grace in the mystery

i've been taking a meditation class this semester that has really pushed my thinking and self-reflection.  my professor is a buddhist lama.  to be perfectly honest, i didn't know all that much about buddhism coming into this class.  i knew the very basics of it from a historical perspective- that which i had to teach when i taught my sixth graders about ancient civilizations- but that's really about it.  i had always heard that it was not a religion but rather a way of life.  that description was never satisfactory to me because i believe that religions should be ways of living.  of course, often they aren't; they are just a set of beliefs that one supposedly claims as truth but never allows to enter the core of one's being and affect one's thoughts and actions.  too often there is great division between the religion professed and the life lived.

in this class, i really appreciate from a pedagogical standpoint that my professor acknowledges that most of us in the class identify with christianity.  he is not trying to convert us to his beliefs.  instead, he frequently challenges us to connect what we're learning in buddhist meditation practice with what we know from a christian perspective.  

today we were talking about the danger in thinking that we know people.  now, being someone who really values the relationships in my life and works hard to nourish them, i have to admit that i find it comforting to feel like i know a few people on this earth really well.  of course, i am really entertaining an illusion- what i know well are my perceptions of those people.  my professor writes, "as we begin to awaken to such pure perception in meditation practice, it dawns on us that we hadn't known others nearly as well as we had previously thought, even those nearest to us!  because now, rather than knowing them just through our familiar thoughts of them, we are starting to sense them from a deeper place." (awakening through love, p. 134)

although i am still learning, and not very far along on this journey, what i think this means is that, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not, every human being has great potential and mystery.  if we acknowledge it, we allow that person to live freely as they are, at the very depth of their being, and we free ourselves from limiting frames of reference.  if we fail to acknowledge it, however, we are likely to only see this person for who they are in relation to us.  we see the "good things" they do as benefiting us (if only by providing a model for right action) and the "bad things" they do as harming us.

from the christian perspective, we believe that all of humanity was created in the image and likeness of God, inherently giving it dignity and value.  when we fail to acknowledge each person's deep capacity for goodness, we fail to see them as part of God's creation.  this concept was easy for me to grasp when it comes to people that i judge negatively from a distance (for example, i don't like chris brown because although he is a role model to many youth- including my former students- he does not live up to that, but rather beats his girlfriend.  do i actually know the person of chris brown?  no.  do i actually know what is in his head or his heart related to this whole event?  no.  but i have written him off as a bad example because of this action that made the headlines).  however, it's a lot harder to admit that we limit our loved ones' potential when we think that we know them rather than seeing their mystery.  

this topic used to come up a lot when i was living in intentional community because we all tended to put each other in boxes, label them, and communicate and interact with the boxes, rather than the fathomless beings that we originally put in the boxes.  why do we do this?  because it's comforting to think that you know someone and that you are known.  but there comes a point where you feel trapped inside that box; you can't escape others' perceptions of you.  you're the sweet one, or the emotional one, or the selfish one, or the fun one, or the cheap one, or the practical one.  but any one person can be all of those things in different situations!

so where does grace enter the picture?  i think that grace is what allows us to transcend those labels/boxes/false perceptions and to allow room for the holy spirit to act in others.  because of grace, we can allow God to do the knowing and the seeing, and, with practice, we can experience glimpses here and there of seeing one another (perhaps even ourselves) in God's eyes- for the deep, fathomless mysteries that we all are.