Buddhist wisdom says there are three ways we naturally approach anything—desire, aversion, or indifference. For the sake of convenience, I call them, “yum!” “eeeeewwww” and “zzzzzz.”

I see a slice of cheese cake. “Yum!” I love cheese cake. So, I desire the slice of cheese cake. I grab it. Five hundred calories down my gullet. I see a squirrel that’s been hit by a car. Eeeeeewwww! Aversion. I look away. Then there’s indifference: trees along the route to work, for example. Those tchotchkes around the house that you haven’t dusted in months. Indifference. You just don’t see them. “Zzzzzz.”

I swallow the cheese cake before I even have time to enjoy it. I’m too caught up in my aversion at the sight of the wounded squirrel to help. I don’t bother looking up to see the gift that simple things like sycamore trees or a souvenir from long ago can bring.

Desire. Aversion. Indifference. These are the reactions we naturally have when our brains are on autopilot. And Buddhists say these lead to our suffering. We go through our thoughtless lives wanting, rejecting, and ignoring. And it’s always about me, me, and me.

How can we get out of that cycle?

Buddhism teaches that we have to find a place of equanimity—calmness; composure; evenness of temper.

But how can I keep evenness of temper when there’s cheese cake around? How can I stay composed when I experience disgusting or frightening things? How can I be composed when I’m staring absently out the window and don’t even see what’s in front of my nose?

Equanimity is about being mindful—aware—no matter how tempting, disgusting, or boring something is. Equanimity is about living in the here and now fully. Fully in touch with what surrounds us, without saying “yum!” “eeeeewwww” or “zzzzzz.”

Equanimity is clearly a way of bringing our aspirations into our actions, of bringing what we wish we did and what we do into closer relationship.

Easier said than done! But that’s how it is with religious thinking: it is always about either paddling upstream—against the currents of human nature—or it’s about how human nature is OK after all, at least in certain circumstances.Things like war, murder, torture, xenophobia, oppression. That sort of thing.

Sigmund Freud, no fan of religion, argued that culture does much the same thing as religion. It functions to mitigate the fearsomeness of nature; to reconcile us to the randomness and cruelty of fate; and to explain why culture itself makes so many problems for us.

It seems to me that both culture and religion (perhaps because the separation of church and state is a modern invention) are pretty good at creating duty, because both contain carrots and sticks. They create duty but not necessarily (or commonly) responsibility, which is a personal choice unaffected by carrots or sticks. Antoine de Saint-Exupery put it this way: “civilization rests upon what it exacts from its people, not from what it furnishes them.” The same can be said of most of religion.

Responsibility is a personal choice. A choice arrived at (or not) by each of us. How we get there depends upon the lives and circumstances we experience. Responsibility is a personal ideal. We live up to it.

Which brings me back to equanimity. It, too, is an ideal—we’re always going to default to “yum!” or “eeeeewwww” or “zzzzzz.”

Equanimity. The Buddhists think it’s a good way to act. It’s what made the Stoics stoic.

Source: Neoclassical_Velocity.JPG: Unitfreak

Equanimity. It’s a choice.

The high April winds blowing damage across the US this week also blew something into town that my lungs are treating as poison.  This morning I face the day with more empathy and exhaustion than I have known in a while. 

To everyone who struggles with their own health through the quiet hours, may you feel the love and support of your community. 

To everyone who serves babies, elders, or the ill through the night, may you know that your efforts matter.  

To everyone who sleeps through the night, may you remember to have compassion for those who do not. 

Be well, beloveds.  Rest easy when you can and know, when you cannot, that you are not alone.

Here is the beautiful truth—saints and sinners are the same from the start.

Hsu Yun, Chinese Chan Buddhist (freely adapted by me)

As a young writer, I read everything I could find on the subject of writing. One of the books that impressed me at the time was written by novelist John Gardner called Moral Fiction. If my memory serves me, it is in that book that Gardner argues that every writer has a wound which drives his or her writing. By “wound” Gardner meant a psychological trauma so devastating that the writer revisits and seeks to re-write this trauma constantly in her or his work. (This theory predates the concept of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD.)

