As I think about my faith journey and how people might react to it, It seems to have been a natural progression. From reading Siddhartha by Herman Hesse in high school to seeing the Dalai Lama in 1984 at UCSB to meditation with Clarence Liu at the Matthew Fox conference in West Yellowstone to Bishop Spong saying "Jesus did not die for my sins" in April 2006 at California Lutheran to Saturday morning with Kevin at the Ventura Buddhist Center to the third Saturday group, it all seems like a flow.
I did a search of my blog post to see if I could find the date of the Bishop Spong's lecture at CLU. I really like his description of God. I also like his explanation, "The Bishop of Rome turned the power of his location in that capital city of the known world into the ability to define Christianity and to limit the understanding of the past to his particular interpretation of the past." While I remember the turning point of hearing "Jesus did not die from my sins," I had forgotten that I read his blog and other sources for a while and found them very helpful as my faith gradually transformed. The Dalai Lama has told people not to leave their faith community to follow Buddhism. Bishop Spong has helped me to understand how I can remain Christian and yet be way out of the mainstream.
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August 8th, 2022
This last Sunday our pastor challenged us after telling the story of the hymn blessed assurance by Fannie Mae Crosby. The music writer she was working with brought her a tune and asked for her reaction. The words just poured out as she wrote the first first of blessed assurance. As I think about this challenge I kind of went back to this blog entry that I had already made and thought I would extend it. I am constantly noticing the consistency with Buddhist practice found in the Christian Church. It's easy to think of a lot of things that are not compatible but as I think about how my faith has matured and I've gotten to this point, I find it heart mean to hear those images within the worship and activities of the church I participate in. I noticed that the liturgy contains precepts. Oddly the main book called the holy Bible is an oddly organized collection of randomly preserved documents. As one becomes aware of the apocrypha and then learns about the Gnostic Gospels, it becomes quite obvious that the books in the Bible are where the result of an arbitrary chance. The Jewish scriptures are more organized and were apparently written more recently than people believed to create a history. The gospels were not the first books to be written and included in the Christian scripture even though they are the first books listed. Well the synoptic gospels tell the story in a very similar way, John is actually a pretty crazy book that starts with Greek thought and has Jesus mansplaining quite a bit. The book of Acts is similar to the synoptic Gospels as they believe it was the same author as Luke. Then we have a bunch of Paul's letters that were kept by various faith communities and many letters that were ascribed to Paul even though he probably didn't write them. What we're missing is the many, many, other groups of Christians who didn't have someone as prolific as Paul. Paws are apparently the earliest writings but we have a huge gap from the death of Jesus to the first descriptions of Christian activities and beliefs.
Buddhist have precepts, vows, sutras and stories that do not need to be taken literally, but have lessons that are accepted by many within the diverse group of Buddhist traditions. There is so much confusion in the Christian church about what is to be taken literally and what is just a reflection of the culture at that time. Can we extract the spiritual truth that was being conveyed? I find it hard to tell someone to read the Bible as a way to enhance their spirituality and understand the meaning of life.
Another interesting aspect is that my Buddhist teachers both virtually and in person have never discouraged me from my Christian beliefs. They are also not afraid to use Christian images and stories to explain Buddhism. All my views about Christianity that do not conform to the traditional story are from reading People associated with the Christian religion that I have mentioned several times. And they have not weakened my belief, it's just been radically changed from the traditional Christian understanding of Jesus.
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