Deluded Fool

Buddhism, Christianity, death and dying, meditation, religion, spirituality

Zazen and Prayer

Some years ago my wife and I were renting an apartment in Chapel Hill while our Durham residence underwent an extensive renovation.  There were various problems with the apartment—it was small, and had a real problem with moisture in the air, so we had to run de-humidifiers all the time—and we were extremely anxious to get back into our house.  The schedule for the renovation was tight.  One day the painters were planning to come to paint the outside of the house, and as I sat zazen that morning I heard it begin to rain, much to my chagrin.  I thought to myself, “If I were a praying man, I’d pray for the rain to stop.”

Then I realized how stupid that was.

That was the first time, though I’d been sitting for 25 years, that I really understood what a delusion was.

Even if you were a Christian who thought God planned every raindrop he sent (as opposed to thinking he created the world and let the weather unfold), it would be a stretch to think he would end a rainstorm just because some knucklehead was tired of living in a small apartment.  There were no doubt farmers and casual gardeners who welcomed the rain, as well as others (those planning a picnic; homeless people out on the street) who were as sorry to see it as I was.  In any case, the rain was taking place in a larger context that I didn’t see or understand.

 

I’ve always speculated about the relationship between prayer and what actually happens.  When my Aunt Alice died, her oldest son told an anecdote.  She headed a group of people at her church who formed a prayer tree.  If someone was ill or otherwise in the need of prayer, she would call three people, who would call three more, and eventually all the people in the church would be praying for that person.  It was similar to the way we chant the En Mei Jukku Kannon Gyo at the Zen Center, hoping to help those who are ill.  On one occasion after the prayer tree was activated, the person in question underwent what seemed a miraculous recovery.  My cousin, hearing this news (and going into his usual introspective state; he was a religious person but also a lifelong intellectual, who had a degree from Oxford and a PhD from Stanford), said, aloud, “I wonder if that”—all the prayers that the prayer tree had generated—“had anything to do with it?”

My aunt said, “Do you want to know what I think?”

That question resonates through the years for me.  Similarly to my cousin Bob’s accomplishments, my brother Bill speaks multiple languages, reads the Bible in Greek and Hebrew, never teaches a Sunday School class without consulting the Anchor Bible commentaries, and I in my own way—though I don’t have their credentials—have spent my life reading works of theology and philosophy and trying to figure things out.  Often at family dinners the three sat there having abstruse arguments about literature and theology while the rest of the family sat there aghast.

Aunt Alice, who was famous in our family for not preparing much before we got to her house, not even cleaning the house, who never dressed well or took care of herself, did at those family dinners want to talk to every one of us and know how we were doing, and at church on Sunday she walked around after the service and talked to everyone she could get her hands on, knew everyone in the congregation by their first and last name, and wanted to know how they were; she would keep going until there was no one left, often finished with the janitor, who was a captive audience, since he wasn’t going anywhere.  She didn’t speak multiple languages and didn’t read great works of theology but she did meals on wheels and I’m sure she knew all of those people by name too, and she organized the prayer tree at the church.  She was, not to put too fine a point on it, a saint, though I managed to ignore that fact at the time.

The question was: did we want to know what she thought?

My cousin, representing all of us, for once in his life said yes.

She said, “I think it had nothing to do with it.  And, I think it had everything to do with it.”

She wasn’t just a Christian saint.  She was a Zen master.

There was also the major occasion of prayer in my life, the thing changed my relationship to religion forever, the six months when I was sixteen and knew my father had leukemia and prayed that he would not die.  I’m not sure how often I actually said that prayer, because I wasn’t sure if it was appropriate or proper, but I fervently wished he wouldn’t die.  Then he did.  When your father dies, well-meaning people come to you and say things like, God called him home, or God needed another angel in heaven, but when you say those things to a sixteen year old boy he wants to scream at the top of his lungs, he wants to say, God need him more than I do?  God needs him more than my family does?  What the hell are you talking about?  What’s wrong with you?

In the middle of my life, when I was 35 and facing the illness of a man close to me, a friend said to me casually, “You’re very angry at religion.”  I had no idea what she was talking about.  But I was seeing a therapist at the time, and mentioned that comment to him.  He said Yes, you are very angry about religion.

How did he know that? I wondered.  We had never, that I knew of, even talked about religion.  I said, “I don’t know why I would be.”

For one time in all our years of therapy (his usual thing was to probe me with more questions) he said, “I know.”

“What is it?”

“I’m trembling as I say this.  But I have five clients right now who have the same anger, and they all lost a parent when they were adolescents.”

It’s a time when young people are questioning religion anyway, and people come to them with those feeble statements about why their parent died, and they feel a rage that they never get over.

Then there is the most famous, and perhaps most notable occasion when a prayer was not answered.  There are various versions of the story, but I’ll quote the one from the Gospel of Mark, the New Revised Standard Version.

“They went to a place called Gethsemane; and he said to his disciples, ‘Sit here while I pray.’  He took with him Peter and James and John, and began to be distressed and agitated.  And he said to them, ‘I am deeply grieved, even to death; remain here, and keep awake.’ And going a little farther, he threw himself on the ground and prayed that, if it were possible, the hour might pass from him.  He said, Abba, Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me.’”