It’s not surprising that Gardner should have developed such a theory, since he had suffered a severe trauma in his own life. John Gardner grew up on a farm and, as is often the case, he drove tractors when he was quite young. One day Gardner was driving a tractor with his brother riding on the back. His brother fell off and was killed by the implement the tractor was pulling.

For the rest of his life, Gardner replayed and replayed in his mind the image of his brother falling. He blamed himself for his brother’s death. He never stopped asking himself, “What could I have done?”

Gardner himself eventually died in a motorcycle accident.

As I made my own attempts at writing, I discovered that the old cliche “truth is stranger than fiction” is partially true because writers can’t help attempting to make sense of the random happenings of the world. The human mind can’t help trying. Creative writing is, if nothing else, an assertion of the self in the face of what often appears to be a completely random reality. It’s the human need to create meaning that makes fiction less strange than truth.

But it is not true that only writers have wounds. Sure, some people become writers because of the need to process trauma. But the fact is, as the Buddha observed long ago, life itself is loss. We suffer because nothing is permanent except change.

Think for a moment about something you are hanging onto. Something that you just can’t let go. Something that makes you cringe when you think of it. Something that you replay, like an old movie in your head.

Now. Allow me to ask a very simple question: what do you gain by hanging on to what you are hanging on to?

Pain makes us individualists. As Shakespeare put it,

I will be flesh and blood,

For there was never yet philosopher

That could endure the toothache patiently,

However they have writ the style of gods

And made a push at chance and sufferance.

I think that Shakespeare is driving at the insight psychologist Carl Jung had when he coined the phrase “wounded healer.” It isn’t that therapists or ministers or anybody else have the answers to life’s wounds. It is, rather, that dwelling on those wounds drives many of us to be therapists or ministers or philosophers.

And the insight we find, when and if we find it, is that pain makes us individualists, but the cure for pain is reaching out. However we write the style of our gods, we must accept our flesh and blood and dependency on others before healing begins. This is perhaps not an entirely reassuring insight. We would rather see our healers as experts. But that attitude, too, is a fall into individualism. The answer is in reaching out.

The Chinese Chan Buddhist Hsu Yun said it simply:

 Here is the beautiful truth—

saints and sinners are the same

from the start.

You’ve heard of a half-way house? Well, this was a quarter-way. For those who no longer needed a locked facility. But only just barely. The quarter-way residents had not been in jail. They’d been where you go when someone decides your brain might bring you harm. But all that was behind them. They’d completed the programs. Had their meds re-adjusted. Now, they were free. Or a quarter-way free.

One had been through a life that left her skittish and cagey. She smoked on the stoop, trying not to remember. Another had nearly completed a doctorate in math at somewhere prestigious before it all came unraveled. But that was years ago. Now, he held court in the kitchen, his lap stacked with newspapers, haranguing the staff in imperious tones. Then there was a woman I’m going to say was called Gina.

Nothing about Gina could not be called big. A hairdo that spread out in every direction. A winter coat sewn with a giant in mind. And a voice with claws that could find you there down at the end of the hall. You know how some people’s complaints are poetic? Well, Gina’s poured out like sludge from the back of a cement-mixing truck that can never turn off and will never run out. A hospital was only two blocks away. That was the place Gina went to shoplift.

As for me, I worked there only a month, maybe two. I left with the idea that I could do better.

By that point, through the years, I had worked for too long in two other group homes. Had subbed around here and there on the overnight shift. Every place was the same. They would make it all homey. You had the living room, the kitchen, the bedrooms, what-have-you, where everyone who lived there could wander all over. The industrial sofa would be urine-resistant. The pictures hung up in frames with no glass bolted down to the wall. Then, for the staff, a locked office, and a lounge with a couch.

