I Am Through You So I Read online

  DSR: Of course, but I do not know whether one should impute that reasoning to him.

  JK: I do not know either, I simply wanted to clarify this idea of sacrifice using an example.

  DSR: The idea of sacrifice is an interpretation; it is externally brought to bear on an event. A guest looks at the parents giving the children all the cherries and only pretending to eat some themselves. The children eat all the cherries and the guest thinks, “How kind of the parents to sacrifice their own enjoyment of these delicious cherries for that of the children.” But for the parent, it is an even greater joy than eating the cherries themselves, and they do not in the least suffer—suffering being mistakenly considered the definitive quality of sacrifice. In true sacrifice, the one sacrificing answers life joyfully and gives life whatever it is at that moment demanding. If life now demands that I give my life for others to live—the Bodhisattva idea—then I will do so joyfully.

  JK: We know that Jesus grappled with his knowledge in the garden of Gethsemane, in the sense that he knew that this betrayal to the point of trial—for questioning religious authorities, thus tipping the religious system into a crisis and undermining the powerful—would inevitably lead to his death under the circumstances of the time. Jesus as a human being had to grapple with the premonition of his impending death.

  DSR: Yes, he does grapple—so intensely that his sweat turns to blood. But he grapples through to the decision to do “the Father’s will”—not grudgingly, but joyfully. Joy is something other than pleasure. Joy is the feeling of being in sync with life, in tune with Mystery. One may have all the pleasure in the world and yet feel out of tune with life; but one may, by contrast, be screaming in anguish and yet hear deep inside the music of joy, a counterpoint bass line as it were, to shrieks of pain—labor pain it will turn out to be if one is in tune with life. In the Garden of Olives, Jesus says, “Your will be done.” He says this in deep anguish, but at the same time, in joy, in the only joy there is, the joy of being aligned with God’s will, in tune with the Great Mystery.

  JK: And simultaneously, the human side of this decision is made clear when, for example, Jesus says on the cross, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” Jesus does not die with a smile on his lips, as has been said of Buddha, as far as is recorded, but with a scream.

  DSR: The Christian tradition underscores clearly the extent to which suffering is part of the Great Mystery of God. In India, I have seen the well-known, somewhat sentimental picture of Christ on the Mount of Olives in the moonlight. It is very popular and many families place it on their home altars. They call this an image of the suffering God, an image otherwise missing from the Hindu pantheon. It is a great achievement of the Christian tradition to integrate suffering into our experience of God.

  JK: In the sense that suffering is a reality of life: to stay in biblical imagery, it is a consequence of the fall from grace, the banishment from paradise. Living also means suffering—being confronted with ephemeralness, with limits, with illness and death—and yet not being left alone in those, not needing to be perfect and still being redeemed. It is precisely the imperfect, the incomplete, the not-yet-whole that is redeemed.

  DSR: But suffering is not the last word. We suffer when something that is dear to us in our temporal existence is being destroyed—we lose health, friends, possessions—but this is a wake-up call, an invitation to raise our eyes and look at what cannot be destroyed. Eichendorff put it so well:

  Now suffering, a secret

  and silent thief, creeps near;

  we all must face departure

  from all that we hold dear.

  If You reigned not in heaven

  what would be left on earth?

  Who could stand all the clamor?

  Who then would wish for birth?

  And then the most important stanza:

  You gently break above us

  our castles in the air

  that we may see the heavens—

  so, I shall not despair.8

  Suffering wakes us up and offers us an unexpected opportunity to raise our eyes from earth to heaven. A well-known haiku by Mizuta Masahide, a seventeenth-century samurai, makes the same point in a most subtle way:

  Since my house burned down

  I now have a better view

  of the rising moon

  JK: Together with Swami Satshidananda and Rabbi Joseph Gelberman, you founded the Center for Spiritual Studies in the United States. Through both the Center and the House of Prayer movement, you encountered a hunger for spiritual experience in the Western Christian tradition. What does the Christian tradition need today to become more alive and to better understand the treasures it contains?

  DSR: We will understand the treasures of our own faith to the extent to which we share them with other traditions and learn to appreciate the treasures of their faith. But in this respect, we haven’t made much progress from where we were at the beginning. Interfaith encounters seem likely to have a long history ahead of it. There is still much that we can learn from one another. However, we should not blur our differences. It’s as with two styles of music: each has its own beauty. Nothing is achieved by mixing them.

  JK: But one must learn to understand one through the other.

  DSR: I would go even further and say that each of the different spiritual traditions has its strengths but also its weaknesses. Sometimes we can recognize a weakness in our own tradition by comparison with other traditions. The other might express an insight of human religiousness better, or go deeper than our own into an aspect of the Great Mystery. In this sense, interfaith dialogue can be truly helpful, but practitioners need to engage in it, not theoreticians.

  JK: What are you thinking of when you say “practitioner”?

