Zen

Dharma Combat with Augustine

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On the meaning of the teaching of St. Augustine of Hippo, addressing God in the first paragraph of his Confessions:

You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.

The restless river and the vast ocean
are different just in how they’re held.

Still, rapids are rapids
And rocks, sharp.

“Honkadori” is a Japanese Zen form of poetry, which means “heart of the poem”. In the 11th and 12th century, after the Buddhist Japanese canon of poems and sutras had been assembled in the Kokinshu, this style of poem arose as a kind of commentary to the revered texts, a way of engaging with the original while redirecting its energy to lift up its deeper meaning — with a lightness of touch and a poignancy often found in haiku and other Japanese forms. A line or scene from the original is referenced, and from that bit the author of the honkadori will choose the mood, or the idea, or the setting, or the season, or even a phrase or a word, and use that as the basis for the new poem, and a way of getting at its meaning, removing a bit of the dross that comes with reverence.

When I first encountered this form from Roshi Enkyo O’Hara on retreat with the Village Zendo, I was excited about playing with holy text and religious teaching, coming as I do from a context of Western religion and Western relationship to text. We understand scripture and its ancient interpreters as literally true, complete, and inflexible. ‘Tradition’ is a noun, the canon is etched in stone, and its word is law. It’s meaning is clear. There is no interpreting — it says what it says. This way of thinking applies equally to the adherents to and detractors from scripture: to fundamentalists who take the King James Bible (a translation created a millennium and a half after the source material disseminated in many versions across the Mediterranean world) as the unfiltered Word of God, and to the atheist skeptic who accepts this assumption implicitly when cataloging all of the ridiculous, impossible, contradictory, and offensive things that happen in the Bible. For both of these readers, the text is dense, full, and final.

But it needn’t be that way. The Bible is written evidence of many communities in conversation with themselves, over a span of hundreds of years. Its manifold self-references and self-contradictions are evidence of that, as are the obvious historical-political perspectives that it implicitly supports. These communities are often not just in conversation with themselves, they are arguing with themselves. Thus the Christian Gospels can’t quite get together on many essential about Jesus’ life and death and life — all four can’t even agree on the day of Jesus’ death, let alone what he did and where he did it and why he did it. Luke begins his text by stating that he desires to put forward an ‘orderly account’ of the Gospel story. I wonder how Mark felt about that?

I also wonder why we feel so limited in telling this same story for ourselves. What is the magical time past which the Western Christian community was no longer in communication with itself about what it was about?

This is of course not limited to Christians, or the Abrahamic traditions, or even the West. A casual reading of the Mahayana Buddhist Lotus Sutra reveals intragroup conflict over the interpretation of right practice. The recorder of what was heard on Holy Eagle Peak is quite clear, again and again, that the ‘lesser vehicle’ of Buddhism (read: old school or Theravadan Buddhism) is simply a sub-form of the ‘greater vehicle’ of Buddhism (which is literally what ‘Mahayana’ means — of which Japanese Zen is a descendant). This political axe-grinding and gauntlet-throwing is so heavy-handed that at times the Lotus Sutra is hard to take seriously. But it’s no different when you read Jesus arguing over and over again with the Pharisees, because we’re not so accustomed to ask, ‘who else would a 1st-century second-temple reformer argue with, but other 1st-century second-temple reformers?’. Nor is it much more elegant than the inexplicable repetition of the Creation story in the first chapters of Genesis. (Once this was pointed out to me, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen it before, so glaring is the disconnect).

But all of these observations are not warnings against taking holy text seriously. They are invitations to engage them meaningfully. Tradition is not primarily a noun, but a verb — in Koine Greek, the language of the New Testament, it is the the word “paradosis” which literally means ‘delivering something’ or ‘handing down’. We are not receivers of tradition, we are always traditioning (Morse, Not Every Spirit, 47). This is an attitude toward scripture and teaching that is more fruitful and relevant than, ‘it says what it says’. And no matter our tradition, it allows us to connect.