A staff area was like you were hiding off-stage. Resident areas? Back on-stage again. Like the set of one of those sit-coms where a family does pratfalls in a brightly-lit house. Except in this sit-com, the girl shaves off her eyebrows to sing Billy Joel, and the teenage boy wipes his own shit on the door. But here’s what I’m getting at: the on-stage and off? Those were other homes, far away. The quarter-way house didn’t come with an off. You were on all the time. Just like part of the family.

How things were laid out wasn’t the only thing different. At the previous homes, I had worked with teenagers. With a teenager, you can make yourself think there is hope. But at the quarter-way, the residents were in their forties, their fifties. The question of whether to hope or not was long settled by now.

But it is in the nature of hope to flicker up just at the moment it seems to be gone. After escaping from Egypt, and passing through the Red Sea, the people of God are out in the wilderness, years from the Promised Land. It says that they murmur, but that’s putting it gently. They are starving. They’re lost. What they do is freak out. Which is when, in the story, the manna appears. Is it dew? Or hoarfrost? A filigree of honey-sweet flakes that you eat at first light, before the sun burns it off. You don’t store up manna. You don’t save it for later. The next day, scripture says, it will stink, crawl with worms. So, it’s food for right now. Just enough to go staggering on toward the dream.

You know the hospital two blocks away? In the cafeteria, you’d see families draped over lunch-tables, on break from the rooms where their loved ones were already failing. If you were hungry, you could get a tray, load it down with whatever, then take it to the lady at the front so she could ring you up. You’ve been somewhere like that. You know how it all goes. The point being, this is not what Gina did.

Baskets of bread-rolls were set out to go with your soup or your salad. Gina would head straight for them and fill her winter-coat pockets, six or seven bread-rolls in each. And then she would just leave.

Did she explode if you said it was theft? Was the concept of stealing beyond her somehow? It’s been so long now that I just can’t remember, but I know we were not to discuss it with her. It was a directive. You didn’t want to praise her for shoplifting, of course. But you weren’t supposed to scold. So, when she slammed through the door, crowing like her pockets had diamonds, not bread-rolls, we all kind of shrugged and averted our eyes.

The night the supervisor heard second-hand I was planning to quit, he called up the house phone. Right there in the living room, with an audience of staff and residents both. Maybe he was upset because now he’d have to find somebody for a job that nobody would want. But what he focused on, in a voice loud enough that it bled through the receiver and out into the room, was you just don’t waltz in and out of people’s lives. Especially the residents, who had been abandoned again and again. If anyone was going to get better, if anyone was ever going to be happy or stable, it was going to take trust, and hanging in there, and patience, and faith. He went on for some time. Wanted to know exactly what kind of person I was. As if there was an answer.

Here’s what I can say. Two weeks before, Gina slams through the door, just like always, coat bulging with bread. But on this day, instead of pushing past me, she stops. Digs a roll from her pocket, holds it out. The shift is over. I’m clocked out. In my wired-shut heart, I’ve already resigned. But I take what she offers. Without speaking, we eat. I do not feel, in that moment, the presence of God. But I see we are lost and that she is my sister. Which is food for right now. Just enough to go staggering on toward the dream.

This coming Easter morning, many people will rise and look east. Some will go to a Christian church for their only visit this year. Many will be reminded by priests and preachers that this one day is not enough. Those strangers to churches will be telling the oldest of religious truths: it is the people, not the priests, who make the gods.

“Easter” we call the day, namesake of a deity of the Northlands, Eostre, goddess of the dawn. English speakers still call the direction she arises from “east.” She is the goddess of new beginnings and of fertility, her day celebrated as the earth comes back to life after a long winter.

The holiday (holy day) called Easter is a movable feast, tied to both the cycles of the sun and of the moon—Easter occurs on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the equinox.

Religious holidays are celebrations of recurrence. Children in the Northlands have been searching the wet, awakening grass for eggs on Easter morning for thousands of years. The celebration has spread to other lands; to other religions. To the far corners of the planet.

Nineteenth Century German philologist Jacob Grimm reported that in some remote German villages of his time people still celebrated Eostre with sword dances, bonfires, and the baking of “heathenish pastries.”