  DSR: I’m thinking of interfaith dialogue as a task for all the faithful of each tradition who want to truly practice their faith. Living faith, in our day and age, must be inter-faith. If we want to live our faith, we should try to get to know those of other faiths. We might, for instance, start a discussion group whose members come from different cultures and religions. Talking about religion can be important, but still more important is celebrating together, sharing religious feasts or fasts. Could Christians not fast together with Muslims? Ramadan would offer a wonderful opportunity. Christians, in turn, could invite those of other faiths to celebrate Christmas with them. Imagine what this could mean for children; how different their attitude toward other faiths would be when they grow up. This is the primary level on which encounters between religions should occur.

  JK: And what of religious institutions?

  DSR: Religious institutions do have their justification; they are necessary, but as institutions, they are first and foremost concerned with ensuring their own survival. In interfaith encounter, they can at best reach a kind of gentleman’s agreement. Events at which official representatives of different religions meet are important. I’ve often had the privilege of taking part in such meetings and am grateful for that, but I have learned from experience not to expect much from them for a genuine interfaith encounter. Often, the men and women who participate in such meetings do indeed practice their respective faiths at home, but here, their duty is to see to the interests of the religious institution they represent; or they have put on the hat of an academician and see it as their duty to remain objective and unengaged as they give learned discourses on this or that aspect of comparative religion. Interfaith dialogue can become fruitful only if those with practical experience engage in it, not those whose interest is primarily theoretical or institutional. For this reason, monks who attend interfaith gatherings play an important role; they are interested in spirituality; they do not need to defend any institution.

  JK: It seems to me that in a globalized world, a world characterized by violent outbreaks, religious institutions do have an important function: they ought to work toward peace and justice by any means possible. But we can see that that is only just beginning. At the Parliament of Worl
d Religions in 1993, Hans Küng made an initial attempt with his “World Ethic Project.” Now, however, critics of his approach point out that religion cannot simply be reduced to ethical principles, and religions feel misrepresented. What would be your approach for how religions, whose claims to truth do hold the potential for violence, can work toward peace for their adherents? What insights should religions put forward as institutions? What should they support?

  DSR: Institutional religions could start by joining their voices loudly and vigorously in support of human rights.

  JK: Human rights began as a process of progress in European history, which had been shaped and shaken so strongly by religious wars. The insight was that the primary justification of human rights should not be made religiously, about God, since that would carry the danger of rival religious truth claims and thus potentially lead to further conflict. This premise gave rise to the attempt to establish some form of separation between church and state, ensuring the freedom of religion. In Western democracies, one is therefore allowed to believe and say anything, but no religion may raise itself up to claim, “It is thus and only thus. Only we are right.” Within a pluralistic framework, such a totalitarian claim to truth would be a potential source of conflict. To that extent, this construction of a secular state is a form of progress, not an expression of godlessness. And yes, in Europe, we speak of God less quickly in political contexts than is conventional in, say, the United States, which has a completely different history. That has advantages and disadvantages. It can have the disadvantage of cutting God out of the discussion and even forgetting about God. In today’s Europe, I see that clearly happening. But at least it has one advantage: the name of God isn’t used for all too human purposes.

  DSR: That indeed is an advantage.

  JK: Human rights are universally applicable. Hans Küng even starts from the premise that the fundamental values formulated in human rights are espoused, lived, or at least aimed at in all traditions—independent of their different justifications in the traditions. It is precisely that premise that I am attempting to strengthen.

  DSR: Yes, strengthening that approach is certainly important for interfaith dialogue. All religions fundamentally recognize human rights, with different emphases. If we made human rights the topic of discussion, this could become one of the most important aspects of dialogue among religions. After all, it is no coincidence that Hans Küng introduced this topic at the Parliament of World Religions in Chicago. I am grateful that I could be a signatory to that original document.

  JK: But your previous piece of advice was that practitioners rather than the institutions should dialogue. To this is added the problem that in many major religions, there are no spokespeople whom everyone recognizes. Who can speak for all Muslims, all Hindus, all Buddhists?

  DSR: Well, one charismatic leader who can speak for the majority of Buddhists—and, beyond that, for countless millions of non-Buddhists who admire him—is the Dalai Lama. He issued an appeal to the world that outlines a new secular ethics as the foundation of a peaceful future. He is convinced that the solution to problems that endanger our future as a human family will not come from the religions, but from people committed to an ethics that can bridge our differences. This powerful fifty-five-page appeal titled Ethics Are More Important than Religion is available, in many languages, for free download on the Internet. The innate ethics on which the Dalai Lama builds is what I refer to as basic human religiosity—the one underground water table, which the different religions tap, each by a different well. If we use the Dalai Lama’s terminology, I fully agree that ethics are more important than religion. In the context of interreligious encounter, I have tried to express the same insight by saying that our innate religiosity—the tug that the Great Mystery brings to bear on the compass needle of the human heart—is more important than any of the religions.

