The Inner Journey: Reflections on the Awakening of Mind and Heart in Buddhism and Christianity

Abstract

December 1989 a letter from the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was sent to all the Roman Catholic Bishops in the world. Some Catholic experts on Eastern meditation concluded that it was far more measured than early press notices indicated. Eastern approaches to prayer, the seven thousandword letter said, should not be rejected out of hand simply because they are not Christian, but it insisted that there be some fit between the nature of prayer and Christian beliefs about ultimate reality. Such beliefs include the distinction between Creator and human creature. For Christians, though united in Jesus, the otherness of each is not lost. Recall Paul's passionate outcry: live now not I but Christ lives in me. Creation, too, was mentioned; the world is God's creation, in need of redemption rather than escape. And union with God is a grace, not something that can be mastered by any spiritual technique. Euphoric states must not be confused with prayer or assumed to be signs of the presence of God, a state that should always result in loving service to others. Without these truths, the Vatican said, meditation, which should be a flight from the self, can degenerate into a form of self-absorption. Father Thomas Keating said of the document: In my experience of talking with Eastern spiritual masters, they are just as cautious as this document is about mistaking psychological states that can be induced by meditation for some great enlightenment. The document did, however, fail to address the absence of any intense experience of God's power that today is sending many Christians to Eastern religions.1 I myself looked to the East for this very reason in 1976, not for God's power so much as for consciousness of his presence, for deeper levels of consciousness of divine love, and in view of what I found I am happy now to share with you some of these treasures of both East and West.