What honkadori brings to this is that light touch. It maintains the spirit of play, and allows us to bring sacred teaching of any tradition into our context while gently redirecting its flow. Rather than trying to fight fire with fire, you write a poem about the fire instead. There is a danger in all theology of over-intellectualizing, replacing the experience you are describing with your description of it. Japanese Zen poetry is a fitting antidote to this trend. It doesn’t distance itself from what it describes. Dew on the grass is not a symbol for impermanence, it is actually impermanent.

So I wrote the honkadori above. I wanted to start with Augustine in particular, because he did so much to determine how Western European Christians would read Scripture forever after — not metaphorically or (God forbid) allegorically, as was prominent among Eastern Christian theologians, but “simply and morally”. Augustine did not found or endorse our modern literalist movement, but he laid the foundation for it with his hermeneutic (his way of reading). He himself is often read with a kind of iron commitment to the written word that ignores that his writing is a process and not itself the final judgment on the matter. Realizing this, we can speak with him as a one who is traditioning to us as we are traditioning. We can even have fun with him. And if we’re Buddhist, we get to open his extraordinary insight to our posture when we are meditating, to the desires and aversions that cloud our originally clear mind, and in my case, to the restless rivers and deep oceans in which we swim.

I hope to write more of these, to Augustine and to other writers in the Christian tradition, to honor their wisdom and play with their interpretations, as an act of faithful doubt and interreligious dialogue as well.

And to write love poems to the heart of the matter.

 

Religion in Culture/Theology

On a secular theology

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Much of what I write on this blog will be notes toward a secular theology.

The fact that I write as a “Theological Engineer” might already suggest that my theology will be grounded with a scientific and therefore secular worldview.

I don’t see it that way. From engineering and the STEM worldview I gather intellectual tools: systems, heuristics, design, and a focus on efficiency, usefulness, and human need. These I lend to the intention and process of theological work: describing and clarifying the dynamics of ultimate concern, getting “ready to give an account of the hope that is in you”.

Of course, by writing a theology oriented toward humans, I fall squarely within the liberal Protestant Christian theological tradition. (That’s no surprise — I’m a white, politically liberal intellectual, educated at liberal nexus Union Theological Seminary.) Liberal theology was a humanist, intellectual movement within the European Enlightenment. It often spoke of God, religion, theology, faith, and the like through the application of tools from the humanities. To the authority of Scripture and tradition, it applied historical method and literary critique; to the human relationship with God, it applied psychology and modern categories of reason.

Engineering is a human form of creativity, and by applying it to theology I’m performing a fundamentally liberal theological endeavor.

That does not make my theology secular. Its makes my theology theology. What makes it secular is my audience. It is directed to the secular world I have made my home, and I have found its method inadequate to answer all the questions I needed to ask.

These questions are questions of meaning but they are not separate from our lives in a secular world. I think my Zen practice is an expression of this desire to bring the theological into the realm of everyday life. By ceding the ground of the ultimate to “religionists,” to those who use explicitly religious language and seem to inhabit an otherworldly religious arena, we lose a source of energy, a common way of discussing meaning and value, and an image of what human freedom and flourishing can be. To reclaim that ground, a secular theology would be a powerful tool — a “skillful means,” as Buddhism calls it. This theology would be liberal, interreligious, and draw on non-religious traditions as well.

But for its liberality, it would still be a theology — orienting us toward the ultimate, finding the ultimate in others, and recognizing how the ultimate confronts us and charges us to compassionate action.

Justice/Theology

On systems

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Systems are scientific constructs, but I’ll often be talking about them in terms of social justice and theology. I’ll connect them here.

A system is a collection of parts that make up some recognizable whole. That whole can be isolated from its surroundings and considered as its own thing, its parts interacting with one another according to certain rules that you trust are working, and the whole interacting with the system’s environment in a predictable and simplified way. Everything outside can be ignored, everything inside can be ignored — once you have a system, you have the thing in which you have some vested interest, about which you can say something.

