated for ourselves. We are apt to cling to what gratifies or enhances the conscious ego, heedless of the still small voice of a true self, prompting us to stand aside, relax, and let go. Being unwilling or unable, it's so we persuade ourselves, to "let go", we hold on, become attached, and so ever more deeply involved in the unending round of karma, described in the New Testament by the formula "whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." (Galatians 6:7)

Of all life's harsh facts here is perhaps the harshest: that the feelings and emotions which are part of our being, through which we gain so much joy, are precisely what entangle us, unless we can find a way out, in an endless sequence of trouble, frustration, and suffering. This was the situation faced in all its painful reality by Gautama Buddha; it is a situation, as the masters of the spiritual life concur, from which there is only one path of release. What then is the Holy Truth of the Stopping of Ill? It is the complete stopping of that craving, the withdrawal from it, the renouncing of it, throwing it back, liberation from it, nonattachment from it. More summarily and in a somewhat different context, the message of Christianity is the same. "Whosoever shall seek to save his life shall lose it: and whosoever shall lose it shall preserve it" (Luke 17:33)" (64-65)


"The true self is our being in its immediate dependence on the creative act of God, Who is the self-existent Being." (65)


"...it is not nature's self-indulgence as such that causes trouble, or even a reasonable desire for such indulgences. There is sound psychology, even wisdom, behind the popular saying "A little of what you fancy does you good". Nature regenerated by grace does not cease to be nature; it still calls for fulfillment rather than frustration; therefore it should be moderately indulged. To deny nature its due is apt to make the individual more, rather than less, egoistic. Given the appropriate context, sensuous pleasure, wealth, power, and prestige, whatever we care to mention, can be enjoyed without any betrayal of one's true self. But because these are ego-enhancing experiences, they easily tempt us to excess and to an absorbing desire for them, that craving - the result, it may be remarked, of original sin - which, while it lasts, debars us from the saving "enlightenment". (67)


"What is to be done about this ego-awareness, which is a necessity, since without it the individual can achieve little, yet which can torment him almost to the point of wishing for death? The first answer is that nothing can be done about it. If we consciously watch ourselves, strive directly to eliminate egocentric thoughts, the trouble increases, as it would by contemplating one's own unattractiveness in a mirror. The same could be true of course of asceticism, by which we attempt a violent withdrawal from the objects of craving. Asceticism of itself does not eliminate ego-awareness, rather the reverse. Even prayer and devotion, though they can bring us nearer to the root of the matter, have not the power to provide a final solution.

Ina sense there is no final solution. We cannot remove from the human condition what is an integral part of it. But we can, with God's grace ( and here in substance though not in modes of expression, Catholicism and Zen agree), make sense of our self-preoccupation, live with it, and eventually find beatitude through it. Expositors of Zen, at this point, make much of the virtue of following ones own nature, just relaxing and letting things be. What is forgotten by some, though not by all Zennists, is that for such counsels to be fruitful we must perform an inner task demanding a high degree of fidelity. This task essentially is to become aware, not merely in terms of ego-consciousness, but by the awakening of the true self, and to respond in attitude and action to this awareness. Eastern and Western religious tradition speaks with one voice: enlightenment or salvation depends on answering adequately the challenge "know thyself". (68-69)


"It is important to note that the metaphysical implications of satori are often presented by expositors of Zen as being incompatible with orthodox Christianity. This point has already been touched on with regard to the real distinction between creature and Creator - a doctrine fundamental to Catholicism., though a doctrine of considerable subtlety. "After the creation there are indeed more beings, but there is not more being or perfection, because whatever perfection there is in the effect, was existing in a higher mode of being in the first eternal Cause." The first eternal Cause, needless to say, is the God in Whom "we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:38)

The experience of nonduality, just now alluded to, between the "I' and the "me", or, more generally, between the knowing subject and the knowing object, is normally interpreted by Zen Buddhists as being between the supposedly noncreated, only seemingly existent, individual human self and the ultimate Self which is God. This position, as so stated, cannot be reconciled with Catholicism. But it is a position, as can without difficulty be shown, in no way demanded by the characteristic Zen insight. Moreover this doctrine, though it may be implicit in the Hinduism from which Buddhism arose, is not explicitly stated in the Buddha's Four Holy Truths, whatever Gautama himself may have thought on the point. Zen expositors, in evolving a philosophy somewhat remote from "the everyday mind" of Zen, have reached behind the Buddha to the Atman-Brahman nondualistic antithesis, the original setting for the deeply impressive tat tvam asi: "thou art thou" doctine of Brahmanism." (70-71)


