George Connell

Chapel Talk

Sept 25, 2012

Theme: Stories

Text: Ephesians 4:15 “we must speak the truth in love, and so grow up in everything into him  -- that is, into the king, who is the head.”

This last May, I got to tag along with the Concordia Band as it Souzaed and Gerschwined and polkaed its way across China.  In one sense, the literal sense, this was my first trip to China.  But in another sense, a figurative but no less real one, I’ve been traveling to China for the last 15 years or so via the classic Chinese philosophical texts I’ve read and discussed with students.  The China my students and I have visited is an agrarian landscape, ruled haphazardly by feudal dukes, shaped decisively by tradition, and populated by somber Confucian scholar-gentlemen along with whimsical Daoist hermit-sages.  By contrast, the China we visited last May is increasingly urban and industrial, ruled by a Communist party that has bet the farm on state-run capitalism, and populated by a citizenry eager to make up for a bitter history of deprivation and foreign domination.

            When we returned from China, Pastor Tim asked me to share a story from the trip as part of this month’s chapel series.  At that point, I was still too close to the trip to have any perspective on it.  But the request to tell a story suggested a useful way to frame the whole trip.  From the time we arrived in Hong Kong till wheels up from Bejing two weeks later, my trip took the form of a quest: I was looking for signs of the China I knew in the China I was seeing for the first time; I was looking for tracings of the spiritual geographies of Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism upon the landscape of modern China.

            That search was harder than I had expected.  Trips to Europe left me expecting that old China would be physically evident in the buildings, monuments, and cityscapes.  It was in places, but I was surprised by how thoroughly China’s modernization is obliterating it past.  To find the old, I had to look for it.  And the same was true of China’s religious and philosophical past.  The end of 2000 years of Imperial Rule, the Communist Revolution, and ferocious economic development have disrupted the religious and philosophical landscape of China enormously.  But the Chinese spiritual heritage is still there and still alive if you look for it.  My story today is about one attempt to connect with that heritage and how I found more than I bargained on.

            About midway through the trip, while the Concordia band was busy giving multiple performances, I had a day to myself to explore Chongqing.  Chongqing is a mega-city with close to 30 million people.  It is a stunning example of China’s rapid modernization, with building sites and enormous cranes everywhere.  Though our hotel and its surroundings were new, modern, international, a map told me that a thousand year old Buddhist temple was less than a mile away.  And so I struck out on foot to find the ancient temple.

            As I set out on my Buddhist pilgrimage, I passed through Chongqing’s Central Square which combines the high end shopping of 5^th Ave. with the monumental video screens of Times Square. (Slide 1)    Not much suggestive of conquering desire or quieting the mind here.  As I proceeded down streets lined by new buildings and ongoing construction, I felt I was traveling into the future rather than finding my way to China’s spiritual heritage (Slide 2).  Gradually, though, the buildings became older and more modest.  Stores featuring international brands gave way to tables on the sidewalk displaying local products.  And then, finally, as I started to wonder whether the twisting streets had thrown me off track, I found the Arhat Temple.  As I entered its gates, it was like going from one world into another.  In the midst of crowded, commercial, noisy Chongqing, I stepped into a world of tranquility, of beauty, of tradition, and of reverence (Slides 3-7).

            During my morning at the Arhat Temple, I saw many things that have stayed with me, but I want to focus today on two very different experiences I had within the course of just a few minutes.   Upon entering the courtyard before the main shrine, I found a place off to the side where I could observe without being too noticeable. (Slide 8)  As I stood there and watched, my first experience was of the transparency of religious gesture and activity.  Even though I knew very little about contemporary Chinese Buddhist practice, the activities I observed spoke a universal religious language.  I recall in particular one young woman who entered the courtyard alone, approached the large censer where she lit a bundle of incense and knelt in prayer.  She then climbed the steps to the main shrine where she prostrated herself before a large, radiantly golden statue of the Buddha.  Despite the linguistic, cultural and religious gulfs between us, each of her actions made sense to me.  In prayer and offering of incense, I saw preparation before entering a sacred space.  In climbing the steps to the shrine, I saw the intentional effort of spiritual life.  In prostration before the Buddha, I saw humility before and devotion to what is the holy.  These modest acts of piety moved me as powerful testimony to the persistence of traditional faith through incredible upheaval.  In the midst of a city hurtling headlong toward economic modernization, in a temple rebuilt after being ransacked during the Cultural Revolution, worshippers were starting their day by calling to mind the Buddha’s teachings and example.