It’s difficult this time of year—at least in the top half of the Northern Hemisphere—not to think of new beginnings. Difficult not to dance just a little bit. The iron grip of the deathly ice is finally broken and life is emerging from the long-dead earth again.

This is one of only two days the so-called “C and E” (Christmas and Easter) Christians—also known as Chreasters—fill churches. There are something on the order of eighty-five million Chreasters in the United States.

Statistics indicate that less than one-quarter of US Christians attend church even once a month. But Easter brings ‘em out—even more than Christmas or Mother’s Day(!). Why? Might it be because Easter is such a blend of religious traditions?

Reflect on the potpourri of religions and cultures that make up the concept of Easter as it is celebrated in the United States today. We have a fertility goddess from Northern Europe who survived the invasion of a Southern European tradition, Christianity, based on a Middle Eastern tradition, Judaism, itself an amalgam of religious thinking from the earliest agricultural civilizations of Mesopotamia with a pinch of Zoroastrianism from a certain Babylonian captivity thrown in.

All those ideas added up to create a lunar holiday celebrating a solar god in a myth echoing human sacrifice that originated in Egyptian mythology concerning the god Osiris, a metaphor for the planting and growth of vegetation in the Nile delta.

All that adds up to Easter brunches. And chocolate.

Why Easter? Why is Easter Christianity’s greatest hit?

“Syncretism” is one of those ten dollar words that permeates theology. The word describes the human propensity for combining religious ideas from various traditions.

The poet Wallace Stevens—an atheist by the by—made a very good point when he said, “The people, not the priests, made the gods.” Yes. The people, not the priests, meld ideas to create their religions.

Reflect on one of the greatest failures of human history. In 1231 the Roman Catholic Church opened its Office of Inquisition, nowadays known as the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith. Yes, it’s still in existence. Yet, after nearly 800 years of terror and cajoling, there are more heresies now than ever.

Wallace Stevens continues to be correct: the people, not the priests, make the gods. And we the people continue to vote with our feet. And the more information that flows on our nets and our webs, the more people are going to . . .  well, what are we people going to do?

Some will become Cheasters. Some double-belongers. Some nones.

Return to the case of the goddess Eostre. The story goes that Pope Gregory the Great was walking one day in a slave market in Rome. This was in the 600’s CE. Pope Gregory saw a couple of blonde slaves and asked his handlers where blondes came from. The handlers said they were Angles, which at the time meant either the English or Northern Germans. The pope was so taken with these blondes that he decided to devote his life to converting the Northlands to Christianity.

In 601 CE Pope Gregory instructed the missionaries he was sending to England with these words:

. . . the temples of the idols in those nations ought not to be destroyed; but let the idols that are in them be destroyed; let holy water be made and sprinkled in the said temples, let altars be erected, and relics placed.

For if those temples are well built, it is requisite that they be converted from the worship of devils to the service of the true God; that the nation, seeing that their temples are not destroyed . . . may the more familiarly resort to the places to which they are accustomed.

Syncretism. Gregory’s order was an act of genius. It was a strategy that led to a Christendom that included the far North. But it also introduced a blue note; a note of mystery. Were those people out in the country—“paganus,” pagans, which means “villagers” or “rustics” in Latin—were those pagans, were those people of the heath, those people of the wastelands, those heath-ans—were those away from the centers of power, away from the army and the police of the king and pope and bishop—were they really Christian? Or were they going to their old temples for other reasons?

No one ever knew for sure. And we never will know. But is it a coincidence that the largest concentration of atheists on the planet today . . . happen to live in those Northlands that Pope Gregory Christianized?

Syncrenism. The people, not the priests, make the gods. In computer speak, it’s called Open Source: people with different agendas; different talents; different points of view, all have access to a program. And the result is a better program than those developed through controlled access. Maybe that’s why Easter is Christianity’s greatest hit.

The people, not the priests, make the gods. Religions are the oldest open source software.