The Fire of the Word: Meeting God on Holy Ground

The Fire of the Word: Meeting God on Holy Ground

There is a teaching in Zen that you don't seek a roshi, a spiritual master, to teach you the way to enlightenment. You simply practice your meditation and, when you are ready, your master will find you. So, patiently, I practiced and watched for his coming.

While I waited, a friend gave me a book of koans to use in my meditation. A koan is a sort of Buddhist riddle, and insoluble puzzle designed to force the mind to think beyond its normal parameters, to push itself beyond rational thought into the realm of intuition—a classic and well-known example is: "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" But many traditional koans don't work well in a Western context; they're too culturally inaccessible, rooted in the thought world of ancient China and Japan. The book I was lent tried to address that by gathering together a series of well-known paradoxical sayings Westerners could relate to more readily. It was a collection of the sayings of Jesus from the Gospels.

Jesus, of course, is the master of paradox. "Those who try to make their life secure will lose it, but those who lose their life will keep it" (Lk 17:33). Or try this: "The last will be first, and the first will be last" (Mt 20:16). Jesus encourages people to abandon their wealth in order to find great riches. He calls them to give that they might receive, "a good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over" (Lk 6:38). He tells his followers that he has come that they might have "life, and have it abundantly" (Jn 10:10)—and then summons them to take up a cross and follow him to death. After two thousand years of diligent preaching, we think we have a pretty good handle on his parables, but those who first heard them left confused and bewildered; even his own disciples often had to ask for an explanation. Is it all that surprising, then, that even Buddhists find themselves admiring Jesus as a teacher whose message pushes the mind beyond its usual limits?

So, armed with my new book, I began to meditate on the Gospels. I immersed myself in the sayings of Christ. I turned them over and over, day and night, hoping to be overcome by their strange internal logic. I wandered into a church and started going to a small group where other people were reading and thinking about his words. And, in the end, the inevitable happened. I had been waiting for my master, and my Master found me—he just wasn't the master I expected. I heard the call of Christ through those words of the Gospels, and my world was turned upside down.

Taken from The Fire of the Word: Meeting God on Holy Ground by Chris Webb. Copyright(c) 2011. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press PO Box 1400 Downers Grove, IL 60515. www.ivpress.com. http://www.ivpress.com/cgi-ivpress/book.pl/code=3563