In the sciences, some systems seem self-evident. A plant cell, for instance: it has a well defined boundary, a number of working components that have certain rules of interaction, and we can reduce the complexity in its environment to things coming in, things going out. Sunlight and carbon dioxide come in (by natural processes or Divine Providence we know and care not); then an elaborate dance is performed among parts of the cell (that we appreciate but with which don’t really concern ourselves); and then oxygen and energy go out (to a fate we can only dream of, but probably won’t).

Other systems are less obvious, but the observer makes a choice to mush certain elements together as a system in order to simplify things sufficiently and apply convenient rules. This is often the pivot of many a frustrating physics problem. For instance, two blocks are connected by a rope and being pulled up an inclined plane, and given this frictional constant and that force, you’re tasked with determining other forces, acceleration, etc.. You can consider each block and the rope individually, and beat your head against a wall mathematically — or you can consider all three together, and determine more about the system with less effort.

All you do is draw a little dotted-line box around what you want to know about, whether on the page or in your mind’s eye, and you have a system. Whatever’s outside works predictably, whatever’s inside works predictably — our little box is now in hand and knowable.

Science is often perceived as such an objective endeavor that its students are surprised to find that their choice affects what they can find out about a system. I once tutored a student in physics, and drew that little dotted-line box around to create the two-blocks-and-a-rope system that I described above. As I proceeded to do math at this New-Thing-in-the-World, she asked:

“Wait…you can just do that?”
“Yup.”
“…Oh.”

Thus she saw the worldview of science at work for the first time. Much learning happens with a reorientation that is marked only by, “oh.” A single bubble rises to the surface. Continents are shifting in the depths.

On one level, it is completely obvious that a system is determined by a choice. If you’re interested in DNA, choosing the system of the whole cell is not helpful. Likewise if you’re interested in psychology, you likely need to investigate a system much larger than a single cell, or even a group of cells in the brain.

On another level, this reveals an important dependency of scientific exploration on the observer, and can be (glibly) summarized as, you only see what you’re looking for. What you call evidence is not evaluated neutrally, but in a preexisting collection of other evidence. I think many assume that science is just the study of what’s there, but scientific knowledge can only be developed once you’ve made broad assumptions that boil down to the selection of appropriate systems.

That’s why a plant cell only “seems” self-evident. There is nothing a priori self-evident about looking at a plant cell as a plant cell and making that The Thing that described a plant most sufficiently. This has happened, not because of pure Reason, but because of reasons. That optics improved sufficiently at about the same time in European intellectual history that natural systems were viewed as machine-like; that that way of looking at things happened to bear the kind of fruit that the patrons of early-modern empirical investigation found useful; that a scientific worldview and its analytical frame subsequently became the dominant paradigm in the West — these are all accidents of history. It doesn’t make observations about that chosen system less accurate or useful, but it’s not self-evident, either — it’s only evident in a context that seeks exactly that kind of evidence.

Choosing a system is intimately related to understanding the context of a situation, and deciding which elements of the context is relevant, and which can be ignored. It is also fundamentally determined by the observer’s attitude and worldview. Also, as my nod above to the patrons of empiricism suggests, it has a lot to do with self-interest. And money. And power.

So we come to racism.

There are…many things to say through this lens about racism. (Class and other social justice struggles as well, but let’s stick to race for the moment, since we seem to be in a moment for race.) I’ll spend a lot of time talking about them, both as a theologian and educator, but also as a white man living in this country, at this time. But for now, let’s consider this.

What system do we choose when we talk about racism? What context is appropriate when we want to explore the pernicious, persistent influence of race in this country?

Attack dogs and fire hoses in Birmingham. Police cavalry(!) driving black religious leaders and laypeople into a desperate retreat in Selma. The husk of a firebombed church, a sign that says “Whites Only” with a lunch counter in the background, Freedom Riders evacuating a burning bus. Etc.

Images are powerful, but we can see the context at play in how we choose these images. Confrontations from the Civil Rights Era, between peaceful protesters and overt racists, the latter supporting segregation with violence.

Obviously this is one vignette that I’m choosing intentionally to make a point (J’accuse!), but it is not a hard sell to say that that conversations about race in America, particularly among white people and particularly in primary and secondary education, starts with the common ground of “racism was a thing that started with slavery and then Jim Crow and then the Civil Rights Movement happened and racism is not a problem like that anymore.”

