Way Station

For several years I was a regular attendee in a Buddhist sitting group. We would begin with a period of meditation, followed by a talk and discussion, followed by a social period with the obligatory Buddhist herb tea and cookies. It was a nice group. The meetings were on Sunday mornings, a situation which struck me as a bit odd. Sunday is just another day of the week in a Buddhist context; it’s not a devotional religion, after all, with all of the spic-’n’-span church-goin’ Sunday-school meetin’ house mentality of your basic American Protestant parishioner. I checked in with one of the group elders with my inquiry. His reply was that people in the group rather liked the overall sense of ‘going to church’ so that’s why the meetings were when they were. (Well, that, and an aversion to the earsplitting din from an adjoining trendy GenY-infested restaurant.)

His answer made perfect sense to me, given that I would have classified at least half, if not more, of the group as spiritually transitional types. Less interested in Buddhism per se, they were more concerned about the shared guidance and community that can be found in a spiritually-based group, but without the dogmatism, smugness, cant, intolerance, bigotry, and just plain nuttiness of your basic Christian church. That this particular group was resolutely non-sectarian, combining as it did elements of Soto Zen, Theravada, various Tibetan flavors, and even a bit of Pure Land, clearly the dominant inspiration here was communal gathering, not adherence to a particular code of ethics or style of practice. (For those not familiar with the general lay of the Buddhist land, be advised that it encompasses kaleidoscopically divergent dialects and varieties of belief, experience, and practice, at least as wide as the Christian world if not wider. Buddhists can be as belief-soaked, intolerant, and unreasonable as any hick fundamentalist from the boondocks, or as broad-minded, sophisticated, and philosophically subtle as any Unitarian or Swedenborgian type.)

All in all, however, my impression of most Buddhist organizations—including large, well-established, and highly organized institutions such as SF Zen Center and Spirit Rock—is that among their attendees are to be found a significant number of people who are on the way out of organized religion altogether. Certainly far more than those who are on the way in; ex-Christians make up a particularly strong block. An average gathering at Spirit Rock contradicts any image one might have of Buddhists, whether that image is of tie-dyed yoga-fied New Age-y butterflies, or bald and eyebrow-less scrawny guys wrapped in yellow sheets, or whatnot. In fact it’s mostly middle-aged white people. To a casual observer the net effect is a bunch of Presbyterians. At Zen Center the population runs a bit more Jewish but is otherwise the same.

Alternate spirituality in America is by and large alternate to Christianity, and it is by and large a way station for people who have mostly discarded belief but who nevertheless seek the guidance and belonging that a spiritual tradition can offer. If that alternate spiritual path can demonstrate a measurably useful benefit, as is incontrovertibly the case with the mental grounding and centering that results from Buddhist meditation, then so much the better.

Which is why this article makes so little sense. The author takes a poop-or-get-off-the-pot stance towards alternate spiritual paths, claiming that you should either go all Enlightenment rationality, or ally yourself with an established spiritual tradition (he makes no attempt to hide that he means Christianity) but that you must not sit on the fence between the two. The article is wrong-headed in so many ways and at so many levels that I’m not going to even attempt to pick it apart; for that, read the thicket of comments, almost all negative, that follow the article like so many angry buzzing hornets. More than anything, I think the author misses the obvious fact that organized religion in America is dying out, just as it has largely died out in Europe. The grand old cathedrals of France are museums and tourist attractions now, as they are in England and throughout those finely civilized Scandinavian countries. There are those who still attend churches, of course, and such will remain for a long time to come. But there’s no mistaking the overall trend.

My class at UC Berkeley is a broad overview of Western European art music, and as such covers yards and yards of religious music. There’s no choice in the matter: Western music developed largely along religious lines, and only gradually weaned itself of Christianity’s pull. And while my class is made up of California’s best and brightest, I find that very few of my students nowadays have more than just passing and casual familiarity with Christian ideas. That means I can’t rely on a shared background. For example, we cover Guillaume Dufay’s Ave Maris Stella, a harmonized hymn from the early Renaissance. To get the idea of a ‘hymn’ across to the class, sometimes I ask how many students remember singing hymns in church when they were growing up. Maybe two or three hands go up out of 100. That’s the reality of modern-day America: the vast bulk of kids growing up in nice, well-educated households are not being frogmarched into Christian churches on Sunday mornings, there to be brainwashed and bored and have their growth stunted by fantasy masquerading as revealed truth.

Those Cal freshmen are the leaders of tomorrow, remember. For them, Christianity is a cultural relic, a museum piece, something that makes itself mostly heard in the rantings of far-right politicos or pops up in the incoherent babble of a redneck moron caught in the CNN headlights. American Christianity’s future is bleak. That’s a good thing.

But American Christianity was never all that much about religion. It was about community and belonging and a sense of identity. You could be a Lutheran or an Episcopalean or whatever and have your church, your clan, your crèche. Americans still crave that sense of communal belonging. But for many, the price of remaining within a Christian clan has become ruinously exorbitant: tolerating massive affronts to common sense and putting up with unconscionable attacks on individual liberties and civil rights. Thus the search for an alternate.

The Buddha’s story of the raft is helpful here. If you need to cross a stream, you can build yourself a raft from the materials on the shore. You cross the stream. But only a fool hoists up the raft on his shoulders and continues to stagger on with it thereafter. The sensible person leaves the raft on the shore; it has served its purpose and now it may be useful for somebody else. You don’t need it any more.

Maybe more Christian outfits should join the author of that misguided article and demand a take-it-or-leave-it, my-way-or-the-highway orientation. That way they’ll offend even more folks, and hasten Christianity’s inevitable and richly-deserved slide into irrelevance. The Buddha’s story of the raft was never more apropos than it is now. That’s what alternate spiritual traditions are all about; they represent a cultural putting down of the raft, and a first step towards leaving behind what is not only no longer useful, but has the potential of becoming a burden.

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