Some Christians for whom the practice seems unfamiliar might ask how meditation can help us in our spiritual pursuit. The spiritual traditions that have evolved in India, for example, where meditation is accorded great respect, employ one method of focussing meditation to bring calm and focus to the mind and another, more analytical method, to improve understanding. Christian teachings lay great emphasis on love. In meditating on this you might take the example of Jesus Christ himself and reflect on how he conducted his life, how he worked to help other people, how he lived a life of compassion, generosity, patience, tolerance and forgiveness. Once your contemplation gives rise to a certain depth of understanding, you can focus your mind on it in a calm and concentrated way. This is how you develop deep familiarity with the quality of the object you have chosen.
Meditation, therefore, is a means to develop positive qualities that I believe come naturally to us. Christian teachings speak of all human beings sharing the same divine nature. I believe that our basic human nature is intrinsically disposed towards compassion, affection and creativity. Our true nature is gentle, not aggressive or violent, and it is this fundamental nature and its qualities that are revealed or awakened through meditation.
The Christian tradition has been a source of inspiration and solace to millions of people throughout the world for two thousand years. An important factor here, as in Buddhism, is the way the lives of the founding masters, Jesus Christ and Buddha, exemplify and embody the teachings they gave. The story of Jesus’ life repeatedly shows his profound love and compassion, his generosity, patience and forgiveness, the very qualities that he encourages his followers to cultivate. Perhaps just as important, we can see from his example too that spiritual growth requires dedication and commitment, an ability to withstand hardship and to hold to your principles.
Father Laurence has written this book, Jesus the Teacher Within in full Christian faith, explaining from his own experience how relating to Jesus Christ and his teaching, combined with meditation, can illuminate the spiritual life. He has given deep thought to all these issues, as well as being an active participant in several interreligious meetings such as the Good Heart and Way of Peace seminars. I am particularly grateful to him for the initiative he has taken in this direction, because there is enormous potential for mutual enrichment in the dialogue between Buddhist and Christian traditions, especially with regard to ethics and spiritual practice, such as the practices of love, compassion, meditation and patience. I feel sure that readers of this book, especially those who seek personal transformation and inner peace, will find much here to ponder and apply in their own daily practice.
The Dalai Lama
June 15, 2000
Introduction
Faith and Experience. Faith or Experience? For many today the tension between the two has led to an unhappy polarisation of their spiritual journey. There is a great interest in spirituality but also great confusion about what it means. Polls show that increasingly we prefer to call ourselves spiritual rather than religious. Is this because spiritual means experience and religious means faith? And so we feel that as experience has the higher claim to be authentic, it is better to be spiritual than religious.
There is a lot to support this point of view. Firstly, the founders of the major religions do not seem to have thought of themselves as that, although they were all both deeply religious and spiritual. Secondly, religious leaders today, with some notable exceptions such as the Pope and the Dalai Lama, seem unable to inspire. And thirdly, the perennial tendency of organised religions to merge entirely with a culture and to fight with others is singularly unedifying in a world where globalisation and tolerance are valued so highly.
The problem is that faith and experience cannot be polarised so easily. Faith means more than belief, the dogma or tenets of religious systems. Experience means more than the good or bad vibes I get when I do this or that: it means the lifelong journey of becoming fully who we can be, who we really are. And religion is not so easily dispensed with either. We cannot be truly spiritual without encountering others on the same path and relating, with them, to those who went before us. Tradition is also a form both of faith and experience.
Jesus is an indispensable force in the achievement of any authentic spirituality. Even though most people have problems with the church–as do most church-goers themselves–the person of Jesus is one of the constant beacons guiding humanity beyond egotism and the violence of despair towards the higher goals it continuously sets for itself of kindness and serenity. As East and West meet and explore each other’s spiritual heritages in a friendship new to human culture, we are all encouraged to requestion the essential meaning, purpose and identity of our religious traditions. Perhaps this will help ease the conflict in people’s minds between faith and experience as we rediscover the essential unity and simplicity at the heart of our founders’ teachings.
For Christians the requestioning of their tradition has an obvious starting-point. It is the central question of the gospel around which the identity of a Christian disciple pivots: Jesus’ own question, ‘Who do you say I am?’ This book is really a play of variations on that theme. It is a lectio, a spiritual reading, of this question before some of the big issues of religious understanding: the historical reality of Jesus, the experiential and faith-meaning of reading the scriptures, personal conversion and naming one’s religious identity, the inner journey. And, running through it all, is the universal understanding that we cannot know anything, let alone God, without knowing ourselves.
This question I would suggest, is important not only for Christians. Those who follow another tradition but have their roots in Christianity can often carry negative baggage, misunderstanding and even guilt which this question can relieve them of. The response to Jesus’ question by a sincere practitioner of another religion, as the Dalai Lama’s response shows, can be highly illuminating for all, as well as helping to develop the dialogue that is so essential to the third millennium. For many Christians, too, this is a question they have never really listened to seriously or taken personally. Doing so will have a profound effect on their self-understanding as well as their sense of who he is. It awakens us to the need for silence and attention as the prerequisites for all listening. And it makes us appreciate better the noble attempts of the past–sometimes called orthodoxy–to respond to a question that can only be fully answered in a faith-filled experience of the Spirit.
However objective one tries to be about it, thinking of Jesus is inescapably personal. I should therefore, by way of example, express something of the personal experience of faith that has led to my writing this book. The first may seem more ‘experiential’, a one-off event; the other more of a process of faith, a long twisting journey. The point, it seems to me, is that they both express the same personal reality of unfathomed richness called Jesus.
Shortly after I became a monk, I was agonising over what I was doing with my life, who on earth or in heaven Jesus was or is, whether the church and all its baggage was only a massive collective self-deception, whether Christian faith gave sufficient backing to my odd and perplexing decision to be a monk. My questioning was not curious but desperate. I was not depressed but I was in great pain. Whether I was wasting or investing my life was what was at stake.
One evening as I was reading the gospel and had put the book down to think and pray I was suddenly filled with the only experience I could to that point really call praise. Suddenly and for no obvious reason I felt myself caught up in an orgy of praise and saw that it was both directed to but also through the person of Jesus. I knew that this was happening at the heart of the world–or at least of everything I was capable of understanding as the world. It was an ecstatic praise not a formal one, more like a rock concert than a church service. Yet its ecstasy was of the most deeply satisfying order and harmony imaginable. The words of the New Testament to him be all glory, honour and praise which had seemed exceedingly grey to me before now expressed a participation in the