The Gospel of Luke adds, “In his anguish he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down on the ground.”

This passage of Jesus hoping to avoid his fate, describing the terrible anguish he suffered, is for me the most moving passage in the Bible.[1]

 

A delusion is a self-centered wish that a situation might be otherwise.  It might be a perfectly innocent wish—that your knees would stop hurting when you sit zazen, or that you could stop thinking about politics or the coronavirus as you sit, or that someone you know who is sick would get well, or that your father would not die of leukemia—but it arises in a larger context which you don’t fully see or understand.  It is a thought.  If you’re a praying person, you might ask for your wish to come true.  But if you’re sitting zazen, you see the thought, and you see it is a thought, then come back to the larger context in which you’re sitting.  Not your wishes and thoughts, which are constant, but what is actually happening.  The present moment, in all its magnificence.

If you’re a praying person, a mature praying person, you express your wish in that larger context.  What Jesus said after he expressed his wish was, “Yet, not what I want, but what you want.”[2]  Not every religious person is mature, of course.  Some people might even sit zazen hoping that their wishes come true.  But the actual practice is to see your wishes as thoughts, just thoughts, and let them go.

The Buddha once said, Let a thought be a thought.  I think that’s one of the most profound things he ever said.

Christian people have an expression, Take it to the Lord in prayer.  I don’t think they necessarily mean that he will grant your wish.  It’s just a good thing to do.  It eases your mind.

Dogen has a similar suggestion in his famous fascicle Birth and Death.

“Just set aside your body and mind, forget about them, and throw them into the house of the buddha; then all is done by the buddha.”

I think of body and mind, in Dogen’s writing, as feelings and thoughts.  He’s saying not to cling to them personally, but to throw them into this larger context, the fact of what is.  We don’t understand the larger context.  But we can throw everything into it.[3]

 

I find myself praying these days more than I used to.  I’m sure Buddhist friends would ask who I’m praying to, and I would say God, a word I don’t hesitate to use, but if somebody objects to it, I just say, What Is.[4]  It isn’t exactly like having a wish, one that comes up when I’m sitting zazen.  I also express it.  I express it as a longing.  I don’t see how that’s any different from reciting the Enmei Jukku and dedicating it to the well-being of people who are ill.  I also, just to make myself a total nut, often chant the Nembutsu, the way a Pure Land Buddhist would.  I think all of these actions are the same thing.  There is a force of love and benevolence in the universe—I have felt it sometimes when I sit—and I make a request of it.  I’m not saying I expect my wish to be fulfilled.  I just make it.

Part of the reason, I suppose, is that I pray with my family.  My wife was raised Catholic, and has a contemplative prayer life that is completely private to her, but sometimes, as a family—I, my wife, and her brother Louis, who has autism—stand and pray together.  (Until recently we held hands, but we haven’t been doing that for the last couple of weeks.)  Those prayers are often funky and funny (I read about a rabbi somewhere who said you should talk to God the same way you would take to an old friend.  Just tell him what’s up, tell him your troubles.  It doesn’t need to be formal.  Jesus addressed him by a word that is apparently the equivalent of Papa), but we say things that we mean for one another, and sometimes we’re able to say things we couldn’t otherwise say.  We also say grace at meals.

And then, though I always sit zazen in the morning, and often sit again in the afternoon or evening, I often say a prayer when I first lie down when I’m going to bed.[5]

I try to confine myself to gratitude for the way things are.  It seems to me that’s the most appropriate prayer there is.  But sometimes, especially these days, I do make a request for myself, perhaps that someone not fall ill, or that someone get better, or that a whole situation gets better.  I’m not sure it “does any good.”  But it makes me feel better.  Sometimes.  Anyway, I do it.

I realize I’m mixing religions, and some people scorn that (I’m cherry-picking things from different religions and taking only what I like).  I agree that one should practice one religion, and give oneself to it wholeheartedly.  Zen Buddhism is that religion for me.  But I read things from all over the place, and I think there is some basic thing so common to all the world’s religions that it is idiotic to make petty distinctions.  Take it to the Lord in prayer.  Throw it into the house of the Buddha.  Then all is done by the buddha.  Are those two different things?  Is the fact that they use different words worth fighting over?

Hell no.

Postscript: My brother Bill (the Christian scholar I mention above) responded to this piece, and I found his response so fascinating that I wanted to include it here.  It contradicts some of what I’ve said, but so be it.  The “Bill” he mentions early on his his mentor, the man who taught him Greek and taught him a lot of theology, William Orr.  The two of them wrote a book together, “Living Hope: A Study of the New Testament Theme of Birth from Above.”  My brother Bill also has a website about other books he has written, williamguy.com.