Which is true. Racism is not quite a problem “like that” anymore. But that frame represents a choice. Why MLK, and not Malcolm X? Why the dream, and not the ballot or the bullet (or even the letter from a Birmingham jail)?

What’s the system we’ve chosen there? We’re paying attention to the enforcement of racially motivated public policy, backed by white agents who hold a view of race that compromises the dignity of blacks. We’re focusing on a group of people who “are racist” and their actions that come from their orientation toward nonwhites. These racist people are often conveniently located in the South, with a few notable exceptions. Because racial utterances have also become universally prohibited in civil society in the last half-century (which is a good thing), racist people also mostly exist remote in time, as well as space. The occasional offhand, derogatory comment by your Grandma, maybe some state assemblyman from somewhere. That’s it.

So we’ve drawn the little dotted-line box around racist people and decided that the way this system interacts with its environment represents all of racism.

Which perhaps leads you to a conclusion that racism is no longer a problem, since the activity of that little system is not nearly what it used to be.

Now — there seems to be enough noise around racism today, in the news and on social media, and in every major and minor municipality with a police force, or a school, or a college, or a prison — that our conclusion doesn’t quite match the evidence. What should we ask of our racist people system?

For whom would such a system be convenient? What larger system of evidence does it fit into? What preexisting system of knowledge does it reinforce? Here we could talk about whiteness.

Is it possible to describe the activity of racism without racist people? For instance, might there be racist actions, instead of racist people? Would those racist actions be overt, or would they be subtle, likely unnoticed by the perpetrator? Here we could talk about microagressions.

And if the law of the land no longer abides institutions and laws that discriminate and separate on the basis of race, how might those racist tendencies, now underground and unspoken of in civil society, find outlet or expression? Push it underground, where does it go? Does it find its way into education somehow, through testing and still-trenchant segregation of communities? And then, does it find its way (or continues to operate as it always has) in the decisions made around housing policy, and real estate? Does our capitalist system somehow maintain racism, because it lends objectivity (i.e. “the market”) to people’s subjective and biased preferences? Maybe there’s something happening in the criminal justice system, from the way laws are enforced to how people are processed to incarceration rates to recidivism, and then beyond to drug use to mental health to health care to poverty to the media to public perception to…

When we find that the previous, racist people system is no longer sufficient to describe relevant evidence, we need the system that talks about all the systems. Here we could talk about systemic racism.

Because persons, real living individuals, live their lives in all of the systems.

And it is in that lived context, with all of the systems, that theology must be rooted. It makes theology powerful that it can take the individual seriously, and the overlapping contexts seriously. This is why theology is also dangerous — it is a voice for the powerless, who trust in faith that they are wholly valued, but know in this world that the little dotted-line box either ignores them inside of it, or leaves them out of it entirely.

A theological engineer cannot help but be interested in systems.

Theology

About the Theological Engineer

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I’m a math-teacher theologian Zen-Buddhist New-Yorker.

I have studied and practiced engineering, education, theology, depth psychology, and all of the above applied to the struggle for social justice.

I call myself a “theological engineer.” I hope to take the wisdom of religious traditions and the structures of western theology, and apply these to pressing matters of human need with efficiency and creativity.

I want to talk about transcendence, reality, spiritual practice and spirituality, mindfulness, meditation, and meaning; but also education, racism, psychology, poverty, math and science, and the news. Ultimate concern is not separate from daily concern — the ultimate is found among and within the daily, right here and now.

This blog is primarily interested in:

  1. education and the work of teachers as a spiritual effort, worthy of a theological perspective,
  2. the lessons of depth psychology and the knowledge of the unconscious applied to both theology and education,
  3. the liberating power and the limits of math, science, and engineering and their worldview
  4. marginalization and oppression in its many forms — but in These United States, that will mostly mean race and class — and what education, theology, and psychology can and should do to shut it all down.

…and more. If any of those are important to you, you’re my audience. I want to hear from you.

Thanks for coming by — let’s get to it.