Emptiness in Christianity

I was reading through some AA source material and came across the following quote from Bill W. talking about the kinship of common suffering he says:

“Let us not, therefore, pressure anyone with our individual or even our collective views. Let us instead accord each other the respect and love that is due to every human being as they try to make their way towards the light.”

12 steps speaks initially about the God of our understanding, then emphasizes God rather than Higher Power, as does the rest of the literature ,  especially the Twenty-Four  Hours a Day.

The general tone and philosophic assumptions encourage people, with half remembered phrases to emphasize their Christian leanings which in turn encourages Jews to assert their identity. The current literature creates the very pressure Bill W. was warning about.

In my spiritual studies, I have been particularly interested in looking at the salient features of the Abrahamic faiths and Buddhism and have found it quite a puzzle.

Christianity emphasizes one's emotional relationship with the divine, a thought sometimes more academically carried through in Judaism, yet in Buddhism, even in those flavors which entertain a pantheon of gods, there is little emphasis of that relationship. It seems the dogmas and experience of Buddhism seemed incompatible in the light of Twelve-Step spirituality developed from Oxford Group Protestantism, which naturally favors the Abrahamic.

In reading Thomas Merton, The Christian mystic who wrote in his “New Seeds of Contemplation,” the following about God as a higher power and the nature of the self.

“ Despair is the ultimate development of a pride so great and stiff-necked that it selects the absolute misery of damnation rather than accept happiness from the hands of God...

...but a man who is truly humble cannot despair, because in the humble man there is no such thing as self-pity.

...In perfect humility all selfishness disappears and your soul no longer lives for itself or in itself for God – and it is lost and submerged in Him and transformed formed into Him.”

He talks of surrender, humility, and contemplation of God, going on to say...

“If we were incapable of humility we would be incapable of joy, because humility alone can destroy the self-centeredness that makes joy impossible.”

It sounds like a good formula for Twelve-step recovery, but it was reading Merton’s last book, “The Asian Journey of Thomas Merton,” when he reconciled his Christian and Buddhist views, that made that root connection for me as well. He had met with His Holiness the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala and stopped off in Sri Lanka to visit the Buddhist temples and great statues at Polonnaruwa before going on to Bangkok, and his untimely death. He had intended to return to India to study advanced Buddhism. An account of his meeting can be heard in the Wisdom podcast of an American, Harold Talbott, who set up the meeting. 

https://apple.co/2m4Yi1E

It was at Polonnaruwa that Merton recorded the following observation:

“ looking at these figures I was shockingly, almost forcibly, jerked clean out of the habitual, half-tied vision of things, and an inner clearness, clarity, as it exploding from the rocks themselves, became evident and obvious. The queer evidence of the reclining figure, the smile, the sad smile of Ananda standing with arms folded (much more “imperative“ then Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa because completely simple and straightforward). The thing about all this is that there is no puzzle, no problem, and really no “mystery.“ All problems are resolved and everything is clear, simply because what matters is clear. The rock, all matter, all life, is charged with dharmakaya (the perfection body of Buddhahood) Everything is emptiness and everything is compassion. I don’t know when in my life I have ever seen had such a sense of beauty and spiritual validity running together in one aesthetic illumination. Surely with Polonnaruwa, my Asian pilgrimage has become clear and purified itself. I mean, I know and have seen what I was obscurely looking for. I don’t know what else remains, but I have now seen and have peace to the surface and I’ve got beyond the shadow in the disguise.”

It is the words “all is emptiness and compassion” that are so meaningful to me, assuring that Merton who had previously lost himself in contemplation of God’s love had a similarly numinous experience in the physical emanation of Buddhist belief.

I guess that’s my point, that FA  is altogether too Christian in expression and that Buddhist realizations of the inherent emptiness of all things, including ourselves, together with compassion for all sentient beings is worthy of study by anyone in recovery.

You’ll notice Merton never had God as a buddy. This was all loss of self and meditation on Bodhicitta compassion as a spiritual development. 

...something we could consider for example is rewriting the Twenty-Four Hours for food addicts and compulsive over-eaters with less bias than is currently present.