As I've gushed to many people less religiously nerdy than myself, I'm taking Japanese Religions this semester, and it's absolutely fascinating. Right now we are studying Zen Buddhism, a tradition that especially intrigues me in part because it seems to defy the gospel and yet hint at its promises. Zen is all about discovering your real self and getting rid of your old self. Sound like a certain Jew we all know and love? "Whoever loses his life for my sake will find it." As the old hymn says, quoting Hebrews (I think?), "My life is hid with Christ on high." And yet Zen dismisses notions of a personal deity, or any deity at all, obsessed with inner enlightenment and attainment of Buddha nature.
Zen dismisses the mind body dualism, along with the Hebrew thinkers from Genesis straight down to Revelation. The idea that my body and my personality/soul/mind are separate is not a Jewish one. That's what we mean when we recite the Apostle's Creed: "I believe in the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting." We profess in saying the Creed that life everlasting ultimately requires restoration of our bodies, a latter day resurrection which will come when Jesus returns to set all things right. That dualism comes from Greek, gnostic, and finally Cartesian thinking.
Anyway, Zen says the goal is to make your mind and body one. They sit in zazen or meditation for hours on end, right foot on top of the left thigh and vice versa, spine perfectly straight. They discipline their bodies. As Paul said to the Corinthians centuries before, "I beat my body and make it my slave." You must perform zazen in the proper physical position because of the oneness of mind and body. A disciplined mind needs a disciplined body.
Christianity can get so abstract. We are caught up in thinking about the Trinity and heaven and lots of other things, while ignoring the bodies God gave us.
My best prayer lately has been happening at McDonalds. (Seriously.) I work there a couple nights a week, and while putting on my uniform that has permanently locked in the stench of mingled grease and old ketchup, I think of Wesley's question for candidates for ministry: "Are you in debt so as to embarrass yourself?" And then I wear my hot fudge stained pants and man's sized polo that goes down to my thighs with pride.
But as I mop, sweep, take orders, get drinks, there is a kind of calmness inside. I don't know why. I just shut out everything else. You might think you're standing in front of my counter, but really it's just me and God there, and sometimes my coworkers if they feel like chatting. I'm not thinking very much about you, though, the customer. In the act of tiring out my body by running all over the store and performing menial tasks, my body is sufficiently disciplined to get my mind to shut up. And then God and I, we talk.
I'm not bragging. Really-- for somebody who's going into the ministry, I'm not a good pray-er at all. (I know, I know: there are no bad prayers, just like there are no bad coloring book pictures and no bad Mother's Day crafts.) I struggle to concentrate, to focus. An intellectual, I snobbishly see prayer as beneath me. Or I just don't care. But when I really put my body to work, God and I connect. McDonald's is a kind of zazen. Or, to put it the Christian way, I'm like Brother Lawrence, finding the Lord in fry baskets and sauce buckets. Because he's there.
We Christians could learn a few things from the Zen folks. Like putting our bodies to work in the great work of prayer.
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