            Drawn by this example of piety, I climbed the steps of the shrine, drawing closer to the monumental statue of the Buddha.  Observing the “no photography” signs, I slid my camera behind my back and made my way respectfully into the room containing the Buddha.  Seeing that the floor immediately before the Buddha was covered by cushions where the faithful knelt, I moved off to the side, looking once again to find a place where I could see without being seen.  And then, to my utter befuddlement, a very slight, very old, and very scary female attendant came after me like an avenging angel.  I still don’t know what I did to set her off, but if there is a universally understandable language of pious gesture, there is also a universally understandable tone of righteous indignation. Guessing that I’d moved too far forward, I retreated.  But that didn’t do the trick.  She was still pursuing me, speaking quickly, loudly, disapprovingly to me.  And then I figured out what she wanted.  Though I couldn’t understand a word of her Chinese, I did understand her finger pointing insistently toward the cushions before the Buddha.  She wanted me to kneel.

            Now, I think it’s safe to say this isn’t an ideal “better together” moment.  It was certainly more than I bargained on.  But we don’t take trips to other cultures to get what we expect going in; we go hoping to learn something we couldn’t by staying home.  I find myself thinking back to those uncomfortable moments at the Arhat Temple more than any other part of the trip.  For my intimidating teacher gave me some valuable lessons to ponder.

First, she challenged my comfortable status as disengaged observer.  As an academic, my natural bias is to watch from the sidelines.  But religious faith isn’t a spectator sport.  When I tried to slip off to a dark corner to watch, my fierce teacher forced me to acknowledge that religious faiths make claims on us, confronting us as imperatives.  They demand existential responses, not just curious observation.  She challenged my status then and there as a religious tourist, but she left me with lingering questions about whether my career as a philosopher of religion is itself a form of religious tourism.

Second, my fierce teacher forced me to face the reality that religions aren’t just ensembles of ritual practice and sacred architecture.  Nor are they just codes of ethical conduct.  At their core, religions represent robust claims about the deepest and most important truths.  My fierce teacher didn’t come after me because I’d violated some point of etiquette; rather, I think she was upset because I wasn’t acknowledging Buddhist claims about the true nature of the cosmos, the true condition of humans, the true way to enlightenment.  Those claims weren’t presented to me as linguistic propositions.  Rather, the temple itself, the buildings, the courtyards, the artworks, and especially the central monumental figure of the Buddha, were concrete, visible and palpable, assertions of the Buddhist understanding of ultimate truth.  What my teacher wanted was for me to acknowledge that truth, not by stating it, but physically, by prostrating myself before the Buddha.

When Eboo Patel was here a few weeks ago, he made the profound point that good interfaith relations have to grow out of each religious community being true to itself and its own deepest convictions.  He warned against religions thinning themselves out, becoming diffuse and generic, in order to coexist peacefully.  I couldn’t agree more.  But the type of truth he focused on was the truth of authenticity.  He encouraged us to be true Christians and Jews and Muslims and Buddhists in the way one might be a true friend.  For good reasons, Patel didn’t focus on the conflicting truth claims of the different faiths.  When we are building healthy interfaith communities, by all means let’s start with our deep agreements.

But my fierce teacher forced me to confront the uncomfortable reality that different faiths really do commit themselves to different truth claims.  As much as I honor Buddhism, as much as I acknowledge its profound insights and moral depth, as a Christian, there are important points at which I see things differently.  Owning those differences is as key to good interfaith relations as celebrating our commonalities.  And that is where Paul’s letter to the Ephesians comes in.  Paul urges his readers to “speak the truth in love.”  Paul tells us to stand firm in our commitment to truth.  We should name the truth as best we can discern it now, even though it be “through a glass darkly.”  But he tells us to speak that truth in love, to speak truth in a way that aids rather than harms our neighbor.  That is especially important to remember when our neighbor sees the truth differently than we do.  Paul’s injunction can give useful guidance as Christians agree to disagree on deep points with our neighbors of other faiths.  And I feel sure that our interfaith neighbors can similarly find resources in their own faiths to help them bear with us in what they see as our failures to get ultimate truths quite right.

To close, I’ll return to the Arhat temple.  What did I do when confronted by my fierce teacher?  I’ll confess that my intellect didn’t do anything.  It went on strike.  All I recall is confusion and consternation as she pursued me.  But my body took over and came up with a response that on later reflection I feel good about.  I knelt on the pads before the Buddha, gesturally expressing my deep respect for Buddhism and its founder, but I kept my head and body upright, perfectly perpendicular, to express that my respect did not extend to agreement.   And that was enough for my fierce teacher.  She didn’t need me to prostrate myself as the Buddhist worshipers did.  She just wanted me to step out of touristic gawking to acknowledge respectfully the faith by which she made sense of the world.  I don’t know whether Paul would agree with my kneeling.  That might well have been too much for him.  But I think that finding some way, through gesture, word or deed, for different faiths to acknowledge each other respectfully even while disagreeing is what we need in order to “speak the truth in love.”