"...Catholicism and Zen agree on two essential points,. First, the way of escape from what the Church calls concupiscence - that is, disordered desire, for anything whatever, not merely sensuous enjoyment - and the Buddhist tradition describes as craving or grasping cannot be had by the ego's conscious efforts to find release; it depends on the ego's "rebirth" as the true self under God;s direct illumination. Secondly, this rebirth or change of heart, though it cannot be achieved by the ego, nevertheless demands that the ego fulfill an inner task. We have by constant watchfulness to correspond with the movement of God's grace, ever striving to bring our true self into being. Corresponding with grace depends on keeping the eye of our mind, according to its natural powers and as further enlightened by faith, open and clear. In the resulting state of clarity the conscious ego will imperceptibility recede into the background, becoming aware of what it is already, the true self.

One sign this process is taking place is the disinclination to think - though, of course, we must necessarily talk ( in moderation!) - in terms of the first person singular. It is not what I do or suffer, but, at most, what seems to be happening through me. " 'I did it", an infantile idea," writes Coomaraswamy, and, quoting Walt Whitman, "These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they are not original with me. If they are not yours as much as mine, they are nothing, or next to nothing." Which, in substance, seems to be the same point that is made by St. Francois de Sales: "We all know that our good works are better to the degree that there is less of self in them. The I, me and mine render worthless over half of what we do. The are like an ugly cobweb clinging to a beehive and spoiling all the honey."

The key to liberation, the truth that makes us free, lies in nonattachment to whatever enhances our separate self. For every attachment there arises a corresponding fear, the fear of losing what we cling to. This fear in turn intensifies ego-consciousness, which may then seek to sustain itself by another attachment - and so the process of entanglement can go on endlessly." (72-73)


"The Church's concern for wisdom, enlarged on by length by Aquinas, recalls a similar preoccupation in Buddhism. For wisdom (prajna), the attempt to penetrate to the actual reality of things as they are in themselves, is the crown of all Buddhist endeavor.

Homage to Thee, Perfect Wisdom,
Boundless, and transcending thought!
All Thy limbs are without blemish,
Faultless those who Thee discern....


As the drops of dew in contact
With the sun's rays disappear,
So all theorizings vanish,
Once one has obtained Thee....

From this one may pass, with scarcely a change of emphasis, to the Summa Theologica. Within the space of a single article (II-II, 45, 2) St. Thomas makes the following points: first, wisdom denotes right judgment "according to the eternal Law"; secondly, wisdom, as a gift of the Holy Spirit, judges what it deals with, not in a detached, rational, abstract way, but existentially, by a kinship of nature (connaturalitas) - which might be rendered tat tvam asi: "that art thou"; thirdly, this kinship or sympathy with the object arises from the fact that the wise man has not merely learned about God, but is consciously experiencing the Divine (patiens divina); finally, this enlightenment - no single word could be more apt - is the direct result of God's love, whereby the Divine Enlightener and he who is so "joined to the Lord" are "one spirit" (1Corithians 6:17) " (94-95)


"The challenge to Christ's first disciples was not to abandon an easy, luxurious mode of life; that would have had little meaning, since they were, for the most part, poor hard-working people to whom luxuries came rarely. The call, then as now, was to a change of heart, to be converted, to turn away from their prejudices and preconceptions and to learn from him how to do God's will.

It is often forgotten that Jesus of Nazareth was not Himself an ascetic, nor did he teach asceticism in the commonly accepted meaning of the term. The form of self-denial He demanded was more exacting. He undertook a fast, when directly prompted by the Holy Spirit to do so (Luke 4:1-2); but, unlike John the Baptist, His regular diet was not locust and wild honey. "The Son of Man came eating and drinking" (Matthew 11:19); He could bear the charge of being " a glutton and a winebibber." This point is being emphasized, not as giving countenance to any excess in food and drink, but as drawing attention to the deeper implications of Christ's mission, with its weight of suffering. The suffering was not sought out; it came upon Him, inevitably, in the execution of His duty. By living up to the light given to His human mind, being faithful to his unique vocation. He involved Himself, the circumstances being what they were, in crucifixion and death. To take up one's cross and follow Christ is in parallel fashion to act in accordance with one's lights, to be faithful to the true self; it is to carry out the will of God, enduring patiently the trials that this must necessarily involve.These are the terms in which our Lord's passion and death are expressed in their most authoritative formulation. He "accepted an obedience which brought him to death, death on a cross" (Philippians 2:8)