  With Swami Satchidananda

  With Sri Chinmoy and Mother Teresa; Spiritual Summit, United Nations Headquarters, New York, October 24, 1975

  With His Holiness Dalai Lama; MIT Boston, November 2014

  6

  Hermit’s Life

  1976–1986

  In the sixth decade of my life, the fact that I was permitted to live at the New Camaldoli Hermitage at Big Sur on the central coast of California would become highly significant. The community at New Camaldoli combines elements of communal life and hermit life. As already mentioned, I was invited there and received as a Brother. For fourteen years, New Camaldoli became my monastic home in between my many travels.

  There I also learned, to my astonishment, that a thousand years ago, St. Romuald, who founded the Camaldolese branch of the Benedictine order, had developed a model for monastic life that is proving especially relevant in our time. Our life expectancy has grown so much that a young person who enters a monastery today can expect to be a monk for two or even three times as long as someone in St. Benedict’s time. While monastic vows hold for an entire life, putting them into practice in one and the same form for so many decades can seem monotonous. But the Camaldolese model offers two additional forms besides the conventional life in community. The first is known as mission, and encompasses any form of service for which a monk may be sent outside of the monastery, for instance, teaching, artistic endeavors, caring for the old or sick, helping the addicted, street ministry, or spiritual counsel in prisons. The second alternative to communal life in a monastery is life as a hermit. Monks can live their vows while switching between these three forms—hermitage, monastic community, or social service. Thomas Merton considered this the most promising and visionary model for the monastic life of the future. I had begun to practice it in my own life, long before I had heard of it.

  My many travels and my times as a hermit are closely connected: from early on, I have lived in the creative tension between being outgoing and turning inward. We can measure the degree of our aliveness by how wide the range of our relationships is and how deeply we dare to explore mutual belonging with all that lives. To live fully, we need to honor both poles of being in contact, the inner and the outer. Even a hermit who understands his task does not simply withdraw from contact as such, but merely from outward contact. And for what goal? To renew that deep inner contact without which any outward contact must remain superficial. A short fable illustrates this well: Every year, a hermit retreated deeper into his cave. Mockingly, a visitor asked him, “What do you expect to find in the deepest depths of your cave?” And the hermit answered, “All the world’s tears.”1

  All of us need both breadth and depth—travels outward into the breadth of the wide world, and retreats into our inward depth. Rhythm and shape of these alternating movements differ from person to person. For me, it is vital to find secluded places where I can dedicate time to inwardness. Like so many things, this is both a need and a gift—and as a gift, it is both blessing and duty. Even as a child, I would look for and discover places to be alone. One of my favorite spots was a small wellspring outside the village. I never tired of sitting there on my own, amazed at the way the water came out of the ground and listening to its sound. As a student, I would sometimes flee from a party in full swing (as much as I loved to dance!) to the only place where I could be alone: the bathroom. In my summer on the mountain pasture, finding a place to look inward amidst the postwar chaos was just as important to me as the fact that I got something to eat there. As a young monk, too, I was sometimes permitted to spend a day or even several days in a row at the small hermit’s cabin in the monastery woods. That began as the result of a dream in which something (I could not name it) weighed heavily on me. Desperately, I would search for a way out, and finally a long, narrow tunnel led me into the open. There I stood, in brilliant sunlight, and looking around, saw our hermitage. We had called it Porta Coeli—“Heaven’s Gate”—and that is indeed what it became for me: the place of a blessedness that cannot be put into words.

  Later, when I began to go on lecture tours, periods of aloneness became more impor
tant than ever. Other monks do not always look kindly on this need. The typical response is “If a Brother is strong enough to live on his own, we need him in our community. If he is not, then he needs us.” But my abbot told me, “You are among so many people on your lecture tours. When you come home, you do not need still more people, not even your Brothers in the monastery. The hermitage will be good for you.” He was right. At first, I would retreat to one or the other of our hermitages at Mount Saviour, then eventually to other fitting locations. Some of them, which I will describe in greater detail later, were quite romantic, such as Bear Island, a tiny island in the North Atlantic, where I was grateful to survive a winter of record-breaking cold, or Sand Island Light, an abandoned lighthouse in the Gulf of Mexico from where I could see nothing but sea and sky. But one should not have any romantic ideas about the life of a hermit. In the end, it requires sober confrontation with oneself and with “all the tears of the world.” Part of the hermit’s life includes being willingly “exposed on the cliffs of the heart,” as Rilke has poetically put it.2 The outward expression of being exposed to one’s inner storms is the surrender of bourgeois comforts.

  I had the opportunity of experiencing that on Bear Island, a tiny isle of less than twenty acres, which has space only for a coast guard lighthouse and the hundred-year-old summer home of the Dunbar family.3 These generous friends gave me the permission to spend the winter of 1976–77 in one of their buildings. I selected a wooden structure with a workshop and wood storage space on the ground level and two rooms above. Dick Dunn, my hermit’s companion there, helped me insulate the walls, as best we could, against wind and cold. In the Middle Ages, St. Francis of Assisi had called for a hermit Brother to always have a second one as a companion; we find this practice as far back as the early desert fathers. When that cooperation is successful, it grants the hermit greater outward and inward freedom. In our case, it succeeded, as Dick mastered the art of brotherly care and the even rarer art of making himself invisible precisely out of care.