What's It All About?

Google Image
I was watching a documentary recently that showed Tibetan monks displaying their incredible talent in creating sand art. Their creations, called Mandalas, are made from white stones the monks crush and grind. They mix that with naturally colored sands to make desired colors.

The monks work in teams, meticulously arranging the sand in intricate designs that form geometrically perfect and breathtakingly beautiful art, much of it depicting Buddhist deities. It takes weeks to finish them, but once finished, the art is ritualistically destroyed.

“Huh? How can they work so hard to create such beauty then destroy it?”

Because the whole process is meant to be a ritual symbolizing the tentativeness of life, something that we in the western world desperately try to ignore.

An Illusion
Oh, we may attend a funeral now and then where we can’t ignore what awaits us all, but by and large, society does all it can to provide the illusion that the world, and all that is in it – including us – is permanent.

TV drug commercials show old people gingerly doing yoga in a park; other ads depict self-satisfied young people buying, not one but two, expensive SUVs, one for each partner. Articles in newspapers and magazines eagerly describe medical breakthroughs that promise to extend life indefinitely.

You would think that observing nature, where life and death are so obvious, would keep our vulnerability constantly before our eyes. But are we too busy to notice?

“Ok,” you may say, “what’s the point?”

The point is exactly what the Buddhist monks try to make with their art. Life is fleeting, and at some point all of us should take stock, asking the question 1960s British movie and song “Alfie” did: “What’s it all about?” The lyrics ask that question and provide an answer.

Google Image
What's it all about, Alfie
Is it just for the moment we live?
What's it all about when you sort it out, Alfie?
Are we meant to take more than we give
Or are we meant to be kind?
And if only fools are kind, Alfie,
Then I guess it's wise to be cruel.
And if life belongs only to the strong, Alfie,
What will you lend on an old golden rule?
As sure as I believe there's a heaven above, Alfie
I know there's something much more,
Something even non-believers can believe in.
I believe in love, Alfie.
Without true love we just exist, Alfie.
Until you find the love you've missed, you're nothing, Alfie.

It may be a bit corny; after all, it’s from the 60s. And “love” in the lyrics may refer to romantic love. But that’s still love, and it’s close to what Jesus was talking about in the gospels when he quoted the Hebrew Bible, saying that the two greatest commandments are love of God and neighbor.

But what is love? People searching for God can do no better than refer to the Apostle Paul’s description in his First Letter to the Corinthians in the Christian Bible:

Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Also in the Christian Bible, the writer of John’s first letter insists that “God is love.” This may be one of the differences between us, who search for God in the Christian tradition, and our Buddhist brothers and sisters. We believe – as Paul in his Corinthian letter proclaims – that love is incarnated in a person and that it never ends. 




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Gospel of The Little Prince

Image
  Attention all those concerned only with “matters of great consequence:” Is it possible that you’ve become someone you didn’t want to be, having strayed far from the innocence and simplicity of childhood? That’s the main question asked in The Little Prince, which Netflix, the streaming video service, has added to its repertoire of movies and TV shows. Though not a big fan of animated flicks, I was a big fan of the book, The Little Prince, back in the 1970s when it became extremely popular in the U.S. It was first published in French and English in New York in 1943 as a novella by French aristocrat, writer, poet, and pioneering aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupery , who disappeared while piloting a Free French Army plane the following year over the Mediterranean Sea. Nearly Two Million Copies “The novella is the fourth most-translated book in the world and was voted the best book of the 20th century in France,” says Wikipedia. “Translated into more than 250 language...
Read more

‘Spiritual but Not Religious,’ Revisited

Image
Google Image I’ve expressed several times in these blogs my skepticism about declarations by some of our contemporaries that they are “spiritual but not religious.” Much of the skepticism results from the false dichotomy this entails, as if the spiritual and religious are mutually exclusive. Spirituality, after all, is the whole point of being religious. With the exception of some forms of Buddhism, all the major religions aim to bring people closer to God, who is “spiritual.” St. Paul, among the earliest leaders of Christianity, wrote that he is imparting a teaching “not taught by human wisdom but taught by the spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who possess the Spirit.” But Daniel Horan, Franciscan priest, theologian and author, wrote in a recent edition of the National Catholic Reporter: “What if our starting point in thinking about what it means to be a person in communion with God, oneself and the world was not reduced to external expressions of institutional belo...
Read more

Clinging to Archie Bunker's God

Image
Google Image Archie Bunker, the character masterfully played by the late Carroll O’Conner in the 1970s TV comedy “All in the Family,” had his own take on the traditional Christian doctrine of the inerrancy of the Bible. “God don’t make no mistakes,” declared Archie. “That’s how he got to be God.” For those too young to remember Archie, who in 2005 was listed as number 1 on Bravo's 100 Greatest TV Characters, Wikipedia says Bunker was characterized by his bigotry towards “… blacks, Hispanics, "Commies," gays, hippies, Jews, Asians, Catholics, "women's libbers," and Polish-Americans….” Bunker was presented as a Christian, however, and “… often misquotes the Bible. He takes pride in being religious, although he rarely attends church services ….” An Anonymous Contributor Sister Mary Matilda, my eighth grade teacher, would accuse me of being uncharitable but I imagine that an anonymous contributor to a recent newspaper column is an “Archie Bunke...
Read more