Thus, from a relatively superficial notion of "asceticism" we are brought back to the fundamental concept of "discipline". The word is basically the same as "disciple" - one who learns. Jesus learned what was to be done from His Father; and we learn, if we know how to attend, from the Holy Spirit. To respond faithfully to the Spirit calls for a high degree of alertness and pliancy. To achieve this, body and soul must needs work together; and it is possible that Catholics could be helped to a more fruitful application of the Church's own teaching by giving some attention to the mental and physical disciplines developed many centuries ago in India. Anyone who has felt prompted to adapt these to a Christian context, in however modest a way, will probably testify to their effectiveness. They induce a sense of calm and physical well-being, together with increased powers of "attention without tension," which it is difficult not to consider wholly for the good. The Christian reader may care to be reminded that the word translated yoke in Matthew 11:29, 30- "Take my yoke upon you....my yoke is easy and my burden light" - is etymologically the same as yoga." (122-23)


"When closely examined, there is a salutary fatalism about the Catholic doctrine of grace and free will, which it is helpful rather than otherwise to keep in mind.the depressing thing would be if we really were, in any ultimate sense, masters of our fate and captains of our soul. to attain religious maturity is to have learned that such apparent self-mastery as one has functions best when it is surrendered to God." (137)


"We are apt to forget that to regard the things of the spirit as lofty and sublime is to put them at a distance, and so provide ourselves with an excuse for not attending to them. Religion might well be thought of as matter-of-factness, since it deals with the supreme Fact. But to see it so we need to be aware that God is not only "in heaven," but within us and all about us. Our sense of God in His height needs as its compliment a feeling for God in His fullness, a recognition that " the world is charged with the grandeur of God"; and not only with His grandeur, but with His lowliness. For we are often nearer to reality when we stoop than when we aspire to the heights." (141)


"Zen meditation is instantaneously contemplative; it has been described as "seeing without desire." There is nothing occult, mysterious, or essentially difficult about it. It is the most natural thing for the mind to do, were not the mind clouded by clinging and craving. If we could disentangle ourselves from these, and keep fully aware without thinking of anything, we should perceive all that we see in its "suchness"; that is to say, within human limits, as God sees it.

To see things from God's viewpoint - sub ratione Deitatis, as the theologians express it - means that we are functioning not egoistically, but as our true selves. And our true self, as has been recalled, is the habitat of God - where, by faith and through His grace, "I live, yet no longer I, but Christ lives in me" (Galatians 2:20). So considered, meditation merges into contemplation as understood by the central Catholic tradition. "There are those who think that this matter of contemplation is so difficult and frightening that it cannot be accomplished without a great deal of very hard work beforehand, and that it only happens occasionally," writes the author of The Cloud of Unknowing.

...Let me answer these people as well as I can; it depends entirely on the will and good pleasure of God, and whether they are spiritually able to receive this grace of contemplation, and the working of the Spirit.....there are some who by grace are so sensitive spiritually and so at home with God in this grace of contemplation that they may have it when they like and under normal spiritual working conditions, whether they are sitting, walking, standing, kneeling,. And at these times they are in full control of their faculties, both physical and spiritual, and can use them if they wish....

What interested Catholics should explore, I suggest, is whether contemplation has not a much more generalized and nonprofessional character than is often supposed. The notion that the contemplative state is an exclusive preoccupation with God is misleading, since God excludes nothing. Of possible relevance is the famous triune formula to be found in the early tradition behind zen Buddhism - Sat-Cit-Ananda: being-Knowledge-bliss, which is predicated of Ultimate reality. this hardly corresponds to the revealed doctrine of the Holy trinity, but it has its analogies in the metaphysic of Catholicism. The evidence suggests that St.Thomas would have been happy with it - since for him material being reaches a higher state of actualization by becoming an object of knowledge, and knowledge of things in their causes, which is wisdom, constitutes bliss. It may therefore be submitted that the contemplative state, when realized in an individual, reproduces at the created level, the Sat-Cit-Ananda: a Catholic contemplative would then enjoy, as already touched on, his satori: "the sober certainty of waking bliss." In precisely this context we find Juan Mascaro referring to "the greatest spiritual poems of all time," those of St. John of the Cross, and adding: "In his aphorisms he says: 'In order to be All, do not desire to be anything. In order to know ALL, do not desire to know anything. In order to find the joy of All, do not desire to enjoy anything'. 'To be', 'to know', and 'to find joy' correspond to the SAT, CIT, ANANDA, 'Being, Consciousness, and Joy' of the Upanishads." " (146-7)