“Bill once quoted Farmer. It must have been in a class when I didn’t feel I could stop him, get him to expound this remark. I don’t know why I never followed up with him on it in our private conversations because it intrigued me. The quote concerns the subject you wrote about. It is: “The essence of religion is prayer, and the essence of prayer is petition.” Go figure. Bill did several times say (sort of along the lines of the idea that rabbi you quoted floated about talking to God as to your oldest friend) that there couldn’t be a relationship between you and God without your telling God directly, no holds barred and without any qualifiers like “But in the end let thy will and not mine be done” exactly what you want. You might get no for an answer, as Jesus did twice (not only in his Gethsemane prayer but in his prayer that Peter not be sifted like wheat by Satan) but you had to express the wish. I think Bill was assuming a certain intelligence on the part of the person offering the prayer—for instance no prayers to win the lottery and to find a pink Cadillac in your driveway. But what Bill was advocating was not only taking it to the Lord in prayer but also putting it to him. Bill said that he himself was a bit dubious about praying for sick people or not entirely comfortable with the practice but the most spectacular success he ever had was when he prayed rather half-heartedly at the request of someone—I think he didn’t even know the requester all that well, it was someone in a class of limited duration that he was teaching at a church. The sick person got well.

“I was intrigued once in the church in Vermont where we used to worship in the summer when we rented that cabin above Caspian Lake as our escape from the NY summers. One summer the church was being led by a seasoned old guy who had a certain charisma, he was the interim minister because the congregation had had a big fight and ousted the young woman they had hired. I never did get to the bottom of that unhappy situation but anyhow it was prayer time in this church—which meant that individual requests could be brought up. A rather sedate and timid old Presbyterian type lady asked the pastor if it would be OK to have a prayer raised for her brother who was sick. This woman had obviously had a strong dosage from the not my will but thy will be done medicine bottle. The minister in a nice and encouraging way expressed amazement at her question. He not only told her that it would be OK to pray for her brother but he then proceeded to put the matter to God in such a way that I don’t know how God could have turned him down, it was the most amazing and powerful prayer. Not that I ever found out what the result was, I think the prayer was offered right before we were returning to NY. But this admirable minister’s attitude toward petitionary prayer impressed and stayed with me.

“Markus Barth’s 2 vol. Anchor Bible commentary on Ephesians is a matchless and inexhaustible thesaurus on the subject of religion. It is so endless and dense a work that trying to retrieve something from it would be the proverbial needle in a haystack job but a phrase of his in what must have been a discussion of prayer as it came up in Ephesians is another one that has stuck with me. He had a long list of the things that one could raise up to God in prayer and as prayers “including the desperate cry Help.” I have myself at times lofted that desperate cry.

“The epilogue to The Tempest spoken by Prospero contains some of Shakespeare’s profoundest and most beautiful lines. They constitute one of those beautiful witty tropes in which what the actor is really asking for is applause from the audience but the insight into prayer which they contain is most notable : “And my ending is despair,/ Unless I be relieved by prayer,/ Which pierces so that it assaults/ Mercy itself and frees all faults.” Prayer that pierces and that assaults Mercy. An amazing idea. But the playing with NT themes that goes on in this epilogue is dizzying.”

 

[1] There are places in the Gospels where it sounds as if Jesus knew he was the Son of God, knew what was happening; he just had to go through this drama and enact this moment in history.  For me, if that’s true, he wasn’t fully human.  I believe he was fully human, that he only gradually understood his fate, and that it was deeply difficult for him.  These passages suggest that, as do his final words on the cross in the Gospel of Mark, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

[2] I hope I’m not making too controversial a statement here—though I know for some people I am—when I say that I don’t think the coronavirus is God’s will.  Some people think everything that happens is God’s will, that God has a plan and he’s working it out over time.  I’m sorry, but I find that absurd.  It was a part of God’s plan that Hitler would cruelly murder millions of his chosen people?  I don’t doubt that God has a will for humankind (I think that Jesus’ statement to love one another sums it up pretty well) but too often human beings do not enact it, and the results of their willfulness can be profound and can alter history.  Something like global warming, which will have a vast effect on human history, is the result of human folly, as is, in some way, the coronavirus (I’ve heard various stories about its origins).

[3] Later in that fascicle, after all his years of impossible-to-understand writing, he gives a simple path to becoming a Buddha.  “When you refrain from unwholesome actions, are not attached to birth and death, and are compassionate toward all sentient beings, respectful to seniors and kind to juniors, not excluding or desiring anything, with no thoughts or worries, you will be called a buddha. Seek nothing else.”

[4] One time, at the end of a lecture at the Insight Meditation Society in which he had used the word God, Larry Rosenberg said, “You think there’s no concept of God in Buddhism.  Come on!”

[5] Clark Strand tells an anecdote that he had been a long time Zen Buddhist, but when he was on an airplane with his family and it seemed to be going down, he prayed to God.  He didn’t sit zazen.

There is also an anecdote somewhere about Maezumi Roshi.  He was asked by a Christian group if he believe in God, and he said certainly not, why would I believe something stupid like that?  Later on a Tibetan group asked the same question, and he said, “Of course there’s a God.  It’s the most obvious thing in the world.”  He was kind of like my Aunt Alice.