"Christianity in its historical, eschatological dimension lays much stress on death. Understandably so, since here, literally, is the great moment of crisis. Viewed, however, from the standpoint of the "eternal now," death appears less daunting. Physiologists tell us that, with regard to our bodies, we are both living and dying all the time. "we do not live, we do not die, we live-die." Preoccupation with the thought of one's death occurs when the conscious ego, as it is constantly apt to do, overwhelms, so to speak, the true self. For the true self lives and loves in the present, at least half consciously aware that the only death that counts is to be separated from ultimate Reality, which is God. As Robert Southwell wrote, "not where I breathe, but where I love, I live." From this point of view we are more concerned about other people's deaths than our own. Here, understandably, is the most difficult field for the practice of nonattachment. We cling, grasp at, the lives and well-being of others, until we learn that these, too, are in better hands than our own." (148-9)


"To live in the present we do not have to ignore the reality of time. For the Christian, time is an important category, since the origins of his religion, unlike those of Buddhism, are bound up with historical events. The veracity of the legends surrounding the life and work of Siddhartha Gautama is of little moment to the educated Buddhist; what matters to him is the whole process by which one may oneself become a Buddha, an "enlightened one." Christianity, on the other hand, is inseparably linked with the person and lifework of Jesus of Nazareth. The Judaeo-Christian tradition sees the time sequence as being itself a manifestation of God's purpose. To a Hindu who is sympathetic to Christianity, as Mircea Eliade points out, "the most striking innovation (apart from the message and the divinity of Christ) is its valorization of Time - in the final reckoning, its redemption of Time and History."

A vivid sense of history is one characteristic of Catholicism. The Church stands or falls by the validity of its claim to have been constituted, with Peter as its first pope, by our Lord Jesus Christ during His life on earth. The Church has grown in the understanding of itself as age succeeds age. we are as yet, it may well be, "early Christians" - two thousand years being a short period compared with, say, a million years. The Church, like its individual members, will advance in self-knowledge until it at length achieves its complete stature, the "fulness of Christ" (Ephesians 4:13). The recurring cycle of the Church's liturgy and the whole sacramental system are further indications of the reality of time. We may make contact with what is eternal; but the normal preliminaries are that account be taken of the Divinely ordained temporal instruments through which God's grace comes to us.

We should observe, however, that what makes for us any day a good day, any season a good season, is that the days and seasons acn be, through an enlightened faith, focused upon the God who is timeless and eternal. "Time becomes a value, insofar as God manifests himself through it, filling it with trans-historical meaning and a soteriological intention." (Mircea Eliade, Images and Symbols). God's saving purpose, to express the last phrase more simply, is executed, with respect to the justification of the individual and the infusion of Divine grace, not in history's time sequence but according to the timeless action of God, "instantly, without any succession in time." (Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I-II,133,7.). Thus while Catholicism has its vitally important temporal aspects, its raison d'etre is beyond time. "While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporal: but the things which are not seen are eternal" (2Corinthians 4:18)." (154-5)


"To-day if you shall hear His voice, harden not your hearts" (Psalm 94:8; Hebrews 3:7; 4:7). It is as simple, and as difficult, as that. All we can do, all that is required of us, is not to harden our hearts. We harden them, not by malice only, perhaps seldom directly by that, but by being mentally asleep or abstracted, daydreaming, not living on the spot where we are. If in our minds or wishes we are not at the here and now, if we are dwelling on the past or the anticipated future, or absorbed in ego-regarding thoughts, we can neither hear God's voice nor see what is before us. To hear and to see we must "let go," that is, allow the flux of thoughts and feelings to evaporate into nothingness from our nonattention. When the mind is awakened to the point of cherishing no thoughts, then the challenge of vision will evoke, on the instant, the appropriate response. To be able to do this, through God's gift, continuously and by way of habit, is to be living as one's true self, egolessly. Then every day cannot but be a good day, every season a good season." (159-60)